But what of Ukrainians themselves? Will they tire of being NATO's cat's paw? It's impossible to find good numbers on how many Ukrainian men have been killed so far in this war. It's likely in the hundreds of thousands. Towns and villages throughout the country are devoid of men, as the men (hunted by conscription) either flee, hide, or are sent to the fronts.
As others said, this is absurd version of the events at hand. If Ukraine loses this war, they are fucked in the same way Donetsk and Luhansk are fucked now, only worse. It may very well happen that they will end up according to the map that Medvedev shown with Ukraine being what Donetsk/Luhansk was in since 2014 - just a puppet state and source of expendable shock troops for the new Russian Empire. The next move? Putin attacks Moldova with forced conscripts from newly annexed Ukraine thus potentially solving two problems at once by expanding the territory and sending potential rebels into the meatgrinder. He already uses this tactics to some extent by conscripting mostly ethnic minorities and rural population. The same tactics Mao utilized when he sent surrendered Kuomintang soldiers to Korea: win-win scenario for him.
And we are not even talking about a scenario where Putin with his newfound strength may test the article 5 and actually conduct Baltic offensive on Estonia/Latvia/Lithuania. It is not as if NATO will fire nukes in face of conventional assault - so what will they do? Will Spaniards and French and Italians send enough troops to the meatgrinder to save some faraway countries? At worst Putin can always say "my bad, I just want part of Estonia and make peace" and play peacemaker or he can withdraw after testing the waters. It is not as if NATO countries will ever muster courage to actually wage full fledged war with the aim to physically oust Putin from Kremlin when he hides behind nuclear ICBMs and torpedoes. And in the meantime Putin will have enough Ukrainians to send ahead of his barrier troops.
Don't forget, things are never so bad that they cannot get worse.
But why would Putin attack the Baltics?
I thought we are beyond this already, the same was said before invasion of Ukraine. If anything - why should he not invade? He is already considered a pariah, Russia is sanctioned, NATO already sent a lot of available weapons from their military storage and with other conflicts in Middle East and potential issues with Taiwan he may just try it. Rhetorically Russia already claims that they are effectively at war with NATO so it is also nothing that the Russians themselves would be shocked about.
But this was not even the point of my post, which was focused more on Ukraine and Ukrainians who would be at the mercy of what whatever Putin sees as his pet project and his legacy. They would be the buffer zone, they would be Putin's shocktroops and their role would be to do whatever is needed in order for the Russian core to be as shielded from any negative impacts of regimes decisions as possible. I can imagine imposing some sort of reparations in the same way Soviets did it to East Germany. We can see more pressure for russification and myriads of other things that could ruin the nation culturally, economically and morally. So the point is that just saying "Ukrainians are dying" is not some ultimate argument it seems to be, one always has to also add "compared to what" - as they may continue dying while achieving nothing after "peace" with Russia. Again it would be good to ask people in Luhansk and Donetsk or even people now living in other occupied territories in Ukraine about how happy are they not being "pawns of NATO" but being part of Russian Mir nine years after "peace" negotiated in Minsk. What an upgrade.
What non-sequitur? Lets say we know that air in glass greenhouse is 2ºC warmer than the outside air. And we had two competing hypothesis for this phenomenon: florb effect and hothouse effect. So we constructed plastic greenhouse that does not absorb as much IR radiation and saw that the temperature in the greenhouse was also 2ºC higher thus proving that IR absorption does not play any significant role in greenhouse effect whole it would be in line with florb effect given that the only thing needed is to prevent convection with no role given to IR.
What did I not get?
It is not "whatever dynamic", it is the greenhouse/florb phenomenon as opposed to hothouse phenomenon using the language of the discussion. If you have IR absorbent glass that captures almost 100% of IR light, it should be the best case scenario for the florb effect. It is weird to me to handwave it away as some logical flaw without specifying why.
Also non sequitur should be a general flaw in the logic of the argument, I did not see it used in the context that some experiment/model does not correctly approximate the reality because of some specific or even unknown physical variable they did not take into account - it should be shown using the logic of the argument itself. Additionally if that was the case, then the Climate Models would be the ultimate non sequitur in this discussion given the complexity of modeling the climate.
Exactly. Germany itself has the same issue as they want to connect offshore wind in North Sea to industrial heartland in the the south. The cost of 700 miles long SuedLink with transmission capacity of only 4GW widely fluctuates between EUR 10 billion and EUR 24 billion and it is not even started as it is mired with thousands of municipalities waging lawfare against having high-voltage lines crisscrossing the countryside. Tell me again about political impossibility of nuclear power.
As the OP said, people vastly underestimate the numbers we are talking about when it comes to electricity storage. Germany consumes around 500 TWh of electricity a year. One pump-storage power plant like Goldistahl has capacity of 8.5 GWh built at the cost of EUR 600 million in late 90s and early 2000s. This capacity is consumed in around 10 minutes in Germany even without any consideration of actual potential output of the storage. If you want to have reserve for weeks of electricity generation at a time, we are talking about thousands of such pump-storage power plants with the cost of hundreds of billions of EUR - even if it is literally impossible to build more than couple of dozens in Germany due to required geological conditions, not to even talk about ecological and other problems these power plants represent. For the cost of 1,000 pump-storage power plants to cover the demand for 1 week if needed, you could literally build 54 newest Olkiluoto 3 style super expensive nuclear reactors and produce 648 TWh of stable base electricity a year - so 30% more than is needed.
My rule of thumb is that anybody who solely uses the unit of power for battery storage like "12 GW" is a moron and should not be part of the discussion at all. Peak output of storage is not the hard problem, the overall capacity is.
I had to look into several sources to check what we are talking about. Here is Bellefield solar + storage that claims to have battery storage of 1 GW output for whole 4 hours for overall capacity of 4 GWh. California consumes 259 TWh of electricity per year, Texas uses 365 TWh. Even if the output of this battery was infinite, it could power California or Texas for around 8-10 minutes. You would literally need thousand of such storage sites to cover potential output loss for one week.
Sabine Hossenfelder had a good video about economics of nuclear power here. She specifically investigates two claims: that it is slow and that it is expensive. Her counterarguments are as follows:
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The overall building time varies from project to project and country to country. In Japan the median construction time is 4 years and 3 months with record being Kashiwazaki-Kariwa unit 6 built only in 39 months and finished in 1996. There is nothing intrinsic in nuclear power for it to be built slowly as is proven by very recent history.
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As for price, using levelized cost of energy the nuclear supposedly pricier but only by factor of 2 or 3 compared to the cheapest gas power plants. The biggest disadvantage of nuclear is huge capital cost upfront with related cost of financing the capital. Here the construction time is very important as pouring billions of dollars that sit idle for years or decades ramps up the costs significantly, it may be around 30% of the cost for a project that takes 7 years to finish.
Nevertheless I looked into cost for electricity of two latest finished nuclear power plants. The Olkiluoto-3 power plant that provides Finland with 12TWh or around 15% of electricity a year caused significant drop of electricity cost in Finland to the level of around EUR 60 per MWh. The latest Mochovce 3 reactor also started in 2023 in Slovakia , which together with two older nuclear reactors provides 55% of electricity in the country will help local energy company to fulfill the promise of keeping the electricity price at the level of EUR 61 per MWh.
The biggest advantage of Nuclear is that you can build it where you need it and connect it to the old infrastructure providing good base load of energy. No new grids needed. You have to shell out onetime payment for construction and then you are fixed for decades to come. Which may also be a good thing as was shown during the peak of gas crisis where energy prices exceeded EUR 200 per MWh due to sky-high costs of gas. Additionally it is hard to undersell the benefit of energy independence from volatile countries such as Russia or Middleast even for backup gas plants. And another addition, to me the high upfront capital costs are actually a good feature in a sense - you can build the power plant and then have very low operating costs. But more importantly the revenue from the electricity goes into homegrown industry be it construction companies and other high-tech industry while operational costs also support high-skilled operators of this huge projects at home as opposed to buying solar panels from China or even worse sending money to Russia or terrible petroregimes in Arab world or Africa.
Just to add my two cents into the whole disgusting affair - it reminded me of genre of movies and documentaries in my homeland of Slovakia with respect to Romani people, so I was somewhat inoculated. There is even a "thriving" boutique tourist segment where people are shown the worst gypsy slums either the urban ones such as Lunik IX or literal 3rd world villages we call "settlements" in Slovakia (here is aerial view of another one), where we have news pieces such as rats feasted on a body of little Roma boy, aged 18 months. Here is a video from that particular gypsy settlement related to another fatality due to fire.
Roma people live in Slovakia and elsewhere in Europe for centuries since they moved there probably from Punjab region of India. As far as I know, they faced incredible levels of racism with laws such as in Switzerland in 1510 where they were supposedly put to death on sight. The problem seems to be intractable, during communism gypsies were forcefully integrated with somewhat mixed results: while in some cities such as capital of Bratislava the effort was relatively successful - they literally put Romani families into blocks with soldiers and police officers. But elsewhere such as with Lunik IX it resulted in unbelievable slum. The sad thing is that while relatively substantial proportion of Romani people are assimilated and have decent life, there seems to be this permanent underclass of gypsies living in slums rife with alcoholism and cheap drugs such as toluene. You may integrate/save individuals but culture and population as a whole just propagates into the next generation.
Maybe you are not aware of it but many countries - including USA since 2013 - declared obesity itself as a disease. The decision makers in American Medical Association openly admit, that they completely abandoned long-standing criteria for diseases such as disease having some symptoms as opposed to being symptom by itself. Imagine for instance declaring malnutrition itself as a disease, it makes no sense. Malnutrition can be simple lack of food and thus not caused by anything special, or it can be a symptom of some other metabolic or psychological disease. The same with obesity, we can create a "cure" that will work 100% of the time, just admit people into anti-obesity camp where they will have their food intake as well as exercise managed. As the saying goes, there were no obese victims in Gulags or other prison camps, the "cure" is easy.
Instead what AMA did was stick with "utilitarian" definition of a disease in order to "destigmatize" the condition as the word "disease" suggests, that people may not have a control over it such as with some pathogens. Additionally if we allow this definition we can now direct the whole infrastructure used to treat diseases into this new problem. I guess this it the precursor of the new trend such as when CDC declared racism as a public health threat, who knows maybe in the future racism will become an official disease that will treated institutionally or by some brain surgery or pills.
I think a lot of that can be viewed through immense impact that boomer generation had on culture. Sixties and seventies when boomers were young adults, it was all about celebrating teenage revolt, and drugs, rock n' roll and all that. Eighties and nineties when boomers were at their prime, it was all about making money, and celebrating being fit and healthy and being full of vigor, and above all else being sexy - it was time of masculine men shagging fit women like in Baywatch. Aughts and tens is when boomers are becoming old and it is time of moralization and experiencing their failing bodies and being aware of their mortality - so suddenly grey is gorgeous and of course sex is suddenly all about power relation of men over young women of young healthy women over old desiccated boomer hags; which means that healthy sexuality has to be suddenly forbidden.
It is all display of cultural power of objectively the most powerful and narcissistic generation of the last century imposing their self-centered worldview on broader culture.
georgioz
1mo ago
As far as I understand the $200 trillion is the difference between liabilities and tax income if taken from the perspective of government's infinite horizon intertemporal budget constraint. It takes into account the net present value of such liability and the number is 200 trillion. I actually like this calculation even for home budget as you can put on the same playing field different type of spending. Imagine that you want to compare value of drinking a $3 coffee every day compared to let's say once in a lifetime expenditure you are about to undertake such as let's say some medical procedure or even a voucher entitling you to one free coffee for the rest of your life, which for that $3 coffee is around $20,000 net present value with around 5% interest rate. You can use this method to discover ponzi schemes if somebody tries to do magic with cash flow - as the US government wants to do.
Similarly here, the solution can only be to increase taxes to increase income to finance those liabilities, or decrease payouts which means reneging on those liabilities or some combination of thereof. Also you are correct that Social Security is a transfer from young to the old but with implicit assumption that the young will receive similar from young if they themselves are old. Except there is a huge risk that by the time it should happen the boomer or even Gen X generation will be long dead and the Millenials and Zoomers will end up with no place to sit in this metaphorical musical chairs game.
georgioz
1mo ago
For many generations the natives of the Belgian Congo, for example, endured the most unspeakable atrocities at the hands of the Belgians, at the hands of Europe.
Those "many generations" were around two - between 1865 and 1908 when Congo was run as personal domain by king Leopold II with all the horrible atrocities, probably one of the worst if not the worst in whole colonial Africa. The whole situation ashamed Belgians and after they annexed the country from the king the invested heavily into Congo making it one of the most developed countries in Africa be it infrastructure and industrialization, literacy or population health and growth.
georgioz
1mo ago
Gaza is already cut off even from neighboring Egypt. So what Israel should have done is basically no change - meaning that they should continue providing water, electricity and support the Gaza in the same way as in the past. Basically pretend that nothing changed, correct?
georgioz
2mo ago
Slave plantations are less efficient than small farmers.
This was not so for usual cash crops such as tobacco or sugar cane or other similar crops especially if these were grown in on large plantations in hot climates ridden with tropical diseases. After revolution in Haiti the newly freed slaves were not that keen on continuing growing cash crops and the revenue plummeted.
This is the opposite of grain or other type of crops that are more suitable for small family sized groups of yeomen farmers. Heck, even growing rice gives rise to different types of societies given that it is a very labor intensive type of farming that requires irrigation and other communal infrastructure projects. So yes, I'd say that slavery is also largely (but not solely) due to economic reasons.
One "theory" I heard was that recent history in the West - and to some extent also elsewhere - basically revolved around baby boomers, partly due to the fact that it is such a populous generation but also due to the fact that so many ideas got discredited as a result of first and second world wars.
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The forties and fifties were the times when boomers were born, it was a time of rebuilding, family stability and security.
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Sixties and seventies were the times when boomers were young adults full of rebellious energies, experimentation with sexuality and drugs and all that. It was the time of peace movements and mass refusal of military service in the name of communal love and peace and almost teenage ideals.
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The eighties and nineties were the times where boomers really came of age, it were the times of risk taking yuppies that proudly destroyed the old stuff in order to unleash creative destruction of this new tide of success hungry urban professionals. It is interesting to see that exactly at the time when boomers were in their most energetic years was also the time the society suddenly discovered that individualism and self-reliance is to be promoted. It was also the time where the society really leaned into gym culture worshiping this youthful vigor, it was the time of Gordon Gekko and Mitch Buchannon.
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The Aughts and Tens are the decades of solidification of the previous achievements. At the same time it is the time of bailouts and growth of assets but also the time of glorification of all the ethos and views of how boomers see themselves, as paragons of Civil Rights virtue who carried the torch of progress forward. But maybe right now we should cut back on some of the stuff and strengthen our social security, healthcare and we should also do everything possible in order to save octogenarians from deadly virus. If the price is incarcerating pre-teen kids in their homes, that is the price boomers are willing to pay.
Now take the aforementioned with grain of salt, but once you see this it is kind of hard to unsee. Boomers collectively seem to have quite a grip on our societies to the extent that they literally shape the cultural lense of how society views itself for over half a century at least. One can even better see it if one for instance looks into statistics of average age of let's say US government officials. The first Baby Boomer president was Bill Clinton born in 1946 who became president in 1993 and we are going to have a president either born in 1946 or 1942 in 2024.
georgioz
2mo ago
As others said, I do not think Israel is particularly destabilizing force in the region compared to all the alternatives. Historically you have all types of conflict in the Middle-East including religious and sectarian strife, ethnic strife, ideological strife between monarchies and republics and socialist revolutionary states as well as tribal and all other types of conflicts. If anything, Israel has quite cordial relations with some of its neighbors like Egypt or Saudi Arabia, which is obviously the reason why somebody sees an ally of my enemy as his enemy.
In fact the civil war in Yemen is a proof that Israel does not have much to do with instability in the region as it is generally viewed as a proxy war between Saudi Arabia and Iran where Saudis are actually propped up by western aid in this conflict. So now what - should US and EU depose the Saudi dynasty and establish the country as some direct protectorate to ensure flow of oil and secure Red See and straight of Hormuz?
georgioz
21d ago
Yes, the OP mentioned the fact that even if we take the EA utilitarianism into account it is hard to calculate utility lost by killing untold number of moths and larvae compared to inconvenience of not crushing them when walking around the tiny apartment. Another interesting thing that jumped at me was that the EA poster decided that next time she has to kill the insect ASAP, informed by emotional response of seeing moths dying slowly. To me it is interesting to compare with how EA is so obsessed by saving future unborn people. I am very glad that this got posted, unlike your accusatory oneliner.
I can't tell if this was the intention of the President's Office when they passed the rule, and how much will be left after everything settles (or if it won't settle, and everything will just sit in storage awaiting a change of zeitgeist).
I think anybody can tell that it was the intent, at least according to the link you provided regarding the NAGPRA Act itself:
These regulations provide systematic processes for returning Native American human remains, funerary objects, sacred objects, or objects of cultural patrimony to lineal descendants, Indian Tribes, and Native Hawaiian Organizations (NHOs). The revised regulations streamline requirements for museums and federal agencies to inventory and identify Native American human remains and cultural items in their collections.
Between funerary object, sacred objects and objects of cultural patrimony, I think anything goes since cultural patrimony is synonymous with cultural property. And I would emphasize the word cultural is by now long hijacked by the Left: as in cultural studies or cultural sensitivity or cultural racism or LGBT culture and others. The word cultural in this context is one of the archetypal examples of "we share your language but not your dictionary", similar to words like inclusion or diversity. So if you hear something like culturally relevant teaching you cant translate it as woke, probably explicitly as a vehicle to pose as a protector of oppressed native peoples to gain power.
So yeah, I guess the exhibition curators and museum directors are now scared shitless as they probably know what is coming their direction - if they do not immediately overdo at least by factor of 10 of any measure they think is reasonable.
I will answer the question in kind of roundabout way, the sexual revolution in my eyes is wish fulfilment of certain strains of feminism that basically worship masculinity. I am talking about people who had incorrect analysis of what the social relationships are - that men use male privilege to oppress women and created Patriarchy to reproduce that pattern, that marriage and basically everything is oppression. As with many religions and ideologies - you become what you worship, in this case feminists secretly worship this fantasy of male power and want it for themselves. In their own way they just seized the means of power and put on the other shoe to serve the "just" case of reparations for historical oppression. The thought that they were wrong all along and that they themselves manifested the monster they fantasized about - now in the real world only in pink - and that there is no basis for reparations and revenge, it is too brutal to contemplate now. The new female rolemodel is a caricature of toxic masculine man that feminists supposedly hate: she is powerful and calculating business owner who can also be physically imposing and aggressive as well as sexually promiscuous. She is formidable and feared by all around her, she is highly competitive high status earner and nobody will tell her what to do. She is stoic in her outlook and she is totally impervious to emotions - especially if they take the form of male or other oppressor tears.
Just look what ideal progressive modern woman should look like: she should be given free contraception at early teen or even pre-teen and get fast tracked into sexual experimentation including with her sexual preference and gender identity. Then she should of course spend her most healthy and fertile years of late teens and early twenties studying in college and slaving as HR representative for some nameless corporation while finding meaning not in family and children but by "doing work" on some activist and ideally feminist projects while popping birth control pills and experimenting with sex of course. Then she can go and have a "career" in her late twenties and thirties because every job is a career and groundbreaking work needs to be done on promoting justice of some kind. She may think about relationship, but her "career" and own "wellbeing" should be a priority. You also have right to pursue "career" as Instagram or OF model, it is just a regular work and possibly doable as a sidejob to being preschool teacher.
In her late thirties or early forties there is time to have your eggs frozen so that they can be implanted into surrogate Indian or Ukrainian mother and delivered to you on silver platter as if some pet like Khloé Kardashian baby - you do not even have to have any interesting excuse, just valuing your body is enough. You see, access to motherhood is a right and it is all about YOU as a Mother, the child is there just as a reminder for the rest of the society that you are so wonderful and capable of doing the most difficult work of all on your own. Then you can become happy wine whine mom and bitch about how men ignore women over 45 - which signifies that it is a good time getting some plastic surgery done and hit bars and clubs pretending to be teenager again. It is not as if you are some respected matriarch responsible for helping your gaggle of grandchildren navigating life, it is all about you until you end the misery by euthanasia in Canada. In the meantime go and slay it on the dancefloor in your seventies queen.
So is sexual revolution a failure specifically for women? Maybe not, if you are happy with the story above and you think that is an awesome culture worth reproducing by implanting your eggs into poor 3rd world women so that the state can pay for your single motherhood in case something happens - at least until artificial womb is invented and producing children will be a job of child farms on Epstein Islands of some "eccentric" billionaires somewhere. I guess that would also be a way to "reproduce" this "culture" and a huge win for the whole paradigm. Progress cannot be stopped, it is what it is and it is always good as it presents us with opportunity to move one step further even if we made two steps back.
Other people really view it as obvious failure as it produced inverted lifestyle where everything - from sex to childcare - is done in wrong order and often in opposite ways it was done before, often seemingly just in spite and as part of some endless revolt against religions or other traditions. Now half a century later this is how the new Orthodoxy looks like - and it does not look as hot.
georgioz
2mo ago
If you consider only wellbeing of nobility/elites, then yes.
I am considering tons of sugar produced, in that sense slave plantations were more efficient compared to other forms of ownership. So no matter the initial organization of labor, slave plantations will be more efficient and thus will be established as dominant structure as that is how incentives are aligned.
By the way it is not dissimilar to some issues here an now: organic and ethical farms are less efficient compared to industrial agriculture and that is why we have the system that we have now. The same goes for textile industry and so forth. And even the do-gooders and Buddhist vegans may not be as squeamish buying illegal drugs with all the costs associated with financing criminal cartels wreaking havoc in many countries. I do not see the situation that different - if English ladies and gentlemen of 18th century wanted to sweeten their tea with sugar, they just accepted slave labor in the same way modern comrades in California accept some people being horribly executed by cartels just as a price of having fun when partying.
Who cares? That which can be destroyed by the Truth should be, immediately.
This Litany of Tarsky shit is probably the most edgy remnants of Yudkowskian writing - and it is of course highly unworkable as it can be subverted by almost childish level of effort besides numerous other flaws. As other people said, it can be used in support of anarcho-tyranny. In this case, we can investigate all Tarskyists and once we inevitably find them guilty of something, we can just hand them the rope so they can voluntary and eagerly hang each other in the name of the Truth. So the rest of us can actually "enjoy" normal society and actually do something about dishonest mercenary journalism without all the noise of litany chants from ratsphere in the background.
To me it seems that Scott is now becoming more mature and maybe he sees things more on the meta level. He realizes that some of rationalist rules can long-term lead to global Truth minimum by being attracted into local Truth maximum. We should be more careful and think about Truth in more abstract level, maybe saying that we just want to be meta-rule utilitarians can work - you can suspend some utilitarian rule in favor of other rule on some occasions like when dishonest journalists target people on our side. I for one am very happy, step-by-step at least Scott's part of the movement becomes a little bit more sane. Who knows, maybe one day he will also admit that people living in weird sex polycules may not be the most "rational" way of organizing the society. One can always dream.
But then maybe you are even more meta level as in this case I'd that it is a ultimately a very good thing that Gay is gone. Good riddance. So in a way Scott trying to indirectly garner sympathy for ghouls like Gay by making them comparable to his very own situation can be actually a proof for Scott still remaining hopeless. So maybe I should really just stay away and let orthodox rationalists duke it out with Scott in this round. Also I think attacking Ackman's wife is probably one of the more stupid moves to make, if anything I saw Ackman leaning even more strongly into his "conversion of Saul" position - not everybody can be as easily neutered as Scott back in the day when he disavowed The Motte as a result of the journalistic attack.
georgioz
1mo ago
Just curious, what response do you think would go against what Hamas wanted Israel to do?
georgioz
3mo ago
Mass immigration is only one angle of change with late stage demographic transition. You can apply the same logic you apply to immigrants to demographic collapse. Some things:
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Dysgenic effect of this demographic collapse. The population that is more likely to have children in modern context is population that is more likely to be prone to risky behavior. We are talking about teen mothers, people who also are more prone to addictive substances and so forth. It also makes huge difference when it comes to regional birth rate difference as well as various subcultures: for instance orthodox vs secular Askhenazi Jews in Israel.
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The structure of post-collapse population is impacted in very important way. If you will have 15 million South Koreans in 2100 their median age can be close to 60 years. I is far worse than just having small population, it means that small number of working age people will have to take care of so many unproductive ones. Even if everything that you say is true and we will have some sort of robot revolution, this whole affair will impact the underlying political structure. I do not think that democracy as we know it can thrive in a situation where over 50% of the population is literally living on government dole or its equivalent.
Nevertheless I think you and Kevin Dolan are agreeing here. Birth rates are "not a problem" as long as some societies somehow will find a way to organize economic and political life so that people don't need to work and everybody will get what they need and want - as if this "don't work and get rich" is somehow a novel idea. I think in that case you just solved the people bottleneck by making people obsolete, as easy as that.
Exactly, and Putin may put this into a test, especially to test how will let's say countries like Portugal or Italy or even Hungary or Slovakia or Finland or Romania react to the situation when their soldiers will return in cardboxes by thousands in peer-to-peer warfare. And we already see the pathetic situation we are in right now - US cannot get a bill of $60 billion passed to support Ukraine, and even that has some Israel support as well as organizational support for European theater inside. And we are still talking about 7% of US military budget and 0.2% of US GDP. And let's not forget that USA and UK actually have some obligations towards Ukraine as part of Budapest memorandum where Ukrainians gave up their nuclear arsenal in exchange for guarantees of territorial integrity from US, UK and Russia. Of course Russian word is as usual not worth the paper it was put onto and US/UK try to weasel out of it by saying it was actually "assurance" and not "guarantee". Anyways even besides that, this is still seems crazy to me - you are supposedly willing to pour trillions of dollars to build up defense against hostile power threatening NATO but you are unable to spend comparatively infinitesimal fraction of money to actually fight it? To me it seems like an invitation for Putin to test the resolve.
Plus the reality check of actual efficacy of all that GDP put into military. Fucking North Korea who is economical dwarf was able to send 3 million shells to Russia. US production is around 30,000 a month so North Korea was able to send years of production to Russia. And we are not even talking about what Russia was able to do since the war started - triple the production of artillery shells to 300,000 a month.
I actually see it as the opposite. The ultimate defeatism is things I reacted to such as "too many Ukrainians are dying, let's give Putin what he wants" or "don't support Ukrainians by 0.2% of GDP when they are in hot war against an actor that threatens NATO, it is too much money that can be spent on social security". So if we care about non-NATO soldiers dying and spending on level of peanunts, then how is NATO going to absorb tens of thousands of their own citizens dying or spending hundreds of billions or even trillions on potential hot war? Will it not be too tempting to again give Putin what he wants and effectively dissolve NATO as a defensive alliance? These two things are related in my eyes and I bet that those new NATO members are watching it in disbelief, they may have been hoodwinked by mushy allies. Also it is not as if this happened for the first time, Czechoslovakia could talk about that a little bit
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