Yeah of course industries will collapse. 100 car factories will close, 5 superyacht factories will open, tying up the same amount of productivity. Owned by the same guy.

There will be tons of spacecraft launchpads, private jet hangars, etc.

And wars of course.

The rich will keep trading with each other. Look at housing for an example.

The rich. Companies will stop targeting products to wider and wider swathes of people, just like nobody caters to the homeless now.

Other billionaires making money might have started to be afraid to do so.

Dutch has aub meaning alstublieft meaning please, and they use it in all kinds of official places.

Only if you were involved in the kidnapping, like paying them to do it.

Reading this I’m not sure I’d fault him even if that were the case.

The thing with Mélenchon is that he’s real flaky on Ukraine to the point of plausibly supporting Putin in his invasion. He has weird positions, he doesn’t support Putin’s domestic policy, yet he supports the annexation, but not the war.

I wonder if Macron stepping back when Mélenchon inches ahead will mean France will basically pull out of supporting Ukraine altogether.

Do Google engineers get off on writing software that’s only compatible within their own little world, then offering it as some de facto standard?

Google Cloud had a ton of these that make it arbitrarily hard to use.

It was outsourced to the guy who ran Nazi concentration camps to build ballistic missiles to bomb London with.

It means, at least in the golang world, that they keep a copy of your source for themselves and use it for builds. They don’t pull from the public repo every time they build their stuff, so malicious code could only get in with new versions, but they check for that.

Are they independent from the cancerous management though?

It’s kinda fucked up that each major political camp denies some genocide. Like we could replace who you vote for with which genocide was a shamocide?

F-Droid could go through it, the thing that is prohibited is for Google to bar them just because they are a competitor.

Yes, unlike congress critters, insider trading laws apply to you and me, so we can’t know what they trade when they do.

Men should all be (the sole) breadwinners.

This seems reasonable, what’s the catch?

Takes one to know one I guess

I don’t really have the time to go digging, but “Eurasianism” is to the Russians as “Lebensraum” was to the German Nazis.

It can be legitimate, IDK, but Eurasia as a term tends to be a red flag.

aiding Kiev has become an end in itself, divorced from a coherent strategy for bringing the war to a close

The capital of Ukraine is named Kyiv. Kiev was the name of the same city in the now-defunct USSR. Leningrad and Stalingrad also don’t exist today.

There is a coherent and very realistic war aim, though. Making it clear to the world that Russia did not gain anything with its war of aggression towards Ukraine, and thus deter further wars of aggression across the world. So far, it’s not entirely unsuccessful, with the Nordics joining NATO, while Russia lost allies in Central Asia, and CSTO is no longer a credible thing.

The authors call on the White House to come out in full-throated support of Kiev’s war aims: namely, ejecting all Russian forces from Ukraine’s 1991 borders including Crimea,

It’s the 2014 borders, the ones established in 1991 by the fall of the USSR, and recognized by Russia in 1994 in the Budapest Memorandum it has now broken. I feel the author is trying to push that status quo into the past as much as it can to delegitimize it. They are not arbitrary historical borders, they are the current UN recognized borders of Ukraine.

Put differently, the West must commit itself to nothing short of Russia’s total and unconditional battlefield defeat. How is Ukraine, with its battered military, collapsing demography, and an economy entirely reliant on Western cash infusions, to accomplish this lofty task?

I love how the article switches subjects mid-thought. Is it the West or Ukraine who is fighting? Also, Ukraine has a military of 1,500,000, with an additional reserve of 2,500,000. They are still able to mobilize more people. The attrition numbers also heavily favour them, even in the current balance, Avdiivka was taken on a 3:1 casualty ratio. Russia’s demographics are not all rosy either, especially since they can mobilize a smaller proportion of their people before the country becomes even more unstable politically.

It’s not Ukraine that had a major portion of its military march on its own capital with the intent of a coup during the war.

new sanctions notwithstanding Russia’s continued economic growth despite being the world’s most sanctioned country; and threatening Russia’s control over Crimea with ideas about “air superiority” that bear no semblance to the war’s current dynamics and likely trajectory.

Easy to do that with a war economy, that is not something that is sustainable. Is the RUB convertible again? How about Gazprom’s latest announced losses? Sanctions are, in fact, working, it’s enough listening to the noise complaining about them.

Russia’s military is substantially larger today than it was at the start of the February 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

As is Ukraine’s. Mobilization tends to do that to militaries.

It has also earned valuable battlefield experience that can only come from the trial and error inherent to waging years of grueling, high-intensity warfare, and rallied its military-industrial base to markedly outpace the West in artillery round production.

And Ukraine didn’t learn those lessons, right? Or the West for that matter, with their equipment going up against their Russian / Chinese / Iranian counterparts? Also, artillery rounds are not a be-all-end-all. It’s central to Russia’s strategy, yes, but if you look at any other aspect of their army, the complete picture is much different. If you only look at the guns they shoot those rounds with, since the beginning of the war, it went from mostly self-propelled to mostly towed with the destruction of SPGs and the mobilization of further older weaponry. The point is, Russia can manufacture as many rounds as it wants, it will not hit jack if it’s D-10s shooting it with 10km effective range, and the accuracy of a drunk mobnik who’s seeing a urinal for the first time.

Russia’s strategy is not to seize large swathes of Ukrainian land or to besiege its major cities, but to attrit Ukrainian forces slowly by leveraging its firepower advantage to grind them down at multiple points along the lines of contact.

That’s going well. Russia is outpaced in attrition in almost every way, they chewed through the best half of their old armoured reserves for example, they lost the better part of the Black Sea fleet, and even manpower-wise, they are barely holding on with just being able to train enough people to replace losses. It’s funny to hear the Russians wanting to win through attrition when new Russian units are equipped with T-55s, D-10s, Mosins and Su-25s against Leopard 2A5s, HIMARS launchers, new HK rifles and F-16s.

There is no decisive attritional advantage to Russia today. Ukrainians are in hot water, yes, but neither side has a clear advantage.

It is not too late to end the war on terms that guarantee Ukraine’s sovereignty while advancing U.S. interests. The West still has substantial leverage on and off the battlefield, but the key to wielding this influence effectively is to finally abandon a zero-sum framing of victory that has prevented leaders from repairing to a more pragmatic, strategically nimble approach.

Thanks man, your vague “strategically nimble” goals are much clearer and more realistic than the alternative. What actually were they though again? What is this article even saying?

There is an old Hungarian satirical movie that had this great quote:

Are you hung up on these things, comrade Pelikán? What you see with your blind eyes, what you hear with your deaf ears, what you think with your dull mind? Do you think any of these can measure up to the truth of our great goals?

It was a 1984-esque parody of the authoritarian socialist system, and somehow it’s still apt. The more things change the more they stay the same I guess.