I'm as tired as you when the top comment always seems to be crying "this was AI generated". Especially since the use of AI to make a new language is almost inevitable, as it is too onerous to experiment, build and innovative without.
But minimaxir put out some very thoughtful comments you'd be wise to lend your ears to, because the technical merits your work seems to have will get drowned out.
Shouldn't we stop pushing the cost of things onto the public, in both CO2 and nuclear contamination?
Surely a nuclear reactor is only economical if you don't have to pay for the cost of a Chernobyl type event. Did they assess the costs? Surely they played the costs down as the public is going to pay for the consequences. Shrug. It's so easy to do business this way. The fins also expose themselves to blackmail by an adversarial neighbor.
But if this is all well reasoned we can now start building data centers on the south pole and dump the nuclear waste where no one notices it. Because that's the fumbling policy relied on. The people are being played for fools.
1. Chernobyl disaster was not related in any way with nuclear plant normal functioning. It was "experiment of how low output reactor can go" proposed and exercised by people without knowledge or experience. It's monument of why government officials should not touch anything related to science
2. Chernobyl nuclear plant was very poor copy of safe by design nuclear plant. It had critical flaw in carbon based proton catching mechanism
3. Closed zone is currently habitable (except Sarcophagus area). You'll receive much higher radiation dose simply by flying to Norway. Nature is returning there, there're plans to repopulate it
4. This was in Soviet Union and power plant was "public". Most of the power plant in EU is public if not every single one. I don't have exact information on this topic
Please do not treat entire technology, which is safe, as a threat simply because some greedy, uneducated people from the past wanted better position and paid ultimate price for it
The Chernobyl disaster wasn't caused by a single person, as you note in your comment "proposed and exercised by people without knowledge or experience."
Chernobyl disaster was biggest nuclear accident, but not the biggest disaster related to energy production. In 1975 the failure of the Banqiao Reservoir Dam and other dams in Henan Province, China caused more casualties than any other dam failure in history. The disaster killed an estimated 171,000 people and 11 million people lost their homes. It's not much known in the West because various elements of the Chinese government concealed the details of the disaster until the 1990s.
In terms of loss of life Chernobyl disaster is comparable to Bhopal disaster (at least 3,787 over 16,000 claimed deaths), caused by Methyl isocyanate leak from the storage tank. A combination of poorly-maintained or non-functional facilities, a disregard of safety standards, and an under-trained workforce made it possible for water to leak into the MIC tanks in the absence of properly working safety systems.
Chernobyl disaster was caused by a combination of reactor design error and operator error. After this errors have been fixed (different nuclear fuel composition, modern monitoring and controlling equipment, improved operator training and procedures) there are still 7 operational RBMK in Russia. (The same reactor type as Chernobyl)
That chart needs a companion chart showing “amount of effort needed to prevent deaths”. Since that is missing lots of people think nuclear is safe when it’s actually by far the most dangerous.
Such charts exist - they're the "costs per unit" charts; perhaps broken down into (say) capital upfront plant costs, ongoing running costs per unit generated, and decommissioning costs.
It's the decommissioning costs for both nuclear and fossil fuel plants that are most often missing or overlooked.
True enough but there's an order of magnitude difference in those costs. For nuclear the costs extend beyond out ability to predict the future, and they simply can't be ignored whatever they amount to.
A fossil plant can simply be abandoned, and the damage will be minimal compared to abandoning a nuclear plant.
Without this information the chart is repeatedly used as an argument that nuclear power is safe, which is of course the direct opposite of the truth. It is the option that requires the most money and effort to keep safe and nothing is even a close second.
Nuclear power plant after removal of nuclear fuel and decontamination is inert as abandoned fossil plant. Such cleaning at end of life has to be done also for many kinds of chemical plants, chemical storage tanks, otherwise you get a catastrophe like in Bhopal, India.
If you are looking for long term storage of spend nuclear fuel, it's mostly a political issue, not technical issue. In U.S. there is WIPP, in New Mexico, a deep geological repository licensed to store transuranic radioactive waste for 10,000 years. But this is only licensed to store military nuclear waste, not civilian nuclear waste.
There is also hazardeus chemical waste which is stored in underground. The Herfa-Neurode underground landfill ( UTD Herfa-Neurode ) is the world's largest underground landfill for hazardous waste, includes 690,000 tons of waste containing dioxins and furans , 220,000 tons of waste containing mercury , 127,000 tons of waste containing cyanide , and 83,000 tons of toxic waste containing arsenic.
>Nuclear power plant after removal of nuclear fuel and decontamination is inert as abandoned fossil plant.
The site itself sure, but the "removal" just moves the remaining cost somewhere else, it doesn't /re/move it.
The remaining costs for "decommissioned" power plants usually end up with the military. Sellafield in the UK, INL in the US for example.
The problem with the idea of a multi-century stable solution is that we make mistakes. The WIPP facility in the US had a similar cousin in Germany, the Asse II mine. Also planned to be permanent storage until they had to empty it because water found a way in. Several new billions of euros will now be drawn from taxpayers to pay for "decommissioned" plants.
It can be argued that so far, there has been no fully decommissioned, as in "stopped costing any money" nuclear plants, anywhere.
Fossil plants however can be fully decommissioned with 0 remaining costs. Thank god, because that's what we should do of course!
Civil nuclear power plants accumulate funds for decommissioning and disposal of nuclear waste. It's part of the electricity costs. Sellafield in the UK, INL in the US are military/research facilities.
"Asse II: A lesson that is making modern deep repositories safer"
There were reports in 2008 about brine contaminated with radioactive caesium-137, plutonium and strontium. I would be interested about the amounts of these isotopes in the brine, as we can detect extremely small quantities of radioactive isotopes.
For example for caesium-137 we can measure amounts as low as 5 Bq/kg, the decay of 5 atoms of caesium-137 per second in 1 kg of sample.
An adult person usually has activity of 3,000–6,000 becquerels (Bq) of potassium-40. 3,000–6,000 potassium-40 atoms decay and emit a beta particle in adult person every second.
We have developed cheap glass that can be mass produced and sucks electricity from sunshine, can be placed on already occupied surfaces to produce 100x more electricity than we are currently consuming. It requires basically no maintenance or operating costs for decades and is xheap enough for an average home-owner to meet at least half of their electricity needs.
We have also discovered cheap containers that can be built using the fourth most common element in the earths crust to store that electricity for when it's needed.
All of this can be built cheaply, massively, quickly, and be deployed anywhere with no conceivable risks of either massive disasters or proliferation of destructive weapons.
The end result is electricity creation distributed everywhere, so cheap that it's realistic to have small communities provide all the electricity they need. Resilient to failure, sabotage or natural disasters.
Why argue for massive amounts of money, manpower and time being spent to create central power plants that take a decade to build, end up controlled by a few masters who can milk the customers at will forever, when we can have so much better?
Cheap solar, yes you can now buy PV quite cheap. How much of this costs (research, developmemt, building large factories in China) was payed by German EEG money and different subsidies? Also subsidies in form of cheap Chinese coal electricity, polysilicon production is very energy intensive.
Costs estimates for Energiewende are in hudreds of bilions of euros.
>How much of this costs (research, developmemt, building large factories in China) was payed by German EEG money and different subsidies?
This doesn't matter whatever the answer is. Cheap solar is what matters, not how humanity made the breakthrough or who paid for the research or build-out.
Personally, I think China deserves credit here. They made a political decision to develop batteries, solar and EV's as part of their long-term planning several years ago and have been wildly successful with all 3.
That Germany (and most other western nations) failed to do this themselves is unfortunate, but having a sour grapes attitude about it is not constructive. Cheap solar and cheap batteries are here now. All countries should make the most of it as quickly as possible. Particularly Germany, and I'm happy to see Munich getting one of the first Sodium BESS storage facilities from CATL.
China still produced only 11% of electricity from solar, Germany 18%, so in this metric Germany is better, but import all of it PV panels. And electricity only a part of primary energy consumption in both in China and Germany.
I'm interested how China could decarbonize, as they still building a lot of coal power plants. They are slowly decreasing coal electricity production, but ramping up syntetic fuel from coal production.
So if Germany wants to follow Chinas path, they should build a lot of solar, wind, coal, some nuclear and hydro power plants, stop building gas power plants. You don't want it, as coal burning still has significant health impacts in Germany.
Medium-term thinking in Germany is to import a lot oil, natural gas, PV. Long-term thinking in Germany to import a lot of hydrogen, PV. Nobody talks about Germany becomming energy independent.
Best place for batteries for decarbonization is in EVs, not grid stabilization. Even better for decarbonization are electric trains, electric trams, trolleybus, they run directly from electric grid.
>China still produced only 11% of electricity from solar, Germany 18%, so in this metric Germany is better
I think it's more interesting to compare actual production in this case. Here is a truly mindblowing statistic:
China's solar panels already produce more than twice the total amount of electricity consumed by Germany per year.
China's solar growth is equivalent to "one Germany" every 2 years.
Batteries follow a similar curve to solar panels, and I disagree strongly that they should not be used for grid stabilization. In fact, nothing stabilizes the grid better than batteries. They should of course also replace fossil fuels in transportation as well, and that's been happening for years now.
I recall many similar arguments for EV's as we now see for grid storage. "It's too expensive", "We can't make enough batteries". Turns out it wasn't, and we could.
I'm sure we can again, and China is basically proving it repeatedly. All that our politicians in the west need to do is get out of the way, and I'm sure it will solve itself without any further involvement from them.
We will see how the battery costs change over years, currently they are still very expensive for quantities necessary for large grid stabilization in Europe.
But they start to make economic sense in regions with lot of sun and high electricity costs.
In China politicians give the way and whoever is in the way, is removed. It an error of Europe to make itself depend from China. The political system China is the same as in Russia and we can see the result of such dependancy.
>currently they are still very expensive for quantities necessary for large grid stabilization in Europe.
They are at about 100 euros per KWh now, which is small potatoes for the hyperscalers building AI-centers for 10s of billions of euros. How about we demand that any data center being built in Europe needs to provide at least 8 hours of battery backup for max power draw? Most of the time that battery backup will not be needed, and can then benefit the grid.
Google is building multiple 1GW data centers in europe, 8 GWh of battery backup at each of those would stabilize the grid nicely!
>The political system China is the same as in Russia and we can see the result of such dependancy.
Here I agree 100%. We are fortunate that Xi seems relatively benign for a despot but we should not count on that fortune lasting indefinitely. It's imperative that we in the west start making our own solar panels and batteries as quickly as possible.
>With Capex of $125/kWh for BESS, 8 GWh of battery backup would cost about a bilion USD. [..] At this scale there just few projects in the pipeline
Worth noting there is that Google (alone, and they are one of several) are spending around 200 billion on datacenters this year, and that the 125/kWh figure is a year old and calculated from BESS-projects that need to pay for a lot of things the datacenter already pays for.
A datacenter already needs infrastructure to handle a 1GW load, which means it can also deliver 1GW back to the grid. Trucks, cranes, housing, roads and everything else that a BESS-project has to finance separately are already paid for by the datacenter itself. So the "extra cost" would likely be close to the raw cost of the actual battery capacity.
It's therefore reasonable to assume that Google & co would pay a lot less than a billion for 8 hours of runtime on batteries. And they are already spending so much that even the billion is no problem.
For the communities who will give up 10-15% of the nations electricity production per center, it seems like a sensible demand. Google will still grab their cheap electricity but a 8GWh battery would go a very long way to remove the biggest problems with solar and wind, which can then be built out much more aggressively.
You are right about about nuclear weapons, every large nuclear civilian reactor produces multiple bombs worth of plutonium every year, spread within the spend nuclear nuclear fuel. This reactor-grade plutonium has miserable properties for bomb making, but in theory could be used to make a bomb (U.S. experimented with concept and created few bombs from reactor-grade plutonium).
This also the reason why every civilian nuclear reactor in non-nuclear weapon states is under constant monitoring of International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and all spend nuclear fuel is under constant monitoring. Every gram of special nuclear material is accounted. Any irregularities detected by IAEA are then handled by United Nations Security Council, with possible diplomatic sanctions or military actions.
Outside of few experiments, civilian power reactors are not used for plutonium production for use in weapons, because to get high quality weapon grade plutonium you have to frequently put nuclear fuel into reactor and out of reactor (every few weeks). This increases down-time and makes electric production more expensive. Also civilian nuclear reactor use high temperature and high pressure steam, this makes change of nuclear fuel under power a risky business.
Plutonium for weapons is produced in smaller, cheaper production reactors. They run at much lower thermal power and are optimized for frequent cycling of nuclear fuel and easy handling of spend nuclear fuel.
Because any spend nuclear fuel could be in theory be used to make a nuclear bomb, U.S. in general doesn't allow countries to develop spend nuclear fuel reprocessing capabilities, or strongly tries to persuaded them not to develop such capabilities. This was a corner stone of U.S. foreign policy for many decades and also the reason why U.S. stopped development of fast-neutron breeder reactors under Carter (they didn't want other countries to pursue this technology).
The long-term U.S. policy for decades was to prevent any kind civilian nuclear power production in developing countries, as written in Nuclear Non-Proliferation Act of 1978.
"The United States shall endeavor to cooperate with other nations, international institutions, and private organizations in establishing programs to assist in the development of non-nuclear energy resources, to cooperate with both developing and industrialized nations in protecting the international environment from contamination arising from both nuclear and non-nuclear energy activities, and shall seek to cooperate with and aid developing countries in meeting their energy needs through the development of such resources and the application of non-nuclear technologies consistent with the economic factors, the material resources of those countries, and environmental protection."
Developing countries have been prevented from exploring nuclear power generation but they were free to explore coal power generation.
As a side-note:
The are many countries that developed nuclear weapons before building nuclear power plants, there are countries (Israel, North Korea) which have nuclear weapons today and didn't deliver a single Joule of electricity from nuclear reactor to the electric grid.
> Fossil plants however can be fully decommissioned with 0 remaining costs
You say that, but someone still has to pay those costs which are rarely factored in and are significant.
To the north of my state we are faced with the costs of decommissioning and removal of 35 platforms, 6076 km of pipelines and static umbilicals; 483 subsea lifts; 11 floating facilities, 120 risers and 548 wells to be plugged - in addition to kilotons of offshore steel and concrete.
eg: One project is the Northern Endeavour is a 274-metre floating production storage and offloading (FPSO) facility. The Australian Government took responsibility for the decommissioning of the Northern Endeavour after the liquidation of its owner.
These are non trivial undertakings with costs running into the billions.
You're absolutely correct that oil and gas extraction activities need to be properly decommissioned, and that is expensive.
But that's a separate activity from shutting down electric power plants. Oil rigs will continue to operate even if all gas and oil power plants were shut down tomorrow, since only about 25% of all oil and gas is used for electricity generation.
A really nice application could be making test jigs, to validate everything on the PCB is functioning properly. One could have it design a fully custom motherboard with pogo pins and the necessary software, etc. All should be low complexity and therefore doable by the AI without much supervision.
It’s also just less risky and easier to work with people that you are near, speak your language, etc. more so back in the 80s before most people were even using email, we Americans had virtually no contact with people on other continents even was limited in the business world.
On the other hand, we can't tell if the US has a goal or not in the middle east or if destabilising countries is the geostrategy unto itself.
People really need to dial down the hype, engage with the real world where large countries get to have a sphere of influence and start talking realistically about what behaviour is tolerable. I still haven't heard anyone make a case for why we keep hitting the Russians given what acceptable US foreign policy looks like. One of the two is worse and it isn't the policies written in Cyrillic.
1) "we" (the US) are not hitting the Russians, "we" (Europe including the UK) are providing them with weapons for their self-defence, since it is in our interest to prevent a humanitarian catastrophe happening on the Polish border. I am no longer clear what, if any, assistance the US is providing. It is also very important in this that no NATO or EU forces are engaged directly with Russian forces yet, despite persistent incursions into EU airspace and occasional sabotage operations in Western Europe.
2) "start talking realistically about what behaviour is tolerable": I think we're past the point of pretending that international law applies evenly, and back to Mao's "power comes out of the barrel of a gun".
If we go back to a Cold War multipolar world between China, the US, Europe, and Russia, the only one of those which hasn't made public statements threatening European territorial integrity is China.
(at this point I would expect India to start asking whether they get to be a world power or not and what they're going to do with that, too)
*It's my current understanding that Ukrainians performed this sabotage.*
If that were vaguely true, Germany which owned 51% of NordStream would have sued UKR immediately and abolished diplomatic relationship. The fact they didn’t tells you everything you need to know about the absurdity of your claim.
Things being a talking point doesn't mean they're untrue. The US is and was the only party that made any logical sense, to say nothing of also being one of only a handful of nations with the technical expertise to do so as well. The US was against the Nord Stream from the beginning because we felt it could deepen ties between Germany and Russia, unilaterally sanctioned companies involved in it, and of course Biden publicly alluded to threats of blowing it up: "If Russia invades ... then there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it." "How will you do that, since the project is under Germany's control?" "We will, uh, I promise you, we will, uh, be able to do that *smirking*." [1]
With it blown up we're able to make Europe completely dependent upon US gas sold at a high premium. Well, at least that was probably the goal. Technically the attack failed and at least one of the pipelines was/is still viable, but the US probably was hedging their bets because there was no way to anticipate exactly how enthusiastic Europe would be about setting aside their own self interests for the sake of US geopolitics. It also helps ensure less chance of a reconciliation between Russia and Europe which is probably seen as a reasonable way of weakening both.
Reading "Rebuilding America's Defense" [2] by the typical names that show up in basically every US presidency, Democrat and Republican alike, is crucial to understanding US geopolitics. And one thing we obsess over is/was the prevention of the emergence of new superpowers. This is even mentioned quite explicitly in the text, "[Deploying US forces to Europe] is especially important in light of the nascent European moves toward an independent defense "identity" and policy; it is important that NATO not be replaced by the European Union, leaving the United States without a voice in European security affairs."
> Things being a talking point doesn't mean they're untrue.
Obviously, but hence the other things I put in the comment.
> The US is and was the only party that made any logical sense,
I aver none make sense, including the USA. The USA has limited capacity to transport LNG, most already being in use. Not really a growth opportunity.
Also, whoever does this, US or otherwise, runs the risk of getting caught; if it was the USA, the scandal of it would likely push Europe much closer to China.
So far as I can tell, the only apparently-involved nation who wouldn't care about the political fallout of getting caught would be Russia, but it was their gas so why would they attack it?
> to say nothing of also being one of only a handful of nations with the technical expertise to do so as well.
I find that many people over-estimate what can be done by a small motivated team. I understand it is well accepted that human divers capable of this are relatively rare, and there wasn't e.g. really enough time for the accused Ukrainian team to have done so, and the ship they were known to be on was very poorly suited to such a task.
However, the Ukrainians have demonstrated significant skill with remote control vehicles. Hell, the only reason I'd rule out anyone like say Greenpeace is that they didn't claim responsibility, such groups would be whom I'd say have the smallest required dose of sudden insanity to mistake this for a good idea.
> and of course Biden publicly alluded to threats of blowing it up: "If Russia invades ... then there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it." "How will you do that, since the project is under Germany's control?" "We will, uh, I promise you, we will, uh, be able to do that smirking."
The problem with this, is that Germany had already brought an end to it, before it was blown up. One thing Germany is very skilled at, putting red tape around things.
The explosion turned an indefinite suspension into a kinetic suspension.
> Europe would be about setting aside their own self interests for the sake of US geopolitics. It also helps ensure less chance of a reconciliation between Russia and Europe which is probably seen as a reasonable way of weakening both.
If the US sees the European reaction this way, then the US has misunderstood the European thought process.
It was, and is, in the self-interest of Europe to end the threat posed by Russia.
> And one thing we obsess over is/was the prevention of the emergence of new superpowers. This is even mentioned quite explicitly in the text, "[Deploying US forces to Europe] is especially important in light of the nascent European moves toward an independent defense "identity" and policy; it is important that NATO not be replaced by the European Union, leaving the United States without a voice in European security affairs."
That is indeed something I have heard from other sources.
Unrelated to Ukraine, it is interesting to see how Trump is doing the exact opposite of US interests in this regard.
« Germany had already brought an end to it » – Wrong. And of course refusal to start pipeline operation and the ridiculous legal shenanigans (at EU level) were down to US pressure.
« It was, and is, in the self-interest of Europe » – Where are you talking from, geographically? What European languages do you speak so as to be able to know "the self-interest of Europe"?
There's quite a bit of smugness and hypocrisy in your response. Because I don't believe you're as dumb as your responses suggest.
> Wrong. And of course refusal to start pipeline operation and the ridiculous legal shenanigans (at EU level) were down to US pressure.
Sounds like you're agreeing with me that they did in fact refuse to start pipeline operation. Regardless of who put what pressure where, that it was not started is by itself sufficient to make the destruction pointless for basically everyone.
> Where are you talking from, geographically? What European languages do you speak so as to be able to know "the self-interest of Europe"?
Ich spreche Deutsch, ik spreek een beetje Nederlands, hablo un poco de español, μιλάω λίγα ελληνικά. I have visited roughly half of EU member states, and live here too.
None of this is relevant to learning about national self-interests, as these are widely reported, taking quotations from politicians and military leadership across the continent, because news sites have actual translators and they're rather better at these languages than me. Even if they didn't, Google translate exists and works across the continent.
In this case, Russia started this war of aggression on our doorsteps, has been engaged in assassinations and sabotage in our countries, and some of their weapons keep ending up landing in our territory. The two largest armies in Europe right now are the Ukrainian and Russian armies, and the transformative nature of drone warfare during this conflict means that even though the rest of Europe has more money than Ukraine, it is not yet ready to defend itself from the kind of threat Russia would be immediately if Ukraine gave up, as we are all set up for elite forces, i.e. small quantities of high value systems, not mass forces, i.e. deploying 7,000 FPV drones per day every day for years.
> hypocrisy
I don't think you know what this word means. I assume from this random attempted insult and your quotation style that English is not your first language.
« national self-interests … are widely reported » – What's “widely reported” by the propaganda apparatus is often at odds with “national interest”, which is at least something that makes sense, whereas “the self-interest of Europe” is a highly questionable concept. Still, cheap gas from Russia would fit the bill, expensive wars on behalf of the US and the UK do not. Rich people making lots of money from it does not equate to “national interest”.
« assassinations and sabotage in our countries » – They did assassinate a Georgian terrorist, murderer and war criminal in Berlin in 2019 (whom Germany refused to hand over to justice), and a Russian traitor in Spain, and maybe others I'm not aware of. Compare these to the mass murder via US cyber-attack (true one), on March 24, 2015, of 150 people (mostly from Germany and Spain) by crashing an airliner into a mountain, and then ridiculously claiming (via NYT) “pilot suicide” (as they did with Egypt Air 990 on Oct 31, 1999). I ignore the exact motive, but I suspect it had sth to do with Merkel's trips to Moscow earlier that year.
English is indeed not my first language, and yet I know exactly what “hypocrisy” means. You can see an example of it by looking at the top of your reply, where you slyly pretend not to understand that the US had ample motive to destroy the pipeline for geopolitical reasons. It is absolutely not meant as an insult, just an analysis of the rhetorics you're using. After all, such rhetorics and styles of twisted reasoning are often unconsciously absorbed and reproduced due to exposure to propaganda (“free press”).
You can see data on US LNG imports to the EU here. [1] After the invasion they more than tripled with the US now accounting for more than 58% of EU imports. Gas prices are up more than 10x relative to their lowest lowest in the 2020 before the war. [2] The EU was most certainly a growth market, if Russian supplies to the EU could be disrupted.
I think the threat from Russia is questionable. This war was predictable after 2014, much in the same way that an eventual war with Moldova over Transnistria seems quite predictable today. However, war with e.g. Germany seems entirely nonsensical. But let's just assume there is a threat for the sake of discussion. How does escalating this conflict, most recently with highly provocative attacks explicitly targeting civilian infrastructure [3], aim to reduce such? And how would aiming for reconciliation and de-escalation not be a much more reasonable way to achieve such?
Even if we again assume reconciliation is not possible, which is also very questionable, you end up with the point that [3] not only serves no viable military purpose, but actively escalates the conflict in a likely self destructive way. Ukraine's attacks made some catchy headlines in the information war, but now they've been predictably been met in kind, putting Ukrainians in an even worse situation, increasing food scarcity and such, all with winter on the horizon. I haven't seen so many headlines about that, however. Go figure. Are these escalations making the EU more or less safe?
US interests in Europe are ensuring we maintain the dominant force in their geopolitical positioning. I think that is probably now more true than ever before. The EU showed some basic degree of self interest and defiance by staying out of Iran, but I'd hope and assume that would also be the case even if the US had a more reasonable President. That was just a particularly stupid war to start. Curiously, something Trump himself acknowledged before becoming president.
> You can see data on US LNG imports to the EU here. [1] After the invasion they more than tripled with the US now accounting for more than 58% of EU imports. Gas prices are up more than 10x relative to their lowest lowest in the 2020 before the war. [2] The EU was most certainly a growth market, if Russian supplies to the EU could be disrupted.
Pointing at the wrong thing: consider not EU imports but US exports, which went from 3,865,643 in 2022 to 4,343,027 in 2023.
Those gas prices surged very quickly, but the spike was very short-lived. The change in longer-term averages was much smaller than the spike; from your own link, the US total from 2020-2025, in dollars per thousand cubic feet: 5.64, 7.62, 12.24, 7.57, 6.41, 7.92.
> However, war with e.g. Germany seems entirely nonsensical.
To us (I mean, their troops are bogged down within a few tens of kilometres of their own borders), but the media rhetoric is that kind of revanchism.
> But let's just assume there is a threat for the sake of discussion. How does escalating this conflict, …, aim to reduce such? And how would aiming for reconciliation and de-escalation not be a much more reasonable way to achieve such?
First, the soft-touch approach was already tried with Crimea.
Second, consider Russia's stated aims with their "special military operation", which they still do not officially call a war. They invaded with words translated as "de-Nazification", but their use of the term means something very different to how it is understood in the west: ~"the enemy of Moscow". Consider that Ukraine was not actually threat, yet they invaded anyway under the pretence that they might at some unspecified time in the future join NATO: the Russian leadership today (not always) sees NATO as a threat, treats NATO membership as being a signal of being in the sphere of influence of the USA rather than voluntary mutual self-defence. Putin does not recognise the sovereignty of any nation that is not a "great power", regards Ukrainian nationality as fiction.
And third, we know that civilians in the occupied territories get conscripted and sent into war against the rest of Ukraine. Documented in Crimea as well as the more recently occupied parts Ukraine. So, the more Ukraine loses, the more of its own people and infrastructure becomes the tool of the invading forces to take more. Losing all of Ukraine means that all of Ukraine gets pointed at wherever Putin wants Russia to invade next.
> you end up with the point that [3] not only serves no viable military purpose,
Dual-use. It's not great that it is a target, but I think Amazon warehouses would probably get targeted similarly if e.g. the US tries this with Canada, given https://www.amazon.com/s?k=bullet+proof+vest+mens (no comment if any of this is good for more than cosplay, I wouldn't know).
(Edit: But also, consider that strikes by Ukraine against targets inside Russia were restricted by the Biden administration. The end of direct support by the USA coincided with Ukraine feeling free to make such attacks, so to the extent that the US can be seen as supporting Ukraine in this conflict, it was the exact force of moderation, holding Ukraine back, as is now called for.)
> putting Ukrainians in an even worse situation, increasing food scarcity and such, all with winter on the horizon
Not really "worse": in this regard they are in a bad position every winter, because Russia has never had a problem attacking Ukrainian food, power, or other civilian assets.
Also, these strikes against Wildberries make it much harder for civilians to directly supply their conscripted families (and those civilians kinda have to, given the military often doesn't bother with even the basics to the extent a new Russian soldier's average life expectancy on the front line is measured in minutes).
> US interests in Europe are ensuring we maintain the dominant force in their geopolitical positioning. I think that is probably now more true than ever before.
If we are clear "US interests" != "Trump's personal interest", yes. Trump is throwing away that position of dominant force in European geopolitical positioning.
On gas prices, US volume, relative to 2020, is up by 120%, and it's being sold for 40% more. That's less than the spike, but it's still the US relentlessly milking the EU for everything she's worth, all thanks to severing Russian and EU gas relations. There was never any soft touch approach with Crimea. The territory annexation was never recognized in spite of there being little doubt it was the will of the people there. Just prior to the invasion, Ukraine had passed a measure seeking to 'de-occupy' Ukraine using all measures, including military. [1] The West was actively indulging of such bravado.
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I think you know the dual use arguments around Wildberries are farcical. Ukrainian propaganda didn't even try to pretend it would have a military effect, but instead cheered about trying to make life for the average Russian less comfortable. The exact phrase used in most Western messaging was "bring the war home" along with some broader argument of economic damage. Why they would want to make that a goal and can't see the mirror response incoming, is quite stupefying. Why the US/EU indulge such things is even more stupefying.
Russia in the past had not been directly targeting civilian infrastructure being used for civilian purposes. What damage had happened was a mixture of Ukrainian anti-air/ECM weaponry resulting in downed drones/missiles detonating on civilian infrastructure, or targeting of civilian infrastructure that was being used for overtly military purposes. You could see things like video of a 'shopping center' being targeted, followed by large immediate and then smaller ongoing secondary detonations - it was storing weapons.
Completely destroying civilian infrastructure, on a very wide scale, is not difficult, because such tends to be completely unfortified and unguarded - the exact reason Ukraine was able to destroy the Wildberries facilities so easily. And Ukraine has started an escalation where this is now exactly what is happening in Ukraine as well. I don't know what the outcome of this will be, but this is not, by any sort of logic, making Europe safer or Russia less of a threat. It's also likely to result in a much weaker Ukraine after all is said and done.
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As for the US - EU. The EU is now completely dependent upon the US for both military and energy. In its current state the EU lacks the ability to be an independent power, and they have tied themselves to the US to an unprecedented degree while also accepting an unprecedented degree of abuse from the US. You might argue I should say Trump, and not the US, but watch - the DNC will win 2028, and the tariffs will continue until morale improves.
The EU does not serve Europe but US interests, origins go back to the “American Committee on United Europe”, where only one or two Europeans were represented (who were already aligned with “globalism”).
You might already know this, but as for US intentions in this war, here's the 2015 Friedman video about US involvement in the Ukraine and the “drumbeats of the future” (very unsavoury person, dishing out quite some lies to a naïve American audience, but also quite revealing):
George Friedman, "Europe: Destined for Conflict?" – Chicago Council on Global Affairs, February 2015
Trump said he would, then cancelled it; what was actually done was reduce troop numbers. As you yourself note, he's not honest, so look at what he did not what he said.
Even if they did though, so what? Deployment in a nation whose borders are around 550 km from the closest bit of the fighting are not a serious threat.
> You mean like when the US (plus allies) sabotaged the Nord Stream pipeline?
Nobody except those responsible knows for sure who did that. There's some trials for Ukrainians accused of involvement, which would have been a crazy move if they were guilty because if they were caught and flagged as Ukrainian at the time, the act of destruction would have risked immediate loss of support from EU nations they were critically dependent on. Then again, as the thing wasn't actually delivering fuel because its certification had been suspended because of the Russian annexation of even more of Ukraine, I find myself unable to name anyone who had non-crazy motivations to attack it.
> There's been no other sabotage operations in Europe of comparable scale by at least two orders of magnitude.
In real warfare, single big strikes are seldom the most relevant. There have been many smaller acts of sabotage, which are fairly easy to attribute to Russia, and the EU response has been to downplay these acts because we actually would rather not take Russia seriously unless forced to.
> since it is in our interest to prevent a humanitarian catastrophe happening on the Polish border.
If your argument is preventing trouble on the Polish border, why is the strategy dumping billions and billions of dollars in weapons into the most corrupt country in Europe, who happens to be on the Polish border? Keeping a conflict worthy of WWII smouldering in the area for more than 4 years now?
The sensible thing to do would have been to encourage a Ukrainian surrender early on and send them some food/whatnot in a care package, then fortify the Polish border.
This strategy actually employed seems like the most direct way to trigger a humanitarian catastrophe on the Polish border. It looks very destabilising. It is also one of the very few paths that could reasonably see Poland or countries in that general region getting nuked.
Can we please be honest about our motivations here? We're all more likely to get what we want. Ideally peace and prosperity.
> We're all more likely to get what we want. Ideally peace and prosperity.
As sovereign citizens of their own country, Ukrainians have the right to decide under which flag they want to collectively pursue peace and prosperity. I believe they have made that choice clear through democratic means, something Russians have not experienced in a long time. If Russia is allowed to take Ukraine, it will move on to Poland next, and then to claim the remaining former Soviet states. A line must be drawn somewhere.
> As sovereign citizens of their own country, Ukrainians have the right to decide under which flag they want to collectively pursue peace and prosperity.
Much like Iran. And yet we took out their leadership just this year (again) because we think they picked the wrong flag.
Apparently such behaviour is tolerable. If it is tolerable, we should tolerate the Russians doing it too, even if it is on their own border instead of the other side of the world.
No, it was incredibly stupid for the US to do so, everyone who has done more than a cursory look at the results of wargames and previous interventions knew this. It wasn't even a good idea in Iraq with Saddam Hussein (second time, the first at least was to stop him invading Kuwait), probably not even Afghanistan.
> No, it was incredibly stupid for the US to do so, everyone who has done more than a cursory look at the results of wargames and previous interventions knew this
And yet there are no sanctions against the US for its obviously reckless interference in other countries.
« no sanctions against the US for its obviously reckless interference in other countries » – Definitely not enough, not even remotely. But there have been sanctions (though not labeled such) against the US under the guise of grounding the Boeing 737 MAX (21 months, sufficient to deal a blow to Boeing).
Allegedly this was in reaction to the crash of Ethiopian Airlines flight 302 on March 10, 2019, near Addis Abeba, killing all 157 people on board. The factuality of the incidence is, however, questionable. I haven't seen a single convincing photo of the crash site. The 737's large modern turbofan engines are said to have been buried in a crater 10 m deep, which is totally implausible and reminiscent of the Shanksville part of the 9/11 hoax. Well, it's just mirroring brazen US lies, basically any BS will do.
The story goes that a UN delegation was among the victims of the alleged crash. I read somewhere that this was, basically, “world leaders uniting in protest” against the wave of airline terrorism perpetrated by the US (CIA/NSA/wtf) via cyber attacks, one of which was GermanWings 9525 which was crashed into a mountain via remote cyber hijack (remote control system compromised, probably industrial espionnage) on March 24, 2015, shredding to pieces all 150 people on board, mostly from Germany and Spain. The perpetrators had the NYT announce it was “wilful pilot action”, which is factually correct, but they blamed it (via French investigative authorities) on Andreas Lubitz instead of on the CIA or whatever US agency was responsible.
Not sure to what extent US cyber terrorism has been “covered” by HN, probably close to zero, although it couldn't be more “on topic” for US “Hacker News”.
No disagreement there, if you look at "sanctions" then yes, there have been none of relevance for a very long time.
I guess "tolerable" has more than one meaning, so I should have checked which one was intended before starting my previous comment with just plain "No", but before reading your reply I hadn't considered that.
The lack of sanctions is due to how power works rather than anyone else agreeing with them in any specific case: the USA has got too much of the money that everyone else wants, and too many weapons which everyone else wants pointed in the right direction rather than to find they're now standing in a position to read the sign saying "front towards enemy" with a wire trailing off to a nearby bush.
This does not change that it was incredibly stupid for the US to attack Iran in particular, so stupid that it cost the US a significant part of its own matériel, made the remaining matériel less scary as a threat, and reduced the economic relevance of the USA's money, all at the same time.
Every US leader before Trump made sure to not damage those things, and thus retained both hard and soft power. Trump's throwing both away rapidly, at such a pace that it's no longer inconceivable that the rest of the world will be able to sanction the US without fear of what retaliation may result. Consider that Trump's poor choices mean in particular that the EU got away with telling Trump to take a hike over Greenland, and China got away with telling Trump to take a hike over tariffs. With the kind of damage he's doing to the USA's power, this shift may be shockingly sudden when it does happen, with nobody being able to see exactly how close the transition is even 12 months before the world order changes. (I am not saying this is 12 months away today, I'm saying nobody will know even when it is 12 months away).
So, stuff is shifting today specifically because of the USA's "reckless interference in other countries", with emphasis on the "reckless" part. There is a degree of governmental tolerance for the "interference" part, out of fear, meaning the condemnation (such as it is) is somewhere between "toothless" and simply not joining in with the misadventures. Trump appears to be trying to punish every nation who didn't help him attack Iran, but between them and all the nations the US failed to defend from Iranian counterstrikes are rather a lot of nations who are all now looking to each other for military and economic collaborations.
It may not look much on paper; it remains to be seen if it is much in practice. China will of course be happy to substitute for the USA everywhere, but for the rest of us this changes which hyperpower we find ourselves forced to kowtow to, this time less metaphorically and more literally. Reasonable chance a lot of nations make their own nuclear deterrents either way, with all the extra risk that comes with. I didn't want to predict anything past 2031 even before all this geopolitical rifting started.
Why do you only care about being fair to the Russians? It's not a two player game. This is not the cold war. Russia is a borderline failed state, not a superpower. Yes, they have nukes, but so does Pakistan and I don't see Americans talking about Pakistan's sphere of influence.
By what metric do you consider them a failed state?
You’re on HackerNews, this website attracts free thinkers, we’re not the group that our influenced easily by propaganda, open your mind, read some data, visit the country and then form an opinion. Dont parrot the propaganda of non-free media.
How about visit Ukraine, the country that was invaded who doesn't want to be absorbed by Russia. The country whose civilian population is deliberately targeted. Russia is run by a cold war dictator who doesn't care how many lives he wastes.
> As sovereign citizens of their own country, Ukrainians have the right to decide under which flag they want to collectively pursue peace and prosperity. I believe they have made that choice clear through democratic means
It's always amusing to hear this and point out what some Ukrainians are... not equal to other Ukrainians and therefore are not allowed to have the right to decide under which flag they want to collectively pursue peace and prosperity.
Somehow it's always only one flag what is 'right' and anything other is 'not right'.
If you're not aware of Crimean demographics, it's never been majority Ukrainian. It was majority Tatar but then they got exiled by Stalin for allegedly colluding with the Nazis. After that it became and remained majority Russian. [1] The reason for the exceptionally high approval is that the demographics made the poll largely a formality - everybody knew it would pass, and so those that opposed secession chose to boycott it, in part on principle, and in part to undermine the poll numbers. But exit polling and various Western polls showed similarly overwhelming support for joining Russia.
As for the US - you could say we had two kerfuffles along these lines, or we'd still be Brits. Win some, lose some. And notably we probably would have also lost against the Brits if not for the French. Granted they didn't then try to take us under their wing as part of France, so the similarities end somewhere - but on the other hand that might have indeed been the exact outcome had we been majority ethnic French. Kind of an amusing parallel timeline to imagine.
Eh, I think there's lots of valid cases for secession.
In the case of the South though, I believe they could have had a peaceful secession had they not fallen victim to their own version of the "sphere of influence" argument: they refused to tolerate a free North to which slaves could escape, resulting in opening fire on Fort Sumter.
That you think it’s valid for the South to break away so they could continue to treat black people as property says a lot of things, none of them good.
That is of course not what I said; "valid" a complicated question, depending on whether we want to get all land acknowledgement and question whether any of the US should have existed at all, including but not limited to the slave states.
An example of "valid" secession is the split of Czechoslovakia.
"Peaceful" is introducing a what-if about whether and why the Confederacy started the actual armed conflict part of the secession.
I have introduced a line break into the original comment as a demilitarized zone.
(we can also see the sort of "historical sliding window" effect as to legitimacy here. At what point does de facto line on the ground become baked in to legitimacy? Does California have a right to exist? Clearly more so than the occupation of Crimea, but is it just time that makes it so?)
> That you think it’s valid for the South to break away so they could continue to treat black people as property says a lot of things, none of them good.
They didn't actually say that, though I can see how one might read it that way.
valid cases for secession. In the case of the South though
Is two things. I wrote a thing and an example, he's replied to both the thing and the example.
It's like Al Gore "I took the initiative in creating the Internet" being taken as "I invented" rather than "This was invented, I took the initiative in supporting it when that happened".
« Ukrainians have the right to decide » – Well, they did decide, but the U.S. didn't appreciate, so overthrew their government back in 2014, remember? “The most blatant coup in history”, see Nuland/Pyatt intercept. Instead, the U.S. (and UK) decided there would be a war, as simple as that. Good for business (“make America great again”).
In Brazil, 2014, President Dilma Rousseff was reelected and the US intensified their effort, resulting in a coup that opened the way to Bolsonaro, which is kind of not what the US wanted (they usually prefer more moderate and controllable authoritarians) but still happened because the only credible opposition to him was the party they ousted in 2015/16
I would argue that the continuation of the war is Ukraine preventing Russia from telling Ukraine what to do.
Unfortunately for Ukraine, Russia is still strong enough to count as a sovereign nation, Russia is not yet weak enough that it is unable to prevent others (Ukraine) from telling them (Russia) to stop throwing high velocity explosives over the border. That had too many negatives in a row, I hope I phrased that right.
That’s crazy. I guess Ukraine must have fallen in the 3 day operation and definitely hasn’t stalemated the larger country. Might as well pack it up and go home since they’ve lost all their territory and resources.
That is one of two ways, the other is to beat them with more guns. For peace to happen somebody has to surrender or you have to both lose so bad you reach a deal
« getting nuked » – If that were a real possibility it would have happened in March '22 when the (not very sharp) Russian leadership understood they'd entered a bear trap and couldn't see a way to get out. This idea has always been a hoax, and if you read the propaganda that accompanied its introduction in 1945 (“Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists”) you can see it was linked to ideas of (literally) world government (because “too grave a danger” etc, mafioso posing as policeman). Russia is the only country still clinging to the idea because geopolitically they feel very insecure, so the illusion is “comforting” (a tranquilizer), but still dumb (like most tranquilizers), and not to be confounded with a stable framework of international order (there is none, chiefly due to the one particular actor who has several hundred military bases abroad).
Most corrupt country in Europe is Belarus tied with Russia, depending on whether you count Russia as European.
Everything Russia touches becomes more corrupt. That includes Hungary btw. And speaking about it, that includes Ukraine - anti Russians politics was also the anti-corruption politics.
No, the sensible thing to do would have been to enforce a no fly zone and tell Putin to get the fuck out. This is horrific and downplaying Russia's invasion is abhorrent.
I can't believe how many fall for the Russian propaganda while it's pretty clear who's the attacker and who is being attacked. And yet, some people still get it wrong. "Just surrender" to have peace... I can't believe it, as if an invading force comes in peace. How about "just stop attacking" instead.
> encourage a Ukrainian surrender early on and send them some food/whatnot in a care package, then fortify the Polish border.
This would still have resulted in millions of refugees, plus some unknown number of people killed by Russian forces exterminating any local pro-Europe political supporters. Remember Euromaidan. It also snuffs out a democracy, which is not a good precedent to set.
The second motivation is the belief that the invasion, if permitted, will not stop at Ukraine. This is why Finland and Sweden joined NATO after it happened.
> Keeping a conflict worthy of WWII smouldering in the area for more than 4 years now?
Russia can retreat into their internationally recognized borders at any time.
> Can we please be honest about our motivations here?
Can we be honest about the motivations of Russia in capturing and annexing other countries, something forbidden by both the post-WW2 international order and the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budapest_Memorandum (which also justifies Europe's security provision to Ukraine)?
« Russia can retreat into their internationally recognized borders at any time. »
The US has around 900 military bases abroad. Far more than all other countries combined. These bases are a constant source of threats and bullying, deploying and projecting a GDP largely based on death and destruction. Why don't the US retreat into their internationally recognized borders?
The simple answer is that those bases aren't considered US territory and do not constitute annexation, and in most cases are there by invitation, such as to defend against the other, worse, hegemon.
If those bases aren't considered US territory whose territory are they?
In case of United States Army installations in Germany:
"
The legal status of Americans stationed in Germany is governed by special international agreements including the NATO Status of Forces Agreement.
People stationed at overseas bases or posts must remember German laws apply to them, too. To protect yourself, know what rights you have as an American. Whether German authorities exercise their right of jurisdiction depends on the circumstances of the case.
"
Guantanamo is leased like Hong Kong used to be, and has been since the Spanish-American war. It is an exception because the US refuses to normalize relations with Cuba. That is not the case for Ramstein and the European bases, which are generally just there by agreement which does not convey sovereignty.
Another special case is the UK sovereign bases in Cyprus, which really are UK territory; I only know about those because during Brexit they kept getting mentioned in the treaty documents.
Bonus pull out sovereignty section: to whom does Transnistria belong? How about Nagorno-Karabakh?
> Why don't the US retreat into their internationally recognized borders?
Mostly they were allowed there by the government of the place.
They are criticised for the exceptions.
> GDP largely based on death and destruction
For all the flaws of the USA, this is not really what their GDP is "based on", though perhaps one could say that functionally they hide conscription by giving many unemployed men a Hobson's choice of signing up vs. going hungry.
Yes, the increased effectiveness of cheap weapons is positive for the global underdogs. And the enormous military network the US entertains is costly. Which is why they have vassals (to foot the bills, at least in part). We'll see how this is going to develop – development of effective counter-measures shouldn't be ruled out.
If “nukes” existed many of these bases, being somewhat removed from human settlements, could be destroyed much more effectively and without much “collateral damage”. As the US and NATO hide behind Ukraine, other “players” could hide behind just any type of “terrorist”, just as the US/UK have done again and again.
> Which, with 20/20 hindsight, we now know was wild paranoia. The Russians weren't even geared up to properly invade Ukraine, they were as shocked as the rest of us when the Ukrainians decided a land war in Asia was a better idea than surrender. They spent something like 2 years back in 2022-2024 retooling for a real war. They weren't preparing to take Poland, they were trying to preserve a sphere of influence in Ukraine.
Them being idiots and thinking they could take Ukraine does not preclude that they were also idiots who thought they could take Poland.
> we embarked on this poorly advised policy of war.
We, the people who are supplying Ukraine with support, and I want to emphasise this, have not embarked on this poorly advised policy of war. We are not at war, our soldiers are not fighting. We are selling (and giving) weapons to someone who wants to defend themselves, which is a standard thing for weapon-exporting nations to do.
Russia has embarked on this poorly advised policy of war.
> It isn't normal for a major to break international law and it ends up in a million-casualty war where we sponsor bombing runs on their capital.
Russia did bombing runs on the Ukrainian capital before Ukraine was able to respond.
Can you give Ukrainians a reason why they should not develop nuclear weapons? The Polish? The Lithuanians?
> We're just pushing the global centre of power towards Asia.
Only if "we" is "the Russian government".
The things which the rest of NATO is doing that can be described as "pushing the global centre of power towards Asia" are 75% Trump being a chaos monkey undermining both the USA itself and all the USA's alliances, and 25% the EU member-states bike-shedding union-wide economic-industrial policy.
I for one welcome the re-establishment of a nuclear armed Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Just as long as we don't get the Hapsburgs back again.
(nb to audience and mods: this is a joke, which probably doesn't belong at the bottom of a serious thread about the Ukraine war and definitely not on a discussion of Japanese operating systems, yet here we are)
> there doesn't seem to be any reason to be provoking and sustaining it. It has been disastrous policy. We shouldn't have done it, we shouldn't have continued it and we should stop it now
Stopping the Iran war via total withdrawal might work like that. Western surrender in the Ukraine war (which, we need to keep reminding you, the first actual shots were in all cases fired by Russia) results in a situation far worse.
The bombing runs on Moscow will continue as long as the bombing runs on Kyiv continue. It is absurd to pretend that Russia are somehow agencyless dupes of US policy because you don't like the idea that Putin doesn't care how many Russians are killed so long as he retains power.
> Keeping a conflict worthy of WWII smouldering in the area for more than 4 years now?
> The sensible thing to do would have been to encourage a Ukrainian surrender early on and send them some food/whatnot in a care package, then fortify the Polish border.
Imagine if the British had responded this way to the invasion of Poland in WW2.
Worse: which side of the border is Auschwitz located?
> It is also one of the very few paths that could reasonably see Poland or countries in that general region getting nuked.
Ukraine had nukes, gave them up. Was probably sensible at the time, but the observed behaviour is now "having nukes means you don't get invaded, giving them up means you do". Russia invading at all is pushing nations more in the direction of getting their own nuclear arsenals to deter Russia.
(Also, but entirely separately, Trump's USA sabre-rattling over Canada, Greenland, war with Iran, and disengagement from previous allies everywhere, is pushing nations the same way but to deter the USA(!) or China).
« Imagine if the British had responded this way to the invasion of Poland in WW2. » – What exactly was the British “response” when the Soviet Union invaded “Eastern Poland” on Sep 17, 1939? And what was their “response” when confronted with reports of Polish atrocities against Germans in “Western/Northern Poland” during the August crisis?
« getting their own nuclear arsenals to deter Russia » – Stuck in the 20th century? Everyone can see that nukes don't work, else Russia would have used them in March '22, on military objects, and to draw a line; not “democratically” on women and children as the US did, of course (in truth the US used a kind of napalm, poison gas, pumpkin bombs, flash bombs, and coloured smoke bombs, see “Hiroshima revisited” by Michael Palmer). “Nukes” are just an elaborate deception created from 1945 through the 1950s, basically in maintenance mode ever since.
> What exactly was the British “response” when the Soviet Union invaded “Eastern Poland” on Sep 17, 1939?
Other than being at war with the nation who had allied themselves with the USSR's joint invasion of Poland?
Also, why even ask? It's not like the post-WW2 international order was good for the Polish. Failing to defend Poland from the USSR, regardless of how this can be attributed to war exhaustion or foolishly believing Stalin's word, doesn't make that failure good.
Failing to defend Ukraine now, would be like failing to defend Poland then.
> And what was their “response” when confronted with reports of Polish atrocities against Germans in “Western/Northern Poland” during the August crisis?
I had to look this up. I think I know what you are now. Someone in the modern age who has the benefit of hindsight calling what was actually done an "atrocity", using the framing of the invader which we now know to have been exaggerated for propaganda to create a casus belli, says something very specific about their worldview.
> Stuck in the 20th century? Everyone can see that nukes don't work, else Russia would have used them in March '22, on military objects
Tell that to Russia. They keep threatening the use of them against everyone who aids Ukraine.
Their nukes may or may not work. But they're definitely afraid of other people's nukes.
And also definitely, the USA is afraid of other people's nukes.
> see “Hiroshima revisited” by Michael Palmer
Jesus, you're also a conspiracy theorist?
We have film footage of plenty of nukes past the 50s, the physics isn't particularly fancy, and with that era's stealth technology Japan would have been unable to avoid noticing the kind of airforce capable of delivering that kind of destruction by conventional means.
« they're definitely afraid of other people's nukes » – They know 100 % no nukes work at all and never have anywhere.
« USA is afraid of other people's nukes » – And of extraterrestrians, too. It's all just propaganda playing back in people's minds.
« conspiracy theorist? » – The book I referenced has lots of hard empirical facts, notably the medical details, which the author is professionally qualified to assess.
« film footage » – Huge quantities of explosives, WWII production kept going. As for Japan, their gov had to collaborate somehow, and eventually resigned themselves to do so because the US wouldn't accept their capitulation and instead kept democratically napalming women and children.
> One of the two is worse and it isn't the policies written in Cyrillic.
I can't tell if you're a tankie or a bot but Russia is right now conducting an unprovoked war against a democracy with no foreign policy goal other than to destroy Ukraine and seize its assets.
Where Russia has been forced out of Ukraine it's left behind war crimes and mass civilian graves. So experience shows, there is no safe surrender for Ukraine, they have to fight until they win.
There is no world where Putin's Russia is the good guys.
Remember, Putin is the only person with the luxury of stopping the war any time he likes.
roenxi is a moderately prolific poster who can post reasonably but is clearly also plugged into the rightwing political and news ecosystem resulting in this kind of "rightwing tankie" take. I believe they're actually from one of India/Pakistan/Bangladesh, which would correlate with the timezone of this argument (it's 7am in NY and I would expect most of America to be asleep)
Horseshoe theory still undefeated. Both right-wingers who consume certain content as well as left-wingers in the pro-Palestine/Iran camp tend to be sympathetic to the Russian cause, as the Russians and Iranians fund specific influencers/political parties on both sides of the spectrum.
Right-wingers in Eastern Europe (who aren't obviously paid by Russia) are way more anti-Russia than the ones in the US.
Negative polarization is incredibly powerful. You can see all over the place how "X is bad" leads to people defining themselves as "anti-X" and then supporting the most extreme position against X rather than a moderate one, often leading them into supporting atrocities in the other direction. This is how we get people in the English Green Party (who I would like to support if they could be 10% less nutty fruitcake) ended up posting pro-Iran propaganda.
You also do have to keep track of internal factions. We're all, me included, using "country name" in this thread as a synechdoche as if all of a country had a unified political axis of action, when we know that's an oversimplification.
This is how we get Israel/Likud and Iran/IGRC who are practically co-evolved to escalate against each other, to which the only reasonable response of third parties is to acknowledge that both are bad and attempt to de-escalate, as in e.g. the Camp David Accords era, before either of those factions came to power.
> Right-wingers in Eastern Europe (who aren't obviously paid by Russia)
This is a bizarre take. Despite propaganda to the contrary most "pro-palestine" takes are actually just anti-genocide and pro-human-rights. Similarly at least in the US this "iranian camp" you refer to is by and large an anti-getting-involved camp. Is it really pro-iranian to ask why the government is burning billions of dollars to destabilize the global economy?
Also I've yet to meet a single person who was "pro-palestine" and simultaneously sympathetic to russia. Quite the opposite.
Most, yes, but there is a noisy lunatic fringe on social media whose existence we must acknowledge. Recent example is Eleanora Folan, a minor politician in a minor UK party.
Of course as you say there's also people trying to lump the many "we should stop mass murder of civilians" people into the same bucket as the negatively polarized "we hate Israel therefore we're going to support Iran" few. Discourse is exhaustingly stupid.
This ranges from propaganda to entirely unsurprising. Propagandists work to hamper causes that are inconvenient for their side. Meanwhile of course our geopolitical adversaries will offer support to otherwise seemingly unrelated causes if it somehow indirectly serves their ends.
The average joe in the US (and presumably the west more generally) does not care one whit about the causes of russia or iran.
> The average joe in the US (and presumably the west more generally) does not care one whit about the causes of russia or iran.
It's not about caring about Russia or Iran specifically. It's about the fact they're swayed by propaganda so the end result is they end up unwittingly adopting the worldview pushed by enemy propagandists and helping to destroy western civilization.
At this point you've completely shifted the goal posts and are no longer arguing your original position.
Sure, my wondering "why are we burning billions in iran" happens to align with iran's interests. It's also directly representative of my own interests. The fact that some subset of people will be swayed by propaganda does not constitute a valid argument against a given position.
If we uniformly apply the same standard you're demonstrating here then your own position would be attributed to being swayed by state propaganda and thus your actions interpreted as helping american propagandists destroy civil society.
tl;dr You're espousing anti-intellectual BS that has no place on HN. Kindly take your braindead political takes back to twitter or wherever the hell they came from.
> You're espousing anti-intellectual BS that has no place on HN.
ChatGPT write this?
> Sure, my wondering "why are we burning billions in iran" happens to align with iran's interests
So naturally you're against lots of other programs that waste billions? Or just this one?
> your own position would be attributed to being swayed by state propaganda and thus your actions interpreted as helping american propagandists destroy civil society
Except my position is pro-west and anti-terrorist supporting dictatorships. It's the old duck test: if it walks like a duck...
And for the record, I'm against both sides of the horseshoe who are bought by enemy propaganda...
> I still haven't heard anyone make a case for why we keep hitting the Russians given what acceptable US foreign policy looks like.
Somewhat cynically it's entirely to do with which country they attacked. Had they moved on one farther away from mainland europe I doubt we'd have heard nearly as much about it.
That said it would still be wrong just as much of US (and yes Chinese) foreign policy is morally wrong. Such should be called out rather than engaging in whataboutism.
We already saw that happened when Russia invaded Georgia in ~2008. Which I’ll also point out to the people in this thread who are incredulous at the idea that Russia would go on to invade another country if Ukraine had folded as fast as they expected, is already proof that they had no real intentions on just Ukraine.
That goes to the heart of it though. If we approach this cynically there are some massive downsides - we're destabilising the leadership circle that controls the largest nuclear weapons cache in the world and pushing one of the major resource-rich countries away from Europe towards Asia.
The moral arguments for doing that appear to all be rank hypocrisy given what we tolerate of ourselves. So if we go back and accept a certain level of cynicism when asking "why?" what exactly is the upside for us in Ukraine? The downsides seem to be enormous and when pushed for what the actual reasons are the best people have seems flimsy and poorly thought out in relation to the risks. This war could have been approached as though it was the US or China who had instigating it and ended with a call-out as opposed to millions of casualties.
The winning strategy in these things seems to me to be much more of the Chinese approach where you sit tight, set up an impressive defensive perimeter and grow your economy until all your opponents bankrupt themselves in stupid wars.
What do you mean “we can’t tell”? For those who aren’t aware, the war against Iran (direct, they don’t have nukes yet) and Russia (via Ukraine proxy, Russia has nukes) as well as Venezuela (infiltrate their power structure and bribe off) are actually the same war: they are multi front (financial, energy, technical; ranging from soft to kinetic) geopolitical “containment” strategies. The US/UK/EU think tank and others influencing policy have written about it non-stop since forever, it’s not like a grand conspiracy - it’s all out in the public if you lift back the on the surface news narrative. You can literally pull down and read the policy papers, read the transcripts of those (in power and adjacent to power) pushing this “primacy” view of US led hegemony.
The think tank argument is very valid though. You can no longer find "Project for the new American Century" online, but they laid out the invasion of Iraq before 9/11 (the pretext) even happened.
Gosh, now I wonder why they would have possibly intervened at that particular time. No geopolitical analysts anywhere could have ever predicted the reaction of Russia to the possibility of Sevastopol becoming a NATO Naval base and US forward strike forces and missile base setting up shop just 250 miles away from Moscow...
The "buffer zone" argument works in reverse: gee, I wonder why Europe got worried given that annexation of Ukraine would put Russian forces right next to Poland, Slovakia, Hungary (Orban era), Romania, and Moldova (which is already partly occupied in Transnistria).
Chernihiv is 280 miles, I was off my a bit. Kaliningrad is not the concern. Sevastopol is a different type of concern (navy power). Russia has a long insecurity about its western boarder going back way before Putin, no leadership there unless in the pocket of the US was going to allow that in the same way China ain’t building an alliance with Mexico. This is geopolitics 101, day 1 material.
Exactly the same way the Russians are uneasy about Chernihiv, Western countries are uneasy about Kaliningrad with it's nuclear-capable Iskander-M missiles.
Geopolitics 101 also says that in a war between countries armed with ICBMs delivering nuclear weapons, distance doesn't matter, everyone dies. Especially with second-strike capability like Dead Hand (Sistema "Perimetr").
US was basically supporting Russian invasion in negotiations. What are you on about here.
EU is supporting Ukraine in their self defense. Eu also know they are the next if Ukraine falls. USA did the right thing in the beginning, but as Trump gained power, his admiration to autocrats made him switch the sides.
I don't like China for how it is behaving with my country but it is rich to talk about "invasions" when all the invading in the past half a century has been done by a Sole Democratic Superpower and its lackeys. Cannot believe I am having to defend China here but here we are!
Democracy is when you drop a ballot every two/four years, and the elected officers ignore you while they take millions of donation from wealthy donors. Dictatorship is when the unelected representatives work their ass off to better the lives of the average citizens, because they're afraid of a revolution.
(P.S.: Xi Jin Ping is as unelected as the British Prime Minister, but I don't see people calling the UK a dictatorship.)
That's because in the time since Xi took over China there's been 7 different UK Prime Ministers, most of whom were kicked out of office before their term ended.
In that same period Xi has changed the rules so that he can hold on to power indefinitely.
Why are we using British PM count like it means anything. Meanwhile, Angela Merkel served longer as Kanzler than Xi has served as President. Is Germany a dictatorship?
(Neither Britain nor Germany have term limits for their head of government, so China removing its term limit is just bringing it at par with the two most prominent European democracies)
The point is that PM count proves it was possible for other people to remove serving PMs from power.
They were not able to ignore public opinion indefinitely and could be removed from power without the need for term limits.
No one can remove Xi from power if they don't like the way he performs. No one in China can even publicly discuss his performance except to praise him.
That's what makes China a dictatorship and the UK a democracy.
He was not elected by the general public to the position of Prime Minister. He was elected, by a small number of UK citizens in his constituency, to the Parliament seat.
British law doesn't even require the Prime Minister to be an MP, technically Parliament could elect any random bozo from the street to be PM.
“Has no personal mandate from the entire electorate” - I suspect they mean.
But that’s not necessary or expected under the British system, being an MP and Party Leader is enough. If Burnham radically departed from Labour’s manifesto you could then argue he call a general election to establish legitimacy for that, but it isn’t required.
The UK PM change happened indirectly as a result of poor performance in the local elections. It does actually matter that the UK has multiple parties that effectively compete, even if some of them are blatantly sockpuppets for overseas millionaires.
The two-term limit for president of China and vice president of China have be eliminated been abolished in 2018. Now President Xi Jinping can rule for life.
"Deng Xiaoping put the limits in place in the 1980s as part of his effort to ensure that China was never again subjected to a crushing dictatorship like that of Chairman Mao and the turmoil it occasioned. China’s Communist system not accepting the Western notion of formal checks and balances, Deng instituted a system with Chinese characteristics designed to prevent return of one-man rule or a cult of personality by preventing leaders from staying indefinitely in power."
> A dictatorship with the explicit goal of invading Taiwan, which is not only a close ally, but also of global geostrategic importance.
I think it's a safe bet that China will invade precisely when they think this won't cause them severe negative losses.
This will likely be when Taiwan finds itself no longer a close ally of the USA, nor of global geostrategic importance.
Of course, "safe bet" doesn't mean "in all possible timelines"; they may end up echoing the Bay of Pigs, Hormuz, or stumble against the hubris that turned the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand into a world war where all belligerents had the mistaken belief they would win.
I think the idea is that a vassal state (operates as though it) owes allegiance to a stronger state, while governing itself (more or less) independently.
And the stronger state exercises a lot of influence on the weaker state, especially in terms of foreign policy, and potentially provides it with protection from other strong states.
Not sure exactly how much this would apply to Taiwan in particular, but I think the idea in general can be meaningful in modern politics.
There's certainly a spectrum between allies, vassals, and directly controlled territories, but it doesn't necessarily need to be about sending troops to help in war.
I don't care much about the typed part, I care much more that this is a good take on what an assembler should be, far ahead of the GCC monstrosity, that serves just one purpose well: it screams "don't use me". This feature could make Odin the language of choice for some types of projects, for it seems to remove so much friction.
The GCC assembly syntax is not a monstrosity, it was a necessity given how GCC represented the intermediate representation of the code. Historical GCC docs actually explain the rationale of the design pretty well.
Moreover, since GCC was one of the very few C compilers that targeted a large number of very diverse ISA's at the time, they wanted to have a uniform way of injecting the assembly code across wildly varying ISA's.
while the only thing that matters is you understand the mechanism and you therefore know how to apply it. it doesn't matter if you know the name, unless you want to Google it. but now with AI you can still find it. so take it easy.
engineers have never been about uttering words, they talk with their hands and minds instead, and like everybody, by putting their weight where it matters.
those in power enjoy words, as they can then define what they mean and start a fight to humiliate you, and enjoy the product.
> while the only thing that matters is you understand the mechanism and you therefore know how to apply it. it doesn't matter if you know the name, unless you want to Google it. but now with AI you can still find it. so take it easy.
Communicating with others about the design is my primary use for precise terminology. It's also very useful when giving AI architectural guidelines.
But minimaxir put out some very thoughtful comments you'd be wise to lend your ears to, because the technical merits your work seems to have will get drowned out.
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