George Friedman suggests that the reason Washington is going back to the moon is that it is easier to launch satellites into Earth orbit from the moon than from the Earth's surface.
There are rumors about mobilization, but Russia will almost certainly have to if Putin wishes to continue taking land.
They are growing their drone divisions - and Russia cares less about equipping storm troopers. They still have elite units with good kit, but not necessary for most. Russia fights wars differently from the West, they give up land and blood for time. Works better when they are the one being attacked (eg. napoleon, hitler), but likely applies here in a stalemate like situation.
Another point of growth for Russia is the ballistic missiles, for which Ukraine has no good answer at the moment :/ We should really be enabling Ukraine's domestic production of a PAC like interceptor, but Trump will forever dislike Zelenskyy, re: the phone call
There are always rumors about mobilization, but the issue remains that doing so would bring the war home to the Russian middle class in a way that would lead to at best, another massive flight from the country. You can say "They'd shut the borders", but even if Russia were tiny it's also too corrupt to make that stick. It would also be a blow to what's left of their economy and productivity, including war-critical industry.
All of that would get them... what? Manpower is needed, but nothing would happen with a massed infantry charge except a mass slaughter, no one is doing that on the front anymore. It's all trenches, artillery, drones, infiltration units with high mobility and a low signature. Russia also hasn't magically grown a ton of fuel, vehicles, weapons and logistics so this really would be throwing warm bodies directly into a grave.
The ballistic missile issue is there you're right, but their current production rate is about ~60 per month and while that's awful, it's not going to change any outcomes. If murdering people in Kyiv and taking out grain silos was going to deter Ukraine it would have happened a long time ago. Ukraine seems to be aware that this is an existential issue for them, which makes sense given what the Russians have done and said to express an intention to ethnically cleanse Ukraine.
All of that together, and Ukraine's increasing ability to strike deep within Russia, taking out their refinery capacity, denying their shipping, etc... why would they stop? Russia would only adapt their AD network, EW, re-arm, and then keep going. This *already happened in 2014* so it's hardly hypothetical.
IMO a lot of people here talk a lot about what they know very little about beyond surface-level readings of news articles, all because they're smart enough to code. That's insane.
Russian troops in some forward areas are already literally starving because the logistics system is so broken. There's no point in sending a lot more troops beyond the quantity necessary to replace attribution losses if they can't keep them supplied. Even Russians can't fight indefinitely on an empty stomach.
> IMO a lot of people here talk a lot about what they know very little about beyond surface-level readings of news articles, all because they're smart enough to code. That's insane.
You might reflect on this with some of the claims you have made here w.r.t. perspectives on Russian capabilities. Western experts like WotR, CSIS, and ISW hold different opinions and warn about common under-estimations
It’s a grinding war that’s taking g countless lives and displacing millions of others, it’s an economic and environmental disaster. I’m not underestimating the ability of Russia to do harm to Ukraine, but one of the more instructive facts is just how slow any movement on the front line has been. Ukraine has substantial external support, Russia does not. None of that changes the ability of Russia to harm Ukraine, but when you consider Ukraine’s emerging capabilities it isn’t hard to see that it’s a two-way street now.
Your comment implies that it is impossible (or at least so unlikely as to be not worth thinking about) for someone or someones to intentionally put an innocent person on the list.
Are you really going to keep on trying to defend the notion that the human society portrayed in Star Trek is not socialist? (In The Next Generation, no human investors, traders or financiers are ever depicted, and human society did away with money. Socialist countries have militaries, too.)
The proper reply to the parent of your comment IMHO is that Star Trek is evil propaganda, not that the vision of society depicted in the propaganda is not socialist.
I regret publishing that second paragraph. I knew (or would've known if I had been paying sufficient attention) it would offend many in this audience, and I should've held my tongue.
But I really do believe that Star Trek, specifically the parts that Roddenberry personally oversaw (namely the original series and the first four seasons of The Next Generation) had a very negative effect on the world.
In addition to making some viewers more committed to socialist ideology[1] Roddenberry's Star Trek made many committed to the ideology of technological progress.
Although it can have a beneficial effect on a person, a commitment to an ideology tends to have a deleterious effect on the world when many share a commitment to the same ideology.
[1] In a (private) debate with me, a committed socialist asserted that a successful transition to socialism would result in a society much like the one depicted in Star Trek. Since it is very unlikely that he engaged in many debates about socialism before his debate with me, the reason he believed that that assertion might make me warm to socialism is probably because it had contributed to his own warming to socialism.
> Although it can have a beneficial effect on a person, a commitment to an ideology tends to have a deleterious effect on the world when many share a commitment to the same ideology.
I think you may have fallen victim to a common misconception of how ideology actually functions.
The most affected by ideology aren't the ones consciously committing to a cause. Ideology is strongest precisely when you think you're outside of it - when your ideological commitments have become so normalized that they are completely invisible to you.
There is no such thing as being unideological, whatever you perceive as such is just a reflection of your own ideology.
If you'd like to delve deeper into the theory of ideology and how it functions, I'd recommend the works of philosophy legend and ideology expert Slavoj Zizek.
There's his seminal work, The Sublime Object of Ideology, which goes into this at depth, but is a very dry and academic read. If you'd like something a bit more digestible, I would recommend the movie The Pervert's Guide to Ideology, which uses a more pop-sci approach of dissecting popular movies to demonstrate their ideological function.
I'm pointing at a different thing in the world than you're pointing at.
One reason I know they're different is that the thing I'm pointing at is vastly less influential in some people than other, so much so that it clearly makes sense to call some people "unideological" or if one is being tediously precise "almost completely unideological".
Everyone is strongly influenced by their language, their culture and the family they grew up in. Not everyone has even a weak commitment to an ideology.
I'm willing to switch to a different term for the thing I'm interested in, but I haven't been able to come up with one.
That’s not what I said. I said that the human society portrayed in Star Trek had warp drive before it had socialism. Viewed charitably, it reflects how society might plausibly be structured when technology renders questions of resource or capital allocation largely moot.
You're right. I had something I really wanted to say, which would have fit into
the conversation if you had said something somewhat similar but actually quite
different from what you actually said, but I overlooked the difference so that
I could say what I really wanted to say.
In other words, I sacrificed the
quality of the conversation (namely, I introduced not only a tangent, but also a tangent rooted in a
confusion) so that I could express some thought that had risen to salience in my solitary mind. My doing that made the conversation worse, and the conversation is what matters, not whether I got to express myself in a way that is quick and easy for me.
The intent of your comment is unclear to me, so I will ask you to clarify. And I will avoid any attempt at sarcasm from now on.
Great grandparent claimed (or at least strongly implied) that the labs have been saying that their creations might end the human race because the labs expect that saying such things will attract investment in the labs or purchases of their creations. I disputed that claim (using sarcasm).
Do you agree with me or disagree with me? (I honestly cannot tell.)
Would you say that the meme you quoted is sarcasm?
Do you believe that the meme you quoted has attracted investors or buyers?
I did read your comment correctly as a sarcastic way to make the point that, "no, potentially wiping out the human race is not a way to attract investors". I disagree.
I referenced the meme in order to show that yes, the zeitgeist does believe that the investor-class will destroy civilization for short-term profit.
And yes, I believe at least a subset of investors are short-sighted and willing to inflict immense harm for profit, and that claiming the ability to cause incalculable damage is a deliberate attempt to appeal to such people.
I believe the LLM-mania is in no small part driven by an ultimately fraudulent implicit pitch to investors that OpenAI etc will eventually Install Planetary Overlords, and that claiming "we could wipe out the human race" serves as marketing in furtherance of that implication.
But the people in for example the Biden administration didn't consider themselves authoritarian or particularly paternalistic. They saw themselves as in a fight against structural oppression.
Although I agree with you that non-white immigration has had the effect of making the electorate more paternalistic, my guess is that most on the Left would be disappointed to learn that.
The pro-immigrant Left must believe that the immigration helps in the fight against oppression somehow or that it helps the immigrants while not harming the US. I think particularly that they reject (as racist) any suggestion that non-white immigration might harm or diminish the US in any substantial or lasting way.
Some of the comment on HN over the years claim that immigration is essential to keep the US from collapsing (although I don't know whether that view has any influence among Washington decisionmakers). If someone believes that US whites got most of their wealth and privileges by extracting labor from non-whites, then it starts to make sense to believe that the US economy is structurally dependent on exploitation and consequently needs a steady stream of non-white immigrants to extract labor from. (Maybe for example he believes that the children of immigrants are less exploitable than their parents because for example going to college in the US insulates a person from most forms of oppression.)
You raise some interesting points. I have a hard time figuring out what liberal Americans think immigrants think. One thing that jumps out to me is that "Biden administration" types (that is, liberal educated white people) are very isolated from the immigrant voting blocs on which they depend. Their interactions with those groups are mediated through minority proxies that travel in the same socioeconomic circles as themselves. When they think of Bangladeshis, they think of someone like me they met in grad school, not the hundreds of thousands of Bangladeshis living in ethnic enclaves in New York or Detroit. And even as to me, they have little basis to understand how differently I think of the world, much less my mom, much less my cousins who came here on family reunification.
I don't think Apple hopes to make significant revenue from ticket sales: this venue has seats for only 600. The purpose of the 600 seats is to give musicians optimal conditions for the creation of music (to be recorded or streamed live) and to showcase to selected audiences (e.g., journalists and other influencers) Apple's audio technologies: the venue is outfitted with a custom 48-speaker Spatial Audio sound system.
And like others are saying, it is at Battersea because Apple has about 500,000 sq ft of office space at Battersea. It's their UK headquarters.
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