Interesting. But Chesterton's Fence assumes we can always find out why something was put there, but often we can't, which makes adding barriers easier than removing them—leading to a buildup of unnecessary rules over time?
For audio based detection, I would start with collecting a large corpus of normal shows vs ad segment audio dataset. I assume the amplitude (volume changes) and frequency distribution would be unique enough to distinguish between them.
Train a model using their Mel Spectrogram and deploy on-device.
Basically, Russia's goal is not so much to cut some cables but rather to create fear in order to reduce support for Ukraine. A loud public response is not necessarily in our interest because it makes their attacks more effective.
You've got to wonder if it'll work out well for them. They basically want to take control of Ukraine and this sort of stuff is just going to have Europe saying sod that.
Arguably this is exactly an example of that? There is also a sanctioning scheme on oil and various other goods. Not saying these are perfect, or even sufficient. But which measures do you have in mind?
The article shows Sweden doing exactly that, following Finland doing same in December. So The Russia-adjacent Baltic states got the message late last year.
Are these sabotages considered an offense worth of NATO response? If not, what is the standard there or has it not been tested with this because it's just an "Internet cable"?
I'm not an expert but I don't think it is, because they took place in international waters and unless there's proof to the contrary, they're done by civilian vessels. And it being done by dragging anchors makes it plausible deniability of being accidents.
It's really annoying to be honest. Makes me wish for stricter laws for international waters when it comes to undersea infrastructure.
No, I don't think so. Or rather, what kind of response? Invoking Article 5 and then what?
It seems like just another chapter in the hybrid warfare. NATO countries can respond in other ways, more sanctions, more military support for Ukraine, undercover actions, restricting Russian vessel movement in the Baltic Sea etc.
I'd say it's 33/33/33 whether it was Russia, Ukraine or NATO countries that blew up Nord Stream.
Russia shut down transfers through Nord Stream months before it blew up, used lots of excuses not to re-open it (they said they need a turbine that they can't get cause sanctions - sanctions were lifted, Russia still said it won't reopen it cause "it got broken even worse").
Blowing up Nord Stream could be simply a way for Gazprom to blackmail Germany energetically without having to pay fines for missed deliveries.
Germany has issued an arrest warrant for a Ukrainian man they're alleging did it. Meanwhile Swedish and Danish investigations were closed without any public accusations, which would be strange if they thought it was Russia but not strange if they thought it was Ukraine (or a NATO country.)
Both Sweden and Denmark were protecting the area from Russian ships before the explosion. So they both knew about what was going to happen. If they planted the bombs, or Ukrainians? Not sure but I don't think it was the Russians. Nord Stream was very controversial in Sweden when it was built.
To case maximum disruption in EU with rising gas prices. To avoid paying fines. To disrupt relations between Ukraine and Germany. There's many possible motivations.
> Lol, what could any country do if they don't pay the fines?
There's 300 billion dollars of russian money frozen on western accounts. International courts can allow Germany to take their money from there if Russia refuses to pay. Gasprom was clearly breeching the contract, and part of the contract is - which court can judge any disputes about it.
I'm as pro-Ukraine as it gets, but it doesn't make any sense for Russia to blow it up. The biggest incentive is Ukraine by far, then some western intelligence agencies / covert groups in some distance.
Gas has been always part of the carrot and stick strategy for Russia. It makes sense for Ukraine to blow it up to stop any discussions about returning back to cheap Russian gas.
If your goal is to sour relations between Ukraine and its allies in Central Europe, then blowing up the pipeline makes perfect sense.
The pivot away from Russian gas was well underway by then and the pipeline had lost its value. May as well blow it up and hope that Germans will blame Ukraine (and not own shortsighted energy policy) for their high energy prices and cut military aid to 'reckless' Ukrainians.
From Ukraine's point of view, messing with allies' infrastructure would've been incredibly foolish: a lot to lose and nothing to gain.
> The pivot away from Russian gas was well underway by then and the pipeline had lost its value.
This is the autumn 2022, the pivot is only starting. Gas prices are sky-high and there's a lot of uncertainty in the anticipation of winter. The storage is low since Russia started this strategy already in 2021 by restricting the supply. The government is against buying Russian gas, but you don't know how bad the winter will be and how strong the opposition will become if factories stop working and people can't afford their heating bills.
On one hand you argue that the pipeline has no value, on the other hand Germany would get extremely mad at Ukraine destroying an extraterritorial infrastructure of no value (as you say) which is mostly owned by Russia.
Again, because for some reason people keep forgetting - Russia stopped deliveries of gas to Germany BEFORE THE PIPE RUPTURED. When they tried to use the sanctions and broken turbine as excuse - sanctions were circumvented by Germany. Russia still refused to take the turbine back and gas still wasn't flowing.
The timeline is somehow always misrepresented.
> On 16 June 2022, European benchmark natural gas prices increased by around 30% after Gazprom reduced Nord Stream 1's gas supply to Germany to 40% of the pipeline's capacity. Russia warned that usage of the pipeline could be completely suspended because of problems with the repairment.[54]
> On 11 July 2022, Nord Stream 1 was turned off for scheduled annual maintenance, but remained off after the usual repair period.[55] The Siemens pipeline turbine was repaired in Canada. Due to sanctions, Canada could not deliver the turbine back to Russia after repair works and instead sent it to Germany, despite the call of Volodymyr Zelenskiy to maintain the sanctions.[56]
Ok, so you misremembered the events and thus the whole discussion was pointless. You probably also did not remember that NS2 was shut down (non-violently) two weeks after Biden made this statement, 6 months before NS1 (and half of NS2) got blown up.
At least we clarified we can't implicate Biden based on your false memory.
That doesn't really make sense to me. Just because international law allows something doesn't mean it's not illegal according to German or other national laws. In this case infrastructure located in international waters and owned by various entities in various countries, including Germany, I presume, was attacked. Isn't German law applicable to that situation regardless of what international law has to say?
If acts of war were criminal under national legislation then soldiers conducting them would be criminals, and you'd be able to stick them in ordinary prison.
This is not in accordance with the Geneva convention. A legitimate war operation during an international conflict is legal.
Important detail is that Ukraine is not at war with Germany. Countries very much can and do arrest the soldiers of other countries when they're found committing criminal acts. Neutral countries also traditionally intern soldiers of belligerents who are found trying to bring the war into neutral territory.
Yes, you have to intern enemy soldiers that enter into the neutral country in order to preserve your neutrality. Spies are not soldiers, they are spies, and you can't quite do this (especially not in practice), but you can pretty much shoot them as you like, even if they've surrendered (and since New Zealand and France weren't at war it was simply treated as ordinary criminality). They basically don't have any rights under the laws of war.
The fact that I suppose it was a partially Germany-owned pipeline probably places the attack in the same framework as interdiction of neutral shipping.
I suppose it's really a proportionality thing then. Was the destruction of the pipeline proportionate-- so I suppose there really is a case, with the arrest warrant then, being legitimate. Since there were alternative avenues-- demanding that the pipeline be cut off, proportionality is obviously doubtful.
I think the problem might be proportionality-- the reasoning would go something like: they could have told the Germans not to let the gas through, and that would have achieved the same effect without violence/destroying civilian infrastructure, so the attack wasn't permitted, or they achieved only a mild military advantage, since the gas could be exported through Azerbaijan, Georgia and Ukraine itself, so it wasn't permitted, and the more I think about it the more I think it actually wasn't.
> Since 1945, developments in international law such as the United Nations Charter, which prohibits both the threat and the use of force in international conflicts, have made declarations of war largely obsolete in international relations
> Declarations of war have been exceedingly rare since the end of World War II.
> In his study Hostilities without Declaration of War (1883), the British scholar John Frederick Maurice showed that between 1700 and 1870 war was declared in only 10 cases, while in another 107 cases war was waged without such declaration
Most of these statements have source references.
While this doesn't cover the whole history, you are welcome to bring up sources contradicting my statement.
Who then denied doing it. Russia accused of it being Ukrainians with UK technical assistance which seems plausible to me. When the Brits were asked if they did it they said something like "we won't dignify that with a response", ie not no.
Once Azerbaijan starts up their wars again though, all the pipelines are presumably going away, so even though the Ukrainians have obviously screwed you, it's far from certain they'll really gain that much.
Germany really should have anticipated this sort of thing happening sooner or later, but German politicians chose instead to bury their heads in the sand by buying into the whole "end of history" narrative. Making their economy so dependent on buying energy from Russia is only one manifestation of this. Another has been allowing their military to atrophy, to the point where they can no longer pull their own weight in NATO to present a credible deterrence to Russian aggression. Germany is lucky to be friendly with so many other nations that aren't run by such foolish people; Poland, Sweden, etc. At the same time, Germany is now in an uncomfortable position with America because of Germany's own poor planning.
Isn't that the whole point of nato? Keeping germany down and russia out?
The last time someone messed with them so hard, they elected that austrian painter dude, who then killed hitler in the end... and now EU is wondering, why the germans are turning towards AfD.
No, the point of NATO was/is to keep the Soviets/Russians from trying to invade. Remilitarization of West Germany happened very quickly after the end of WWII and only after the fall of the Soviet Union and German Reunification did Germany seem to conclude that history was over and lost their vigilance.
> Lord Ismay, the first Secretary General of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), reportedly observed that the purpose of the Alliance was to keep the Americans in Europe, the Russians out, and the Germans down.
Ah, the habit of reducing geopolitics to one-liners. Germany has, of course, benefitted massively from NATO both before and after reunification.
Worth noting that the quote must have predated the EU and all its predecessors, as well as the Euro.
At the same time, one of the main concerns of at least US foreign policy has been to keep a truce between Germany and Russia from happening, because that would be one of the few constellations that could upset the European power balance.
And yes, that seems absurd, and no, I don't want this nor can I see it succeed in any way, but I also think it would definitely be an upset.
> At the same time, one of the main concerns of at least US foreign policy has been to keep a truce between Germany and Russia from happening, because that would be one of the few constellations that could upset the European power balance.
Well yeah... german industry + russian raw materials and energy sources would mean a big problem to american industry... so yeah... to turn it back into a one liner, they managed to keep germany down and russia out.
And now, more and more germans feel betrayed and are looking at an alternative (could be written in uppercase too).
I said the European power balance, not the global one. You misunderstood again.
I also wouldn't say that Germans feel betrayed. Quite the opposite, they instead think it's beneficial to betray their allies. Playing both sides, much like Hungary and Turkey.
That was his observation, i.e. his opinion and not the official policy, 70 years ago.
I imagine it might have been part of the strategic thinking at that time, but that has apparently changed quite quickly. By the 1970s, Bundeswehr was the strongest western European army, West German economy living its golden years. (it's quite astonishing, but towards the end of the Cold War, West German economy was bigger than that of Soviet Union with 1/6th of the population)
In my opinion statements like that are mostly a sop to the French and other formerly Nazi-occupied peoples, who were not happy that the de-Nazification process was largely abandoned after only a few years and most war-time German military and civilian officials were given blanket amnesties and used to rapidly rebuild the new West German state and military.
It's a fact that West Germany was rearmed after WWII at about the same time denazification policies were revoked, maintained considerable military power through the Cold War, and effectively disarmed itself through its own political processes following Reunification.
Didn't they already by forcing people to pay in rubles? Anyway it's not like Russia has any negotiating powers with the rest of europe at the moment, we're not buying their gas until they withdraw and repatriate.
Of course history of this goes all the way back to the very first thing the British did in WW1 was to cut the telegraph cables between Europe and America https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-42367551
My point is that the calculus for Russia isn't "is there a precedent for breaking this type of international law?", it's rather "can we get away with it?". NS2 didn't figure in the Russia's calculus when planning the undersea cable interruption.
> Ultimately, international law has to be enforced by someone
And who has more moral right to do that than the superpower that supports a genocide, invaded iraq for no actual reason (and the whistleblower who called it "suicided")?
USA doesn't enforce "law", they enforce oppression and the interests of a few rich guys.
I find it weird how some people think that the country who illegally invaded Iraq on a whim enabled a genocide in Gaza could possibly be trusted to enforce international law on any other matter.
There was a period when a law based international order theoretically could have been implemented by the US but since 1991 it's always just followed the principle of "fuck you my guns are bigger than yours" with some bullshit legalistic pretext.
But is a programmer who uses AI to program the same as
a Typescript programmer who doesn't understand JavaScript well?
Or a Python programmer who doesn't know C?
Or a C programmer who doesn't know assembly code?
Or an assembly coder who doesn't make his own PCBs?
Is AI orchestration just adding another layer of abstraction to the top of the programming stack?
Not until their outputs become predictable and reproducible. Then a form of English or whatever other language becomes your programming language with its quirks and special syntax to get the right result.
