It’s not that large of an incursion force, I think something like 2k of some of their better troops who would normally be acting as a quick ground reaction force. So they aren’t really moving people off of the front line, though they may have lost the ability to quickly reinforce one front or another.

From what I’ve seen, the salient is being used to probe the strength of the Russian’s western flank. It doesn’t appear that Russia was expecting an offensive, and didn’t have their own version of a quick reaction force held in reserve.

Unless the Russians can move men and more importantly artillery to the area, there’s a risk the salient could be used to roll their western flank, cutting of their border guards from their supply lines.

Yep, that’s a tapered/angled roller bearing. They’re conceptually a pretty easy concept, but deceptively hard to manufacture

Dude complaining about a dude complaining about apple being proprietary in 2024, when apple has built their entire business from day one by being the most draconian closed loop proprietary hardware/software model since personal computers were invented…

You just made the same argument, but in an aggressively dumb way.

Pretty much anything with a turning wheel and axel relies on some sort of bearing system. That means traditional and high speed rail systems both require them.

There are some differences in types of bearing depending on what you use your rail system for. In the US we utilize antiquated plain bearings that are relatively easy to manufacture, but that’s because our rolling stock is ancient compared to most countries. Mainly because we rely heavily on trucks for transporting most goods and haven’t bothered investing in our aging rail network.

In Russia they have a much more modern rolling stock, as everything they ship goes through their rail network. Their rolling stock utilizes angled/slanted roller bearings, which can vastly increase their weight capacity, speed, and can double to triple their lifespan. The only problem is that they are complicated to manufacture.

The bearings in trains are actually pretty complicated to build. They use slanted roller bearings, not just regular old ball bearings. 10 companies in the world make like 70% of all rail bearings, and 5 of those are in Japan. Plus, only a few countries produce the two steel alloys that you make these bearings out of.

China does produce around 20% of the bearings used in trains, but pretty much all of it gets used for domestic purposes and they still have to import due to their massive rail expansion projects

That’s mainly because America mostly moves freight via trucks, and thus has very outdated rolling stock. It’s not unusual to see freight chassis that are 50 plus years old.

Russia on the other hand moves the majority of their freight via rail, and like most countries utilize tapered roller bearings for their trains. This allows them to carry a lot more weight, and the bearings last nearly 3x as long.

I’m not quite sure what would be harder, to import new bearings, build a production line from the ground up for bearings, or retrofit all their rolling stock with outdated technology.

Each choice is going to be expensive and extremely time consuming.

My hobby > The children

The reddit community will up vote them, and even down vote people who try correcting them.

Yeap… Especially with any topic where there’s a big hobbyist community.

I work in orthotics and prosthetics for a university hospital as both an educator and a healthcare provider. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been down voted by 3d printer enthusiasts for critiquing untrained and uneducated people fitting children with medical devices that can severely injure or debilitate them.

Bearings for rolling stock are actually relatively hard to come by, and there are only a few countries that even produce the two different steel alloys they are made from.

Ten companies in the world manufacture 75% of the bearings used in rail. With like 5 of them being located in Japan, and the rest in the US, Germany, and I believe Sweden. China only produces about 20% of bearings used in rail, but they are pretty much all for domestic use, as they are still expanding their network.

Hell hath no fury like a competitive nerd being put on a pedestal.

I think this happens a lot anytime someone who perceives themselves as being shunned by society gets too much positive feedback and an iota of power over people.

I think its the same reason why every nerdy twitch streamer ends up being outed as an abusive child predator.

(IBA) president, Umar Kremlev, saying that DNA tests had “proved they had XY chromosomes and were thus excluded”.

This incredibly misleading, and I’m guessing since the IBA is currently just a mouth piece for the incredibly homophobic Kremlin… I’m guessing intentionally so.

Just because you have a xy chromosomes, doesn’t mean you’re automatically dictated to be sexed as a male. You could very well have a XXY pairing like women with certain types of gonadal dysgenesis, something like Turner’s syndrome.

Gender is without a doubt a human construct, but so is the false dichotomy of male/female that most people outside of the medical field view sex.

The intersex population is much larger than most people presume, and the labels in which we use to classify the majority of the population don’t really serve a medical purpose for them.

There is no standardization in medicine for Sexual assignment at birth. Sexual assignment in medicine is utilized to categorize treatment needs that are commonly specific to the patient’s sex. Intersex patients will require individual assessments, as even patients with the same diagnosis can have wildly different needs.

If Wormtongue didn’t want me to have the orb, then why did he throw it at me? Everyone knows that orbs are free if you find them on the ground, Gandalf is just jealous the ents like me more and I have all the good leaf.

It is a bit more complicated than that, mostly because the US isn’t a signatory to unclos, while China is. However, China does not recognize the agreed upon terms of unclos, while America for the most part does…

but news media needs to quit exploiting the fact that readers don’t know the difference between different types of waters to manufacture “more-interesting” stories.

The problem is that there is conflicting information on how the states in question interprets what they and others can do in EEZs, and how the EEZs are constituted in the first place.

In reality an international body of laws like unclos is only enforceable if the international court is willing to confront its members with hard power. Withholding that, it’s just a dog and pony show that has the possibility of validating an international conflict if someone oversteps their mark.

My understanding of these trophy hunts is that they only allow people to shoot the animals that are no longer contributing to the gene pool.

For now… A lot of these “conservation groups” putting out these types of studies are actually just hunting lodges owned by rich families. They claim that they are preserving the land, and that they use the proceeds from these types of hunts to protect the land.

However, these “conservationist” are typically just poachers with a marketing team. For the most part their goal is to legitimize the illegal hunts they are already committing.

Nah, the Japanese government since WW2 has primarily been run by war criminals or the children of war criminals. Modern Japan is basically what Germany would have been if people like Goring got to skip the Nuremberg trials and instead became the president.

Wikileaks was never really a beacon of free speech its always been more of a platform where people can leak information about goverments and other powerful individuals or organizations doing bunch of shady or downright evil stuff behind our back. These often offer rare glimpse behind the scenes allowing us to be little less blind when voting during whather elections comes next.

When WikiLeaks first came about it’s original goal was aimed at leaking information about authoritarian governments, primarily China and some countries in the Middle East. It was pretty big news at the time because assange had wrangled together a team of some pretty high profile Journalist and privacy tech people.

However, most of those people were never really involved in the organization, and were mainly utilized as a marketing scheme. The rest slowly left the organization as works in their fields within WikiLeaks stagnated, or left over security and leadership concerns.

Imo Assange has always been a duplicitous attention seeker. However, if that were illegal, pretty much everyone involved in media would be thrown in a cell. I think his biggest failures that should tarnish his public image is his handling of the leaks. Him rushing to release information against the advise of his security experts, information that hadn’t been properly vetted to protect the whistle blowers from prosecution.

Multiple people have had their lives ruined because he didn’t take the time and effort to protect his sources. And not because they didn’t have the ability to, or lacked the proper protocols, but because Julian didn’t care so long as his name got air time.

That’s not fair. I’m still kinda convinced Brandon Sanderson has clones, or has made a compact with the devil or something. How can someone write so much and not be in the throws of of some kind of manic breakdown? It’s just not fair to the other fantasy writers.

Fair enough. I think then it’s important to distinguish between what subsidies are worth tariffing and what subsidies are not. If Germany rezones an area to allow car factories to be built, is that a subsidy worth tariffing?

Eh, I don’t really have a strong opinion on tariffing. Tbh I don’t really have strong opinions about subsidizing private equity, other than they really shouldn’t really exist.

Under “free market” capitalism subsidies nor tariffs should exist by definition. And under socialism or communism, I would much prefer that the state employ the workers to do the work of the state. Subsidizing private equity just moves the people’s money into the pockets of middle men.

I think the current global regression back to an odd stage of mercantilism is the product of the moneyed class in China and the west attempting to goad political leaders into abandoning their economic principles for greater profit margins.

I mean, in this case it’s more that the developers lost money and the government gained assets sold below book value… That’s pretty good return imo. The developers’ investors got fucked, yes, but have you looked at, say, Evergrande’s ownership? Not all Chinese developers are state-owned. In fact, the distressed ones are not.

Right, but the developers are way over leveraged meaning that it’s not really their money but the banks. The banks/government is making the best out of a bad situation, but they are still loosing substantial amounts of capital. One of the reasons this kicked off in the first place was the government trying to get a handle on private equity borrowing more than their company is worth. That’s not really not criticism on the government action, it’s best to pull that bandaid off as soon as possible, but it still hurts. I think it’s mainly the fault of local banks who have probably been either careless or fraudulent in their reporting to the central bank.

Do you know how China imputes rent for their GDP calculations? It’s the construction cost depreciated linearly over the life of the building. Think about that for a second, then come back to me. I can explain it to you, but when I realized what it meant it shook me to the core so maybe it’ll have the same effect on you lol. For reference, the US imputes rent by asking “what would the homeowner have paid if they had to rent.”

Again, this just isn’t something I really care about much. GDP and how it’s calculated is mostly legal fiction, utilized primarily for international bragging rights and as a way to lull investments from foreign capital.

It sounds like China utilizes user cost approach, and the west utilizes the comparison approach. China’s approach makes sense for a more centralized lending apparatus, as it can help prevent the boom and bust cycle so common in western real estate market. But it’s still susceptible to market collapse if you miscalculated building cost or depreciation values, and makes it harder to sustain value in real estate investments unless you are constantly building more and more.

I think in the end it just creates two different types of problems. In the west the comparison approach provides less motivation for developers to build an adequate amount of housing. In China, it creates too much incentive for developers to overdevelop housing to the point where it devalues the very concept of individual investments in housing.

I think a better solution would be to consider affordable housing development to be a natural monopoly that is provided by the government without the input of private capital. But that would be a blow to GDP for both systems, and I think we both know how the capital class of both China and the west would respond to that.

Your claim that surveillance flights are not considered an action worth intercepting in inside EEZ is disproven by the actions of basically every country on the planet.

I didn’t claim that, as I already said there are specified clauses within unclos that delineate between military and commercial aircraft that limit the freedoms of travel for military aircraft.

Which is why it doesn’t make sense to assume a delineation of “military action” vs navigation at sea. If they really wanted to limit navigation for military vessels they would have specified so, as they did with military aircraft.

Again, I’m not saying this is fair or reasonable. Laws of the Sea were originally developed by nations that could enforce them with a strong navy, mainly to maintain a monopoly of that power. It doesn’t make any sense for these nations to ratify a system of rules that strip those powers away from them. The goal is to maintain the hierarchy of power, making the laws just reasonable enough for other nations to sign, as opposed to fighting a stronger naval power.

Land management. In the same way that changing zoning is not a subsidy, changing land management rules is not a subsidy. It’s government support, agreed, but to call it a subsidy…?

I think I prefaced the statement with it depended on what you consider a subsidy. I admit it isn’t semantic, but I really consider any government assistance to private equity a subsidy. Mainly because it in truth and investment in which the government is hoping for a return.

Subsidizing low income housing. This has been a new policy used to seize distressed assets and make sure they don’t sit… Well, distressed. The central bank is an arm of the government, and the government is achieving it’s goals of housing access. At the end of the day, your claims on profit detract from the actual benefits of public housing.

Right, but this is a reclamation action. It’s not what the original investment was meant for, and surely they aren’t getting the same monetary return they originally hoped for.

I support governments subsidizing affordable housing, this is another thing I think western states need to realize. However, it doesn’t seem like they needed to focus on that much housing at the moment, and it doesn’t seem like that was their original intention.

By your arguments, public transit is robbing Peter to pay nobody, because the government sure as hell doesn’t recover operating costs from fares. That’s never been the point of public infrastructure.

I think the government’s entire existence should evolve around fulfilling their public’s needs, including adequate public transportation. The key word there is need. The Chinese government didn’t need to throw billions of dollars to private equity to build more homes than necessary. They did it because they wanted to maintain their gdp, so they could flaunt their economic vanity alongside the US on the international stage.