The buildup begin in '21. Although I’ve had people yell at me for suggesting the war didn’t actually start in '14.

Age verification that will, itself, be quickly subverted and spoofed. And which they won’t bother to manage internally, because that’s hard

$1500/mo

Only available in Chattanooga, Tennessee.

I hate the US and Russia equally

If I were a native or neighbor of one, I might hate it more than the other, merely due to proximity.

I dont think anyone is saying we should invade Russia.

I seem to recall a bunch of anti-Russia hawks saying exactly this when the invasion happened in '21. The US, the EU, the rest of the Asiatic continent - they were all told they needed to team up and crush Russia, once and for all.

Now that the US has collapsed into a fascist regime marginally sympathetic to Russian white nationalism, the Keyboard Commandos of Reddit don’t really expect Cheeto Mussolini Von Putinkisser to take the fight to Moscow.

But I’ve also heard (1) Putin is senile / infirm / on death’s door and regime change in Russia will come any day now and (2) The Russian military is absolutely on the brink of collapse, so another year or ten of drone skirmishes will be the end of the entire Russian armed forces with a bit of patience. Just a few hundred more billion to Ukraine will be the end of the Russian army absolutely for certain guaranteed. So we never really needed to invade directly, just finance an endless parade of mercenaries to get the job done.

90% of the world online scammers and hackers

It’s crazy how these major tent poles of the modern internet - Facebook, Google, Twitter, and Microsoft - are all centered in the United States, but never bare any responsibility for the malicious traffic on their networks.

They’ve got concept art in the article.

Isn’t Speak With Dead going to be easier to cast?

if you provide enough dark energy

“How much ya got?”

“Well, it’s a purely theoretical substance. But theoretically we’ve got more of that than all the regular energy in the known universe.”

and shape it into a specific configuration

I want to say that’ll be the easy part, but I guess it really depends how abstract of a shape we’re talking about and how malleable dark energy ends up being.

Active or dorment?

traveling back in time is not mathematically disallowed by the general relativity.

Moving mass backwards through time isn’t strictly mathematically disallowed. Idk what it’s going to look like when it arrives, though.

What does a Tachyon even look like?

Western corruption is starting a company to produce y and when a government orders x of them, x are delivered

Well… not always.

The initial contract award called for the combat-ready tankers to arrive in August 2017; the first arrived in January 2019. In the years that followed, the KC-46 program was beset by further delays, including production line problems that regularly stalled deliveries and an underperforming vision system. That system is years behind schedule and expected to come in October 2025.

and

Broken Boeing airplanes are going to the military thanks to corruption and bad decisions

Increasingly, the US model for contracting is to take money, outsource the work to a bunch of bargain basement contractors, pocket the profits, and then fail to deliver the end product.

Also R&D is priced in because it’s all done for the sake of making profit and must be recovered through the unit sales.

Again, this is something of an open question. The engineering of a given retailed unit is priced in as part of the unit rate. But the bluesky R&D is, as often as not, performed at the university level and then arbitraged through the private sector or simply stolen from rival militaries / companies / individuals through espionage and laundered through the private sector.

The Octopus Murders, on Netflix, tackles the anatomy of this kind of government-backed swindle with regard to the development of early iteration database technology.

The real difference between more Socialist/Communist models of corruption and the Western Capitalist style tends to be in the legal canonization of the corrupt practices. You really got to see this in the post-Soviet liberalization of Eastern European economies, as mafia cartels were supercharged by western financialization and eventually subsumed the entire federal apparatus of ex-Soviet states. What was considered a criminal black market prior to 1991 became the standard for managing the economy a decade later.

Probably (my guess) with the AI set to “if you lose connection, try to hit any humans in this area”

What could go wrong there?

Which one of these two do we think is going to run out first?

Setting aside that this is largely wartime propaganda horseshit - both militaries are relying on conscripts and mercenaries, both are heavily invested in cheap long-range drone artillery, both are saturated in “Victory is just around the corner” propaganda which has degraded support for their civilian leadership - Russia has 5x the population of Ukraine. If this really is just a Bodies-In-Spaces conflict, the Russians can drown Ukraine in their own blood over a long enough timeline. Ukrainians still need someone to fire those bombs and bullets, ideally before Kiev looks like Tehran.

But then nobody is “winning” this war in a material sense. Putin is shedding what political allies he has as the war drags on - Romania, Hungary, Turkiye, Syria. Zelensky is fully fucked the next time Ukrainians bother to have a domestic vote. Both of their economies have tanked, with further economic pressures coming from the conflict with Iran and the climate change threat.

The issue isn’t whether one runs out first. It’s how long the political leadership can drag this forward before someone pops them and brokers a settlement that ends the bleeding. Netanyahu is in a similar position in Israel, with endless war being the only excuse he has to stay in office. And domestic revolt might be what brings all these governments down long before the actual wars are ended.

Rub a lamp

Genie comes out

Oooh, that felt good. Keep going and I’ll give you three full wishes.

Shrug

Keep rubbing lamp

Ooooh yeah baby. Give me your wishes. What are your wishes? You’re going to get so many good wishes, hon.

If the worst thing they do to each other in the next few years is to exchange leaflets and trash balloons, I’d call that a win

Theoretically. But if Ukraine won’t negotiate without full return of territory (presumably even including Crimea, which is fully outside their political influence) and Russia won’t cede territory they’ve entrenched…

Feels like a North/South Korea situation is the best case scenario. They stop fighting but never really declare a peace.

I’m not entirely clear how you add Ukraine in the middle of a war, particularly when a chunk of the country isn’t even under their control. If EU states wanted to openly war with Russia, they’d have just done it already. Admitting Ukraine mostly means opening the doors to a massive migrant wave, which nobody else in the EU (particularly neighboring Poland) seems to want.

Of course, sending them €90bn in Russian assets so the Ukrainian government can liquidate it and send it right back to EU arms dealers? That’s a no-brainer.

They haven’t even broken ground for that one yet.

Spot price of oil goes up, domestic producers get richer.

On the flip side, we’re also seeing a surge in mass transit use and big cuts in the number of flights planed for the rest of the year. Wouldn’t be surprised if there was a blitz of new alt-energy construction and surge in sales of EVs in the next few years, either. Not unlike after the Bush-Era $6/gal gas spike during the Iraq War.

Trump’s crusade for $500/bbl gas is doing more to de-carbonize the economy than anything Biden or Obama tried.

Pressure is growing for windfall taxes on the war profits of oil and gas companies, with the European Commission considering a request from the finance ministers of Germany, Spain, Italy, Portugal and Austria to “send a clear message that those who profit from the consequences of war must do their part to ease the burden on the general public”.

Has this ever actually been implemented? I see “windfall taxes” legislation floated every couple of years, when price gouging goes to 11. I never see anyone ballsy enough to implement it.