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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Ah yes, it’s…

    checks notes

    the US fault that Russia invaded Ukraine. Right, makes perfect sense, carry on.

    The only involvement the US or even most of the NATO countries have had in this complete shitshow has been to sell obsolete military hardware to Ukraine at a steep discount. It was probably cheaper to ship the stuff in bulk to Ukraine than it would cost to properly decommission it so might even have saved some money doing that.

    Russia desperately wants to make this a fight with NATO or even better the US so they look like less of a laughing stock for losing this badly.



  • I seem to recall a big kerfuffle around a decade and a half back about Russia not actually knowing what became of a whole bunch of nuclear weapons in the aftermath of the USSR collapsing. There were also rumors of Soviet nukes being sold off to various unsavory groups. It really wouldn’t surprise me to find out there was some truth to that.

    I have also heard that ICBMs and the like require regular expensive and specialized maintenance in order to remain functional. Knowing what we now know about Russia what do you figure the odds are that some general or other decided those maintenance funds would be better used to line their pockets since the odds of actually using those nukes were so low?






  • Ultimately this is how renewables win. Not because people are pushing for them, but because they’re cheaper and easier. In order to reach that point we do need a certain number of early adopters that are using renewables because it’s the right thing, but we’ll eventually hit a tipping point where it costs you more to use non-renewables and the migration becomes self-sustaining at that point.



  • orclev@lemmy.worldtoWorld News@lemmy.worldUkraine Can’t Win the War
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    7 months ago

    Russia’s strategy even going back to WW2 has been to throw bodies at the problem until it goes away. I think most people were just assuming that in the modern Internet connected era that that strategy would fall apart. That at some point the Russian people would get fed up with seeing their people being sent off to be slaughtered over a piece of land that means nothing to Russia. The surprise is really that that hasn’t happened yet, or that Putin hasn’t decided to cut his losses and declare the job finished and withdraw.

    At some point Russia will run out of bodies to toss into the meat grinder, it’s just a question of if there will be anything left of Ukraine by that point or not.

    As much as this has been (and continues to be) an absolute disaster for the Ukrainian people, from the perspective of NATO no matter the outcome this is a win. They’ve managed to get a fairly accurate look at Russia’s current military capabilities (laughably bad). Russia has badly hurt themselves even in this short period of time and the longer it goes on the worse it will be. And lastly NATO didn’t really need to do anything but donate or even sell some old hardware stockpiles they had lying around collecting dust. From a purely logical standpoint this is an absolute win for everyone but Russia and Ukraine. Even if Putin ultimately “wins” and takes over Ukraine he hasn’t really accomplished much of value.



  • There is an entire universe of difference between the government telling you you can’t say something and arresting and/or disappearing you if you ignore them, and privately owned museums, exhibit halls, or online platforms refusing to do business with you if you say something stupid in public that harms people’s perceptions of you. You’re absolutely free to spout every hot take and conspiracy theory you want (there’s certainly no shortage of people who do), but nobody is obligated to respect you or do business with you if you do. What’s not going to happen is an FBI agent or cop coming around to “have a chat” and if you refuse to publicly retract your statements then quietly sending you off to some gulag without telling anyone where you’ll be worked to death and then your organs harvested and sold. That’s the difference between “the West” and China.


  • Silencers are very badly named honestly. A “silenced” gun is still very loud, it’s just moderately quieter than an unsilenced one. People watch movies and TV shows and play videogames that make it seem like a silenced gun barely makes any noise at all and think that’s reality. That is very much not reality, it just makes for a more entertaining story.


  • I’ll say the same thing I said when this was posted to news, nobody gives a shit what neo-nazis think about anything. Their opinions are less than useless.

    If they’re not doing anything kick them out of anywhere they show up and then ignore them. If they start something beat their ass and put them in jail. There’s never any reason to talk to them, you’re just providing legitimacy to them that they don’t deserve if you do that. They’re ambulatory excrement and they should be treated like it.






  • orclev@lemmy.worldtoWorld News@lemmy.worldWho is eating all the fish?
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    10 months ago

    No? The only times I’ve seen fish treated as somehow not meat is for religious reasons. Generally you’d categorize the meat by the type of animal, such as beef, pork, chicken/poultry, or the broad categories like fish or shellfish.

    Maybe it just depends on if you live someplace that’s very religious or not?


  • Safety procedures are written in blood. There’s a reason they exist and it’s not just because someone felt like it. If there can be any good to come out of this tragedy, hopefully it’s more respect for proper safety procedures around industrial machinery. This honestly wasn’t even one of the crazy ones where like 2 or 3 different safety systems needed to fail on top of a couple different instances of human error in order for the tragedy to occur, it was simple disrespect for the power of industrial machinery.