Ukraine’s current main limitation appears to be funding, not troops or production capacity

That explains their lack of need for conscription and their air superiority.

I will never understand the knee-jerk insistence to play the Kamala Harris “We ran a perfect campaign” line against whatever Ukraine’s current defense policy happens to be. This was a country starved for equipment and experienced personal going back to before the '21 invasion even started. And now exporting equipment and manpower for some quick cash is the optimal play?

To assist in the invasion of another sovereign state, even?

Stop trying to optimize experience gains for fucking making me have to play 20 hours a weeknto unlock the battlepass I already bought within the 3 month window. Seriously, fucking stop, I have other things to do in life too.

The worst part about all these games. It’s like your weed guy blowing up your phone telling you its time to smoke another J. Only a group of sales guys coked off their asses could have come up with this as a marketing gimmick.

I have no interest in playing against hackers or no lifes who run everything with Potato mode graphics and swest skins who play 24x7 and have 2000 crown wins by day 2.

The truly crazy part about this group is that it is increasingly just bots. Like, not even proper “professional gamers” anymore. Just scripts running on a server built by a madman.

no one deserves a relationship

Alienation drives people nuts. Idk about “deserves”, but everyone ultimately needs them to function normally. Folks who are shut up and hooked into the YouTube Vomit Cannon or the Twitter Racism Space to get all their socializing are the ones that burn out, melt down, or become Elon Musk.

Being unfulfilled is part of life, and any adult is well aware of that, and is good regardless.

Being unfulfilled creates motivation to change oneself. But being trapped in a sense of unfulfillment is toxic to the point of madness. If you’ve got no release for your anxiety or depression, you turn inward in a way that can get very dark over time.

“In and out, twenty minute adventure”

Walking past a sign post that reads “Welcome to Tristram”

The bottleneck is not drones, the bottleneck is expertise.

One cultivates the other, as operators need something to train on.

That said, raw supply of materials remains an issue across each theater of conflict. One of the bigger problems US/Israel has atm is producing and staffing weapons systems both offensively and defensively.

Ukrainians stepping in to provide support both drain their own front lines and create some miserable optics for a country that needs to be seen as opposing violations of sovereignty.

Foreign investment/buy orders increase the production capacity of Ukrainian businesses

A country already strapped for resources and manpower, which they cannot afford to export.

Might as well be France, during the Blitz, exporting tanks to Franco’s Spain. It doesn’t help you if you’re businesses are going to be someone else’s property in another few months.

The “friendzone” only exists when you end up in the mental gap between “I want to have sex with this person, but don’t care about them as a person” and “I want to have sex with this person, therefore I must care about them as a person.”

I think there’s definitely some confusion and frustration that comes from people who see their peers hooking up, but can’t figure out what transitions them from a friendship to a romantic relationship. Add to this, a certain low-key distrust cultivated by social media, wherein one person may assume they are getting strung along while the other isn’t willing/able to clearly signal their intentions.

Normal consenting adults can meet someone, vibe, and engage in sexual behavior without necessarily more.

Well… sometimes. The term “getting lucky” is apt, as there are so many variables - some totally beyond either of the participants’ control - that can determine whether or not the magic happens.

Once you understand that sexual desire is not romantic desire, and that romantic desire is actually really unfulfilling if not reciprocated, you’re usually good.

No. You’re “good” when you’ve found a person for whom you can reciprocate romantic love. Just understanding the difference isn’t fulfilling so much as it is enlightening. But it’s like hanging a steak over the head of a hungry dog. One dog heedlessly leaping at it isn’t more or less fulfilled than another who has come to the realization it is forever out of reach.

Guasanos have been talking about reclaiming Cuba for over 70 years.

The New York Times reported the administration is seeking to oust President Miguel Díaz-Canel from power while allowing the island’s Communist government to remain in place — a repeat of what they allowed in Venezuela — and giving Trump a “symbolic win.”

…

the Atlantic noted that plans could also give “wealthy Republican donors with Cuban ancestry” leadership roles in a transition or even permanent government.

How on earth is this supposed to work, exactly?

Why would domestic Cubans submit themselves to overseas authority without a massive security state capable of enforcing control?

Isn’t Zelensky selling US/Israel drone tech that he’s then diverting from his own front line?

One of the original promises of “Online Betting Markets” was that they were more efficient aggregators of information than traditional journalism.

The two driving forces that have born this out appear to be

1. Insiders betting on information before it becomes public

2. People in a position to manipulate the release of information shaping publicly available information to profit off their prediction market bets

To ensure that global demand for fossil fuels remains buoyant, the United States is leveraging the advantages of incumbency. Unlike the Green Entente, which must build an entirely new energy production, distribution, and consumption infrastructure from scratch, the Axis of Petrostates is playing infrastructural defense—a strategically easier position.

Crazy to read this as the US shuts down the Straight of Hormuz and decimates the O&G infrastructure of the Gulf States in a matter of weeks.

According to the International Energy Agency, China controls more than 90 percent of global processing of rare earths and 94 percent of the production of permanent magnets (essential for electric vehicle motors and wind turbines); its share in manufacturing solar panels exceeds 80 percent; and it produces more than 70 percent of all EV batteries and also accounts for over 70 percent of global EV production.

I do have to wonder how much of this is the result of geological good fortune and how much is merely the fruits of geological discovery. Is there an unusual load of easily extraditable minerals in Chinese sovereign territory, or is China the only country doing exploration and mining at scale?

The trouble, of course, is that joining this bloc isn’t a simple trade agreement; it effectively means entering a hierarchical system led by Beijing. Because China has secured a massive (perhaps even insurmountable) lead in both green power generation and transport systems, any country seeking to go green is essentially forced to adopt Chinese hardware and standards. From this perspective, the Green Entente could represent the emergence of what Joel Wainwright and Geoff Mann have labeled the “Climate Leviathan”: a global system where the climate emergency is used as a pretext for a new form of command-and-control dominance, in which tribute is paid in technological dependency and the risk of political blackmail at the hands of what is also a deeply illiberal and nationalistic regime in Beijing.

Again, so much of this seems to be predicated on the notion that China has some kind of intrinsic advantage, when it seems as though they’re out ahead merely because they’re the only country with a public policy focused on a green domestic industrial output.

Where European countries do embrace alternative energy strategies (France’s nuclear program, UK wind farms, Spanish HSR) they seem more than capable of matching Chinese productivity. But as these efforts are confined to specific regions and decoupled from a continent-wide long-term economic strategy, the real “Climate Leviathan” does not appear to be China specifically but any continent-spanning economic policy generally speaking.

That would appear to be the real threat posed by the US, Saudi Arabia, and Russia. The fossil fuel industry nations are fundamentally aligned on their economic goals in a way that rivals the Chinese superstate. What the article describes as “command-and-control domination” is merely coordination and cooperation between public policymakers and private stakeholders.

Control over solar panels, lithium-ion batteries, EV supply chains, and rare-earth processing gives Beijing an infrastructural chokehold over any nation seeking to modernize its energy metabolism

That’s simply not true. Not in the way the Saudis can maintain a chokehold on cheap light sweet crude, anyway. “Rare” earths aren’t that rare. Technology is highly fungible. The geography isn’t what’s at play with green energy. And the marginal yield on cutting edge imported green technology doesn’t justify refusing to manufacture lower-end domestic infrastructure.

Nothing China produces is beyond the reach of the European (or African or South American) economies, should they be willing to invest capital and labor in their development.

But Europe has positioned itself as a consumer finance economy first and foremost. Until they change course on that front, they’re necessarily going to be locked into a choice of Chinese Coke or US/Saudi/Russian Pepsi.

The biggest con with tumblr is the CEO

The ban of every website’s existence.

It’s nicer to live in the US than in a country the US has decided to re-colonize

I’ll have to take your word for it

They’ll be blind inside a month trying to work like that.

Goes back to email. Easier to create a machine that churns out digital messages than find humans to do the work manually. So you get increasing loads of spam and gibberish, attempting to out-shout one another in a digital space with no bureaucratic regulation or material limits.

That said, one thing that made early social media like Facebook and MySpace and Livejournal appear valuable was the degree of human interaction. What’s more, the interpersonal networks that formed between verified humans gave enormous value to communications across the platform.

Facebook did a pretty good job, early on, of limiting who could join based on authentication through college admin offices. MySpace had a large cohort of real human artists producing real human music, which attracted a real human following. Livejournal predated a lot of advertisement-by-blogging. After the Dot-Com bubble burst, this is where you could see green shoots of economic value in a digital space.

We’ve demolished all that chasing fictitious capital. How valuable it was in practice is debatable, of course. But it’s all gone now.

Reddit, very famously, used bot traffic at its inception to create the illusion of a community big enough to compete with Digg.

It was the OG “fake it till you make it” business.

As the company implements an increasingly draconian “ban every account that looks at me sideways” admin policy, I’m not sure if “2/3rds of the traiffc” isn’t lowballing it. There are entire threads - from initial post to bullshit bottom comment - that get created by bot traffic on the modern site. It’s a full blown hall of mirrors over there.

Plenty of Big Pharma money in producing and distributing cannibas in various forms. We’ve seen thousands of patents filed since legalization began in earnest in 2015

“Huge study reveals ibuprofen doesn’t eliminate pain, just the sensation of it”

Oh okay, I guess I should stop using it then?

“Well, maybe… We need to do another Huge Study to confirm”

take a really long time getting to know someone

I mean, I’ve found 2-5 dates is a good measure. I’ve also seen 7 hours of social time, ideally within a week or two of getting to know someone, helps build up the chemistry before getting physical.

Idk about “really long time”, but there’s a dividend in accruing that sexual tension, especially if you can toe the line between flirting and fucking.