• 5 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 27th, 2023

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  • Unless you want to take out a whole bunch of them. Swarm of nanosats with some kind of miniexplosives or even just one-use engines to force deorbiting would probably still be more efficient, unless…

    Unless you want to go for geostationary. A real crowd of satellitrs which have a feature of always looking at the same part of the Earth. While it would be very easy to send a boom device to low earth orbit (also very crowded), erasing a bunch of satellites there would be a temporary inconvenience (let’s not talk about Kessler) since a lot of what’s important is either a global constellation (starlink, gps) or has redundancies (earth observation comes to mind). But explode a nuke in the geostationary over the US and suddenly America has no sat TV/radio, no weather sat coverage and it’s harder to patch up than “just” replacing missing nodes of a constellation.






  • Oligarchs. You’re missing oligarchs. The issue with Ukrainian agricultire is that a lot of it is a big, concentrated business with ties to Western capital on top of the traditional post-soviet oligarchy. This influences actions of both Ukrainian and EU politicians. The matters of imports or transit from Ukraine could be very well sorted out for the short term, but no one in power is really willing to do so.

    In the long term Polish agriculture faces a serious challenge from Ukraine when it gets more and more integrated with the west but it’s also not so binary in terms of who floods whom with produce.



  • I recommend everyone who hasn’t to look up the idea of “Potiomkin villages” (and subsequently Potiomkin anything eg. Potiomkin AI). In short: back in the tzarist days lower ranks put up mock villages which looked clean, modern and prosperous for higher ranks (and tzars) to see during visits. These mockups were essentially theatre decorations which hid the real state of the matters - dilapidated, dirty, poor and corrupt. For at least the last decade everything we saw of Russia was Potiomkin in nature - either to show off before the West or to hide corruption before own superiors.




  • Yes. Most people don’t have the awareness of a lot of what’s been said in the comments or they suspend it in their daily lives. They do what they feel is right and since most were socialised in a similar way the signal-response expectations match. Then a certain rapport can be formed by the empty interactions borne out of the semi-conscious feeling that it’s “right” or “nice” to initiate a small talk and respond to it in kind. In this way indeed most of us are like 15 yo girls, just somewhat more serious and self-controlled.

    If I were in a condescensing mood I’d say humans generally are bots following Pavlov’s reaction patterns imprinted during upbringing. But this would be a severe oversimplification and a little a-hole talking through me.




  • That’s an amount of gear and people comparable to what a mid-sized European country could have and what a big European country could muster on short notice. It’s “only” a factor of 2 or 3 less than what Russia prepared for Ukraine at the beginning. It’s likely more than the combined forces of the Baltic states’ militaries and the NATO contingents stationed there.

    With a generous dose of optimism it is a force that would at least hold a conventional invasion at bay, if not defeat it via superior tech and sea support. It is a lot even in absolute terms, for an exercise it’s massive.