KillingTimeItself

june of 1832, i wonder what kind of goofy shit happened that month.

based. You and me my friend, we think alike, which is probably not great, but hey the law of RNG strikes again!

or voting for all lol.

Some people just like sitting around and bitching about things all day.

the new ones suck so fucking much though

i mean yeah but like, what the fuck is the point? I hate a lot of things for stupid reasons, i feel like as far as the government goes, that’s something that i have a pretty direct involvement with that i can pretty directly influence change with. What’s the point being mad about it when i could be doing something about it instead?

brother AI is a solution to “solve all of your business problems with your business and elevate your business to a level above all other businesses” are you unironically reading marketing speak this straight?

Imagine what things would be like if the UN had more teeth (and no security council)

well then russia would be right about NATO lmao

wait ok, i’m confused why do we hate the US government? Is it because it’s doing global geopolitics shit? Like what’s the motive for caring about this, as opposed to like, stopping world hunger.

Like the motive for the latter is obvious, but i don’t really see the motive for the former. It just seems like yelling at a vast brick wall for no reason.

The US election system is set up for the rich and powerful to stay in charge. It’s ridiculous that there’s effectively only two parties, and it’s ridiculous that a single person, the president, holds so much power. No accountability. Their system needs an entire overhaul, IMO:

so then go and push/vote for voting reform, federally and more importantly at a state level, shit like IRV is very much within reach.

nothing motivates more than disproving stupid things people say lol.

That’s the internet and the broader scientific community at large for you.

Since the start of the conflict it looks like we’ve given ukraine more than $100b in funding. (not all of it is direct) (since 2022)

Israel has received $300b, which is more, but only 3x more, and this is since 1946, the literal founding of israel. Covering spending for the last two fiscal years, it seems to only be about $20b since the october 7th attack, though that’s a pretty rough figure.

in fact if we average these figures, $100b over 2 years is $50b a year, where as if we average the $300b over 78 years it’s only about $3.8b a year. Though in the most recent funding package we have given israel $12b or so in marked funding, which is considerably higher. Still not $50b though.

https://www.csis.org/analysis/past-present-and-future-us-assistance-ukraine-deep-dive-data https://www.cfr.org/article/us-aid-israel-four-charts

50 bucks is cheap compared to destroying the bed of your truck, and spending thousands on material

yeah, that’s mostly dependent on US aid going to ukraine though. Ukraine isn’t going to take the easy path out of this one.

If ukraine is an ally, i understand that to be fairly recent, prior to zelenskyy the president of Ukraine was a russian plant. I believe he was voted in about 2014 or so.

NATO is primarily an alliance between members of the alliance, of which ukraine is not a member. Protecting members outside of NATO is not really inside the purview of NATO as an organization, although protecting border states is politically advantageous.

anyway, i tried looking for some data and didn’t have much luck, but even thinking about it from a strategic position it wouldn’t make sense to loan shark ukraine here. Worst case scenario they collapse after winning due to the loans, and then russia takes over, or they collapse during the war, and we have to deal with getting that money back, because it’s marked as a loan, which wouldn’t really make any sense.

I think the idea is relatively simple, it provides a way for ukraine to borrow money, assuming they win it provides them a way to pay it back or default on it, and that allows ukraine to stay relatively neutral. Just giving free money to ukraine is probably less than ideal.

From the research i did do, i couldn’t find anything talking about how it would be problematic, it was mostly talking about numbers which makes sense, so i guess that checks out, but i would’ve been surprised if nobody had reported on that either.

that’s the general strat, but nothing competes with real world testing fortunately for us, having tested thousands of nukes over the years.

yeah and we aren’t selling them weapons, we’re giving them money to buy weapons. Instead of just, giving them weapons they probably don’t want/need.

We are donating a lot of weapons globally, but universally money is still required, and money can buy weapons so…

we’re not telling them, i think ukraine is even asking for them at some points. Ukraine agrees to the loans, and like i said, i think some amount of the money is default-able loans. So it’s not actually “debt sharking” here.

well then you’ll just have to wait until this war is over i guess.

yeah, and so will russian landmines? Like, vastly more amounts of them will be vastly more problematic.

Cluster bombs are built to explode, in US cluster bombs, up to about 1% of them fail to detonate iirc. It’s higher for russian bombs, upwards of 5% i think. Even if we’re generous to cluster bombs, it’s still just a tiny, tiny fraction of the probably hundreds of thousands of russian landmines that have been planted.

enemy troop trenches.

You can blast it shortly above the trench, accurate enough that a small amount of cluster munitions can explode killing the most people most effectively.

in some cases, this isn’t advantageous, in the one atacms that ukraine sent over an airfield for example, having more clusters is obviously most important there.

Also i take it you know nothing about them so i’ll expound upon my previous comment as i left out a few details. Modern US cluster munitions have individually targetting clusters. This means they can only detonate the actually important munitions, while leaving the rest as dead munitions, or even detonating in air to self destruct (still dangerous, but not as much) so you can kill a group of vehicles, without carpet bombing the rest of the area.

TL;DR more precise cluster bombs allow for using less cluster munitions, which means less collateral, and more damage for the given explosives. I.E. more effective weapon.