I feel this is where the coalition of the willing as the dubbed it, need to step up and say “fuck this”, find a solution for the frozen assets, establish a no-fly zone over Ukraine and put the US under pressure to stop being a little bitch and continue the intel support.
That being said, without US sanctions and support this would become exponentially harder to do.
I’ll take the mail. We hardly ever get any, I always enjoy it when we have some items in the mail to sort.
I’m not super deep into it, but I honestly hardly noticed. Only when I ended up at reddit for some obscure tech issue did I notice it and 10 minutes later it worked again. The thread turned out to be useless anyway.
They’re not atheists as they believe themselves to be gods.
I think you vastly underestimate the catch-22 Putin has steered Russia in. They’re not recovering from this economic disaster this century. They’re damned if they do (continue the war) and damned if they don’t. That’s also why NATO considers Russia a significant threat to regional stability even if the war were to end where they get everything they wanted. It’s a lose-lose situation for Russia, but continued aggression to keep the war economy going is currently the path of least resistance.
Infrastructure spending? This is Russia we are talking about. From every ruble spent by the government, at least 75% disappears if not more. The systemic corruption in Russia will obliterate any supposed advantage they have by ending the war.
And those foreign assets are only partially government assets. These include investment accounts of normal Russians, payment to companies that have been held back, etc… We are talking billions but Russia is bleeding billions every month now, and the release of those assets will only partially mitigate the unfolding souffle like collapse of the Russian economy. It’s not a sudden crash, just a general return to poverty.
A return of fossil fuel sales to prewar income would help, but I don’t see that happening as long as they occupy the Donbas and Crimea. Some sanctions will be lifted in case of a peace agreement but not even regime change will roll back all of the sanctions.
Except he does feel humiliation and I think he feels it more intense than most. I’m not a psychologist but it appears to me as one of his main motivations to do something. Because deep down he’s a deeply insecure little shit and all this strong man stuff is just a facade he puts up.
I would argue humiliation is what he fears above all else and that makes him lash out even stronger.
We have 4 cats but they’re not allowed in the bedroom. We will let 1 of them in sometimes to cuddle on the bed because that’s his favoritest thing in the world but other than that we just want to avoid cat hair in the bedroom.
It wasn’t a connecting flight.
Singapore doesn’t fuck around, which my cousin found out the hard way when he had to leave Australia after a year of travelling/working and he just took the cheapest flight (pretty much the only one he could afford) out of the country, which went to Singapore. Of course he had no clue about Singapore and when he arrived without a visum, they took him into custody and interrogated him for over 12 hours. After they put him on a plane home (in Europe). In the end he rode the cheapest flight out of Australia all the way home, so that did work out for him.
Sure, but they also suffer the consequences of their own focus on pushing out more and more SUV’s instead of focusing on EV. Volkswagen actually made the correct choice going fully for EV’s, but then backtracked under shareholder pressure. And the EU as a whole failed to protect local battery production and technology, allowing itself (although this also goes for the US, Japan and South-Korea) to become completely dependent on Chinese raw materials refinement and battery production and technology.
China on the other hand, not suffering from fair and free elections, had a much easier time keeping its eye on the ball and sticking with a coherent long term vision.
That being said, I do think it’s good for Germany to become less dependent on their car industry. They have a lot of industries screaming for highly qualified employees and the car industry has been vacuuming up a majority of those. These people becoming available for other industries will provide significant benefits as well.
My wife suggested it recently, but we watched it already this year so we planned it for the Christmas break, when we always watch it anyway. I wouldn’t mind if we could skip the hobbit trilogy, but she likes it, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ .
I saw an analysis recently on youtube of a chess problem where if you picked the queen, you couldn’t win the game because it would always end in a tie due to the opponent being unable to make a move, so the correct choice was to get a tower instead.
Buying the blueprints would still remove the need for extensive testing, but you make a good point. After I posted the comment, I actually wondered about how hard it would be since there is so much information about nukes publicly available.
Well, France or the UK could also share their technology, or even Pakistan or India. I imagine it’s easier to buy the technology from an ally than developing it from scratch.
And the only reason Chinese cars are so cheap is because of massive subsidies all throughout the supply chain.
Edit: If you’re going to spout whataboutisms, provide proof. Because for all intents and purposes, European manufacturers aren’t nearly as subsidized as you think they are. Also note I stated “throughout the supply chain”, which is far more substantial than a discount on buying an electric vehicle.
Two things I think. They gambled on fuel cells because it offers an easier solution at a time when charging stations were rare. It’s Tesla becoming popular very quickly followed by VW going all out on EV that really caught them on the backfoot. The second thing is that they underestimated the level of change to battery technology. They (at the time correctly) stated that for every 10 EV’s, they could make 90 hybrids. While that is still valid, the battery technology has evolved significantly and become cheaper in the process. Even 2 years ago you couldn’t find an EV in Europe for under 30k €, now there are several cars to choose from and not only Chinese cars either.
To be honest, it is not in the best interest of Ukraine to piss off two neighbors who are also EU members. Not that those shit stains Fico and Orbán don’t deserve it, but they can make further sanctions on Russia or EU support for Ukraine significantly more difficult to achieve.
We are not ready though. Mentally, sure, but in case of an all out war we would still run out of ammo, bombs and manpower in weeks. Only now do we see the first factories and production lines coming online based on the investments of the past years and even then not all the supply lines have been adjusted for it. Europe could probably be ready by the end of 2027 at the earliest, provided it removes its command and control dependency from the US.
Realistically, Europe won’t be ready until 2030. That’s not to say we wouldn’t be able to get ready sooner, we absolutely would, if we were to switch to a war economy. But nobody wants that, because it ruins your economy and is grossly expensive.
That doesn’t mean we would get crushed, that wouldn’t be the case, but we would be on the defensive for a while until the gears of war are properly greased.