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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: August 24th, 2023

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  • Right, I should make myself clearer. I’m no expert in economics, I just try to build a reasoning based on what I know.

    The context of his statement is that Russia is outproducing the West in ammunition, specifically artillery shells. Earlier he states Russia is producing 4 millions shell a year compared to .5 for the US. So without qualification, the statement implies Russians are somehow 80x superior as they produce 8 times more with an economy a tenth the size.

    I feel he should have qualified his statement to improve reader understanding:

    • in general domestic production for domestic consumption should be compared using PPP, in which the Russian economy is “merely” a fourth of that of the USA (hence my PPP comment)
    • the sanctions Russia is under distort the nominal picture since they restrict trade
    • weapons production is hard to put a number to, since they are very “custom” goods that can’t be easily compared or traded, and even moreso for Russia which has a huge domestic arms industry
      • granted, that last point is is much more true of things like fighter jets than artillery shells
      • still though, there is some Western focus on quality over quantity that also explains the discrepancy (or at least there was before countries realized their entire inventory wouldn’t last more than months in Ukraine)

    Because he didn’t provide this context to the number he is giving, I thought that either he wanted to misled or he was not sufficiently informed, and assumed the more charitable option.



  • If all people who share your opinions think like you then that institution will be left to your opponents.

    Joining would be praxis. You don’t have to be a double agent or anything, just be a sympathetic voice in meetings and such. Simply making the institution politically diverse and preventing it from being an echo chamber of like-minded people is already making a change in the world.

    As an example, in 1923 Hitler attempted a coup, but got off with an amazingly light eight months of prison. The reason is the judiciary at the time were quite sympathetic to him; they didn’t do anything illegal, yet had they been SPD supporters instead Hitler might have gotten a life sentence for his high treason.


  • And the EU has been fumbling the bag on advanced aeronautics practically since its inception.

    This is disinformation.

    Arianespace pioneered commercial satellite launches and in the 90s peaked at 60% of the market through domestic technology, with the French having developed ICBMs and SLBMs for national security. Meanwhile Airbus drove Northrop and McDonnell-Douglas out of the airliner market and is now out-competing Boeing. And regarding missiles MBDA is competitive as well, with some products like the Meteor leading the way in implementing ramjets.

    Jet engines are dominated by the UK and US true, but Safran is still competitive enough to matter (through CFM for commercial or by themselves for military purposes), and although not in the EU Rolls-Royce is much friendlier to cooperation with the EU than American firms.

    The EU is currently behind on drones, stealth, and reusable rockets. But that is not indicative of decades-long inability.


  • My (probably incomplete) understanding is: phones have a GNSS chip (such as GPS, Galileo, or Glonass), but getting location from that takes a long time and a lot of battery. So they estimate location based on other information such as what cell tower they are connected to and the list of available wi-fi networks. This requires a database with all that info, which Google built through its Street View cars.

    So the location provider is a service to which your phone sends all the info it has and which replies with an estimate of your location; which means it handles a lot of sensitive data.