291–300 of 355 posts
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Somehow I don’t think that’s their primary concern at the moment
Granted. But it's going to be someone's concern after all this is over. And unlike landmines, how do you detect and remove kilometers of cable?
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> Today, some Ukrainian and Russian units are also using drones controlled by fiber-optic cable, rather than radio, though I had no personal experience with this type of drone in my unit
Because it is mostly the Russians that are using those, the Ukrainians have also started using them but in less fewer numbers.
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However, they effectively bought the owner of Starlink.
I don't believe they have enough money to buy Musk. They can influence him through propaganda and memes, but outright bribery is unlikely. That would have to be a vast, vast money transfer. Trump looks more likely to be bribe-able than Musk. Very different personalities and net worths. Musk seemed to be genuinely angry with Trump's budget, for example.
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>NATO tank invasion Invasion? Oh my, are you delusional? NATO is a defence alliance, stop consuming Russian propaganda maybe.
You mean defence of Yugoslavia/Serbia in 1999?
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The big thing that FPV drones have going for them is that they're ludicrously cheap and easily constructed from relatively basic parts by moderately skilled people. It's literally cheaper to strap a grenade to an FPV drone and fly it into a tank hatch than it is to fire a single non-precision artillery round, let alone tens or hundreds of them. Plus, you can deploy your drones remotely from the top of a trunk deep be…
This seems to contradict the article, which among other criticisms, specifically says that these drones are more expensive and less reliable than mortars.
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It's very easy to mistake one's own government for the good guys. 20 or so years ago, my degree's optionally-mandatory* industrial placement year had me interviewing at Lockheed Martin. I didn't get it, and in retrospect, given what is now coming to light about UK misbehaviour in Iraq**, I'm glad I didn't. Unfortunately, I don't know what to do about this, as you're correct about the world we live in. * tax thing **…
It's easy to identify who is a evil country and who is a victim in Russo-Ukrainian war. Who is bombing civilians? Shelling cities with inaccurate old missiles? Which cities are destroyed to the ground? Russian state is pure evil, even worse than Iran.
Propaganda, and arresting dissenters, makes it difficult for the *average* Russian to realise anything is wrong.
But even in free nations, people like to think their soldiers are heroes rather than villains, and reports of crimes are covered up or brushed aside.
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Fertility rate in China has been less than one for decades. They have a lot of people, but they are heavily weighted to old.
in japan it was even for many decades and its a problem but not tragedy, japan today still doing strong. Even if population in china shrink by 50% they will still have more pole than europe or us. And lets face it shrinking 50% this will really take decades and unlikely to happen since this will correct itself eventually.
Japan is stuck in the 90's with no hope for the future and they will be even less relevant then they are now within 1 generation.
Japan is absolutely not "doing strong" for the next 50 years or so and the same will happen to China. If you have no people, you have no future. As simple as that.
And how does the fact that it "will still take decades" suddenly make it OK for the country? Also if you shrink a population by 50% within decades it will completely destroy the economy (and military and culture). You can't just half the population that fast and expect things to just carry on as normal or magically recover.
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China's fertility rate is 1. Even if they win the war, they still eventually will have lost.
China can set the fertility rate to whatever they like. It is tied to taxes and penalties. They can move the slider to make it fiscally impossible to be childless.
Moving the slider up (MORE children) is the hard part.
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China's fertility rate is 1. Even if they win the war, they still eventually will have lost.
Fertility rate is a problem for the future, that you can also solve via better polices and incentives if you want to, meanwhile dying or being enslaved in a war is a problem for right now that you can't escape via policies. Which one you think is worse? Also, most wealthy industrialized western nations have the same fertility issues, some are only compensating by huge legal and ilegal immigration which can be causing…
Nobody can. And it's not like they don't want to. Neither the very traditional and religious Arabic countries like Saudi Arabia (2.14, barely above replacement, and trending down), nor a country like Norway, which can afford the best social program in the world. All have fertility troubles. Urban lifestyle just does fertility in.
Mortar shells (80mm class) are cheaper, but mortars need to be compared to drone-dropped munitions, not artillery shells - because mortars' range is way shorter than that of an FPV drone and is comparable to the artillery - a good FPV drone - although not the $500 one - can cover about the median artillery firing range of this war (16km).
Drones bring about more casualties and are used wider exactly because they are more cost-efficient.