Earlier quoted context omitted.
Vietnam https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Vietnamese_War Tibet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annexation_of_Tibet_by_the_Peo... North Korea https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_War
Also, Mongolia.
and India
Ukraine is a major producer of neon gas, critical for lasers used in chipmaking
171–180 of 452 posts
Re: Ukraine is a major producer of neon gas, critical for lasers used in chipmaking
#172This is not the reason. Pure and simply Russia needs people, its dying. Low birth rate, high death rate, little immigration to make up the short fall (who wants to move to Russia :)), and to top off a weak economy that will struggle to support a small less active workforce. Interestingly Ukraine has pretty much the same population problem. This will be increasingly common problem for countries as population growth sl…
Aging population implies a decades spike in demand for elder care. How does it imply an invasion?
You need a strong services based economy to support an aged population, this is not what russia has by a long shot.
Russia has few choices to fix this in timeline they'd have to work with. Population demographics take a long time to solve peacefully.
Re: Ukraine is a major producer of neon gas, critical for lasers used in chipmaking
#173EU and US response to Russia is totally ineffective. They should have moved troops in from the beginning.
And risked an enormous escalation with a nuclear power? That would be reckless.
Don't get me wrong - I would also like to see decisive action to this attack. But escalating a relatively local dispute into a conflict between world powers would risk a WW. Moving in troops into a non-NATO ally would also be extremely difficult to explain on the world stage.
There probably is decisive action being implemented behind the scenes right now, it's just not visible to the public.
Re: Ukraine is a major producer of neon gas, critical for lasers used in chipmaking
#174Earlier quoted context omitted.
dictators are blind. a single person does not have the mental nor technological capacity to run everything. they must delegate. the way dictarships work is the dictator's subordinates, friends, whatever, must live in constant fear of each other, so they are incentivized to lie (or at least omit truths) to the dictator. a benevolent dictatorship doesn't exist, because no benevolent person would survive the process of…
>a benevolent dictatorship doesn't exist, because no benevolent person would survive the process of getting dictatorship. Singapore is the first one that comes to mind. See: https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Benevolent_dictatorship Additionally monarchies are essentially old forms of dictatorship with slightly different customs and titles. It's one and the same and plenty of good kingdoms exist. I have PLENTY of examples:…
Singapore, maybe. China, please.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uyghur_genocide https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinjiang_internment_camps can't be bothered to look for atrocities they've committed before 2010...
US has its share of bad stuff, too, but I never said they're benevolent. They're a democracy, which means the winner of a beauty contest is in power instead of somebody who took forcefully or has been gifted it. No good options here, but at least in the contest somebody actually wins.
Re: Ukraine is a major producer of neon gas, critical for lasers used in chipmaking
#175Russia's actions make me nervous that China will be emboldened to do the same for Taiwan
I wonder if they'll also call the invasion a "peace keeping operation".
Re: Ukraine is a major producer of neon gas, critical for lasers used in chipmaking
#176Earlier quoted context omitted.
dictators are blind. a single person does not have the mental nor technological capacity to run everything. they must delegate. the way dictarships work is the dictator's subordinates, friends, whatever, must live in constant fear of each other, so they are incentivized to lie (or at least omit truths) to the dictator. a benevolent dictatorship doesn't exist, because no benevolent person would survive the process of…
>a benevolent dictatorship doesn't exist, because no benevolent person would survive the process of getting dictatorship. Singapore is the first one that comes to mind. See: https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Benevolent_dictatorship Additionally monarchies are essentially old forms of dictatorship with slightly different customs and titles. It's one and the same and plenty of good kingdoms exist. I have PLENTY of examples:…
> Tibet it also an example. A little iffy this one, it's actually not benevolent but the West has definitely painted them as such to use as propaganda against China
Or perhaps you've bought on to the Chinese propaganda to justify Tibet's invasion, subsequent occupation and genocide of Tibetans by China.
And, China benevolent, oh please...
Re: Ukraine is a major producer of neon gas, critical for lasers used in chipmaking
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
Interesting. I wonder if China has the same amount of waste and overspending in their military industrial complex.
That's highly relevant! China may spend 1/3, but they are more efficient. We probably waste 1/2 or more of our spending. So it's possible we are closer to parity than it would appear if solely comparing budget.
> they are more efficient.
Citation needed.
Re: Ukraine is a major producer of neon gas, critical for lasers used in chipmaking
#178And Russia produces 50% of the worlds palladium which is critical for manufacturing ceramic capacitors. Looks like we’re stuck between the hammer and the sickle…
The article quotes 35%.
Re: Ukraine is a major producer of neon gas, critical for lasers used in chipmaking
#179I was personally hit by this back in 2015 as a grad student. We called up our process gas supplier and asked for a k-cylinder of Neon and were laughed off the phone, so we ended up running our experiment on krypton for setup and used a lecture bottle of Neon that a partner lab had left over for the few minutes of data collection we needed to get our result[1].
At the time, we were cursing the semi industry for using up all of the remaining Neon with their billion dollar operating budgets...
[1]https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/0953-4075/49/15/1...
Re: Ukraine is a major producer of neon gas, critical for lasers used in chipmaking
#18090%! Did we really let ourselves become so reliant on Ukraine and Taiwan for computer chips? Taiwan being the next country most under threat. In fact, Reuters just reported that "Taiwan warns Chinese aircraft in its air defence zone" https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/taiwan-reports-ni...
Would we care without these dependencies?