You know, sometimes I feel bad about gambling some money away on the stock market and feel a bit like a failure. But then I come across posts like these and I remember that at least I do not fuck up on a colossal scale like this.
this post was submitted on 13 Dec 2023
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I remember that at least I do not fuck up on a colossal scale like this.
There is always Thomas Midgley, who invented leaded gasoline and Freon (CFC).
Not only invented them, but poisoned the hell outta himself trying to prove they were safe.
And then when he was too bedridden to do anything, he invented an automated bed to help him move around and strangled himself to death in the ropes.
Truly an inspiration.
Sounds like he won a magical monkey paw from that weird stall at the fair that nobody else seems to remember.
Oh, I bet the shareholders would beg to disagree
An unfortunate fact is that we're never going to beat Russia primarily by killing russians. Russians should be killed when they try to steal and rape our countries and peoples, but the only way to properly win this is to somehow get to the leaders or their wallets.
That insight makes the large loss of life in this war even more tragic. Fuck war. Fuck Putin for sending these men to kill and die.
I think the hope is that eventually things get bad enough for Russia that a revolution starts within. Because of the threat of nukes, Russia will only fall from its own population.
Russia had a total standing military of approximately 900,000 active-duty troops
Of the 360,000 troops that entered Ukraine, including contract and conscript personnel, Russia has lost 315,000 on the battlefield, according to the assessment.
So roughly 87.5% of the initial troops was lost, like the article said so that checks out.
900,000 - 315,000 still means 585,000 troops remaining, and that's outside the conscription efforts.
Russia has announced plans to increase the size of the armed forces to 1.5 million.
Still a considerable force, as long as the supply chain is able to back it up.
I can't even imagine what 300,000 human corpses does to a place. How do you even manage that over a short period and fairly small location?
You build mobile crematoriums.
Russian use of those is contested, but it is an efficient way to deal with a problem like that. There was some media buzz about those things about a year ago or so.
13% ...we can do it guys.
Due to putin's lack of qualms about sacrificing civilian men, these numbers may not be militarily very relevant if the professional army and cannon fodder are not segregated.
According to wikipedia they have ~1.2 million people in the military. that includes reserve, and paramilitary etc.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Russia has lost a staggering 87 percent of the total number of active-duty ground troops it had prior to launching its invasion of Ukraine and two-thirds of its pre-invasion tanks, a source familiar with a declassified US intelligence assessment provided to Congress told CNN.
Still, despite heavy losses of men and equipment, Russian President Vladimir Putin is determined to push forward as the war approaches its two-year anniversary early next year and US officials are warning that Ukraine remains deeply vulnerable.
A highly anticipated Ukrainian counteroffensive stagnated through the fall, and US officials believe that Kyiv is unlikely to make any major gains over the coming months.
Russia has been able to keep its war effort going despite the heavy losses by relaxing recruitment standards and dipping into Soviet-era stockpiles of older equipment.
“Since launching its offensive in October, we assess that the Russian military has suffered more than 13,000 casualties along the Avdiivka-Novopavlivka axis and over 220 combat vehicle losses-the equivalent of 6 maneuver battalions in equipment alone,” NSC spokesperson Adrienne Watson told CNN.
Russia has also leaned heavily on convicts marshaled to the fight by the Wagner Group and has increased the age limit for certain categories of citizens to remain in the reserve of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation.
The original article contains 651 words, the summary contains 202 words. Saved 69%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
That's doesn't seem sustainable
Frankly I don't care. The US wastes trillions of dollars on military spending. We have the most advanced military in the world by a mile but all too often it ends up using it to defend someone else's financial interests or to pad the pockets of people that make their money through a war economy.
Russia can get fucked. Every cent spent on the defense of Ukraine is a fully realized fuck you to our enemy. Ukraine did what we could never do. They essentially removed Russia from the equation. Yeah they have many poorly maintained nukes but they know we will fuck their ass if they touch them. They will not be posing a real threat to anyone for generations.
We aren't spending this money on the American people and we never were going to do that anyway. Our choices are we fund people actually fighting for their life or we allow that money to get sucked into the military industrial complex for no real return. They're already getting theirs out of this, the only question that remains is do you back Republicans that have made up a nothing burger about this money because they've arbitrarily decided this is the 96th hill they'll die on, or do you you want to see the money you pay in taxes actually get put to a meaningful purpose.
Saying that it doesn't go to the American people isn't strictly true. It's not like it's cash shipped across the Atlantic. The money spent on weapons to Ukraine is injected into local American economies where weapons are produced, as wages that let people consume products which goes to the wages of people who sell those products wages in turn.
Frankly, it may come to be seen as, in terms of bang for the buck, the single most effective use of US military funding in history.
Think about it: Russia went from being considered a peer-state of the US to the second most effective army currently conducting combat operations in Ukraine. That’s embarrassing any way you spin it. They have utterly destroyed any real vestige of conventional military power they had, and Ukraine is the one who shattered not only that reputation, but also the capability.
And not just in terms of physical assets - Putin called up training officers and sent them to the front. You just… you don’t do that. It means that instead of taking another year or two to train a new generation of officers to competence… it takes 10, and even then they’re not very good, because all the institutional knowledge those instructors had was lost. The only reason they’re even considered these days is because they’re a nuclear state.