Comments by "" (@SusCalvin) on "Ryan McBeth" channel.

  1. ​ @UtubeMemRnB  We can totally read what you guys say.
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  2. North Korea has a relatively open border with China and a few special economic zones where Chinese companies can operate. When someone leaves the DPRK, it's usually this way. A few also leave from official work abroad.
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  3. ​ @faisaldmdmalupco Jesus is not the first Messiah candidate the roman occupational authority executed at the time, and not the last. There is a slew of them, some of them drawing much more attention from Rome with armed uprisings.
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  4. There are US bases in Norway and mainland Denmark. You have some sort of air base there already. Denmark is one of the more obedient NATO nations you got.
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  5. I'm starting to appreciate the production of very basic stuff. Not the next generation of attack aircraft but basic shells. Or stuff like helmets, rations, drones. Covid made me nervous about short-staffing health systems like they were just in time systems that only had to function as long as everything was normal.
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  6. It looked like all sorts of your institutions are farmed out. A state can rent institutional space from a contractor in another state to house everything from foster care to narcotics treatment. Sweden has started to contract hospice care and schools. It is impopular with voters but popular with politicians. Every now and then the last politicians end up on their boards or start their own commercial provider.
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  7. Why you have private institutionalization is another matter. Right now, it looks like that sector is looking to expand with a whole new level of federal contracts.
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  8. Your other social media companies have also built mass data gathering systems that would make Stasi drool. The main difference is that TikTok has foreign owners residing in a dictatorship. The EU forces your companies to not automatically collect as much information.
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  9. My favourite part was when any chump with $8 could be the "official" company or org account.
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  10. I usually think of gun owners in segments. In my country the hunter segment is pretty big. Their idea of firearms is a tool you use situationally. They might not like people taking a firearm to the pub or keeping one in the car. The few collectors I know might own a lot of firearms, but they are closer to people who own a huge amount of mechanical watches or Barbie dolls or guitars. They think of historical importance of uniqueness or interesting engineering. Of course all these overlap, too.
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  11. The USA are one of the few nations using something like armed Air Marshalls. I always wonder how often they are needed.
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  12. ​ @Godfrey544 I think various Republicans from the last term described Trump as a man who can't read the Daily Brief, and needs to be either flattered or goaded, or given a dumbed down oral version. But I think a lot of your business leaders are partly showmen and personal branding.
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  13. The Mother Church is sometimes a pretty decentralized organisation. The Holy See is sometimes run by local organization, sometimes by central edict, sometimes by doers.
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  14.  @TheAlastairBrown  We have a labour conflict with Tesla right now. Not because they are moving in workers from India, but because they refuse all union contact. Personally, I think its not impossible to undercut an American with another, slightly more desperate American.
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  15.  @gsilva220  You already do escorted deportations routinely using chartered flights.
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  16. I don't know what your FEMA uses, but a communication system is usually something civ authorities request help with here. Our national plan is to fall back on FM radio. People with a battery or hand cranked radio can listen in and receive information.
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  17. It took until the 80's for South Korea to democratize. The modern South Korea we know today was not in place.
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  18. I thought the US armed forces had to vaccinate for all sorts of weirdness that you don't see stateside.
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  19. The mass conscript army my nation had during the Cold War meant you, for better or worse, served your mandatory period with a cut-out section of a generation.
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  20. It reminds me a bit of Soviet interior troops and all their janky functions. Diverting every cop in the USA into ICE is definitely a cost. I assume you have many other tasks your cops must do.
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  21. I think the typical techbro CEO wants to have a vision some engineer needs to figure out, and to talk others into investing.
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  22.  @MarcYanruw  It would prove Castro right. There can never be anything but a client relationship to the USA. It's like watching the USA dismantle it's own hegemony.
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  23. I have to be able to imagine that any sort of spy will try to create the kind of persona I will go for.
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  24. One of my mates described it as easier to look at them as different regional autonomist or nationalist groups.
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  25. For some reason people think us folks in smaller business have more beef with the government than we do with larger business. Smaller business here usually have their own branch organisations. We are one branch interest and they are another. I would be mighty upset if some blokes swooped in, "liberated" us and then it turns out peak liberty is a Koch monopoly on fertilizers.
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  26. ​ @equos5060 PiS is out of power now. The war has pushed Poland closer to the EU and NATO. PiS thought it would be possible to do what Orban did, and teeter as some sort of middle man. Orban on the other hand has pushed further from EU/NATO. A lot of the little nations trying to hold this middle man position are not necessarily friendly or allied with Russia.
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  27. Right now I think the Israeli unwillingness for any Palestinian alternative to Hamas is the other step to overcome. Bibi has a way of saying different things depending on who he stands in front. Partly in order to balance his own coalition, partly to be the realpolitik man he thinks he needs to be.
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  28. Rwanda is also only nominally democratic, which is a little awkward. They keep contributing blue helmets. Things are a bit awkward currently, with a Rwandan proxy militia attacking Kongo-Kinshasa and killing a bunch of UN troops in the process.
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  29. Too bad the candidate talks about pet thieves instead of auto accidents. Auto accidents was among the top three causes of death for young people in the USA, next to opioids and firearms.
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  30. I've started to think it's very much an old total war production conflicts. Everything from MREs to gloves to shells to helmets. Everything is a consumable.
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  31. The EU is sending a lot more cash. Part of the EU foreign policy toolkit, when lacking hard military power, is to use its industrial and financial clout. This usually meant peacetime civilian and government development funds. But a lot of the Ukrainian state and armed forces are funded with EU aid at the moment.
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  32. I think that showed just how populist opportunism works.
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  33. ​ @danburnes722 It's perhaps the hardest part to grasp from the outside, just how relatively few Americans are hardcore party folks, trying to figure out if the big-tent parties even have ideologies and just how much is down to your support of local faces. If I describe a euro christan democrat or liberal-conservative or green or social democratic party I can assume they have an ideological unity.
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  34. ​ @looking4themountain I think the USA really likes having cheap workers, but pretends not to. Sergio Aragones did a comic strip on immigration where a bunch of dudes in sombreros build a wall.
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  35.  @gsilva220  What happens if you start shooting inside a cargo plane?
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  36. Regarding oil fields: Syria has a miniscule production. It is among the microweights of international producers. This was an important government revenue source, especially as the rest of their civ economy collapsed from the war. What is a piddling amount of resources to a nation is a huge wealth for non-state actors like Daesh and later Rojava or Wagner.
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  37. Belarus is currently an aggressor nation. Letting your territory be used for troop movements makes you one even if the Belarus armed forces aren't in Ukraine.
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  38. I would think dumpster diving and fishing is easier for a modern day bum.
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  39. From what I understand of the cartels, they have little interest in replacing the central government. The cartels have split and reformed numerous times and have become pretty paranoid about eachother. Which is still pretty gnarly when twitchy, jumpy sicarios are not sure. A failed state is a void, a whole different levels of buggery. They exist and they are a whole lot scarier. A lot of nations fighting active armed rebellions with partial territorial control are not failed states yet.
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  40. I think the House of Saud would act differently without the possibility of a carrier group to show up. Same for Turkey without NATO membership.
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  41.  gfgh1234  The traditional reason in a European early modern period army was that the army pays better than day labour.
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  42. How seasonal is US agriculture labour? If I was to work a seasonal job, I would either need to earn enough for the downtime between, or have other jobs to support myself on. Tourism and the Norwegian fishing are both seasonal industries here that try to earn money for the off season in a few, intense months.
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  43. Snowfall is by nature seasonal work. You need a lot of machines and people in a weird burst. We can activate home guard for some civic emergencies. I haven't seen it for snow clearing. Home guard has done missing person searches. Sometimes we want any terrain vehicle out there, or 200 people to canvas a forest.
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  44. I think the US system ensures you must have gobs of money to break the law.
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  45. ​ @johanmetreus1268 NATO opinion changed dramatically in Sweden and Finland.
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  46. ​ @AnonD38 I thought modern self-pripelled artillery during artillery duels did the same.
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  47. ​ @jsncrso This is mostly about pressing Ukraine. Whatever Trump and Putin agreed on requires Ukraine to obey. The groups Musk visits are not the reps of a strong, united Europe. He is going around to the weakest quislings he can find who are just waiting to appease Russia even further.
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  48. ​ @OutsiderLabs It depends a bit on how much cooperation with the USA is worth. And that is rapidly shrinking.
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  49. ​ @Zenerd775 It is one of the weirdest part to grasp in Europe. I could not grasp how the social democrat party, the conservative party and the christian democrat parties could just flip places. The most radical shift in my corner was the agrarian parties. When farmers were a large block of people they sometimes had their own interest parties. But only 1-2% are farmers today, and that does not make a party. So they became a more general small town liberal party.
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  50. Jeff Bezos is not sitting around waiting for a chance to stop busting unions. I am personally pretty weary of people fretting on my behalf, only to tell me the real pay was culture or honour or some other bollocks.
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  51. @magigooter2096  Parts of the EU has voices ideas about a shared labour standard, for example an EU min wage. Sweden and Denmark argue against, and for independent collective bargaining. The unions on my national level have suggested that foreigners fall under union-negotiated salaries.
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  52. ​ @MarkBarrack The old Soviet war plans involve a forced neutrality for Finland, and sometimes bypassing them entirely. The assumption in the other Nordic nations was that everything the Soviets did around the Baltic Sea would be in support of the greater continental war.
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  53. Part of it seems to be specialization, there is no general "computers dude". There is a tug between who should do all the retraining. Company job training, public funding, employees taking a second student loan etc.
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  54. I always hit a wall eventually where I can't imagine some specific substance or another ever having a legitimate use. Marijuana is not good for you with long term use, but neither is alcohol. It always weirds me out how socially accepted alcohol is.
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  55. ​ @gorillaguerillaDK We got an EU exception to make snuff, I think. Finnish people also sneak it in from Sweden. I have not associated it with kids, its pretty foul.
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  56. ​ @LowJSamuel I still need a place to live, and evicting people from our town when it grows would be awkward. A lot of towns here would love to have problems like that instead of becoming ghost towns.
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  57. ​ @Jack93885  I think the practical application failed. In practice, that would make Greece and Italy etc administrative border centers.
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  58. I'm gaining a new appreciation for basic war materials like socks, cheap drones, shells and helmets over the next wondersystem.
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  59. I think a chasm of time separates us all from past generations.
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  60. I would think dumpsters behind grocery stores are much easier, if I was urban poor.
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  61. From what I understand, in practice Greenland usually negotiates from within it's continued position as a regional autonomy at the moment.
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  62.  @xiiguardian  Your ICE already charters whole flights for that. I don't know how many ICE staff are used in escorted deportations.
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  63.  @xiiguardian  Most of the historical plane hijackings took place in an era when some fool could walk into a plane with a concealed grenade or firearm or knife.
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  64. @microcolonel  My rule of thumb is usually that military vehicles are more expensive, with increasingly specialised needs civ vehicles do not need. I always dislike it when cops or schools or the armed forces are seen as free organisational slack other orgs should borrow.
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  65. ​ @evgpanchenko Medvedev and Putin did a funky little castling. All the actual power moved with Putin.
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  66. @anantakesharipanda4085  Should Ukraine continue to supply occupied Crimea with municipal service? Whether or not to stop the gas has been a long debate. What would you have done if Saddam had asked for oil sales to continue during Desert Storm.
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  67. The DPRK special forces are drilled and trained, but if they are trained with up to date methods is unclear. I think just training itself could be part.
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  68.  @johnsimion2893  The nominations are effectively and internal party process, right? The parties set most of the rules themselves. Both at local and national level. I'm always interested in how internal democracy works though. In parties, churches, unions, associations. The Chamber of Commerce has to run some sort of internal decision making. The electoral college usually puzzles outsiders. It looks like a middle man between the voter and the presidential candidates. It lumps people into sometimes arbitrary zones. The largest party in my municipality had 36% of our votes. And giving them 100% representation would be silly for us. I can vote for a party with 5% voter support and still feel we have a fair share of representation.
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  69. Does anything compare to the centralized Mother Church?
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  70.  @liambiggar5658  I mean they never did, the Cold War propaganda war did not escalate like that. I think you can shame and expose the propagandist, or run your own counterpropaganda.
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  71.  @scotthix2926  The FM radio system here is for mass broadcast of updates. What is going on and where, what they want people to do. I don't know how the cash grant works for you. For me, that would come through the state or private insurance system. That would be necessary long term. If I evacuate, I would need to rely on state or municipal resources in the neighbouring town. But the emergency is usually not supplying people with cash, but supplying them with stuff.
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  72.  @waitandsee9345  I thought your system intentionally placed emphasis on local government, with FEMA in a supporting role. From what I understand, a lot of your road infrastructure has been disabled. I don't know how well terrain vehicles would work. Here, we assume the same blizzard that caused the incident could ground air transport.
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  73. The US armed forces were probably one of the best-supplied armies in general terms at that point in the war.
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  74. ​ @Peterski What the EU does have is different anti-trust regulations. The USA is the place where people can grow huge, dysfunctional monopolies and keep them.
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  75.  @randmayfield5695  It is a single party state. The reforms of the 80's look a lot like the reforms China took, but more. The party is not going away but they allow a sort of managed capitalism. They seem to do more agriculture than the South Korean heavy industry drive. China still leads in state owned companies. I start to think centrally managed economy is more common in SE economic models than I thought. It took a few decades before the USA figured out what a keiretsu was. The closest news to me was when China arrested two Scandinavians, one with dual citizenship who was visiting Thailand. Like they see all Chinese abroad as in their jurisdiction.
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  76. Halting abortion funding for service members sounds like a rather big deal. Would service members in Europe have to get abortions on their own dime.
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  77.  @DavidWilliams-xe3ig  I have little idea how the USA views conscription. Its less controversial in Europe. Especially in a territorial defence role. The vast majority did their mandatory years and filtered back to civ life and reserve status. Finland, Switzerland and a few others still have large reserves. We have just reactivated ours. Its not like the US draft where you get an influx of raw recruits a cadre of instructors has to indoctrinate.
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  78.  @DavidWilliams-xe3ig  There is usually a mix of conscripts, career officers, volunteers in home guard and civ def and contract soldiers. But most volunteers and career troops except from purely civilian volunteer orgs are recruited from that mass of conscripts. I can't recall how much conscripts here are paid, but I think they get a cash allowance on top of room and board. Career troops have a salary. The core difference is that mandatory part. At the most extreme, it can mean cops knocking on the door. Just how hard the states really pursue people and just how leniant the options out are varies. But the state reserves that option. And the system rolls on punctually, at a certain year the state will send a letter. The level of training can be tuned up and down too.
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  79. Chernobyl and Afghanistan was starting to crack up their system. And Gorbachev allowed a slightly more open debate about it.
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  80. ​ @seansmith5955 The tech companies employ relatively few people for how valued they are. There's not a lot of people at a server farm. And the most nonsense crypto and tech hype is even stranger, then they conjured value out of the air.
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  81. ​ @ericciaramella1984 A possible downside of protectionism is that competition is removed. You could be locked in with the companies you got and whatever competition regulations you got.
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  82. I think your economy exists to drive up tech company hype and crypto, and it's starting to freak me out a bit.
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  83. ​ @sumduma55 Europe had dog butchering during it's various wars, and it hasn't become some sort of comfort food. Same with beavers and other weird survival food of the early 20th century.
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  84. Poland had a change of government recently. The war itself has also pushed Poland from Hungary and into the EU.
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  85. Poland has an upcoming presidential election, where they will decide if PiS will retain the president post.
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  86.  @barnettmcgowan8978  I am curious about how you transport higher-security people. I was surprised to learn that ICE escorts are armed when flying domestically. Transporters here are not armed, firearms are kept far from the institutionalized. And an armed cop inside a cabin sounds like a very US thing.
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  87. There is a similar but much smaller scale runabout with police and psych patients here. Civ medical agencies can request police to pick up people. Originally intended for dangerous patients, it turned out that it allowed cop cars to be used as a free taxi service. The only situations I consider it is when we need every terrain vehicle the region can muster to assist a train wreck out in the hinterlands.
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  88. ​ @grandsome1 Stray dogs are seen more like pests in bits of Europe. Not like cherished pets. There's a taboo to eat them but sometimes for slightly different reasons than them being cuddly pets.
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  89.  @RyanMcBethProgramming  I think you have increasing cooperation with all sorts of nations near China right now. From South Korea to Vietnam to Japan, who sometimes just share a growing unease with an increasingly arrogant Chinese neighbour.
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  90. The culture war always shows how stupid it is when it comes close to home. My region has banned christmas a couple times at this point, and probably banned bacon three times, according to the culture war. While I sit here eating a bacon sandwich.
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  91. ​ @erf3176 I don't know if your small towns have that issue, but some of the smaller municipalities in my nation have a bit of a slow spiral. A company moves, people start to think work is somewhere else. Municipal income tax drops as working people move and a larger portion of elderly and disabled remains. Those who remain has to either lower services or pay more, causing more to look elsewhere.
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  92. ​ @AggressiveLemur We have a wonky situation in a few mid-sized boom towns. More people are moving in to work at a new plant than the local real estate developers can bang out houses for. It gets awkward when working class people you need to operate a city can't afford to live in that city. Those people on a civil engineer income are not going to clean and cook.
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  93. ​ @SeanPat1001 I don't know what rules you have for roadkill. Most people are not trained butchers or hunters and have little idea what to do with the animal. We have to report it if the animal is injured, so the poor thing isn't laying there bleeding out. We had a roadkill accident at work earlier this year. Some deer got confused and darted onto the highway. Me and a colleague sit in the company van and suddenly it just bumped.
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  94. The first response where I live is assumed to be municipal government and volunteers organized by them. A lot of civ def stuff is volunteer organizations.
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  95.  @GrigoriZhukov  They are government to me. There is less divide between the central government and local government here. A national response can mean a part of the government from one side of the country is shifted to another place.
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  96. Snowden becomes a lot more guarded when asked about the Russian government. He does not seem to spread their most vulgar propaganda, but he neatly steps around criticism of Putin.
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  97. That's what I fear. That the military will be pushed into a role a civ agency already does. Either that it will create a wonky dual role of that the civ agency will learn they can use the military as a taxi service.
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  98.  @survidmt  That would get into boring policy, like how to test drivers and administrate people. Stuff that tests the administrative capacity of the state instead of security theater.
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  99. There's also different kurd nationalist groups, some of which have okay relations with Turkey. It's a matter of comparing different options I think. Turkey backs ex-al-Qaeda.
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  100. We had Cold War instructions for forming a partisan group. Wear an arm band or something for uniform, form a chain of command, cooperate with the army.
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  101. A lot of propaganda on social media is related to events outside the USA as well. The companies police even less of that. Staff who could read what was posted in Malaysia or Egypt etc was not guaranteed.
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  102.  @Testimony_Of_JTF  I think the amount of Americans who quietly drop out of democracy is a sizable chunk. Most of you are not hardcore party folks.
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  103.  @Testimony_Of_JTF  I look at one important number. How many people in a nation skipped voting.
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  104. At least here we have limited military assets. They are needed in case the military needs to do military stuff. Making the military a permanent taxi service for civ agencies would mean permanent allocation of resources to do so.
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  105. A lot of the old French dominions seems to be Catholic.
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  106. I don't think it would necessarily be China. But if the cost of being a US partner just keeps increasing, the EU is also looking to provide an option. China are much, much less picky with human rights.
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  107. @JoniAntonioo  The EU tends to use the promise of development funds and limited access to the single market as tools. The EU has little hard military power but pretty strong financial clout. The EU is currently negotiating with the Mercosur for increased access. Other bits of the EU want to maintain higher protection for certain sectors. China wants raw material and port concessions. Their selling point has been that they claim not to interfere in how their partners run their countries. Including staying quiet if they do HR violations.
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  108. During the Cold War, it could mean you are approached by someone who just happens to be your ideal friend or partner.
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  109. @jarls5890  There is a number of training missions where the Americans learn arctic operations as well.
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  110. ​ @airborne63 I noticed the release of communications that displayed just how cynical Carlson was and what he really thinks of his fans.
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  111. That's the important part to understand about state actors. This is chump change for a nation-state. Even a few of the crappier ones. A state can try to buy into the absurd social media attention economy too.
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  112. Robberies here sometimes used a vehicle to make entry. Essentially using the van as a ram through a gate etc.
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  113. Coin shopping carts were common in Scandinavia just decades ago. I think they are out of use now as people carry less coins. There was a transition where they just issues plastic tokens for a bit.
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  114. Weapons from the Balkan wars have partly stayed in Europe. There are conflicts closer at hand near your region.
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  115. ​ @MrEddieLomax Me and my friends joked about the bike raider gang, pedaling away. In Twilight 2000 you deal with this.
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  116. France is still active in their various former dominions. Part of that involves getting stuff they want like uranium for cheap. They have started saying they won't force people to use the French monetary union.
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  117. ​ @thadisturbedone1606 I think the USA got a president who announced that withdrawing from Afghanistan was worth a separate peace with the Taliban. It was always clear this was not a treaty between the US-backed Afghan government, the US-backed warlords and the Taliban. The various warlords the US had propped up out in the provinces only had reason to fight as they got paid, and the Afghan government had created its own fracture with them. Attacks on coalition forces slowed down, attacks on the government rose. Still ok for the president. The USA does not think Afghan government troops will hold, only that they will die slow enough to empty the embassy. Afghan units start to figure out what's going on, with the help of Taliban propaganda and bail. Now the evacuation window starts to dramatically shrink. The warlords are no longer paid, they don't do crap. The Taliban arrive in Kabul and pretty much guarantee US security. At this point other foreign militias are in Afghanistan, and they have no treaty with the USA or the Taliban. There are still big chonky transports taking off from Kabul airport.
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  118. It feels weird talking about how states should be able to pick and choose international law when I live in a small nation near Russia who very much appreciate being able to pick and choose international law.
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  119.  @boosterhuiz2779  It means moving the cost onto the military. Not that it disappears. Long term, it means either removing some other military task or increasing the budget of the military.
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  120. You could go back to Americans bumming the rail system between temp jobs and some Hooverville.
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  121. I think current Russian depolitization play on that. You should be saturated and numb questioning the validity of all things until everything might as well be true. Russians can believe the state lies to their face, but also that every other alternative would do the same. So the only reasonable thing is apathy, inaction and hustle.
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  122. I don't think Russia prioritize any ideological conversion, they are not trying to spread any advanced ideology. It's not important how US shells stop coming, only that they do.
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  123. There is a whole bunch of other foreign actors too. France, Saudi Arabia etc.
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  124. ​ @Calebe428 My most NATO-unfriendly mates still understand the reasons for finding bin Laden. And eventually you found him, sitting in Pakistan.
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  125.  @AnonD38  European nations sometimes form consortiums, or specialize. A small NATO nation like ours can try to be the best it can be at for example submarines. A small nation is not going to be the best at everything. And there is so far little need and interest for 20+ different designs to solve the same issue. Some countries like Yugoslavia or the DPRK try this approach of keeping everything in-country.
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  126. @Stegostomatidae  Like I said, my nation designs submarines and the Gripen etc. But all our tanks are Leopards from Germany. That would make us a "nation uninterested in tanks" with this definition.
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  127. @kamikazeviking3053  That would mean Sweden does not believe in tanks, because our force uses German Leopards.
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  128. ​ @jimfin3718 The early fears of marijuana creating instant psychosis were overreactions. Long term heavy marijuana use is not really healthy, but neither is alcohol. And teenagers should probably not have easy access. I'm personally spooked by how socially accepted heavy drinking is.
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  129.  @fh5926  A lot of NATO exercises try to make joint NATO command structures work. NATO seems to see a few nations as the natural eastward front, to which other NATO forces must be directed. The logistics of using eachothers rails and bases etc has to work.
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  130.  @_dev_null_  The hard part is when that mixes with culture, and the state needs to determine what a correct national culture to assimilate into is.
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  131. ​ @sciencecompliance235 One of my mates believed the USA, most of it, is very far from war. War for most Americans is to cheer on different low-intensity expeditions from the sideline while sitting in the middle of empire. I thought it was close to the UK, where the army became a little professional corps of volunteers that had expeditions in Africa or Afghanistan.
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  132.  @kerravon6058  Building a job market that expects every position to be filled with the best of the best sounds strange. Most people here are okay.
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  133. I thought that was an important lesson in previous contacts with foreign intelligence services. They don't walk right up to the president or senior directors immediately. They approach people out on the fringe of a party or institution. Like someone with access to the president or a site or documentation etc. Parties are by necessity very open organisations. Like local state organs they do not have the same shell of security.
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  134. People can usually get cigarettes without a handler. They are socially acceptable, unless someone has really heavy alcohol use they keep hidden.
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  135. ​ @crouchback4820 It's hard to imagine Reagan saying that the Soviet Union needs to fill the power vacuum the USA must create.
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  136. The PRC is mildly supportive of Russia. Right now, they have no strong position but readily accepts discounted Russian raw materials and stuff. They sell various things Russia can't easily access on the international market. The PRC tends to prefer stability, with a slowly growing net of barely controlled clients.
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  137. ​ @rs72098 That is an important reason France never really left their dominions.
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  138. ​ @MayaPosch I thought it was a tradition to limit yourself to two terms. Washington steps down after two and this becomes tradition. The USA has a lot more theoretical weirdness waiting to be tested. No clear rules on exactly how large the SCOTUS can be. What happens if electors have a change of heart etc.
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  139. ​ @rbettsx A lot of Europe had war cabinets. There was governments in exile in London as well. The war cabinets could usually afford to exclude a couple fringe parties, like the local fascist party or communist groups.
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  140. Bashar was literally the spare of the heir and spare. Six and a half years to learn how to run Syria.
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  141.  @MeAndTwoCats  We have similar systems for civilian workers. You could effectively have your civ job as your wartime post. It also meant civ def agencies could order you around differently. I hoped the whole "essential worker" discussion had prepared people that certain jobs just can't stop and who these jobs are.
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  142.  @Canthus13  A lot of other efforts depend on power, so I don't mind that they rush about. I got to accept that my private dwelling does not have the same priority as the regional hospital. Part of the min three days includes loss of power and heating. Three days is the bare minimum here. They insist that you should be ready for more if you can. A week readiness is not bad.
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  143.  @angelmartin7310  I thought your system intentionally placed emphasis on the local government. Where I live there is less divide between local and state government.
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  144.  @Novascrub  I don't live anywhere near the USA, so I can just talk generally. The threats in my area could be a blizzard, a storm knocking out power lines, a dam break or forest fire. Part of three days minimum preparedness here includes power failure. Or some sort of rolling power rationing for a period. It's three days minimum, they heavily suggest that more days are a good idea. My personal assumption is that my personal dwelling might not be too priority. FM radio, the regional hospital etc can run for a while on their own but not indefinitely. I don't fully grasp why cash is an emergency response. I thought insurance and finance would creep up in the months to come. Moving stuff in and people out is a bit more immediate.
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  145. Europe is highly integrated and dependent on certain US capabilities like intelligence sharing because neither the USA or most of Europe wanted a parallell second NATO.
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  146. ​ @quintrankid8045 Juche is partly hardcore nationalism, and not above trying to foster individual action. DPRK special forces are expected to spearhead assaults on the south. Of course it has been several decades since.
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  147. ​ @gloriascientiae7435 I also don't like how the freedom online we dreamed of disappeared. Even a medium-sized ad agency that just wants to sell cars has a larger footprint than an individual.
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  148. The Germany closest in my personal memory is the DDR. The security state and border control system it used.
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  149. ​ @Sumit-wo8pq They looked at the emergency response after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, where huge amounts of survivors had to be cared for. Some is close to other strategic bombing precautions. What happens if a house falls on you, how will flash fires spread.
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  150. I think more Americans should boycott your own dysfunctional monopolies. Amazon wants to grow until they are the everything company. Alphabet (Google etc) runs a gigantic surveillance system.
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  151. ​ @sc1338 If you were Erdogan, how much would you make the EU pay.
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  152. ​ @Provocateur3 Horse meat is used in bits of Europe. I had horse meat in school. In Sweden it is a smoked, cured cold cut you can put on a sandwich. The wonkiest French food I can think is ortolan bunting where part of the recipe involves drowning the small bird in armagnac.
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  153.  @itsmederek1  I meant in the greater USA. I don't know who would issue and check my license if I travelled there to drive a delivery van.
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  154. ​ @OutsiderLabs Your prison system already uses prison labour.
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  155. Operation Sentinelle in France means troops are essentially on permanent deployment inside France. A portion of the army needs to be reserved for this, rotated etc.
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  156. The military here uses conscripts. If I was a civ company, I could not compete with a state conscript.
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  157. It's really hard to compare the US budget to ours when you have a whole military welfare state baked into it. I don't think you could fund much if you took every hour-long course and somehow converted that to submarines.
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  158.  @CrankCraven  My impression of US military industry as an outsider is that the overwhelming demand is pressure on us to buy American. I think funding partly depends on how much you can ask the home front to sacrifice. Like how well do people react when tomatoes grow more expensive and they get a ration card. The US home front looks like our home front during UN deployment in Bosnia. Only vaguely aware there is a low-intensity conflicts going on.
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  159.  @CrankCraven  Here, it doesn't cost much at all. A dude doing an hour lecture is dirt cheap. But the motivation to keep paying Cold War levels of readiness when suddenly lacking a Soviet Union was hard to keep up. I think the inclusion stuff was just a scapegoat. They could take it all away and they still wouldn't afford an attack submarine more.
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  160. You are not all that physiologically different from a cavemsn.
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  161. The army here could afford to get pickier when the recruitment goal was lowered as the Cold War ended. I'm a believer in conscript reservists myself.
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  162. It's the low level administrative drudgery I'm interested in. Not weird theater.
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  163. Finland has the largest direct land border of the Nordic nations. One of the "front nations" along with Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. Right now I'm curious about the Baltic Sea itself and how the Nordic navies fare. And what a thawing Arctic means for the naval race.
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  164. ​ @T1hitsTheHighestNote The downside of Finland was when people from the Russian elite could purchase property outside Åbo and launder money until the state police raised them. Like military readiness is good, but Russian money is still money.
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  165. ​ @MikeSVZ 24.000 active duty and 280.000 reservists. Unlike the other Nordic nations, Finland did not put conscription on hold.
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  166. Beards were also going out of fashion. The safety razor is a cool, new thing.
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  167. Medieval armies could have weird breakdowns when they reached the baggage train and tents with stuff are right there. Or groups take a detour from their orders to look for the baggage. WW II has nasty bits like the hunger plan where the army intentionally makes an area unlivable for civilians.
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  168. From what I grasped at the time, the AF did most of the job the new Space Force does. But there was enough armed forces organs doing related tasks that you had something to merge together.
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  169. Malta in EU has a sort of system where you buy an EU passport and get a couple years probation. It mostly ensures the wealthiest money launderers can keep showing up.
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  170. I think Bosnia will be what I compare this movie with, not the USA.
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  171. In France it means troops must be reserved for rotation. "This org has a bunch of slack, lets cut it off/use it up" is the good idea fairy.
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  172. My impression of most armed forces is that they are made up of working class blokes.
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  173. I think Americans living in a Hooverville or bumming it on the rail system as cheap seasonal labour is still part of history. Right now your economy exists to boost tech hype and enable crypto.
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  174. ​ @StewCatso That's the part I want to see, if you have decided what a working class American is worth. Right now, your fastest growing sector is cryptocurrency.
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  175.  @LowJSamuel  Towns where I live struggle for who gets to host the next plant and government office and garrison etc. It's not just being more quiet. Dying towns can have a spiral where fewer people have to pay more per individual to maintain services, or lower them. Either drives more people away, especially the ones seeking work. I can't really pay municipal tax with my good values. Especially when the people who applaud good values show up the next day to tell us the clinic is closing.
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  176. ​ @mnxs Trump is no Cold Warrior to me, with way too many blind spots.
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  177. Lutheranism in Europe soon came to mean state churches.
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  178. What scared me about Putin was not that he was a 4D chessmaster. But that an isolated old man with an inner circle of maybe 3-4 cronies were just improvising after their first plan failed.
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  179. The Schengen is best described as a bubble of free movement of goods and people without much customs.
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  180. It makes me react similarly to any sort of security theater. Someone wants to flash a bunch of uniforms. But a cargo plane is not going to check employment records or money laundering.
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  181. Italy has a sort of gendarmerie unit who deals with financial crime. But then we are so far from the military that these guys are effectively cops.
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  182. ​ @kate5911 People have complained job training is worse too, I think. Like why should a company train people when they don't want to retain them.
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  183. There is a bunch of weird moments after the sino-soviet split where the Soviets and China fund competing communist groups, or indirectly assist US efforts.
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  184. I like them, but I think all conscript systems are backed by the force of law in the end. It is a mandatory service system.
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  185. ​ @FireLizard98 It is a bit of EU nonsense, not international law. The EU is fairly flexible at renegotiating these things. It just tends to always follow the path of least resistance.
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  186. ​ @solarpunk_ Yeah, EU law is very malleable and easy to fit with exceptions. It's more like a constant negotiation between national governments at times. This immediately broke down during the Syria war. And with the war in Ukraine they just gave up. I never got to see how all the cash we spent on Frontex handled the next big war. I compare it to Bosnia, where the EU was largely passive as the war raged right next doors. It is a bit awkward with rules who do not survive a week of contact with war.
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  187.  @FireLizard98  It's only a little perspective on how EU law is made. The EU just renegotiated all of this.
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  188.  @FireLizard98  The EU law. The EU has a whole body of law regulating the Schengen free movement zone. EU citizens get a lot of freedom to move about. I think Dublin has routinely collapsed in every major war for a few times now. And a convention on refugees that can't survive a couple weeks of war was starting to look silly.
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  189. al-Assad and the other strongmen could not suppress the bread and veg prices, the unemployment, the corruption away. Only the symptoms.
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  190. The USA also has a presence. A presence in Rojava and like one base in the other corner of the country. They arrived with a mandate to fight Daesh, and on the way they seem to limit unfriendly powers. IS was holding oil fields and making bank, and they were not turned over to Wagner or the government. The US ground presence has shrunk, it is almost symbolic. You do enforce a no fly zone, so each US presence is a bubble where Russian and Syrian, and to some degree also Turkish, air forces are not allowed.
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  191. ​ @miguela.sepulveda3771 The UK tried austerity politics. Their austerity also targeted the cops. If all this saving is going to make public services efficient, why not cut the police budget as well?
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  192. European conscript systems call people up at a steady rate. The armed forces might set a goal, and send a letter to large amounts of 18 year olds to show up by force of law. Training conscripts takes time. Training a sudden surge of volunteers as well. The main difference I can see between reserve systems and your draft/volunteers is that a large bunch of already trained reservists exist.
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  193. That's how it works here. The armed forces have their emergency medical care but a lot of medical stuff in the total defence org would be handled by civvie institutions. It's still a buerocratic process where the state makes sure what has happened, but it's not an entire separate agency. And the readiness of civ hospitals for military need is under debate.
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  194. Right now your institutionalization system seems to rely on contractors. States can rent institutional space in another state with cheaper services if they want.
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  195.  @aerohard  The force stated in this video is a fraction of the DPRK forces. Not large enough to make a huge difference in Ukraine or seriously deplete DPRK itself.
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  196. I don't know about this parade, but remembering the Great Patriotic War aka WW II was a big part of the parade. The war veterans there should be the age of your old WW II vets. Younger people being indoctrinated to the military has been part before, but seemed to have a resurgency now.
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  197. I always thought a lot had a re-enactment feel. Like older vehicles of the Patriotic War and other eras. A similar showing of aging veterans to honour as we do. I don't know if kids on military events is new.
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  198. The government in my country had a few months decades ago when they figured out the armed forces could not negotiate for pay. It's even cheaper because it was conscripts.
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  199. Greenland has a local autonomy. This is not strange in Europe. They also have a couple reps in the Danish parliament. Scotland has its own regional government as well.
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  200. @Calebe428  There is some desire for expanded autonomy or independence in Greenland. I personally think Scotland is further ahead in their readiness for independence. Spain has another regional independence movement.
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  201. I thought they were specifically training takeoff and landing, the most involved parts.
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  202. I can't understand why Americans didn't understand that tons of hardware has been left in piles when conflict after conflict concludes.
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  203. The kurd autonomous region in Iraq is its own thing.
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  204. Starting with training in how to do extremely basic stuff like folding your bed the army way sounds like the norm. I think people outside might expect it to be all warfightin' all times. I thought the level for Cold War recruits here was set to make sure busloads of chumps could function together. The conscript system made the platoon into a cross-section of a generation for better or worse. I saw one of your WW II films for preparing troops in Europe. How a pub is a community building, and that they won't throw out black people.
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  205. My great fear is always that civvies have no idea how to spot UXO and eventually someone pulls a "can" or "box" in a fishing net. It can be part buried, it can be malformed from impact, or any marks can get eroded. Every few decades some WW II naval mine even drifts up.
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  206. This was becoming the norm in the Great War. Europe is in this wonky half-motorized stage. My favourite is bike infantry. I think they figured a bike was less logistics intense than a horse when moving an individual soldier.
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  207. Its hard to imagine someone from the Reagan administration going on an independent fact-finding mission in the DPRK and reporting back that the regime translators and the Potemkin villages are all rather lovely.
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  208. Long-term I think it could prove Castro right. The only relation the USA seeks is clients. It's like watching the USA turn itself into a communist propaganda charicature.
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  209. As a foreigner, the power of the president is probably of greatest direct impact. Like does wording about presidential immunity mean hou want future presidents to do some Iran-Contra now and then?
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  210. The people who made careers on the '15 refugees from Syria built a very fancy system including the EU Frontex border police force. It took a couple weeks of the next war for that to collapse. Right now, there is no border check for Ukrainians on the EU side, the EU grants them a blanket emergency work/living permit. I do not know if It's being reviewed. The Ukrainian state has their own drive against draft dodgers. I never got to see how well Frontex could manage anything.
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  211. ​ @zxb995511 I thought there was a chance these little republics would seek another client as the Russian units who used to be stationed float off to Ukraine. Not that they would become democratic, but at least be forced to rely on China, the EU, anything but Russia.
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  212. I think the domination of a shrinking handful of effectively local monopolies suppress wages. For a union, it doesn't matter if the scab is from El Salvador or Nevada.
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  213. I think it's pretty obvious right now. You know we can read you guys, right? The president is transactional in a very personal, literal sense.
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  214. I think Putin has done that to his population. Everyone lies, so it does not matter if Putin lies to your face. All that is left is depoliticized, apathetic hustle. The state can say anything and it is maybe and maybe not truth.
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  215. Sweden had a Christian sobriety movement but didn't get the full ban. Instead there was an alcohol rationing system of sorts.
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  216. The independence people on Greenland argue they are treated as a colony, as in an underrepresented territory of Denmark. They want either preserved/increased regional autonomy or independence depending on who you talk to.
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  217. ​ @domerame5913 I think Iceland was just a lot easier to settle in larger numbers at the time. There is a few more little odd islands out there that Denmark claims.
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  218.  @hellmalm  As I mentioned, the region is thawing up for reasons. It is getting easier to ship things right now. The water is open a lot longer.
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  219. @hellmalm  The EU is a system of governance where a lot of power rests in the national government of it's member states. Including the national government of Denmark. This is not the only regional independence effort in the EU. Spain has one, Scotland when the UK was a member. The EU tends to not take sides unless it conflicts with EU civil rights law.
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  220. Since climate change no longer officially exists in the USA, you could simply sign legislation that the polar regions are not thawing at all and traversing that area by ship is just as hard as it was in 1940.
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  221. There is a lot more on the escalation ladder under nukes. Nukes are there, but they are a lot further up. China and its clients are sometimes unruly. Beijing does not like the DPRK nuclear weapons and unannounced tests.
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  222. In the multi-party European parliaments the divide is even clearer. Then you might have two or three competing conservative parties. And these new wannabe conservatives are usually in a push and pull with established conservatives of who is the real conservative.
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  223. ​ @Forester- I think the two giant big-tent parties are confusing. Sometimes I look at local Republicans, and bam German style social housing. Like people I would have placed in different parties are spread inside and between the two massive parties.
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  224. ​ @RodrigoCen7456 I'm always a little spooked by how socially accepted heavy alcohol use can be. In general, I think there is a large amount of casual and regular users who are functional enough to hold down a job without being spotted.
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  225. What is a taboo food varies. Stray dogs are sometimes taboo for other reasons, for being a "dirty pest".
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  226. An old use for motorbikes that's probably seen less now was runners. A soldier on a motorbike can run messages around a spread out division or up and down a column fast. A postman on a bike or motorbike was not odd in the civilian world.
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  227. I never think of the military as an economic engine, it is very alien to the total defence doctrine.
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  228. There is still a lot of use for mechanized infantry and armour. Light infantry would just melt away.
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  229. ​ @ThaddäusTentakel-v2n  The EU believes it can pay off Turkey. It outsources border administration to outside countries like Marocco and Tunisia etc. The EU foreign policy consists of rolling around in weakness.
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  230. Our recruitment gap is traditionally solved with conscripts. The armed forces message here was a little different. Everyone is necessary.
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  231.  @gsilva220  Your ICE can charter whole plane, and seems to have a few permanently chartered. The best prison transport security in my country is to not make a big spectacle. Most escapes when people are transported between institutions are not initiated because the transported suddenly becomes a handcuffed ninja master.
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  232. @jamesmcdonough2726  We have a number of MPs and people like base security units in my nation. They are unfortunately securing bases. It would be silly if the spetsnaz showed up and the MPs were off playing taxi service.
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  233.  @markburton5292  I think the USA is showing that Castro was right all along. The USA will never seek a equal partnership, it wants clients. Cooperation with the USA keeps giving less.
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  234.  @007gunlogo  The USA complains how poor it is and quietly offers 100-200% pay raise if you slip over to mow the lawn real quick. Texan farmers can openly chat about how they do it with little risk.
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  235. @deplorablelibertarian  Your ICE usually charters whole flights if necessary, without fuzz.
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  236. @microcolonel  A quirk of Operation Sentinelle in France was that the French government found out you can force troops to work overtime while paying them less. They can't go on strike or complain about no breaks and other sillyness. Just push out a bunch of troops as mall cops.
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  237.  @microcolonel  It's the closest example I got in Europe where the armed forces are used to send a signal, with unclear reasons for why they are necessary. And what happens when such a program becomes permanent. Now its routine to add a few thousand troops to look tough.
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  238. The majority are internal refugees. A portion have ended up in Lebanon, Turkey etc. And an even smaller portion has moved further, like the EU. I was not worried about the refugees, but of the EU response. If this is how the EU can handle being on the fringe of war in 2015, how would we handle an actual war in Europe?
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  239. @HalfAssedRanching  A lot of folks built their political careers on readying Europe to control the next migration wave. I did not get to see how Frontex would handle the next war since the whole system collapsed in a couple weeks. EU foreign policy uses a lot of structural development funds and the promise of limited access to the single market as tools.
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  240. Out Cold War plans had some discussions about how a civilian authority under a foreign (Soviet) occupational government would need to work. Some municipal services like water, the regional hospital, power etc would hopefully continue. The municipality council would have to form some working relation with a Soviet officer, and try to keep things in their hands.
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  241. People working full-time to manage a stable of accounts. It seems to take as little resources and technical skill as a medium-sized advertisement firm.
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  242. ​ @greg5011 There was growing protests when old Yanukovych suddenly tore up plans to near the EU. The EU is not NATO. Many EU nations are NATO nations but they are separate spheres.
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  243. ​ @jfangm I think the sharp, hard parts of your state that can get people real good are still there, and being shaped into fun new roles. A bunch of authoritarian states and dictatorships aren't very big at all.
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  244. @jfangm  Some raw material dictatorships are skeleton operations where the state needs a mine, a port and a road to connect them. Military juntas sometimes let things run by default, except when they want to give the army some privilege. The Russian state is still a kind of anarchic capitalism where the state reserves a right to act if it wants to. You can have relatively good personal freedom unless you oppose the state.
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  245.  @jfangm  Like the state consists of a roadblock with the militia, and the road tax is what their sergeant feels like.
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  246. The conflict I will compare compare this movie with is not the USA but other conflicts closer to me like the Balkan wars. Militia units was a decent part of that conflict. There was room to negotiate brigade status for you and your militia.
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  247. It just makes me more curious how many, or rather few, billionaires you can afford.
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  248. There is a tug about this re-education. Should this fall on companies in the form of work training, on individuals in the form of a second student loan or other pay, on some sort of expanded public vocational training etc.
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  249. @charliefoxtrot5001  I mean if it stays as training and education that build on your previous training, or if you become expected to re-train a whole new career repeatedly.
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  250. You could try to land in Kabul or China without permission.
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  251. ​ @docbenway1082 I don't think Musk and Bezos and Gates etc are just sadly waiting to be allowed to part with more of their money. Right now, hype about crypto and tech are the fastest growing sectors.
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  252. New recruits here are worried about a few things I can understand. Accidents and penalism. Every few years some accident happens with a terrain vehicle and patrol boat. It takes one article about sexual assault or drug use in a platoon to screw up civ interest in joining. A side effect of conscription here was that huge chunks of people near you were reservists. Your teacher, the dude driving a cab etc.
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  253. I think the first thing the cool, new "conservatives" do is push out conservatives. It is more clear in Europe where the new "conservatives" have their own parties in opposition to existing conservative ones. If you absolutely do not like a social democrat party you have more non-socialist options than the crazy fringe.
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  254. ​ @scotteaton4868 It brings me to the other part. How easy is legal documents. How much administrative muscle do you have.
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  255. ​ @Lobsterwithinternet The US states argument this far, from what I grasp, is not that they collect a ton of information. But that unlike Meta or X etc it's a company with Chinese ties who does so.
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  256. ​ @liambiggar5658 We had a propaganda war with the Soviet Union. What have we learned from that. There was no SEALS strike on Pravda.
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  257.  @oldtop4682  For us, it's something that needs to be in place before stuff happens. One channel is the designated emergency channel. The cell masts are dotted around our region. Villages have cover, the roads have cover. A lot of the surroundings have, but it's not guarantee. The FM system is currently more robust than the cell and WiFi net.
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  258.  @FireNTheSky  In my country, people in similar places get upset when a government service they argue is basic disappears. There is less divide between levels of government here. The municipality is government to me. The civ def is government. A volunteer crew in the civ def are government in a fringe way.
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  259. What was their role? A lot of armies of that era had recon and Messenger bikers.
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  260.  @GolfKilo  I always thought the main use of such an MG was to pick it off and duck into a ditch.
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  261. I was just told your ICE already charters a fleet.
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  262. ​ @thisishappening7273 Danish intelligence services released an assessment where Russia needs a ceasefire of between 6 months to five years to rebuild enough military capability to threaten other countries.
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  263. Sweden has bicycle platoons. You would have a long line behind a motor vehicle with conscripts holding it to coast behind.
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  264. I thought Russia had a sort of seniority system going. In peacetime, it meant senior recruits had formal and informal privileges over other recruits.
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  265. This has been a discussion for a while. Is it reasonable to run military communications through a foreign telecom giant. Would Starlink satellites count as military targets, if an actor decided to shut them down? Not that I think the PRC would need to, when they have the giant Tesla factory in easy reach.
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  266.  @ScoutPL  Both countries have been at the militarized border at readiness. From our side it is probably easier to gauge South Korea. From what I could look up, there was some questions of DPRK training. They don't seem to skimp on it, but they lack facilities. They try to instill a heavy regime loyalty. I tried to look up if they have ever used foreign advisors and trainers the same way smaller NATO and Pact nations did. The DPRK troops at home do not have the same kit available. The country is isolated, and Juche seeks an extreme self-reliance. Lack of modern kit and resources in general is probably their big downside.
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  267.  @randmayfield5695  Vietnam today has a bit better US relations I think. They are still a one party managed economy the way China is, but also one of the smaller neighbours who are weary of an increasingly arrogant China.
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  268. I think this is the sort of chart upper middle class people pull up to prove how splendid things would be if only the entire city was populated by upper middle class people.
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  269. I think the sea of garbage vs the relatively concise message of communist utopia is a big change from the Cold War. There is no strong, clear ideology. Just a weird confusing mess. Outrage-driven attention economy largely produces burnouts. The few people who can handle being angry online as a full time job are not very nice people.
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  270. ​ @DavidWilliams-xe3ig What is the US thinking on conscription? I know you have the draft, but the draft is not rotating.
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  271.  @Ideo7Z  I actually like that part about the conscript army. The nation going to war is suddenly a personal cost to at least a couple people in your family. Not something a small corps goes off to do, but where most are on the sideline. It takes a lot more than people think to break conscript units. Like impopular deployment or decades of conflict etc.
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  272. In Europe, Manpower needs have increased conscription. It never really ended after the Cold War, but recruitment goals were set so low that it was practically voluntary.
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  273. Consumers and distributors can tell what they want, but I can check the sales data for how many of you buy local. The USA has fewer and fewer large industry actors who can exert influence on smaller companies, labour and consumers.
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  274.  @mcarpenter2917  Low US food standards is partly how the agriculture sector in the EU argues against US, and other, imports.
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  275.  @AutismIsUnstoppable  I'm interested if you have figured out what an American working class wagie is worth, and why Bezos or Musk or Gates should pay that.
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  276. I think that is a weird part. Farmers openly talking about how they fudge stuff. Construction companies here at least have shells of contractors between themselves and workplace violations.
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  277. ​ @TheWorldsprayer The other parts I look at is how strong and organized labour is, and how few the actors in production/distribution are. I don't know how many national distributors dominate in the USA, or how many local monopolies you got.
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  278. ​ @kirkmoody6109 I don't know about the USA, but service industry work here is slightly more competitive and more stable than a seasonal job in forestry/agriculture.
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  279. ​ @MajesticDemonLord The US steel workers being paid a record wage is sometimes blamed for the end. But that was at the tail end of the boom. For war reasons, there was little industrial capacity in Europe. And the demand for steel was so large that it didn't matter if other producers sprung up. I think it was hard to find someone to buy all the steel. People were less likely to buy a third car or a second refrigerator. The same in the rest of the world.
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  280. ​ @Ninex4t Labour costs in Scandinavia lowered the bar for motorization and mechanization a bit. It is still a lot of capital investment that has to come from somewhere, and larger actors can take this on easier.
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  281. ​ @DwightChaosRoninPath Construction companies in Scandinavia at least hide behind contractors, so they don't need to know how things get done. But doing it this openly is hard to imagine. One possible outcome would be that companies get to try what Musk does and negotiate their own little private pipelines. But most farmers do not have techbro levels of wealth to back them up.
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  282. ​ @Magic_Toaster Stray dogs are considered pests in huge parts of the world, not just Haiti.
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  283. ​ @gofukursef  China has a huge amount of regions. It depends on the province. In some it is a seasonal or festival food.
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  284. I remember the wars in Chechnya and Syria, and how little Russian urban sieges have changed.
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  285.  @jparbiter1972  Right now, the Russian nuclear arsenal is mostly used to warn off against some sort of full NATO intervention they fear. It depends if Putin thinks he can hold on to just a portion of Ukraine, or if he thinks the entire state of Ukraine must go.
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  286. That's a bit too close to how Putin runs Russia.
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  287. ​ @ghosthunter0950 It's a reminder of artillery. It is hard to concentrate force when both actors have artillery and rocket systems. Shells are used at a rapid rate by both.
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  288. Turkey does not sit and wait, I think.
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  289. In El Salvador it meant US prison populations were dumped out.
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  290. One thing the DPRK gets from their current defence treaty with Russia is Russian security guarantees in case someone was to regime change the DPRK.
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  291. I think Musk in a role as both presidential advisor and contractor has that risk.
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  292. @wisenber  Musk purchased a $44bn megaphone.
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  293. @wisenber  I think it's a lot bigger megaphone when you own it all. But I usually see the platforms as giant data collection services, with or without Musk.
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  294. The Russian system offers pennalism and occasional murders. When Putin started talking about drafting, Russian middle class people booked the train out of Russia full.
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  295. ​ @sagapoetic8990 Part of the prep for Bashar, as Ryan mentioned, was to purge the officer ranks and add more loyalists.
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  296. The Syrian-arab state was teetering before the Russian/Iranian intervention. Bashars forces have been attritioned over the decade as well, I think.
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  297. I'm partly interested in how many upper and upper middle class people the USA can afford.
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  298. Vlad Vexler tried to explain his ideas of current Russian propaganda. The goal is not necessarily to change what people believe, just make them flip out. There's eight different narratives being pushed out at the same time. Ukraine started the war, there was no war, USA started the war, Russia started the war but for good reason etc. People who do not believe in the democratic conversation itself want to flood the selected space until we are numb.
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  299. This is a lot like the argument the upper middle class makes when they want to show why a city with nothing but upper middle class left would be tidy.
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  300. I don't like all the little quislings in Europe who agree to trade their country or other European countries for Trump. They have been there for decades, trying to derail the war with Russia.
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  301. It depends a bit. Denmark tried to do that with Syria. But it turned out that people still did not want to return to Assads torture dungeons.
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  302. The space force mostly looked like a reorganisation of stuff the US armed forces already did. Mostly the AF, but a few others as well.
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  303. ​ @Angry-Lynx Putin and his little inner circle, and the Russian elite around them, have a cynical worldview where all that matters is a few great powers and their spheres of influence. Every power has the full right to behave like a mob boss with anyone smaller, as long as they don't intrude on other spheres. There is the USA, Russia itself, China, maybe the EU. Trump would then be in his full right to act like a mob boss in his sphere. Greenland, Panama, whatever.
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  304. I still have not found any American critic who can tell me what sort of good retreat from Afghanistan, pulling all support, would have left an intact government. The Afghan government itself was already in a frayed relation with the US-allied warlords. What kept them loyal was US pay and the belief the USA was the stronger, winning side. When those two things disappeared, they had no loyalty to Kabul.
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  305.  @socks4305  I thought the USA had two competing doctrines. Bolster a number of regional warlords to be a local auxiliary, and raise up the national government in Kabul to exert more control. These were at odds. The warlords out in the provinces wanted to keep the central state weak, so they could run their corner as they saw fit and grow opium or whatever. They are a negotiable bunch who can be paid off. They did not like the Taliban anti-opium drive. Afghanistan has been a heavily centralized state for a while, and the central government ends outside Kabul and a few regional cities. The Afghan presidents relation to the strongmen was growing worse. This centralizion was also a problem for the old Taliban government. Most Afghans seemed to hate the strongmen. Like to them, the everyday face of the occupation was a doped-up goon from the same old strongman, with an occasional visit from foreign coalition troops. The Taliban did not disappear, they had some sort of shadow administration at times. With taxation increasingly replacing their temporary reliance on opium. Taliban on the road far outside Kabul could collect a road toll.
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  306. @socks4305  Afghanistan was heavily centralized for both the old Taliban government and the new one. I think a lot of the anti-taliban warlords wanted to keep it that way. But the most expedient way to get things done was to allow these blokes nice new titles as local commanders and governors and to keep paying them. The civ aid people in Scandinavia described it as constant little negotiation with local strongmen. The old Taliban government in Kabul was not a strong central government either. These strongmen were never popular either. When you wargame the war in A Distant Plain, the national government gets to represent the corruption in Afghanistan. They win by militarily holding the country and slipping bits of the security budget into a hole. Similar to the South Vietnam victory condition in Fire In The Lake. The drug warlords win by default, if no other side wins (including the Taliban) and the game clocks out with Afghanistan still in chaos. I like how the US footprint and casualties in Afghanistan becomes negative VP.
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  307. You get labour and stuff, we get printed paper. Right now the USA seems to want both. The president was really upset about the mere suggestion that we abandon the dollar standard.
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  308. @ToeCutter454  The euro, like a lot of EU systems, is optional for nations. The EU has a lot of exceptions in it. Some extend outside the core nations. The EU is mostly an inner market with some import dependencies.
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  309. @ToeCutter454  I think all steel producers struggle with who the heck will buy huge amounts of steel. Steel plants today are smaller, there is no huge need for a first or second car or ships or fridges, recycled steel can be used more often. It didn't matter that outside nations had their own steel industry because the worldwide demand for steel was much higher. China has its own delayed construction boom, and tries to get Chinese to spend money on that first car.
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  310. Your ICE does both escorted and unescorted deportations.
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  311. I haven't seen it myself, but one bloke I read drew a parallell to Arkan's Tigers and similar militias. The ones who became auxiliary forces in the Balkan wars and could negotiate a brigade status for themselves. They sometimes effectively ran a place as deputized bandit gangs loyal to an actor.
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  312. ​ @KollinsPlays People have told me both sides are mixed.
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  313. ​ @badcornflakes6374 Cats are one of the best examples I can think of animals raised in luxury.
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  314. Others have told me your ICE already has their own flights.
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  315.  @bburrett  From what people tell me, your ICE charters everything from a single seat to a whole flight as needed. They have a number of vehicles permanently chartered.
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  316.  @bburrett  That ICE agents are armed on domestic flights was new to me. COs aren't armed in Scandinavia. Firearms are generally very far from the institutionalized.
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  317. ​ @univisiontech1 Does Americans usually comply with reporting roadkill?
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  318. ​ @univisiontech1 Does Americans usually comply with reporting roadkill?
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  319.  @univisiontech1  Poaching is pretty hard to investigate here. But you are expected to report it to the cops who pass it on to the person with hunting rights. Usually the landowner.
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  320. ​ @TyuHeyheyhey I still don't understand why Musk got to run private diplomacy with Russia for a while.
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  321. The UK is two economies, the City of London and the rest. All I know is that I can't easily order books from UK printers any more.
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  322. I think people are much more worried their kids will get their backs and knees screwed up or have a truck flip on some poor recruit. I still have not seen anyone given a stress card for that.
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  323.  @andrewdubose9968  Right now it looks like you want to down-prioritize those with criminal records.
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  324. It depends a bit on how easy it is to undercut an American with another American, I think.
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  325. Rank, last name is the norm here. Or just rank. I think the amount of time spent on making sure people can function in a group surprises people. Down to extremely basic things like the army way of folding laundry.
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  326. There is always a few Scandinavianists who dream of a greater Scandinavia union.
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  327. A cargo plane does not investigate corruption.
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  328. ​ @matthewkornder5586 I know there was minor questions if catholics like Kennedy should hold office.
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  329. I still think of France as the place where you can take a loan from a Russian bank in their muddled state oligarchy and still call yourself a nationalist.
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  330. That would need to adress the wider field of labour organization, labour conflicts etc. Personally, I think it's fully possible to make your own, homegrown underclass. Or undercut Americans with another American.
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  331. "Woman eats cat" sounds like normal US news cycle weirdness. Next to "Florida man smuggled alligator".
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  332. ​ @piccalillipit9211 I think it's more fun to watch the culture war from afar, until the stupidity suddenly arrives at your home town.
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  333. ​ @Steve-ev6vx I don't know what your rules are. Most chumps on the road do not know how to process roadkill.
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  334.  @Steve-ev6vx  I think the hardest part about making half the town hunt would be scaling. There is a lot of hunters in my area. The US laws for roadkill are foreign to me. Ours deal with who has hunting rights in that area, how to keep the road clear etc.
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  335.  @Steve-ev6vx  It's tied to the landowner here, but they usually form associations.
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  336.  @Steve-ev6vx  There is a state license here as well, tied partly to firearms permit and coursework. They do the theory part near me. They can't do anything they like. But who hunts and how they are organized is up to them. Self-organized associations are everywhere here. I still think scaling up hunting to support the region in the place of mechanized agriculture would be hard. The cops are intermediaries, unless there is personal or vehicle injury or the road is blocked they just pass on the information.
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  337.  @Steve-ev6vx  The first thing I look at with any civ def stuff is if it can be scaled. Same with "just grab firewood". Cities in Europe could deforest the area around them when firewood was the only option and transporting it was awkward.
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  338. I think a lot of my town would count as military age males. A military actor could do a lot if that became an accepted category.
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  339. The propaganda on US slavery usually does not outright deny slavery. There is confusion and befuddlement instead. Like inserting state rights, trying to claim Jews ran the ships etc. Or stating that the kingdoms of Africa mounted raids on eachother like this is a great secret THEY do not want you to know. Or claim people benefited from being slaves somehow. Holocaust denial sometimes start with a little nibbling at the edge. They start with "But was that camp really that big?" and the goal is to lead you in with but by bit.
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  340. For us it was a lot less expensive when the US armed forces held Kabul. Why did the USA stop doing that to help our deportations.
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  341. My government used to feet about the poor. Then it turned out they still believed the poor deserved to be poor in the end. I'm more interested in how much upper middle class and upper class the USA can afford.
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  342. There was a "ghost rocket" scare in post-WW II Sweden. Civilians and a few army observers would report rockets moving in odd ways before steering down into a deep lake or at sea. The civ opinion, and the armed forces working theory, was Soviets tests of recovered German rocketry, testing some form of radio-guided rockets. But for a few years, people would report these objects flying and crashing.
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  343. I think people need to get used to the idea of how powerless they are online and how easy it is to lie to them. One of my friends jokes that the best outcome of this is that it could make the internet grind to a halt faster.
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  344. ​ @thepizzawithnocheese I think the Russian propaganda in Europe follows that idea. There is no coherent ideology they want to push, not like Cold War propaganda. It's a weird confusing mess meant to leave you in apathy.
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  345.  @bartobo  From what I can tell, your ICE does not operate it's own fleet. You charter anything from one seat to a whole flight as needed. The job of the ICE is not to parade around for your entertainment. The more an org is dedicated to security theater, the less I tend to trust it.
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  346.  @NOLAgenX  I tend to distrust security spectacle. The more an org needs to conduct theater the worse. It's the sort of behaviour I expect in the PRC. You do unescorted deportations where no ICE staff accompanies the flight as well.
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  347. @NOLAgenX  That's the part I think people forget here. There is a whole lot of chumps who just got stuck in a work site inspection or whatever you use. You have moved some of the most dangerous, high-profile people in the world using chartered flights and a law enforcement escort. Some folks were talking about armed guards on planes. But from what I can tell, your Air Marshalls are the only ones who carry a firearm into cabins. The standard way is to lock the firearm away during flight.
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  348. @NOLAgenX  Here, there are limited firearms near prisoners. They believe not being seen is the better security. Armed police can be requested, but they are there in an outer layer. Security tends to be less visible, with regular cars and plainclothes.
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  349. WW II had a few brigade-scale raids. It depends if the Ukrainian state wants to take and hold ground or not. Which we will probably see in the next few weeks.
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  350. Allowing the state to conscript people for labour would be even cheaper. A side effect is that soldiers can't negotiate wages or workplace conditions the same way.
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  351. I think there has been very little discussions about the nuclear arsenal. We just forgot it was there. I'm interested in how people think about things like target listings.
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  352. Your ICE already does escorted flights where ICE staff accompanies them. And a lot of unescorted ones. We had such flights to Kabul airport. Armed guards on flights? The Air Marshalls are a very unique US institution to me. Prison staff here are not armed. Letting a firearm near prisoners would be nonsense.
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  353. On the diplomatic side... In Kabul, it's now the Taliban who control Kabul Airport. First you would need to ask "Do we want diplomatic relations with the Taliban?" You could decide to invade Afghanistan again. That would make our deportations a lot easier.
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  354. The last large-scale German migration control I can remember is East Germany. The Grenztruppen looked like they fell into that odd Soviet system area of internal troops and security forces.
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  355. ​ @darkstar7999 That would have been after abandoning the most ambitious parts of Denazification, and the start of East German border controls. I'm always trying to learn a little more of their different systems and weird internal troops. Like who and what the Grenztruppen were.
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  356. ​ @PatRiarchy-qw6cp Conscription systems are mandatory and involve some use of force. My personal impression is thatmiddle class and upper middle class people have better opportunities to skip out.
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  357. That is always a trade off with conscripts. Any conscript will be pulled from a civ job. A corps of professionals is less disruptive. 50.000 does not sound like a lot, considering how much manpower the USA has. You can tag some jobs as exempt. Your work repairing cables and driving trains and staffing the hospital is effectively your wartime placement.
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  358. Rojava is more than the YPG. It's a multiethnic autonomous region.
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  359. This was pretty much open in Sweden. The government talked about how this was important for integration as a NATO partner. Exactly what our special forces did was not as open, but it opened up when a couple of them became casualties in Helmand or something. Right now it's a bit different. NATO forces try to unlearn stuff from Afghanistan and COIN, and fight a near-peer opponent.
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  360. Musk took over and Twitter is still a black box with little oversight.
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  361. Bus accidents happen a few times a decade. A bus that overturns is always gnarly. During certain weather, they just suspend bus services here.
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  362. I think that sort of stuff, if you implemented it, would really shaft trust. Our conscription system worked in part because it pulled a cross-section of a generation. You could be stuck in a platoon with an awkward rifle and crappy shoes but at least a dude who could be your boss in civ life was there with you. Modern armies are largely working class because you can't have a mass army without.
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  363.  @nisw1918  The armed forces historically adjust their demands depending on the urgency of recruitment goals. A lot of tasks a civ employee does in the USA would have been done by a conscript here. They were turning down some people every year.
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  364.  @nisw1918  I have no idea how military medical works in the USA. Here the armed forces could afford to be picky when recruitment goals were low.
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  365.  @nisw1918  I like the role various rear units have. I don't think everyone would be in the tip of the spear units but someone has to drive stuff, repair, guard bases, sit watching a screen etc. We had Cold War home guard units who just had to delay Soviet initial assaults long enough for regular units to mobilize, and then blow a bridge as they retreated. A lot of people would have an unarmed civ def role. Your SF units and expeditions usually has local partners. For every SF soldier there is a slew of afghan soldiers, kurd militia, Nigerian constabulary etc. Right now Ukraine needs more people, it looks like their debate on conscription is over. They got to rotate more units from the front.
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  366. You could move an MG behind a horse like a cart in the Great War.
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  367. ​ @randot6675  These are international platforms. So you could stumble into the propaganda war between Russia and Ukraine, or between the juntan in Burma or Hezbollah etc. Russia has two covid propaganda lines. One for us and one for their own population. We got the antivaxx, their own population were told Russian vaccination and health care was the best. So you could stumble into propaganda not aimed at you. Every few years, I am told my country has banned christmas. Some little village decides they can't afford the lights and suddenly we're some front in the war on Christmas.
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  368. We had a border with the Soviet Union for decades with no wall. It was seen as lacking any military value at the time. But they worried about things like spetsnaz and full Soviet motorized divisions.
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  369. That's why I always ask people who simply state that people should use the legal way what the legal way looks like. If It's a lottery, a painfullh slow process, if it requires a buy-in or some other wonkyness that lowers trust in it.
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  370.  @batandy23  From what I understand your ICE already charters everything from single seats to full flights.
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  371. Russian recruitment wants to target the population of the poorer member republics while avoiding the middle class people in Moscow and St. Petersburg. The stated pay for a contract was already high compared to the average income in those parts and keeps getting bumped up. It's generally easier to be patriotic when wars are kept to neat little expeditions largely fought by contracted troops and mercenaries. For a long while there was no risk of even lower living standards for middle class Russians as the state fought interventions in Syria, Georgia etc and a proxy war in Ukraine. Right now I would like to see how many forces Russia needs to contain the... Maybe incursion, maybe raid. The Russian versions of Ryan seems to debate this. I thought the Wagner mutiny/putsch was a sign that Russia does not have all that many rear security units and internal troops, or that they can't coordinate what they got all that well. Contract soldiers from other military districts have been pulled to Ukraine.
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  372. An argument against mental health institutionalization here was the growing cost. People were not secured and incarcerated, but the state was running a village or township. The USA has a lot of private institutionalization from what I could tell. We have just started to try that, and it has been a corruption dump that is popular with politicians and companies but impopular with voters.
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  373. @JoniAntonioo  Personally I think China wants nothing short of clients where Chinese companies are safe to operate. At least a couple decades ago, they did not have much of a military expeditionary capacity or ways to secure their companies. I haven't checked if that's changed since then. I know there has been attacks on Chinese workers in different partner countries.
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  374. Snowden has showed that he gets much more cautious when it's time for questions about the Russian government. He does not spread the blatant propaganda.
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  375. I think that man spoke of his era, when the USSR had a different ideological bent. Some of it reflected the paranoid Soviet state who thought punk music and Radio Europe was a threat. Right now it's a mush of nonsense. Its not like they try to convince me to turn communist, they are pushing out confusing and contradictory nonsense.
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  376. ​ @taylorc2542 Taking cash from Russia to produce anti-american propaganda is as close to a Soviet-era propaganda tool as I can imagine.
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  377. The mineral resources have been known, but now the ice is thawing for reasons.
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  378. It makes me feel the same way I feel when I watch any sort of security theater. Someone in Kreml or Beijing or Paris wants a nice-looking spectacle. But we all know those uniforms won't do crap to investigate anything.
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  379. Operation Sentinelle troops walk past, then go somewhere else.
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  380. Right now there is a number of actors being interested in the Arctic, as the water opens up. Not just Russia.
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  381.  @subjekt5577  The other actors are not very hostile. Like Canada or the different Nordic nations.
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  382.  @baneofbanes  Yeah, its the USA, Russia, Canada and a handful of Nordic nations. They and a number of indigenous groups are part of the Arctic Council.
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  383.  @baneofbanes  The Nordic countries are all NATO nations now. Canada has its own security cooperation with the USA. It depends a bit on how dysfunctional the US-NATO relation becomes.
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  384. I thought the new jets would not be ready this soon. Any time the Ukrainian state gets a new system we got to train them in how to use it. It was the same with the previous robot systems and armoured vehicles they got. Part of the NATO aid is a sort of training mission
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  385. I think they rely more on the risk that even a handful of nuclear devices would succeed and detonate. Nuclear weapons are an incredible taboo. The nuclear arsenals of the B-list nuclear nations are often not large.
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  386. That's what I look forward to. Not the main characters but the weird little meetings on their roadtrip.
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  387. ​​ @mitchconner403 It sounds like watching Jarhead after watching an ad featuring action scenes. Jarhead was not bad but sometimes marketing didn't seem to understand what they were marketing.
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  388. I don't think Bezos is just waiting to start paying out more money. There is a shrinking amount of companies growing increasingly too big to fail.
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  389. What is the ratio of reservists to standing troops? Reservists usually support themselves on their day job.
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  390.  @WednesdayFin86  I think a European conscript is much cheaper than a US contract soldier, without necessarily lacking in quality. Officers and some specialists are still on long term contracts.
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  391. The relation between the Orthodox church under patriarch Kirill and the Russian state is why I fear states who talk about protecting the faith. Kirill lives in a gilded cage. He is pretty cozy and well-off as long as he is loyal to the state. He largely speaks about how Putin is a protector of Russia and Christianity, how much better Russians are under Putin and what horrors await if he is not given absolute loyalty. He has endorsed Putin since his first election, and continues to do so through the war. Relations between Kirill and other Christian leaders are tense. He is largely ostracized in other parts of the orthodoxy.
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  392. At one point our government figured a conscript MP was easier than labour conflict with the cops. Conscripts could not negotiate their non-salary.
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  393. ​ @T1000_2  The full, hypothetical Kurdistan would cover a small part of Syria, a huge part of Turkey and a bit of Iraq. Its important to remember that there isn't a single kurd group or kurd autonomous region. The kurds in Iraq has like a couple different groups.
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  394. ​​ @chuckyxii10 Yeah, the autonomous kurd region in Iraq had at least a couple groups. Turkey and others also have different relations with all these groups. From what I understand of Rojava, it covers a few kurd towns and a lot of others. So it runs like a sort of federation?
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  395. Not by a whole lot. Military systems need a whole lot of extras civ flight does not. A civ flight does not need to worry about fools with a missile most of the time.
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  396. The civ agencies usually charter a flight here.
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  397. ​ @r7calvin I thought the idea was to take bits of the AF and combine it with aerospace units from other branches to have a unified whole.
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  398. ​I'm still spooked when the leaders of Saudi Arabia get treated like they're normal. Bibi doesn't like to say it loud, but they have done security cooperation with their neighbours in the past. Including Fatah and the Palestinian Authority. Same with Egypt etc. A quirk of how Saudi Arabia is run makes MBS pretty much immune to opinion. Saudi foreign policy is what he says it is.
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  399. ​I was surprised by how long it took until there was a US ambassador in South Korea. And then the president casually drops that US presence in Korea could be scaled down. I think the leadership in the DPRK has nothing against meeting world leaders. We are the ones boycotting them.
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  400. My most anti-NATO mates could understand the war goal in Afghanistan at least.
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  401.  @bobfg3130  Yeah, they are either NATO nations or US partners. It depends on how far the USA wants to drift apart from Canada and the EU/NATO.
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  402. How is China supposed to be intimidated if the USA and the EU drift apart from trade wars and intimidation.
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  403. ​ @AstroGremlinAmerican Russian propaganda right now doesn't seem to have a clear ideology. They will push eight things at once and hope the flurry leaves you numb and apathetic. They take something you already believed about woke Ukraine or US imperialism or secret masters and try to make you trip up. This money is big for an influencer, but petty cash for a nation.
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  404. ​ @RussellWarshay  It means the Russian elite does not need to give up the lifestyle they and other international elites have just because something silly like a war is going on. They want to put their kids in the nice "decadent liberal" schools they deny their countrymen. Its different from the Cold War. Its hard to imagine Brezjnevs family suddenly going to Disneyland.
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  405. ​ @brassroots2024 My impression is that most want to sit out the war, get consumer goods unavailable in Russia, launder cash, enjoy the good life other international elites have etc.
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  406. Using the armed forces here-and-now readiness is also a cost.
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  407. A lot of regional powers are involved with several neighbours. Russia has a number of little central Asian republics as clients.
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  408.  @useyourbrain1539  A lot of regional powers have raw material wealth and nukes. They are not active on a global scale the same way.
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  409. What would you do if you knew a US job, even a crap one, was an instant 300% pay raise. And the USA both moralize but also leave the door open enough to let people come mow the lawn for them. Remittance money from US jobs is a large part of the El Salvador economy.
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  410. I'm still curious what the US view on conscription is.
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  411.  @fretlessed25  From what I could understand, your foster care system and other institutionalization works similarly. A state with nowhere to put a bunch of teens can buy spots from a contractor, sometimes out of state, who makes a profit the more they cut out.
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  412.  @jidk6565  Rome crucifies a load of Messiah pretenders.
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  413. The USA ends up running South Vietnam after a while. There are repeated South Vietnamese military coups. The USA seems to believe the war could be run over the heads of the locals, with direct negotiations with Moscow to force them back. The North is not just scrappy guerillas. It is a functional, brutal nation-state. Even the largest, fiercest non-state actor is hard to compare with the scrappiest nation-state.
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  414. I remember that propaganda as well. Everyone, including Syrian government forces, looked good when the alternative was Daesh. The ba'ath party was more nationalist. I think Bashar failed to live up to the personality cult Hafez had built up, and resorted to ethnic loyalists.
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  415. You could go back to letting the FBI investigate marital status.
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  416. It gets more important with overseas deployment here. People can be on a UN mission in a place where dengue fever is a thing.
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  417. ​ @helbent4 The Soviet and later Russian system has a tradition of internal troops. Anything from border troops under security services control to the OMON units stationed around the republics as riot and uprising suppression. A fairly common threat in dictatorships is palace coups. You think you can sleep safe with the Royal Deathsquadron on watch, until they figure out they got the guns. A lot of weird parallell agencies in anything from the Soviet Union to Saddams Iraq was there to counter eachother.
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  418. ​ @FakeSchrodingersCat I think it was a quick of the Soviet security system. They wanted to have internal troops for suppressing uprisings and as coup defence. In practice it meant the Soviet security services had their own units.
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  419. ​ @thecommentaryking I think European gendarmerie is a grand example of what happens when the military works as police so much that they become police. Effectively they are armed forces on paper, permanently detached to the ministry of the interior. You could replicate the effect by taking the FBI hostage rescue unit or the New York SWAT team and the alpine rescue teams for good measure and instantly giving them a brigade status. You end up with the police and the second police. Both thoroughly lack military capacity and do eachothers job.
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  420.  @thecommentaryking  They have a lot of double roles, yeah. Paramilitary or fully military. I still think too many roles lessens focus. Like next to that military unit in the org chart you have a countryside cop on a bike, who happens to be part of a police district labeled as a brigade. The US coast guard has that double roles too, I think? Both peacetime policing and sea rescue and a wartime role. I know it was beefed up to counter prohibition era smuggling. Guardia di Finanza was an odd one to me. The department of finance has them. Most of their tasks are smuggling and financial crime. I just learned they got their own alpine rescue group too. Cops in our system had a wartime role. They could be pressed into wartime security roles. There was a reserve police, like reservists volunteer police that would fall under regular police command. Turkey still has a large countryside gendarmerie. France too.
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  421.  @thecommentaryking  I'm from the part without gendarmerie, so I don't see them in my daily life. MP units here are normally limited to secure military objects. Civ authorities can request assistance, usually they need field comms or extra terrain vehicles. When I look at their organisations, it looks like the military component is small compared to the everyday policing. They function partly as central state police and partly as home for specialist units and partly as military. And I still think it seems to end up looking like the police and the second police. The parts of the org who does police work are effectively police. I know France has run Operation Sentinelle for a while. Since 2015 and the Charlie Hebdo attack, regular troops and reservists conduct foot patrols. Sometimes these patrols themselves are the terrorist targets. People have tried to grab their firearms or clip them with a car. Between 7000 and 10000 troops are used.
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  422.  @FakeSchrodingersCat  I think in practice a lot of dictatorships end up with people building little personal empires. I'm just trying to grasp the SS security state Himmler tried to consolidate. The East German border troops were seen as politically reliable units. There had been uprisings in some of the Pact nations. A lot of these units were not meant to suppress army units, but civil disturbance. I think the coup makers in 1991 thought they were doing regime preservation. The IRGC in Iran has a regime preservation role parallell to the regular army, independent of the government. Sometimes regime preservation means policing the government with a coup. I don't know much about the Chinese system besides the obvious basic. A lot of state organs are not state but party organs. Like if you had a Democrat/Republican army.
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  423. It's partly why we have a labour conflict with Tesla in Europe. Its not the first US company to start a weird labour or EU law conflict.
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  424. @ark194 Toys'r'Us had one long ago. The unions don't particularly like Subway.
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  425. People get worried when they read in the paper that a patrol boat with a few recruits flipped during an exercise.
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  426. I think the war in Ukraine is far beyond "But it will hurt Russia in the economy" at this point.
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  427. Your ICE already does escorted deportations on it's chartered flights.
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  428.  @48306jw  The ICE is a US agency, yeah? They already do escorted deportations. They have a small fleet permanently chartered and charter from one seat to a whole flight as needed. Their job is not to put on a theater though. I just learned they are armed as well, at least on domestic flights. Armed COs aren't used here. There are extremely few firearms near the institutionalized. They think the greatest security is to not be obvious. I am always worried when the state becomes obsessed with spectacle and theater.
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  429.  @daviddesrosiers1946  I usually don't like to press the military into non-military roles. The ICE seems to have the sort of infrastructure they need. Just charter flights as needed. Have a few permanently chartered.
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  430.  @daviddesrosiers1946  Operation Sentinelle has been running for years here. A constant rotation of troops to walk around the metro or guard shopping centers etc. It has become a permanent presence. They have intervened a few times over the years. It would be rather silly if all these troops tied up as mall cops were suddenly needed in case of military stuff. Soldiers are easier to abuse at work than cops though, and aren't paid as much.
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  431. European neonazis have a habit of taking a monument and showing up anyways, if they decide it is part of their vision of national strength. The sensitive part, like in much of Europe, is collaborators. Sometimes there is a specific sort of denial where you don't deny the occupation or the camps, but downplay how some French, Belgians, Poles etc enthusiastically cooperates with the occupation. It was all done by an overstretched occupational authority.
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  432. I think Facebook has become less usable. It gets harder and harder to read what your mates are up to.
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  433. ​ @EaglePicking The Brotherhood mostly seemed to use their good old cell network system. The Egyptian state could do a lot when it had physical control of the cables.
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  434. Overall, I think the cost and risk of being a US partner increases in real time. It's like watching the USA dismantle its own hegemony. Right now the USA is aggressively insisting that we both stop and continue using the dollar standard.
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  435. It's hard to imagine parts of the Reagan administration going to Kazakhstan or the DPRK on an independent fact-finding mission and reporting that the government translators and the Potemkin villagers were all very nice.
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  436. I still think the air/missile supremacy lies in removing whatever is firing missiles as fast and decisive as possible.
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  437. Putin has continuously escalated for decades, during president after president. There was the war in Chechnya, in Syria etc. Putin has been fudging more power and paying/beating the Russian elite into obedience.
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  438. Our private schools are bland garbage. They keep going on hype, fake exclusitivity, lying to parents and cutting corners. They figured that you can cut more corners with bright kids.
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  439. There is an independence movement in Greenland, but they are not interested in going from being what they see as a danish colony to a US colony/client. Part of their campaign with Denmark is to preserve and increase the regional autonomy.
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  440.  @johngorentz6409  I think it depoliticizes people.
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  441. @GdzieJestNemo  I don't know how fast Poland is rearming. I know a few European nations try to at varying speed. And that most European nations, if singled out one by one, do not compare to Russia militarily. But that's a reason Poland has been pushed closer to the EU now, unlike Hungary. I also agree the security spectacles with a nice-looking fence has no military value. We had no fence against the Soviet Union because a fence does not stop spetsnaz.
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  442. ​ @DatTeilchen As a general rule, no current member of the nuclear club likes it to expand. The USA did not share technical details with the French and UK nuclear programs. Other NATO nations were not hindered but discouraged. A US nuclear umbrella, completed with US nuclear weapons stationed, was an alternative being offered.
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  443. I usually don't like it when the military starts to be seen as a labour pool civ agencies can routinely use instead of bothering with their own long-term capacity. The military operates the other way in our total defence. It is civ agencies and civ society who needs to figure out how to be a civ def or civ auxilia. I am not a fan of the french Operation Sentinelle for example. Their foot patrols through the subway system etc.
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  444. There was already a debate on where and how to integrate drones. Like should an infantry platoons have it's own light recce drone. This has been speeding up with Ukraine. A lot of Ukraine is still mechanized infantry, armour and howitzers.
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  445. You could start discharging people with PTSD.
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  446. I think Russia doesn't give a shit about the US border, but they like any all-important distraction and a dysfunctional congress.
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  447. ​ @sumduma55  I think you have a system where you collectively agree Jeff Bezos deserves more than any veteran because he takes so much more risk.
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  448. France has Operation Sentinel where troops patrol the metro or guard the Louvre. You can see a foot patrol move around as anti-terrorist measures.
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  449. Our Afghanistan veterans described it as commercial flight most of the way, with the last stretch as more risky. A civ flight can't do a lot to a fool with an IR missile. To smaller European countries this is a limited resource. Civ agencies can call on military assistance, but the military is not a vast pool of slack. Constantly relying on the military would require either a higher military budget or cutting part of the military mission. Our deportations to Afghanistan went with civ flights to Kabul airport. As long as Kabul was safe they deemed it safe for deportees.
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  450.  @thecocktailian2091  Shell demand in peacetime is not the same.
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  451.  @Zagar099  Russia has two parallel covid propaganda drives. The antivax campaign aimed at you and the campaign aimed at their own population to build trust in their medical system.
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  452. It shows security theater, and that has worn very thin on me. But Operation Sentinelle is a lot older than this.
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  453.  @Ciborium  I think its a terrible strike of the good idea fairy to look at the slack/give in an organization and think up how to minimize it.
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  454.  @SAFbikes  Your ICE does not make a big, flashy show of their deportations. They are not there to clown around for your entertainment.
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  455.  @kennethdodd-ll9qo  It is a bit cheaper. And your military would not be tied up as a taxi service.
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  456. @MrEricmopar  Apparently your ICE uses armed escorts already. And here I though only Air Marshalls did. I still see little benefit to armed guards. Prison staff are not armed here. There is very little firearms near prisoners. There are states where the military is regularly used as labour. The military, especially conscripts, can't negotiate salaries the same way.
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  457. @MrEricmopar  The best prison transport security here is to not be a public spectacle. When they transport people between institutions it happens in civ cars with plainclothes COs.
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  458.  @TheSpectralFX  If you use conscripts, it is extremely cheap. No private business would be able to compete with state conscripts working for room and board. There has been historical, and some current, military systems where the armed forces are a labour reserve. Our Cold War mobilization plan in Sweden included pressing vast amounts of people into service, including forcing some people to stay at their current jobs. But that was meant in case the Soviet Union came. They did use MPs as a way around labour negotiation with the police once.
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  459.  @MrEricmopar  It looks like your ICE are armed during domestic flights. Prison escorts are rarely armed here, they want to keep firearms far from prisoners.
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  460.  @microcolonel  The ICE normally doesn't seem to make much fuzz. You could have an unescorted or escorted deportation on a few seats of a normal flight. A whole chartered flight with no special pony show around it. Transporters here drive in normal but up-secured cars, wear plainclothes and generally don't advertise what they do. They are not armed, firearms are generally very far from the institutionalized.
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  461. @A_Bit_of_Thought I figured you would know how many ICE flights are vandalized and hijacked the last decades
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  462. That is very little cash for a nation-state.
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  463. I think the companies themselves are not as invested in the culture war as anti-woke people think. Twitter and Facebook and TikTok etc are machines to draw your attention and sell advertisement. Musk took over Twitter and all the reasons twitter sucked remained.
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  464.  @erickottke9673  In part it means a carrier group is now tied up doing one thing, with others to rotate it. You have a lot of carrier groups but not an infinite amount.
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  465. @shenmisheshou7002  I usually try to not think of the military as an economic stimulus system. The military is a public institution where the main benefit is a service. There are civ institutions that provide more services directly to the public. The military is best seen as a necessary economic black hole.
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  466.  @boosterhuiz2779  In France, the state figured out that troops are much easier to underpay and force into overtime than cops.
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  467. One comparison I read was the execution of Nicole Ceausescu. About as banal.
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  468. The use of tactical nukes would target concentrations of troops, logistics and stuff. It could be any sort of depot or staging area. Like some rail junction too. A fleet concentration. But probably not a single tank and mech infantry platoon.
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  469. I think there's already more piles of clothing than we can use.
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  470. I don't like how dirt cheap it all is. A crew with staff and budget as a medium-sized advertisement firm can manage a great amount of accounts. They can run contradictory stories, they can throw out nonsense and see what works in the raw amount of propaganda. There is very low skill requirements.
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  471. ​ @dancingferret6654 The Mexican army not understanding how to trace weapons is one of the reasons I don't like pressing the military into non-military jobs too often. Your feds have pushed them to trace more and faster. Last time I checked, the USA was not the only source but a large enough source that I would not rest easy. I would not like to tell the cartels that there is a special, legitimate source they are tacitly allowed to use. Other sources are Mexican deserters taking their personal weapon with them, smuggling them from previous South American wars, robbing the state of guns and buying from corrupt government sources.
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  472. I think conscription here socialized people into it. Your granddad did his years and then entered reserve. Your dad did the same. The dude painting a fence, your math teacher and your boss at work did. Not like they were full-timers who lived the armed forces life, but it was expected. And it still wasn't popular, people described it as a few years of bad shoes and uncomfortable walking but at least you shared the nonsense with people from all walks of life.
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  473. The USA wants Sweden to buy American robot systems. Even as dudes here argued for French ones. But I guess we gotta have the Patriot etc.
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  474. ​ @chm985 It looks like the USA wants you to buy a whole package deal, all American. France usually pushes for euro consortiums.
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  475. In Europe, France and a few others keep pushing for European consortiums.
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  476. A mayor with no party affiliation is the strangest surprise for me in this video. The town councils here are all party representatives. The civil servants and other apolitical functionaries are not party folks but everyone in an elected position is.
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  477. ​ @chrisclarkson6232 I think it's a sign this person or persons are doing this as their full-time job. Or that the account is managed by a team of a bot.
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  478. My personal suspicion is that YouTube and the others use the cheapest means necessary. If users remain despite a barely-enough robot on the task, the robot stays.
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  479. The Soviet sphere had their own mirroring. They believed any sort of nuclear escalation would begin with a first strike, since a nuclear first strike carries such an advantage. And so it must make sense that the NATO leadership are ready and prepared to initiate a first strike. And this leads to the whole doctrine of constant high readiness and a lower barrier to use nukes on army or army group level. Stuff that makes a bit more sense if you believe the Joint Chiefs could recommend pre-emptive first strikes.
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  480. The fact finding mission reminded me of my local fringe communists going to the DPRK and happily reporting that the government translators all said it was a lovely place.
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  481. I look at accidents where a terrain vehicle with recruits flip or where they break a bone up in the mountain, and I just think that makes people averse to joining. Russia has a military system with a ton of penalism with their old seniority system.
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  482. Operation Sentinelle troops in France are just dudes. They show up occasionally, but most of the time they're not there. They don't add a lot more than a gendarme.
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  483. I think the military does little about money laundering and corruption. Long term, it means the military now has an additional duty to be a taxi service for civ agencies.
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  484. This offer from the USA looks a lot like the offers China gives their clients. But instead of utter chaos, the party prefers stability and says they will not regime change you or make a fuzz about human rights. It is a bit strange to see the USA suddenly behave like a Pravda caricature of itself.
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  485. ​ WhiteBaronn I try to look if accounts are pro-Israel or just pro-Bibi. Their nationalist propaganda war is a bit like others. There are true israelis and there are traitor israelis. And they the true israelis must be some sort of vanguard for the others.
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  486. From a pure union perspective, it makes only a slight difference if the scab is from India or Florida or Canada etc.
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  487. It's a legal issue I guess. Shooting up RC cars or drones or wrongfully parked bikes is frowned upon.
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  488. @ebikeengineer  You probably know the different levels of the US government much better than foreigners like me. The main difference here is if the drone is above a state sensitive area or not.
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  489. @NorthernChev  I'm actually curious about how different drones react to a shotgun. The flimsiest little civ drones are probably knocked down easily, unless they just turn to splinters of plastic instantly.
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  490. I assumed its what you called an industry sector. The industry sector I work in has both interests as a group and competition and cooperation. Sometimes people ask "Aren't you competing with x?" Or they think our big beef is with the municipality instead of eachother. But you can definitely group us and others into rough industry sectors.
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  491. Putin and his circle see the world as a cynical set of spheres of influence. The USA, China, Russia itself, maybe the EU. Each great power is fully free to run their partition like a mob boss. His sphere stretches over Ukraine and a series of former Soviet satellites. The Russian elite gets a share of corruption and raw material wealth as a prize for loyalty. Which Putin can pull away at any moment if you show disloyalty.
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  492. Part of the parade is the old WW II veterans, or the Great Patriotic War. How much they play it up varies, but everyone from Soviet nostalgists to modern nationalists celebrate that.
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  493. Vlad Vexler tried to explain his ideas of current Russian propaganda. The goal is not necessarily to change what people believe, just make them flip out. There's eight different narratives being pushed out at the same time. Ukraine started the war, there was no war, USA started the war, Russia started the war but for good reason etc. People who do not believe in the democratic conversation itself want to flood the selected space until we are numb.
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  494.  @KA-wu2kt  The PRC seemed really paranoid about organization. Any sort of organization from churches to unions that is not party affiliated.
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  495. Your ICE already does escorted flights. This can be done on a charter flight. The US Air Marshalls are a very unique institution. Even worldwide. Armed staff in the cabin are really uncommon. That brings into question if we really want to keep hosting US bases. If the benefits from the USA will just keep shrinking.
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  496. The traditional solution to retention here was conscription. Conscripts do not negotiate their compensation. I think a Euro conscript costs a lot less.
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  497. At the least it forces a Russian response. I'm not yet sure what's in that area.
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  498. I'm a lot more interested in the administrative muscle of the state. Like how much control of firearms, car licenses, finances, money laundering and whatnot do you got.
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  499. They do that with police transportation here. Other agencies can sometimes request cop cars as a free taxi service. Which is nice for their budget.
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  500. Here it's a bit different. The armed forces use conscripts. There are few ways any civ company could compete with a conscript working for room and board and a machine park paid by the tax budget, if they somehow allowed the armed forces to operate commercially.
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  501. I'm starting to think the new technology was day labour using an app, in a form just slightly outside regulation.
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  502. The most common thread of the Trump cabinet is nobodies who would be nothing without the personal patronage of Trump. The first Trump cabinet had more officers and Republican minders.
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  503. The EU zone has the Schengen. I can move borders extremely easy inside it.
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  504.  @JRaney  The EU is a lot looser than the USA. More power sits in each national government. Imagine if every single state governor had veto power over every legislation, the president was more like a chairman and congress an advisory body.
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  505.  @JRaney  The Schengen is like one of many sphere. Some countries outside the Union are still in the Schengen.
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  506. Putin spent a few years whipping the Russian elite into shape. There was the trial against Chodorkovskij, the owner of Yukos. A few of the people who got rich after the dissolution of the Soviet Union had rivalries with eachother and Putin. The Russian state applies the law but is highly selective. Corruption is the reward for elites who remain loyal.
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  507. There is a number of garrison towns here. Good or bad, the locals usually form some relation with the regiment. It's usually good and a little protective here.
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  508.  @Charles-k9g5y  Scandinavia. But I think any town develops some relation with it's base.
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  509.  @Charles-k9g5y  I think the base can certainly have a bad reputation with locals too. We haven't had US servicemembers here yet.
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  510. ​ @warheadsnation Russia has a different sort of acceptance for losses in their officer corps and political leadership. They had to learn a whole lot of stuff the hard way, military academy folks here believed Russia lacked institutional retention of experience. Both actors are trying to learn and do things on a budget.
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  511. ​​ @warheadsnation  The Chinese communist party was a bunch of weirdos in the mountains in '36. They had to make that weird and chancy transition from weirdos in the hills to a group that could fight a conventional war. The wonky part in China is how the armed forces and security forces are party organs.
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  512. I have to think of Russia as an aggressive regional power. Far from a superpower. It's starting to look like the same Russia that entered Chechnya.
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  513. Depends if you want to do anything about the homeless. My government worried about poor retirees for a while and then admitted that deep down, those poor old people deserve to be poor.
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  514. The issue of Greenlands status in relation with Denmark goes back a while. There is a couple MPs from Greenland in the Danish parliament.
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  515. The UK has a horse meat taboo, but large chunks of Europe does not. I had horse meat sandwiches in school because it was cheap.
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  516. How compartmentalized is your military? During the Cold War, ours feared that spetsnaz would look up the addresses of pilots and officers to assassinate them, and shared information accordingly.
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  517.  @brandon4185  I think basics like shell production has returned.
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  518. @Stegostomatidae  Turkey has ambitions to be a regional military power that can go on independent expeditions at times, without cooperation with other NATO nations.
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  519.  @michaelmammoth1010  There's usually something to learn after every wonky event. This usually happens after, not in the here and now.
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  520.  @zlauriault  Europe has a lot of countries. It depends on which European region you compare to. It could be anything from dense urban and agrarian regions to mounted, forested hinterlands. Northern Scandinavia is a string of mid-sized towns hugging a coast with increasingly forested, mountainous interiors. With highway- and rail-connected towns sitting said interior.
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  521.  @olivere5497  I always thought disaster movies had awkwardly forced family and romance perspective. There was a couple about 9/11 about how the closest people can be the random chumps you see day long.
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  522.  @michaelmammoth1010  I'm not from America, I can only discuss general terms. I'm not sure what state service you expect.
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  523. ​ @12what34the Trimmed moustaches were part of European fashion at the time. There was full beards but they were falling out of fashion. The safety razor was new and cool at the time. Female shaving was also becoming more widespread.
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  524. Narrow country roads in Norway or the Swedish forest could be used that way. Norway has these winding roads where you can't see what's behind the mountain. Of course this was the role of a point man on a bike or otherwise. They try to spot (or trigger) an ambush before the main body is there. Home guard units could have orders not to engage these troops at all, because they need to sit in an OP and detonate a mine as a more massed unit moves.
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  525. ​ @ВадимКружилин-м3ц Minefields are a staple in the war. But yeah, it's hard to mine every approach. The Russians seems to have pretty deep minefields on the Surovikin line.
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  526. The AfD looks like a weird mix right now. Skinheads, hippies, reichsburger, libertarians, vaccine skeptics etc.
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  527.  @almitrahopkins1873  They are another party. AfD was largely immigration skeptics and kept absorbing others. They seems to have a bunch of Putin-verstehers.
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  528. Your ICE does both escorted and unescorted flights. They seem to charter entire flights at times as well. I can't see that they operate any aircraft themselves, but instead charter ones as needed.
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  529. I know other electric vehicles function in smaller, more specialist roles.
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  530. My impression with social media platforms in general over the years is that they value engagement. Exactly how the black box measures and weighs engagement is unclear. But it tends to give you more of what you have "engaged" with. The more attention it swallows the better. Attention and data is then auctioned off. The companies themselves only act when either copyright threats, legislation or loss of user attention forces them to. Absolutely none of them wants to be pinned with efitorial responsibility.
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  531. ​ @LowJSamuel Who would you trust to define real US culture?
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  532.  @LowJSamuel  It sounds vague enough that anyone you are personal mates with can get a pass, and anyone you have a personal disagreement with can be ostracized. Does this mean my cousin in the city who designs refrigeration systems and my cousin who stayed home to run a diner are now foreign to eachother, because one lives in a city. I always suspect people like you want to leave it vague so you can make yourselves boss of your chosen identity crowd. Like you are just waiting to be able to tell your neighbours how to behave.
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  533.  @_DB.COOPER  The way people describe the ICE procedure, they mostly try to not draw attention. I don't know how much staff the ICE uses. They seem to just move people out of sight.
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  534.  @_DB.COOPER  The ICE loads a flight out of sight from what people tell me. It's not obvious what's happening.
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  535. Right now, ICE charters escorted and unescorted flights. Everything from a single seat to a full flight.
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  536.  @smoketinytom  The church is not as centrally managed as it appears sometimes. A lot of church business happens out in local level. I think different church orgs kept thinking they could handle things in-house but only kept bouncing people.
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  537. Russia is one of the actors in the Arctic. It helps if you take a map projection with the Arctic as center.
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  538. There is a lot of Europe that is conservative, that is highly pro-NATO and pro-USA. Their job got a lot harder
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  539. That's the part I'm missing from all the "Use the legal way" talk. What is the legal way? What am I supposed to do if I want to pick oranges? The EU system is trying to deal with refugees in its usual consensus governance.
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  540. Germany is one of the largest NATO/EU nations. Larger than France and the UK. I could buy that the smaller nations need to specialize. In Sweden we are apparently going to focus on air cover and beef up the navy and teach people arctic operations. But larger nations, eh...
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  541. ​ @alexanderrobins7497 Evacuating people out of the area was fairly standard, Ukraine has also evacuated the front over time. What stood out to me is the lack of rush to Russian recruitment offices. People were not instantly overthrowing Putin, but they were not enthusiastically joining in.
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  542. I think Trump was pretty upset with the amount of Republican minders he had on his first term, and would very much like to do without them. And these people are trying to throw him tempting bits like increased presidential legal immunity and presidential authority.
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  543. Which US politicians would you trust to define the official US culture in the future year 2050.
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  544. The task of an SF unit on bikes or trikes isn't typically to go up against an armored formation or a trench though? You need to be an artillery/air spotter or try to find all those soft logistics systems. The dudes guarding a fuel depot might not have main battle tanks.
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  545. ​ @RogerK9883 Environmentalists here don't like cruises either. They thought the regulations and enforcement for dumping waste at sea were too loose. Container trade is like the silent, unseen trunk of international logistics.
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  546. That is possible in dictatorships. I would not recommend giving the state that power.
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  547. In France it meant military capacity had to be shifted from something to something else.
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  548. Thinking "the military has a bunch of slack, lets tie it up" is too much of the good idea fairy. I have started to appreciate letting organisational slack be.
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  549. I think armed forces recruitment depends more on how many veterans come out with PTSD and chronic back pains than what some ad shows. The armed forces is usually a consensus decision in my country. The social democrats and the liberals/liberal-conservatives had virtually identical ideas.
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  550. ​ @RyanMcBethProgramming No one likes an hour mandatory course. But an hour long course is still a boring hour at worst while UN duty in Mali was undernourishment and occasional mortars. The UN veterans here in Sweden got a memorial a few years back. They had care and pensions but missed that little bit of recognition.
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  551. They are not everywhere. My guess is that they want to use a few channels to get a ball rolling. They are a nation-state and have more resources than us poor chumps but they seem to focus on what they think are decisive points. Like if they agree hard enough with locals, those locals will circulate stuff for them. The Russians themselves don't need to give a crap about hindu nationalism. If they can get the sphere around Modi or someone else to repeat and reinforce.
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  552. ​ @enigma6682 What is the Russian propaganda goal in India?
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  553. Snowden has permanent residence in Russia and, by direct presidential decree, citizenship. He becomes a lot more guarded any time matters related to the Russian state comes up. Much more guarded than when someone threatens crypto.
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  554. ​ @r9xh Old Pravda propaganda used to grab US events and enlarge them. If you read Pravda it looked like every US city had monthly race riots, that drugs were freely available, that the KKK was a nationwide paramilitary force and Union men were harassed by cops daily. It was produced as negative propaganda for their home audience.
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  555. My impression of the US military, from the outside, is a bunch of people who can drive a single cruiser into our waters and instantly outgun everything.
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  556. Recruitment ads here focused on how everyone is necessary in the total defence. Not the best of the best, tip of the spear but everyone.
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  557.  @KirkHermary  Professionalism here means no yelling. It has been for a while. When were you in boot camp? Which generation?
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  558.  @KirkHermary  The armed forces expecting people to bottle up what they saw in Bosnia sounds like a shitty path to PTSD.
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  559.  @KirkHermary  I think people look at how much firepower a carrier group has and how these things can show up any place. Russian military ads are more macho. But their main recruitment tactic has been increased promised signing bonus. Military service is still as popular as it was during the Chechnyan war.
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  560.  @KirkHermary  The PRC still think they don't out class the USA. The party hopes it can do so decades into the future, and has a sort of wish list of things it hopes will put them on equal terms. The PLA has seen very little foreign deployment. I'm actually not sure what would happen if they decided Somalia needs a PLA presence.
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  561. Everyone who had a beard then are long dead and buried. Wearing pants was also weird to roman fashion.
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  562. Sweden has national ID. It is tied to practically every interaction with the state, finances, employment etc. Different bits of institutions and companies and agencies can have separate registers using the same ID number. For some reason the banks operate a digital ID as well.
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  563. I think it becomes a greater debate when those people could be elevated from the fringe to presidential staff.
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  564.  @TRYCLOPS1  I have little grasp on the factionalism inside the US parties. Here, these dudes would have just formed their own little party. We have parties in parliament with 5% representation. From what I grasp, Trump did not like the Republican minders during his last term.
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  565.  @TRYCLOPS1  I know Trump and co is going on about who is or isn't a real conservative. Maybe chanting about hanging Pence should be mainstream. At least those guys think they are, the fringe is never content to remain the fringe. At least it takes one large minority of your congress to jam up the rest. And the less functional Congress is, the more the president and court can do. You can do similar things in a Euro coalition government. If that 5% party says it will leave the coalition, it would probably dissolve the government.
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  566. From my view, these are the guys who insist we buy american as a big security package instead of another Euro nation. No matter what we need. The need for large amounts of very basic stuff has grown. They can't use the next generation howitzer or missile platform in Ukraine if basic shells and robots and canned food isn't coming.
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  567. It's a bit wonky. Like what cost shows up on the ICE budget and what shows up in budget allocation to the AF.
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  568. Europe has a number of gendarmerie units. On paper they are militarily organized police units. France, Spain, Turkey, Poland, Portugal etc has some variants. They can be under the ministry of the interior, the ministry of defence, both etc. In practice they are primarily cops. If you took the FBI hostage resque unit, the Secret Service and the LA SWAT team and slapped a brigade status on them, you would have these guys. France has run the anti-terrorist Operation Sentinel for a while. Foot patrols of regular troops guard the Louvre and other landmarks and patrol the subway. They have opened fire on terrorists a few times. Right as it was running, the Bataclan attack happened. The bad guys hit a club that was far away from these foot patrols.
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  569.  @gk7754  I think Rome kept holding Syria and Iudae for a while longer. It's a part of the route to Aegyptus, a much more important province.
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  570.  @common12  The signal to me is that a cargo plane does not investigate money laundering.
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  571.  @CarlosAlbertoUrrutia  The clearest military statement the USA makes is usually the appearance of a carrier group.
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  572.  @TheStrategos  I would freak out a bit if anyone wanted direct political control of the central bank. Erdogan uses that a lot. He was firing people until someone agreed to do what he wants. Erdogan has his own economic theory about how low interest lowers inflation. Especially when its election time.
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  573.  @brawndothethirstmutilator9848  Right now I'm unsure what you want the dollar to do. The easy movement of the dollar is a big reason it's used.
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  574. @TheStrategos  Yeah, the government can usually appoint the head of the bank. Ours are appointed for a set mandate. Erdogan used very rapid hiring and firing.
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  575. We had a conscript army. A side effect was that large chunks of the population were reservists. A lot of people in your life would have done their time. I think people knew armed forces service could suck, but sharing that suck across class and ideology and background helped.
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  576. ​ @ahwhite2022 Chomsky repeated things closer to the older Soviet propaganda, the kind of propaganda they try on social democrats like me. The Russian propaganda is a weird and contradictory flurry where they just want to numb you into a dream-world where everything could be real and you can't trust anything.
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  577. I had to explain to people outside the EU that no civil war is near.
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  578. "The military has a bunch of slack in their org, lets use it up/cut it off" sounds like an attack of the good idea fairy.
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  579.  @Its-Just-Zip  How is the money used by the individual? Where I live, this would be part of state or private insurance. But that would be necessary after the emergency phase, when you have been removed from the disaster area. Getting stuff in and people out is usually a lot harder than getting money in.
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  580. You pay people 100-200% higher than at home.
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  581. I don't think it could mean full EU autarky. But there are producers in South Korea, Japan etc as well.
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  582. I think the Cold War understanding was that propaganda is part of the global conflict, but not necessarily high up on the escalation ladder. We escalate with similar means. You can expose and shame the propagandist.
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  583. The system is rather unforgiving and you want to ramp up further.
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  584. ​ @adrianblicharz1704 At the time, it was a tradition but not law for two terms. FDR points out they are not really laws. I still think a surprising amount of the USA runs on these mere traditions. I thought the tradition where the candidate with the second most votes becomes the vice president was fun.
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  585. ​ @Vuosta Carlin described accounts of people who met Roosevelt in person towards the end, and how they thought the man was dying.
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  586. ​ @MrCSeiberlin I think a surprising amount of the USA still runs on this sort of informal traditions. Like exactly how large can the Supreme Court be.
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  587. @MayaPosch  The EU has its different kind of jank. More of it is formalized. The EU runs like government by consensus, and often attaches exceptions as part of compromises.
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  588. ​ @Acetheskyhook The president saw on the news that someone is maybe catching geese, and now says they are illegal.
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  589. There is a bunch of islands in the area claimed by European nations. Iceland is a sovereign nation though.
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  590.  @C4rb0neum  I think there used to be an understanding between the parties to at least keep to the formalities and outward appearance. It's better to describe it as three movements. The Republican party, the Democratic party and Trump. In Europe it's much more obvious. Next to each resurgent populist party is the crashed hulk of a conservative party. Corruption really sets in when the last shame disappears and large parts of the population accepts that this is how things work. If high class people can give gifts, why can't I tip a cop with $20.
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  591. The US Air Marshalls are a very unique institution, even worldwide. One of the few where you have armed staff in the cabin.
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  592. The Chinese economy is hard to discuss. Partly because the party does not speak openly on most things and partly because its mixed status. The last claim my local economy news reported was that it simply does mostly what ChatGPT does, but using the cheaper Nvidia hardware. While Nvidia lived large on people flocking to buy their expensive next gen stuff. Chinese battery production seems to churn them out faster employing less people.
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  593. Here it would create issues with using the military as a commercial actor. If I was running a civ company to do the same, I could not compete with state conscripts.
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  594.  @calvinthestormfreak  My municipality planned to drive water out to town. The pipes freeze sometimes, they can park a tank on a lorry as substitute. If the area is completely unlivable, you might need to shunt people to the near area. Even if you have people in a school gym or a tent you need water.
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  595. My latest impression of Rogan was a bloke showing up to say that banks being forced to do money laundering checks on politicians is bad, and Rogan just nods and goes along with it like an incredulous child.
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  596. ​ @forbeginnersandbeyond6089 The best part about Musk is that he clowns around in public, while Thiel and Zuckerberg are relatively discrete with their clowning.
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  597. If you are living under a military occupational government, your town council could be your intermediary with the occupational government officers.
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  598. ​ @tilenjeraj2684 Civ def organizations here are usually part of the civ chain of command, as low as municipal level. Someone is going to order you around if you are in civ def.
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  599. The troops of Operation Sentinelle are just dudes standing around. They walk past and then leave.
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  600. I think the USA complains about being poor while quietly offering a 100-200% wage increase to just hop over real quick and mow the lawn.
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  601. Your ICE already does. They charter escorted and unescorted flights.
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  602. I don't know about Mormons, but religious communities in a secular majority society usually lack enforcement capability. They pressure you in other ways instead, like freezing you out of the faith community.
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  603. You could try conscription. Its not a career, it's mandatory.
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  604. El Salvador kept receiving US prison gang members for a while.
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  605. What is the job of these forces back home in the DPRK? I first guessed they perform regime security tasks, and that they seem to do. But also to stand ready as shock and infiltration troops should the war with the South reignite. Their kit is good for DPRK standards and their training potentially a bit outmoded.
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  606. The bit that stood out to me was the affirmation that your president must have immunity so they can Iran-Contra now and then.
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  607.  @user-ve5ei2xe8h  Does China have any overseas deployments yet? I vaguely remember they had some training mission. The DPRK armed forces mostly seem to prep for a reignited war with the south. Even their elite units lack modern kit, and there's been some questions about their training.
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  608. ​ @alexander1902 My impression was that the US armed forces will use a lot more civilian staff stateside, far from the front itself.
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  609. ​ @stevecastellanos It has made me like the EU more. Meta and Apple and Twitter are arrogant gits who will ignore a little nation until legislation forces them to.
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  610. ​ @Stevie-J How does Twitter monetization work? Youtubers usually complain when they can't grasp what is being rewarded. Does the black box crave 20 minutes videos? Does it favor one minute skits?
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  611. Here, this is reserved for extreme emergency. Not the daily operation of civ agencies. The assumption here was that civ agencies must be able to operate during war, with both high needs and a very busy military. It's almost like the other way around, with civ agencies and civ def as auxiliaries to the military need. It would be civ medical agencies shipping military casualties.
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  612.  @concord14  It's really hard for me to pin down any sort of ideology to the parties.
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  613. Here there is a resurgency of conscripts and reservists. We wouldn't be able to hold ground and fight Russia with a tip-of-the-tip-of-the-spear force.
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  614. To me it looks about as intimidating as any other security theater. Like you want to use the military as a prop. But I feel the same about Operation Sentinelle troops in France. They stand there. Walk around a bit. Leave.
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  615. If I was a money launderer I would probably not be intimidated. A cargo plane does not inspect records or conduct investigation.
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  616. I don't know, but just being able to smuggle in what's effectively a moderate luxury car irks me. Even if It's for a silly stunt. Their elites still want to live the life other elites have, even if there's a war. And our sanctions are supposed to make that a lot harder. I know a civ car doesn't trigger as many flags as trying to sell sensitive stuff but these guys are trying to keep buying a new Lamborghini.
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  617. That was the reasoning behind mass internment of US-Japanese citizens.
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  618. What would you like that celebration to look like?
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  619. A lot of NATO support is training missions. There was a load of Ukrainians in the UK.
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  620. I think the USA just keeps offering people 100-200% wage increases. I'm more curious about the legal way. If I want to work on the harvest, how much time does the legal way take. In the end I think the US immigration system ensures only the wealthiest money launderers and spies are allowed to threaten the nation.
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  621. In the TTRPG Delta Green you get to utilize the federal state to fight space demons and Cthulhu.
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  622. That brings the rest of the labour conflict stuff into question. Who negotiates on what a fair wage is. I think it would perfectly doable to undercut an American with another American in some circumstances.
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  623. Your feds think a lot of the overland smuggling is mixed with legit truck cargo or small vehicles.
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  624. Why was it finally closed? It looked like Rwanda was the only taker on this. The EU doles out security aid to a string of nations, and has it's security agreement with Turkey.
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  625.  @ece2178  I think rolling in abject weakness before Erdogan somehow became the new tough thing to do.
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  626.  @ece2178  That was an EU policy, not the UK. The EU is negotiating its own security deals. Erdogan and the other partners usually demand more than money. Like freedom to act as they like in Sahel. I think the EU has been painting itself into a corner.
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  627.  @K3rbalSpace  I thought so as well. It was like the UK was begging to become a client of Rwanda, in a negotiation where Rwanda had the upper hand.
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  628.  @ece2178  Yeah, I mean that the EU has it's own measures in that field. But you are right, that was a UK plan.
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  629. I think it depends on how much Trump wants to pick loyal staff. He did not seem happy with the amount of mainstream conservatives minders the last term. The term ended with a crowd chanting about hanging Pence. I think he is largely a populist opportunist. And the chance that these people will sway him with how much legal immunity a president should have scared me. And I have seen how even a large minority in your congress can deadlock any process.
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  630.  @barmalini  The USA to me is the place where a little handful of companies grow ever larger.
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  631.  @barmalini  I just wish americans would stop adoring their own giant companies in general. Now it seems like a bunch of tech companies are on top. And dang crypto, for some reason.
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  632.  @sc1338  The EU doctrine is to roll around in abject powerlessness before Erdogan and hope he solves things. This now counts as toughness.
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  633. ​ @johanmetreus1268 The average armed forces recruit for much of the 20th century is young and working class.
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  634. ​ @dustinfrey3067 WW II had younger adult males serve in large amounts. The stereotypical recruit is a working class bloke from a large population center at a much younger age than the cast of Saving Private Ryan.
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  635. ​ @orkhepaj  I thought prison labour was part of your regular detention system. Not sure what the process to use them is.
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  636. The ICE already does escorted deportations where staff will be in the flight.
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