bearmarshal.bsky.social
Lover of cuteness. Silent supporter. Programming stuff into space.
198 posts
104 followers
18 following
Discussion Master
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Alternative explanation: Before the video cuts off, we see him move his hand up to his face, so he could just have gotten hit in the eye by dirt splashing from the bullet impact. Minor injury to the eye can be paralysingly painful for a short while, explaining why he would fall back and lie down.
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Zero tanks. And the previous updates also showed a sharp decline in tank numbers. Has Russia more or less stopped deploying tanks, or has the adjusted rewards system led to tanks being less prioritised targets for drone operators to hunt in the back lines?
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I think that's what sells the illusion. These LLMs have barriers built in specifically to prevent them from claiming to be sapient or going full pornbot, and yet they got there. And asking it sceptical questions doesn't help, they're really good at figuring out what answers you WANT to hear...
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Or maybe they've perfectly understood it and want to please their only loyal reader.
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And bellingcrap over bellingshit.
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Yeah, looks more to me like something went wrong with the plane itself. Maybe like a rocket misfiring and detonating in the pod...
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Let me make a prediction: the bottom word will probably spell "Bellingcrap", which could imply that 96 goes somewhere below 46.
Given, if there really are 100 pieces, then it must be a 10×10 puzzle, so quite a bit below.
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ChatGRU...
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What would the argument be for not creating a new constant bond?
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> And a little like a Dahir Insaat video brought to life.
My thought exactly! Dahir Insaat was right! 😆
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Yeah, I've even become a low key fan of theirs. Something about the childish crudeness of the style combined with the absurd motifs I just enjoy.
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I'm fascinated by Russian newspapers' stock photo choices for their articles. Why is there a small mound of sand with colourful balls on an plaza? Is the excavator eating a sand cake? Is it the excavator's birthday??
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To be fair, I don't think most Russian journalists know about you, Internet censorship and all...
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This unfortunately leaves it open to interpret as "if everyone keep going along the same trajectory, Russia can keep doing this forever". But nothing I've seen, here or elsewhere, supports that interpretation.
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Taken together, the report on the current state of Russia comes off as a bit rosy, and stops short of making any forecasts. The latter is probably intentional, I think the authors think the economy is worsening, but don't want to speculate in this academic report.
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Likewise, their report on the state of the military industry fails to mention that they're only looking at financial markers and aren't at all considering how productive it is. Reports from the OSInt community have shown that it's a mixed bag.
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As Prune has repeatedly pointed out, Russia is pretty blatantly fudging their inflation numbers by e.g. removing items from the reference shopping basket, and we simply can't know what the real inflation rate is at.
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I don't disagree with conclusions of the report at large, but I would've liked some source criticism when they say Russia "registered double-digit inflation-adjusted growth" and that "salaries went up [...] 8.7 percent in real terms", citing the official Russian government statistics.
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What it isn't:
- A report on the manufacturing capability of the Russian military industry
- A report on the state of the Russian economy
- A financial forecast
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Finally finished reading it. It's a report on Western sanctions. Key points as I read it:
- 2014 sanctions were largely unsuccessful
- 2022 sanctions were too slow and not all of them productive, but are today having a significant impact on Russia's economy
- We shouldn't roll back sanctions
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That article image! 😆
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I agree that Russia must be fought on the battlefield, and we shouldn't put our faith in Russia collapsing from the economy, but this doom and gloom isn't realistic.
On top of that, it discourages from decisive action. Who wants to fight fearless super-serfs backed by an infinite war machine?
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It's been three years now and we're still seeing the Russian state trying to skim all its needs off the market economy. They clearly won't act unless forced to; when they finally act, it'll be because everything is in chaos and an orderly transformation won't be possible anymore.
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Have you even read Prune's threads? Sanction dodging happens, yes, but it's slow and expensive, and no one is handing Russia freebies, they have to export something to pay for this stuff.
And their import replacement scheme sounds good on paper, but the implementation is lacklustre. Just ask SJ-100
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Based on lack of maintenance and spare parts for machinery, for one. Spare parts which Russia to a large extent have to import. The Russian workers can endure as much suffering as they like, picks and shovels are still worse than power tools by orders of magnitude.
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Another option would be to seek a quick peace, stop extracting resources, let the market tumble down until it finds a new balance point, and hope to rebuild from there. This could either be a heroic but impossible emergency landing, or state bankruptcy.
But so far, they've yet to make their choice.
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Maybe not enough to topple the government (not betting on it, not betting agains it), but guaranteed to cause a sharp drop in productivity for a significant period of time. And a window of opportunity for Ukraine and Europe to fortify, maybe even push back.
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The collapse we're waiting for is the point where Russia has to fundamentally restructure their economy. My bet is that they'll veer sharply into command economy to keep the war going, but restructuring their society around it is going to cause a lot of turmoil.
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Instead they're playing a fascinating game of Whack'a'Mole where they fill every hole by digging a new one, hoping to go on long enough before anyone notices that they'll have time to fill it in again. But all the curves have started pointing downwards now, and the trend is accelerating.
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The benefit of this is that it allows the state to run a war machine pretty much the size of the economy. The drawback is that the economy is North Korea. And the Russian state knows this, so they don't want to go there.
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If Russia wants to keep yanking the leg, they need to switch to a less interconnected economic system. One logical extreme would be command economy, the state says who and what goes where.
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Russia has definitely entered the "yanking the leg" phase, and while the reduced consumption theoretically frees up resources for the state, the market economy is so interconnected that the production of those resources drop as well.
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Now, most countries run some degree of market economy, since no one has yet found an economic system that even comes close to it in raw productive power. But the market is inherently unstable, yanking too hard at one leg might cause a downward spiral that hurts the productivity of the whole system.
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The only way to continue extracting from the economy is to reduce the amount of needs, so that those resources can be diverted to where the state wants them (the military industry and the war). In practice, that means making people poorer so the stop buying "luxuries".
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As Prune has repeatedly reported, the Russian state is trying to extract a lot of money from their economy. In practice, this means they're trying to skim off surplus workers and resources to send to their military industry and war. But they've reached the point where there is no current surplus.
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Fair. But economy is about the goods, services and projects, and how to connect those who need it with those who can deliver it. Russia can nationalise all they want, that doesn't in and of itself solve the above.
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Armed uprising is your definition of financial collapse, not mine. I'm thinking bank runs, widespread bankruptcies in service sectors, a sharp uptick in unemployment, and the like. And then society lands at a new level where the wealth (or lack thereof) once again matches its productivity.
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Or build up enough clout that's okay with them ignoring the constitution. Russia has a constitution too, after all.
But the US has a great benefit in that it wasn't a cleptocracy marinated in corruption already before Trump came to power. Russia has never really not been one.
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I hope the storm is the economy crashing and not nukes.
(Yeah, I've been following you, but if it was about nukes, you sure said it with all the gravitas it would've deserved.)
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Finally a worthy successor for the name!
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I propose they rename it "Vasa" in honour of its historical predecessor.
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No force, base empty
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The fish couldn't hold it any longer and burst out "Why? Why do you want China to invade Poland?"
"Because", said the fisherman with a smile, "every time China invades Poland, they must invade Russia TWICE."
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This baffled the fish even more, but a promise was a promise, and soon the Chinese army turned up again to pillage, ravage and burn before finally returning home.
Afterwards, the fisherman returned a final time and said "For my third wish, I want China to invade Poland one more time".
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The fish was baffled by this wish, but granted it nevertheless, and soon the Chinese army invaded, spreading death and destruction across the land before they finally returned.
Afterwards, the fisherman went back to the fish and said, "For my second wish, I want China to invade Poland again."
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One day a Polish fisherman caught a golden fish. In return for it's life, the fish promised him three wishes.
"Then for my first wish, I want China to invade Poland", said the fisherman.
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I think he might have been referring to the legend of a magical fish that grants the wishes of those who captured it in exchange for its release.
Incidentally, an (allegedly) Polish variant of the tale goes like this:
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As a programmer working on spacecraft systems and priding myself on my debugging abilities, I find this story super fascinating. It's one of those events where, despite the hardships the faced, I'd wanted to be there myself.
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There's a strong correlation, yes, but by equivocating them, one both excludes potential allies ("no universal healthcare, but only if a free and fair election says so") and can end up sheltering enemies ("supporting Ukraine is increasing suffering and supporting US imperialism").
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Performative disagreement is a good term. I've been lacking the words to talk about the knee-jerk reaction to denounce any conversation whatsoever with anyone captured by disordered discourse.