mattsteinglass.bsky.social
Europe correspondent for The Economist. If you don’t use your real name, the bar for mute/block is low. Send me tales of corruption, the most important story in the world.
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Getting Started
Active Commenter
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Kind of amusing that what Elon is trying to do to the federal government is get it to ignore all previous instructions
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If we were so rich back in 1910 how come the government couldn’t afford to give away transgender operations then?
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I’m going to take down the thread bc it is still too unclear. Might not be that bad.
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The politics of Captain America have always sucked, throughout MCU
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@dandrezner.bsky.social see above
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Definitely. But if they are taking a mile in order to turn Ukraine into the global rare-earths powerhouse and make lots of $$$ well that is plenty fine at this point.
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There is some clarity emerging now and it seems to be 1. 50% of profit and 2. that goes to a fund intended to encourage investment in Ukraine and reward investors. It may not be crazy at all. I may take down this thread bc it’s obscuring rather than clarifying.
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It’s extortion anyway! But it could be extortion to get a deal that results in a bunch of investment and profit, with a “krysha” over your head; or it could be something much more sinister. A straight-up kibosh on Ukrainian mining. I can’t believe that’s what it is.
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What non-lawyers like me know is that for individuals, contracts signed under threat of retribution are not valid. How does that work at the level of corporations and states?
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Thanks
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It’s crazy. Civil wars are horrible but sometimes can’t be avoided and occasionally the better side wins. Anarchic political violence is just terrible and never leads to anything good. Murder is bad
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I basically agree but somehow the Russians are still making incremental gains in Ukraine. I think we need to so well armed that the Russians can’t even convince themselves they can do it. They need to be afraid.
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They definitely won’t go unpunished! But it seems they can keep getting punished for a long time, and Europe has a tendency to run out of ordnance.
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Basically the method in this article is to look at what NATO’s response plan was with America and ask what it would take for Europe to replace the American capacity. Maybe you don’t need to do that fully. But maybe you do. This seems to me like a very reasonable way to approach the question.
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I don’t assume anything. Maybe you’re right. But I’m not sure they need to make a breakthrough. The Russian method often is to grab a bit of your country, keep it and use it to make you hurt. Stock market drops, investors stay away, politics in turmoil. Like Georgia.
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What is Akesson saying? Is the party in lockstep on this?
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Wait, sorry, somehow had Jimmie Akesson in mind. Not surprising Karlsson would turn against Trump, he has always been serious on defense and was instrumental in turning Sweden Dems towards NATO. I spoke with him a couple of years back
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I didn’t realize this either! If Hans Weidel was a Nazi judge in occupied Warsaw in 1941 sending Poles to concentration camps and his granddaughter refuses to apologize…relations with PiS must be, uh, complicated
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Alas, likely to prove true
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The Dutch are quite blunt and unprudish about bodily functions
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Dank!
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Sure, they should ban exports of anything the UA army needs
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I’m sure his tune has changed now that Trump won though
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Wow. Missed this
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I disagree that it’s just a plan—I think there are expandable production lines you could fund tomorrow—but yes, they also need kit we should give them right now.
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They certainly can’t produce everything at home but where possible we should be paying them to make it cheaply, not paying ourselves to make it expensively. Building up Ukrainian business and industry is 2x or more as effective as giving them kit. “Teach a man to fish”.
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We need to do both, but this is not an “unrealistic” thing—the Ukrainian arms industry already exists and can ramp up fast. They’ve created/revamped it in the past 3 years. We should be pouring in capital so they can expand. It’s the fastest thing we can do.
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Also, in the case of drones (air land and sea), the Ukrainian ones will now be better. Westerners are generations of battlefield experience behind
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If you try to build new ammo plants in most European countries it will take you ages and wages will be very high. You can do it in Ukraine profitably for a fraction of the price much faster
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The EU doesn’t have enough of a workforce: we are at full employment basically everywhere. This is another problem we face, a big defense spending push in EU economies will probably generate inflation
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First pay them to build weapons for themselves instead of giving them weapons made abroad. Then where possible let them ramp up production and buy the surplus: Europe needs more weapons too. Meanwhile it’s a twofer, you’ve built the infrastructure for sustainable European defense.
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Oh right! That’s where 4/4
www.economist.com/leaders/2024...
from The Economist
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If only the West had a biggish country that was more like China or Vietnam: low wages, good technical education, young people see engineering/electronics/manufacturing as a promising career and are pro-military! But where oh where? 3/
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One of the biggest security problems the West faces in competition with Russia and China is industrial/electronics undercapacity and difficulty getting young people to go into relevant fields (electronics, engineering, metallurgy etc). 2/
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In unrelated news, on.ft.com/4i0wBBq Ukraine to sign critical minerals deal ‘in the very short term’, US claims
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? The article about Ivanka in Czecho (Harding in the Guardian) is 2018. The Mussayev claims in Byline Times are yesterday
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I’ve never thought the Russia dossier was all hysteria, but I also think we’ll probably never know.
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I think it’s De Croo there who’s saying Stella is good? As is his responsibility
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Still hard for me to believe this is a real thing: in the modern info environment, if they released it, no one would know whether to believe it
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Particularly mad since Russia’s main asset is oil and gas, which the US doesn’t need.
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In both cases these democracies want to belong to regional blocs that are ruled by law, not be conquered by neighboring ethnonationalist autocracies. There already is a self-determined democratic East Asia. It just wants American help defending itself.