freagle

GDP in the US context is ridiculous. How much money is spent on DRM alone? From research and development to PR to legal to software development to hardware development to manufacturing. HDMI has DRM embedded in it, as do all devices that have an HDMI port.

And that's just to STOP the distribution of digital copies of media. It's literally ONLY negative productivity.

Then there's the IP-heavy sectors, which are predicated entirely on the artificial market created by the US IP regime, which includes tons of economic activity in litigation, lobbying, think tanking, and many people-intensive processes.

Then we've got an aggregate of billions in rebranding - fonts, colors, logos, slogans - which make brands indistinguishable from their former selves and each other.

And as Yog said, health insurance.

So many examples of billions just wasted.

The UN doesn't have sufficient military to do such a thing. They would need make an alliance to be strong enough against Russia, or it would have to the be the US. This is what we have now, it's called NATO, and the point is that NATO advanced on Russia. So sure, you can say the UN will enlist all the NATO countries to fight Russia, but only in defense, and no one in Europe would agree to that.

Still delusional. Russia has no interest in attacking Ukraine. Learn the history. Every single Russian intervention into Ukraine has been in response to Western meddling.

You want the Ukrainian people to be safe, get the West the fuck out of it

You have no idea how police budgets work then. Millions are spent annually per municipality on police activities to disrupt homeless encampments.

Was disappointed to find it was only rhetorical flak

I agree with your main points. I just don't think saving lives at the expense of national security makes sense. I think national security was the main driver and saving lives was part of the process and part of the calculations.

As for the timing, I think the timing was very interesting from an intelligence perspective. The US was warning about an imminent attack and Ukraine was saying there was no intelligence to support it and then Russia invaded the next day. To me, that says the Russians were testing the West's intelligence capabilities and launched when they thought they had the element of surprise. I think they were correct and the ensuing first day of battle gave the Russians good intelligence on what was and wasn't known by the West. It is very useful to know what your opponents know (and what they don't know), so I think timing was partially urgency and partially opportunity.

I really don't think that the potential massacre tipped the scales here. Realpolitik requires that you let people die if the consequences of intervening threaten national security.

From what I read, Russian intelligence could no longer assure that the activities of NATO were not preparations of nuclear kill chain capabilities. This, I believe, is far more likely to be the cause of the SMO launching when it did and the genocide of ethnic Russians was the legal and moral pretext that aligned with Russia's national security profile.

NATO began military exercises in Ukraine at the end of 2013. In the years leading up to the SMO, NATO flew B-52 nuclear bombers up to border of Russian airspace, they ran a simulated invasion of Kaliningrad with a full force, and Putin explicitly stated that the reason the SMO launched was because there was NATO activity on the border that was indistinguishable from preparations of nuclear capabilities.

Since the SMO, none of these things have been possible. This is the reason for the SMO. It was not mindless adventurism. It was calculated and reluctant.

Don't forget the India-Pakistan flare up. There's mounting evidence that the USA has a contingent that is focused on getting closer to a war with China.

This would result in foreign products maintaining their price competitiveness against domestic products, preventing the supposed domestic investment in production that the tarrifs are aimed at.

Keeping the costs low means the tarrifs will have no effect. The point of tarrifs is to increase the cost and make domestic products more attractive to consumers. Having Walmart eat the cost of tarrifs means that foreign products will retain their price competitiveness with domestic products and result in absolutely no domestic investment in production.

This is delusional. It's not a personal vendetta against the USA. Nuclear Europe fielding military in Ukraine is a red line for Russian national security. Until people understand the reality of security, you're all going to be blathering idiots.

There are two positions on security - it's either I am secure while you are not or it's we're both secure. Mutual security is the only way that peers can engage sustainably. Assymetrical security cannot be sustained by peers.

Ukraine being a non-militarized buffer between Europe and Russia is critical to Russian national security. Any arrangement where Ukraine is militarily aligned with the rest of Europe is an asymetrical security situation where Europe has security at the expense of Russia losing security.

It will never be sustainable.

Russia will either establish Ukraine as fully demilitarized with its constant oversight for the next several decades, as a result of the violation of trust that the US and EU committed, or Russia will occupy Ukraine. These are the only two options that establish mutual security and thus are the only sustainable options. Anything else is an escalation by Europe.