from the sound of it, no, the article suggests that someone probably commanded them to fire back in the 70s while the thing still worked, and its just unclear when exactly this was and who did it.

I mean his military. If it gets ground down badly enough, him ordering them to keep fighting would be of little consequence, because armies fight with weapons and ammunition and manpower, not just on pure will.

of course not, but if things get bad enough for him, he may not have a choice

Russia actually can’t go on forever. There’s a reason they’re having to buy bottom of the barrel artillery shells from North Korea of all places. They’ve had gigantic reserves from the cold war to burn through, but they have been burning through it.

Well, we don’t actually know that the next administration won’t support them any. We assume they won’t because of Trump’s attitude to Ukraine, but the republicans have been somewhat divided over the issue, and Trump just does whatever he randomly feels like, and sending more military aid does benefit the MIC that can pay politicians, so it possible, if unlikely, that they’d get some support from them. There’s also the possibility of support from Europe or elsewhere in the world. Finally, while a Ukrainian loss without foreign support seems quite likely, the pace of Russia’s advances and resource expendature are such that a win for them is no longer likely to be “annex Ukraine or make it a puppet rump state”, but more “take a strip of land close to the current occupation line”, in which case a stronger Ukraine has a better negotiating position and so may be able to give up less.

Isnt this the exact reason why there was such concern over the idea of Threads federating with the fediverse at large?

Iirc the Russian casualty rate was supposedly on the order of 1000 a day recently, so probably implying the former.

Did the judge actually determine it, or did the judge just relay information given to them by someone else?

Given that Iran has it’s own orbital launch capability these days, I wonder why they’re getting Russia to launch them?

Looking at the website for company I order mealworms from when my colony hasnt bred enough of them for gecko food, a box of 1000 crickets is like, a bit over 20 bucks, not counting shipping. So assuming the UK has a similar business somewhere with roughly equivalent prices, 6000 is like a couple hundred bucks worth of crickets, or less. Not cheap but honestly not terribly expensive for such a huge number of insects, probably wouldnt even need the layaway

Not hard to find when it’s hogging so much space at the top of the map

Honestly I suspect it would do the opposite, Lemmy is a bit of a echo chamber and while users here heavily skew towards favoring Palestine in this, or at least condemning what Isreal is and honestly has long been doing to them, the US as a whole, even the base of the democratic party, has long been at least mildly friendly towards Isreal, and a large fraction will see Hamas’s attack as justifying Isreali action. It’s a bit of a damned if you do, damned if you don’t situation for the dems I think where their current path angers progressives on the left, and actively sanctioning Isreal would probably anger the more center-right side of the party, and they need both to turn out to win. They probably figure that at the end of the day, the left either is mostly younger people that don’t vote as reliably, or will bite their tongues and vote for them, because, well, if you’re given only two possible futures, both evil, and a choice between them, one has a moral obligation to choose the lesser evil, no matter how evil that lesser is, just because by definition, the greater evil is worse. But the center-right, they probably figure, probably don’t care about what is happening as much, and will feel much less uncomfortable about just voting for the republicans instead if the dem candidate doesn’t do what they want.

That being said, it doesn’t really much matter, ethically, if not helping kill tens of thousands of innocent people makes it slightly harder to win political power for yourself, it’s still a pretty horrible excuse. Nobody sitting in a jury would let someone go free if they were accused of being an accomplice to a murder, if that accomplice’s defense was “well, I’m running for mayor, and if I didn’t help the murderer, his friends probably won’t vote for me”. Like I get that Kamala isn’t really calling the shots on that, being only vice president currently, but she doesn’t seem like she intends to change how Biden has handled the situation much.

Don’t get me wrong, I am voting for her, I’m not one of those people that thinks that it is somehow noble to just let the greater evil win if it means not taking an action that helps the lesser evil beat it, I think that the going for the best outcome plausibly available is always the right thing to do and that doing the reverse because “well my hands are clean” is a misguided and self centered way to do ethics, but like damn people (to which I mean the people that actually side with Isreal in this, and the DNC I guess, not they they see my tired internet ranting), just because the other option is as close as the country has come in a century to “literally Hitler” does not mean that you have to emulate Churchill refusing to help the Bengalis.

Sweden in general seems to have way more good game dev companies than most countries, especially most of similar size. I kinda wonder why.

to be fair, though politicians are usually rich, we dont want a system wherein they have to be rich, or where compromising information on a high level politician gets to a hostile power just because while said politician was running they were a cheapskate about who they hired for security

It does make me wonder though, if there is a need for just the warhead portion of these weapons and not always for the whole missile and launcher, if it might not make sense to get the manufacturer to just make some of the warhead bit by itself and send a delivery with a few of the systems replaced with the extra loose warheads, to use aid resources (and the time of whoever is taking the missile apart again) more efficiently.

And that’d be reasonable for you to do. However, having a network choose to remove something, or cut ties with servers in the network that don’t in an attempt to persuade them to remove that thing, isn’t exactly the same as a government ordering a thing be removed. The former doesn’t give much avenue for a malicious actor to suppress something that isn’t in their interest, because they can hardly control the collective actions of users on the network, but the latter does by creating a single point of decision making on the network’s content from the outside. Not that the motivations in wanting that video gone were bad, but there is an element of risk to making it possible for a government entity to remove something from a social network, even if the thing they want gone this time is something that really shouldn’t be there.

In a sense pragmatism would mean that a soldier eats whatever they can, given that generally, people will do things they find objectionable rather than starve, if one was talking about the individual soldiers being pragmatic. However, what I was referring to was the state or military leadership being pragmatic here, because even if your soldiers will eat rations they object to, they’re probably not going to like it, and one can’t so easily pragmatically decide to like something. So even if your soldiers dutifully eat whatever they’re given regardless of if they’d object to doing so given a reasonable choice, it’s still going to hurt morale and therefore hurt their ability to carry out their objectives. Not really arguing with you here obviously, just responding to that hypothetical response you were suggesting someone might give.

I mean, in the middle of a war, especially a defensive war, pragmatism is going to override a lot, and providing soldiers with meals that align with their preferred diets wherever possible is going to avoid a big hit to morale over making one eat things that they have some ethical or religious objection to, so it makes sense to do

To be fair, if one was sure that the answer would be no anyway due to an unfriendly administration, and suspected such a leak might happen, it would give Ukraine a chance to put targets they don’t consider as important on the list, to get the Russians to waste their resources fortifying those instead

• invade a country

• Country starts building weapons

Who could have predicted this?