Loads of fossil power use gas turbines that do not involve steam :x

Right, I should make myself clearer. I’m no expert in economics, I just try to build a reasoning based on what I know.

The context of his statement is that Russia is outproducing the West in ammunition, specifically artillery shells. Earlier he states Russia is producing 4 millions shell a year compared to .5 for the US. So without qualification, the statement implies Russians are somehow 80x superior as they produce 8 times more with an economy a tenth the size.

I feel he should have qualified his statement to improve reader understanding:

• in general domestic production for domestic consumption should be compared using PPP, in which the Russian economy is “merely” a fourth of that of the USA (hence my PPP comment)
• the sanctions Russia is under distort the nominal picture since they restrict trade
• weapons production is hard to put a number to, since they are very “custom” goods that can’t be easily compared or traded, and even moreso for Russia which has a huge domestic arms industry
  • granted, that last point is is much more true of things like fighter jets than artillery shells
  • still though, there is some Western focus on quality over quantity that also explains the discrepancy (or at least there was before countries realized their entire inventory wouldn’t last more than months in Ukraine)

Because he didn’t provide this context to the number he is giving, I thought that either he wanted to misled or he was not sufficiently informed, and assumed the more charitable option.

My (probably incomplete) understanding is: phones have a GNSS chip (such as GPS, Galileo, or Glonass), but getting location from that takes a long time and a lot of battery. So they estimate location based on other information such as what cell tower they are connected to and the list of available wi-fi networks. This requires a database with all that info, which Google built through its Street View cars.

So the location provider is a service to which your phone sends all the info it has and which replies with an estimate of your location; which means it handles a lot of sensitive data.

The Russian economy is less than a tenth the size of the United States or the European Union

I wish I had the self-confidence to pontificate on Russian domestic arms production while apparently being unaware of something as basic as purchasing-power-parity adjusted measurements.

No worries, Macron has been working very hard to put an end to Françafrique and it is already mostly over :)

Just curious, do you get 10¢ for every metaphor you write or something?

I certainly could have made myself clearer to begin with.

The way I read it, this post complains about “wokization” more than enshittification.

Else why would it point out “African or Indian last names”, reviews using the word “brave”, or “books about Trump gathering dust”? Those are all right-wing memes.

This greentext is literally just right-wingers convincing each other their already-held stereotypes are true.

My city hosts a number of cruise ships, and it was explained to me they can’t be connected to the city grid, so they instead keep their diesel engines running the entire time.

It’s a local air quality issue, and the bigger the ship the more it pollutes locally, even though it might be more efficient on a global level.

A far-right candidate (Nicolas Dupont-Aignan) proposed imprisoning French mujahideen in the Kerguelen Islands in 2016.

I choose to believe this is brilliant trolling

it’s France of 1794. A bloodbath that ended, as it always has in history, with a conservative backlash and a dictatorship.

It didn’t “end” with a dictatorship. Social change continued for a century, in which the people gained more and more power to the detriment of autocrats, until the establishment of today’s strong liberal democracy. The millennia-old institutions that opposed this change couldn’t be replaced in a day.

Mainstream western political theories holds the power of nations arises from their economy. What threat would Putin be were Russia incapable of producing weapons and supplying soldiers?

Sanctions therefore seek to diminish the power of Russia, counting on its economy being sufficiently interconnected with and dependant on that of the West.

In this context, sanctions hurting the common people is ultimately the point, because they’re literally trying to make Russia poorer, and therefore the poorest will be hurt most. Sanctions targeting the ruling class (such as seizure of assets like yachts) are at best symbolic.

If you’re unhappy why stay? Personally I’m happy with the Lemmyverse as it stands now — certainly happier than in the corporate lowest-common-denominator that is now Reddit.