Also Europe gave away so many shells that now the European ammo factories work to replenish the most basic strategic stockpiles of the EU militaries.

The link does not say in what way people were not supposed to share.

The link is the same kind of self-delusion people show around all of these generative tools: “look the faces are weird, the bird has wrong feathers, the cat has only 2 legs, nothing to worry about” while forgetting that most everything else in a clip works well and that it is the first-of-the-first releases which will get gradually better.

Is it really that good or is it just a meme?

If so is it good compared to other cheap brands or as good as the stuff I can buy in dedicated tea shops?

I recommend everyone who hasn’t to look up the idea of “Potiomkin villages” (and subsequently Potiomkin anything eg. Potiomkin AI). In short: back in the tzarist days lower ranks put up mock villages which looked clean, modern and prosperous for higher ranks (and tzars) to see during visits. These mockups were essentially theatre decorations which hid the real state of the matters - dilapidated, dirty, poor and corrupt. For at least the last decade everything we saw of Russia was Potiomkin in nature - either to show off before the West or to hide corruption before own superiors.

No no no no. It’s, you know, just warfare. Terrible things happen at wars. But you can always send more missiles and bombs so Israel can end the war faster! No genocide to speak of! Just mundane defensive war.

(/s obviously)

That’s an amount of gear and people comparable to what a mid-sized European country could have and what a big European country could muster on short notice. It’s “only” a factor of 2 or 3 less than what Russia prepared for Ukraine at the beginning. It’s likely more than the combined forces of the Baltic states’ militaries and the NATO contingents stationed there.

With a generous dose of optimism it is a force that would at least hold a conventional invasion at bay, if not defeat it via superior tech and sea support. It is a lot even in absolute terms, for an exercise it’s massive.

Sad but maybe at least someone will drag the virus into a mansion of some superrich prick and he’ll spend the rest of his life with brain fog.

Whether pro-Israeli bots like it or not, numerous acts by IDF do fit perfectly into descriptions of the acts forbidden by the convention. Even if the case is eventually dismissed it will be on technical grounds such as “it’s actually a war crime not a genocide” not because “IDF did nothing wrong”.

You’re not getting good data from most of Europe either. At this point hardly anyone cares and death causes are reported as they were before 2020: pneumonia, dementia, cardiac arrest etc. Whether these were caused or worsened by COVID isn’t anyone’s concern.

How about the same but about the world? If I gathered together all the places I visited, all documentaries I watched and all conversations I had it adds up to a mere glance at a myriad of different worlds. Every single small region in the world has more history and social and natural structures than any fantasy book. Living is like pulling individual pixels from a 4000000000000…000k photo which then changes every second.

My brain explodes sometimes, but the idea of fractals helps. There is still immense value in perceiving this small collection of pixels as they build up to more and more connected structures.

Care to elaborate why is this relevant?

To people who say it’s oVeRbLoWn CoNsPiRaCy

Every viral disease may leave long term consequences, including the common flu. So can COVID. But we as a society got quite good at handling common flu. Also most people don’t contract it that often and if they do it’s a cause for medical attention. Meanwhile people are getting infected with COVID 3-4 times within 4 years and no one bats an eye besides “yeah, you’re not lucky”. So we were forced into pretending that going through a potentially heavily debilitating disease every 1-2 years is a perfectly normal thing and those who eventually “find out” are either just unfortunate or straight up lying.

Sadly facts don’t care about our feelings and social setups. The endgame (that is max percentage of affected people) is at the level of 50% of the entire population with long covid at all times because the damage from subsequent infections accumulates. I just don’t remember if the timescale for this was 10 or 20 years of unmitigated spread of the virus (that is: what we have now)

Meanwhile the new mutations are not really less severe. Only vaccinations make it so we’re not seeing death rates of 2020 until today. And sooner or later one or another mutated form will evade all immunity, wheteher it emerges tomorrow or in 5 years.

Fun times ahead and, oh, remind me how well are health care systems faring right now when “the pandemic has ended”? Yeah, thought so. And these people are first in line to be affected so it won’t be getting better. If anythong COVID is the one topic where doomerism is perfectly justified as we don’t even try to pretend we’re doing something like we are with climate.

Not society, but rather a bunch of detached money pushers

I want it to be true but I also see the world. In my line of work in my country (science and not exactly commercial) the consensus seems to be “remote work was a disaster, let’s not” up to explicitly forbidding remote/hybrid seminars.

Last time I checked BBC wasn’t a Fox News cosplay

There’s probably much more. Half of them only recognised in their village somewhere in the middle of South Asia, the other half too burnt out with work and continuous crises to notice they could be good at something.

Ohhh elections, so the plan is to get bogged down in a low-intensity border conflict and then say “oh no, we can’t do the voting in the middle of a war!”

Is that a ploy from Russians who are too cheap to bribe three juntas at the same time and want to consolidate assets?

In Poland it’s “hybrid attack”. Devious, disgusting dehumanisation which makes even otherwise smart or kind people cheer for forces literally letting people freeze to death in forests. Rebrand helpless, misguided refugees as “Russia’s hybrid weapon” and you can get away with any atrocity.

The fucking hubris of man. Antarctica should be off-limits for everyone except science teams. Yet here we go, the most important of the importants (not really, but I guess he feels like that) goes for a fieldtrip polluting the place just like any other cruise ship. And for what? A fucking publicity stunt. The message he sent is “this whole planet including this one extremely unhospitable, legally uninhabitable piece of ice is our playground. It’s no big deal to just pack up and randomly drop by Antarctica en route to Dubai.” Mate, this way of thinking is what brought us to where we are now. You’re not helping.