SeventyTwoTrillion

Once again, the problem with these assessments is that it creates a contradiction. You can say that Russia's lost a billion troops, but then you also have to explain why Ukraine and NATO weren't then able to beat Russia extremely easily. If Russia's army sucks, then your army necessarily must suck more, given that Russia has retained their positions, and there isn't the slightest hint of a secret mass conscription campaign (and it's REALLY FUCKING DIFFICULT to keep mass conscription campaigns secret - same with massive amounts of death).

Your Tuesday Briefing

Either my standards have gone up or there really isn't much going on right now.

French lawmakers have rejected an immigration bill that would facilitate the deportation of migrants "who pose a serious threat to the public order", increase resources to combat smuggling networks, and grant one-year work visas to irregular migrants working off-the-books in sectors with labour shortages. The right rejected it for being too friendly to migrants - they wanted even greater tools to get rid of them. The left rejected it for being not friendly enough to migrants - they wanted irregular migrants to be given an unconditional right to stay and work in France.

After the PiS party in Poland refused to go gently into that good night after losing a majority in parliament, they tried to rule as a minority government and have now been forced out due to a vote of no confidence, and Donald Tusk has been elected the new Prime Minister, ending the two-term rule of the radical right-wing party.

Iran is launching a joint venture with Chinese tech companies to employ AI to digitalize production in oil and gas fields, hoping for a 20% improvement in efficiency. This is probably just gonna be some kind of advanced algorithm that for some reason is being called "AI" because that's the mandatory buzzword to attract funding. I love that the image that the author chose for this article is something from like, a futuristic citybuilding game. Anyway.

South Korea's President has kicked off a visit to the Netherlands to forge a chip alliance between the two chip powerhouses, visiting, in particular, ASML, which makes the cutting edge chipmaking equipment that the world relies on. I assume that the entire point of this meeting will be to try and find ways to make the sanctions on China actually work, and they will obviously fail, as western sanctions are increasingly meaningless.

Due to a union dispute, 400 miners were underground for four days in South Africa, eventually forced to leave due to hunger and thirst. There was a similar event in October. To be honest, I've read several articles covering this and I have no idea what's going on with South African miners right now.

The UN mission in Mali, MINUSMA, lowered the UN flag at its headquarters in Bamako, closing ten years of deployment after the government ordered them out due to their ineffectiveness in solving the crisis.

The US has hit companies in Turkiye, the UAE, and China with more sanctions to try and stop Russia from obtaining "high priority" goods like microchips. Why are we still doing this? What's the definition of insanity again?

If there's one thing that the Ukraine War coverage taught me, it's to not pay too close attention to conflicts. Day-to-day is completely unnecessary. Week-to-week is only really needed if you're somebody with a military background studying the war, or if your "thing" is covering it. Month-to-month is sufficient for newsheads. When I revisit the megathreads around the time of Mariupol and Azovstal, I'm struck by how... not unimportant, but how granular it all really feels in retrospect. Like, there was no real reason to care about the progress of Bakhmut until it was over in late May, and my time and energy could have been much better spent doing basically anything else. At least the counteroffensive was tense, even exciting (in a very morbid way) for the first few weeks, but by mid-July I realized that in the absolute best case scenario it might only reach the outskirts of Tokmak, and definitely not Melitopol or the Crimean border. And it was then that I realized that caring in a granular sense in the war just wasn't worth it, which is why I'm totally disengaged from Avdiivka or whatever is happening now.

This is all broadly true for the ongoing Palestine conflict as well, though the active genocide of civilians does add another layer of empathy and urgency that was a little harder to extend to Ukraine, where the civilian death toll is fairly minimal and like, if you were over 50 km from the front line for the first 6 months, you wouldn't even know there was a war going on (no real missile/drone strikes on infrastructure, etc) beside people getting drafted around you. For Gaza, by the third week after October 7th, I realized that I was falling into the same "granularity trap" and so made a conscious effort to disengage, at least a little, from it all. And, to be honest, by the 20th video of charred bodies being dragged out of bombed buildings, I didn't really wanna see all that anymore. Doomscrolling and powerlessness is a hell of a depressing combination, and I decided to at least not do the former.

The warrant canary is still present at the bottom of the Code of Conduct, it's just the c/feedback link that was broken

Imagus enlarges images when mousing over them.

For youtube, I use Unhook and Sponsorblock. For articles, Bypass Paywalls Clean is sometimes helpful. Tree Style Tabs can be quite useful if you have a lot of tabs (like I do)

libs, 2022: "totalitarian communist tankies aren't just delusional for being pro-China and pro-Russia, but because they have no understanding of how even basic economics works. see, there's a concept called supply and demand. if the demand of artillery shells rise, then so too will their production so that companies can make a profit. it's so fucking simple, how do they not understand this?"

libs, 2023: "WHERE THE FUCK ARE THE ARTILLERY SHELLS! HOW CAN RUSSIA MASSIVELY INCREASE PRODUCTION BUT NATO IS TAKING YEARS! WHAT THE FUCK?!"

Good catch, I think it's an error because we shifted from git.chapo.chat to git.hexbear

It has a bunch of different meanings depending on the country and all of them are kinda difficult to explain. Over here, in the UK, in a conversation, it's essentially the acknowledgement of a secret.

Like, somebody might say to his friend: "Yeah, Emma is late to the party again... I wonder why this keeps happening, eh?" taps nose Which indicates that the person speaking knows why Emma is late to the party, and sometimes possibly that the person being spoken to also knows, but it's not something they can openly say to the rest of the group (e.g. a secret boyfriend or something like that).

In other places, it can just mean the acknowledgement of understanding, and in other places (like the US I think) it means "You guessed correctly," i.e. "You got it on the nose." Sometimes if done to you after you ask a question to somebody, it means "It's a secret, so it's none of your business, shut up." In your case, I think the most likely case is that they thought you were hitting on her, but it could also be a bunch of different things based on context, or even just a "hello".

#Tradle #646 2/6
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https://oec.world/en/tradle

i hate islands i hate islands i hate islands

Oops. Joe Biden mixes up Chinese leaders, refers to Deng Xiaoping instead of Xi Jinping

“I’ve said this to Deng Xiaoping in the Himalayas, and I’ve said this to every world leader: It’s never, never, never been a good bet to bet against the American people,” Biden said.

Also corrected in the White House transcript was a mistaken reference to former South Korean president Moon Jae-in instead of his successor Yoon Suk-yeol.

Joe Bideng

Wrong.

Now, 8 minutes into the future of your comment, is actually the best time to be alive.

My man put out that first headline a month into Ukraine's counteroffensive, when indications were generally showing that it wasn't going to get anywhere? If it was November 2022 or something, I'd at least understand where he was coming from.