Putin won’t negotiate.

Every war is a prelude to diplomacy.

Putin is a dead man if the Ukraine war ends

This is a mythology the media has invented to keep people titillated with the news.

You’re looking for a storybook ending with a mortality tale. The bitter truth is that Putin’s as cemented in place as any Russian politician has ever been.

This perpetual conflict is entirely ego-driven, with Ukraine caught in the middle of a tug of war. Putin won’t quit because he’s old and stubborn. The EU leadership won’t quit because they need this war as an excuse to rearm, after decades of US occupation.

If the economy contracts hard enough, we’ll see a negotiation. Until then, it seems that everyone in power is playing with house money. So the conflict can drag on indefinitely, because it’s more fun to play at war than manage a peaceful continent in decline.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preemptive_war

Fascists love doing this shit.

Communism suffered its first Big Mac attack today as McDonald’s opened a restaurant in Yugoslavia, and police were called in to keep customers who lined up for hours from getting too unruly under the golden arches.

Calling this a Bread Line and suggesting it was proof of capitalism’s failure.

China had too many people for it to have the highest per capita amount

It has too many people to avoid the economics of scale that blunt per-capita emissions rates.

the amount of people you have has no bearing on the per capita amount of anything

As the number of people using a public service increase, the per-capita waste declines. A bus takes roughly the same amount of gasoline to move 5 people as 50. Cooling an apartment block during a heat wave is more efficient than cooling an equivalent number of stand-alone houses. And as the apartment approaches 100% occupancy, the net benefit is spread over more people. Industrial scale refrigerators consume less energy overall than individual freezers.

The more people using a piece of capital, the less energy is wasted through its continuous operation.

Large populations tend to have a lot of shared utility and a lower per capita emissions standard as a result. Countries with lots of mass transit and dense housing enjoy significant efficiences of scale. One reason why India looks so good on paper, despite having some abhorrent ecological policies in practice.

Smaller countries - especially small tourist countries - tend to have emissions far higher than their native population size would suggest. Places like Qatar, the UAE, and Kuwait regionally top the emissions per capita chart as a result. Canada and Russia also score badly in no small part because of how spread out the population ends up in countries with enormous amounts of wilderness.

probably somewhere in Eastern or Central Europe

The worst per capita emissions tend to be in the Middle East. Qatar is regularly at the top of the charts

US allies would be absolutely fool to attempt any “back to normal” process after Trump.

They wouldn’t be US allies to begin with if they weren’t fools

We’ve been doing Trumpism since Nixon. Even under Trump, quite a few US allies are openly in favor of this kind of leadership

Idk, man. What did you plan to do about it?

I wonder how long until we start seeing hysterics about Linux being taken over by the Chinese.

I would expect something time-senstive to be solved quickly be the State Department’s IT department.

I can’t imagine why. It’s a slow-moving ship with numerous levels of authorization between The Guy Hitting The Buttons and The Guy Making The Decisions.

They should have been able to do something like this in less time than “days”.

Again, I can’t imagine why. This information isn’t so time-sensitive that they need to respond to it in hours, much less minutes. And the cost of reacting swiftly but clumsily far exceeds the reward for opening a document in a weird format on a State Department computer.

I am quite certain that they are extremely lacking in skilled IT workers lol

I haven’t seen any evidence of this. Unskilled IT workers will just blindly click and install shit without any gatekeeping or cybersecurity. It’s the skilled ones that go slow and steady, verify within sandbox environments before taking any big risks, and deliver a product that isn’t going to blow up in your face after it’s been configured.

Calling it shit is reductive and inaccurate

Anything North Korea does is default assumed incompetently executed, maliciously intentioned, and/or the result of stolen work from a more skilled (western) developer/designer. The American Brain cannot comprehend the existence of a Soviet computer science expert. Certainly not one from a country where the prevailing wisdom is “These stupid foreigners all believe the President has a perfect golf score and never poops. Everyone eats grass because they’re always starving. And their army feeds their Olympic Soccer Team to wild dogs every time a player misses a goal in a qualifying match”.

For what should be fairly obvious reasons, officials at the US State Department aren’t able to easily download and install software from foreign governments. This is doubly true in file-formats that the security system isn’t equipped to screen and vet.

If you were working at a corporate office, you’d have likely run into the same set of hurdles.

There’s an old Bill Gates quote about whether he was worried Windows software piracy in foreign countries was hurting the Microsoft bottom line. He responded, “I’d rather they pirate copies today so we can sell them copies tomorrow.”

Similar logic behind distributing Student copies of windows software on high school / college campuses.

It would tank the value

Temporarily, and not nearly as much as you’d guess.

The appetite for treasuries vastly outstrips the supply.

Canada and the US engage in bilateral trade across the supply chain. And they are on generally good terms with the northern liberal neighbor states.

Canadians would be better off working with their US neighbors to evade tariff collections than increasingly the policing on people who share a broad class interest

Wonder what would happen if that was sold all at once?

Canada would take a massive loss on the sale while the private markets and the Federal Reserve casually absorbs the influx of new notes at a discount.

But Russia is helping fascists across the west seize control

Russians like… Steve Bannon, Jared Kushner, and Steven Miller?

unless we get some real populists across the west, liberal deocracies are going to fall like fucking dominoes

I would look to Albania and the Flamingo Revolution. Or the popular revolts in France and Italy. We’re getting more material democracy in Europe than I’ve seen since the end of the USSR. Trump’s bungling has created global opportunities for the overthrow of bourgeois dictatorship.

The Stephen Crowder tier of right-wing hucksters make money on the “Buy My Merch To Make The Libs Mad” gambit precisely because you’ve got a full panel at MSNBC screaming about Russians being behind everything from Black Lives Matter to InfoWars. This kind of annoying Own-The-Libs bullshit only works because Liberals eat the Evil Foreigners Behind Everything line up with a spoon. It works because so many people are panicked about Russians hiding in the weeds.

“They” also happily parade around with “Trump 2028” hats and bumper stickers that gloat about contributing to climate change, because these things are unsettling to a liberal audience. If nobody cared about Russia, conservatives wouldn’t try to enrage their Lib neighbors by claiming the love Putin so much.

The public has been generally brainwashed into believing the Russians aren’t a threat

Are you fucking joking?

Does make you wonder about all those Flock Cameras going up in the US and Europe.

I wonder how the public would respond if they believed the cameras were accessible by the nefarious Russians or the insidious Chinese?