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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • American hegemony was a conscious American policy choice. We didn’t want the Euros having an independent foreign policy, we wanted them reliant on American military protection. This was how the US kept those bits of its empire in line.

    Notice how the only Western European country that even pays lip service to independent action is France, the one Western European country with a military capable of independent operation. And then we get “Freedom Fries” and all that shit whenever they don’t do whatever the current US admin wants.

    The single biggest thing Trump fucked up for the US was pushing NATO countries to spend more on defence. This will drastically reduce US influence over the continent in the coming decades, speeding up America’s worsening diplomatic isolation.


  • They send random gifts some times, usually a code to redeem something in a game I don’t play.

    Some super reacts - animated emojis basically.

    Other than that I really couldn’t tell you. I don’t think the subscription is worth what the subscription gives, but the alternative is the free product gets worse faster, and that would disrupt a lot of communities that I enjoy interacting with.

    Thinking of Discord as a whole, I think it is worth the nitro price. Not in love with the trajectory though.








  • And that is a valid opinion. Unfortunately what do you do with all these people if the homes close because they can’t afford staff?

    The intent of the bill is to prevent neglect in nursing homes - that is a worthy and important goal. The mandate doesn’t actually help make that happen.

    It doesn’t provide funding the care providers to increase staff, it doesn’t add incentives for individuals to get certified and help address the personnel shortage, it doesn’t put a cap on administrative costs for care facilities, it doesn’t actually DO anything to help solve the problem.

    Good mandates also provide an avenue to meet them.


  • That is an insanely small margin, and directly contradicts your claim that they can staff properly.

    Let’s take the entire profit for the industry and hire nurses. Let’s say reach nurse costs $80K ( $60K salary, $20K for taxes/insurance/other benefits).

    That pays for 9600 more nurses. Which, given the nursing requirements in the bill (3.48 hours per day per resident), only covers staffing for 22K residents… a rounding error to the more than 1.2 million nursing home residents in the country.

    There are ~15K nursing homes in the US, each of them getting 0.6 more nurses doesn’t help anything.





  • While Finland lost, the difficulty the Soviets encountered during their offensive was noted by the powers at the time. It was another factor convincing the Nazis that invading the Soviet Union wasn’t as terrible and idea as the balance of resources and forces would suggest.

    Historians still debate whether the Soviets intended to conquer all of Finland at the onset of the war. While the eventual peace treaty left Finland ceding more territory than the initial Soviet ultimatum demanded, Finland retained its sovereignty, which was incredible given the disparity in military power and the existence of a puppet Finnish communist government.




  • Yes, you can make the argument that a hyper-modern vehicle is a vastly more effective weapons system, so the disparity in cost is justified.

    That isn’t what we are seeing in Ukraine - relatively modern NATO-standard tanks are being knocked out by old artillery, immobilized by old mines, and killed by cheap drones. Industrial warfare in the vein of WWI and WWII is clearly not dead yet.

    This isn’t to say Russia would win a direct conventional war against the west, but we also can’t sit here smugly and claim it would be a steamroll like Gulf Storm given the observations from Ukraine.


  • The raw spending figure isn’t what is important, but the PPP figure. Russia’s economy is about 1/5th the size of the EU’s in PPP, and its defense sector is vastly more efficient on a monetary basis than the west - The US alone has given Ukraine close to $60 billion and it is a fraction of the hardware that Russia has produced with fewer dollars.

    This isn’t a ‘Russia stronk, Europe bad’ post, it just bears emphasizing that Russia has a large industrial base and has brought much of it into arms production over the past two years. The West hasn’t, and defense procurement remains an almost artisanal process where high tech goods are bought - in low volumes - at inflated prices.