Given Putin’s theory that nations comprise a set of territory they’ve historically held–Ukraine and Alaska being “rightfully” Russia’s–he surely wouldn’t object to China taking this part, right? And Kaliningrad goes back to Germany? He’ll be good with all that, right?

It’s a shipping lane, so no.

Inflation is a basket of goods. Yes, you can pick out specific things that are rising faster than overall inflation, but people don’t buy just those.

There have been alternative means of measuring inflation, such as the old Billion Prices Project (stopped in 2016) or the Penn State ACY index:

https://sites.psu.edu/inflation/

In practice, they tend to track CPI fairly close.

There was a giant drop in the number of men in the Soviet Union during WWII. This has had “echos” in their population pyramid every 20 years, where there’s a shortfall of new babies being born. They never had a baby boom the way the US did.

This affects all the old Soviet states, including Ukraine.

All that is to say that Putin was a real goddamn idiot by launching a war right in the middle of one of these echos when they’re already having population issues.

They aren’t, but if you’re unable to produce a peer reviewed study showing this, then you “lose” the argument. And even then, it’s probably the result of Marxist college indoctrination.

It’s pure sophistry. It’s taking the form of a rational argument while strangling its purpose.

Sometimes of the most trivial things.

A conservative once asked me for proof that bikes have a lower co2 manufacturing footprint than a car. It’s funny how they tend to share tactics.

Can’t be a big bad dictator while being compared to a silly cartoon bear. Compare Tim Walz to Winnie the Poo, and he’d probably run with it.

It’s not just that Dems have to win by +5% to make sure the Electoral College matches the popular vote, either. Now it almost has to be +7% to +10% to keep Republican election officials from contesting the result and it mattering in the end.

The Electoral College was bad enough. Its only justification is “whelp, them the rules”. Now Republicans made up a new set of rules and expect us to follow them.

OG Tankie Michael Dukakis

I was too young to have memories of the Dukakis run. Was he actually a tankie in the Hexbear sense, or are you just referencing that picture of him riding a tank?

The most booming economy.

Maybe China just got sick of Russian checks bouncing. They weren’t helping Russia because they like each other.

I suppose they could mine it all themselves. To handle all its international trade, a good sized nation state would need the electrical production of a smaller nation state just for that.

Even when sanctions lift, it’ll be hard to reenter Russia for practical reasons. My company left entirely, and it would be very hard for us to turn it all back on now. We’d be basically doing a whole deployment from scratch to the region.

Which is to say that, yeah, you can negotiate a potential return, but companies may not be quick to want to reinvest.

Yes, I do see the issue. Maybe don’t bring up the Enlightenment when talking about religion, especially if you don’t want to be held to it.

I dunno, you brought up the enlightenment, so it seemed like fair game.

That’s the age where we said “all men are equal” while keeping lots of people as slaves, right?

There are people who deserve to live their lives in peace. And then there are people like Putin, who deserve to have their dick put in a blender. Rarely do these two match up.

The Japanese have clearly ignored the threat of an alien probe showing up 200 years from now and sucking away the oceans looking for the missing whales.

A 120W panel at full sunlight easily has enough power to kill someone. That’s 1A at 120V, minus some conversion losses. 120W is pretty low end these days.

Which is most effective at evading Russian air defense? The F-35, an exquisitely designed $110M jet with among the best stealth that Lockheed Skunkworks can create, or the Ukrainian equivalent of a Cessna trainer aircraft?

Unlike in the US, where police are strictly prohibited from doing this. I tell other lies, as well.