Troy

Pro tip: when you find a comment by someone you find interesting or insightful on a topic you wish to see more about - click on their profile and see where else they’re posting. It’s a great way to find additional communities.

Furthermore, lemmyverse.net is amazing for finding communities.

Pissing into the wind.

Yeah, that’s been a long term problem for them.

I don’t want to see a modern Japan on war footing. I also don’t want to see a modern China on war footing. But here we go.

1.5% per month. Don’t compare directly to your home country’s annual inflation yet. Unless you’re Turkey or Russia.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidaxe/2025/01/22/like-the-spartans-in-thermopylae-a-dozen-ukrainian-commandos-battled-scores-of-north-koreans-for-eight-long-hours-in-kursk/

https://www.forcesnews.com/ukraine/british-commandos-helped-generals-leave-ukraine-start-war-investigation-finds

You have a confirmation bias.

American ingredients in domestic made stuff is the next target.

That’s paraphrasing a bit. Chekov’s rule is about conservation of narrative real estate, no about the gun itself. It wasn’t even consistently true of his own works. The real world is not a stage play and armies created for deterrence don’t need to be used.

That’s a crazy amount of people under any circumstances. World, take note - this is how you protest.

Nerb

Serious answer to an unserious question: adopting an adult is legally possible in about half the jurisdictions in Canada, and then most of those jurisdictions require the adoptee to be a citizen or permanent resident. https://adoptingback.com/adopting-back/canada-adult-adoption-law/

Oh geez, those registry rules. We used to make jokes about the Soviet Union: “papers please!” US Xenophobia will end up removing all their freedoms. It’ll be about “catching illegal aliens” but the effect will be total internal travel restrictions and tracking for US citizens. I really hope they wake up before it’s too late.

I have an upcoming trip with a US transfer. We booked it before Trump won and started these shenanigans. We worry that the declining traffic will cancel our direct flight and we’ll be left scrambling to find an alternative route. We also worry about US Customs now more than we used to. It would cost us ~$1300 for the two of us to reroute, and we’re seriously thinking about it just to reduce our risk.

In unrelated news, most of the lettuce in the store in grown in the USA. We went shopping yesterday and all the Canadian produce was sold out while the US stuff was sort of rotting. Well, we found romaine hearts grown in Mexico, so we bought that. Thanks Mexico-bros.

Long lazy meandering answer.

My degree is in geophysics, so I’m somewhat professionally connected to the world of resources. So that’s where I get that angle.

Physics, as a degree, is somewhat of the universal bullshit detector, since you learn to take what people say and run back-of-napkin math to figure out what is or isn’t realistic. “Now hang on, that doesn’t sound right… let me check…”

Aside from that, I’m also a fan of historical fiction, geopolitical games (EU4, etc.), and my spare time pursuits tend to send me down research rabbit holes, disentangling the fiction from reality. Largely for my own amusement. But it comes in handy on trivia night if the topic is the Teutonic Knights or something.

In grad school I’d hang out with the philosophers, geographers, and others that were asking large questions with beer in hand. “I’ll buy you a beer if you can convince me the electron is real.” was not a pickup line, but the start to several hours of liquored debate.

I’ve been known to be mildly politically active, and sort of on top of the pulse. But never an activist or anything. Observing and predicting is fun.

Today I was in Google Earth just looking at the continent of North America, looking at it as though I were the US playing a strategy game. The major areas of contention right now for the US are: Greenland, Panama, Mexico, and Canada. It’s like he is establishing future boundaries at the edges of the continent – like it is an affront that borders exist on it. Upon further contemplation, Canada is fucked if this is what they’re doing. So I created !mapleresistance@lemmy.ca to start organizing – maybe the space will grow organically.

But, no, I don’t subscribe to higher end geopolitical info sources. That doesn’t mean I eschew them either (ISW was particularly interesting at the start of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine). I just integrate or search for info when questions are interesting.

You’re not wrong. I just like to point out the actual logical folly now and again so that people in the middle (if any are left) can see the folly.

And my axis?

I just saw Apocalyptica last night. That’s Metallica on three Cellos… close enough?

And Kim

One of them just needs to claim they were broadcasting their plans, as an experiment in psychic receptivity (or make up a word that sounds more new age jargonish).

Not a bad take.

The problem here is that the US doesn’t need Ukraine for any of those things. They have their own deposits. The problem is that the US or Ukraine and everyone else does not have any significant capacity to process these minerals – China does. You’re not building a rare-earths refinery in Ukraine during a war or occupation – too easy of a target. So unless the US builds such a beast at home, it’s entirely irrelevant what Ukraine has or otherwise.

Furthermore, as a nervous Canadian, I worry about the same stupid rhetoric being used on us. We don’t produce rare earths, because we don’t process rare earths. But damn do we have a lot of potential deposits. Trump only sees the value of the potential deposit and not the actual produced products. It’s boneheaded but they don’t care.