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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: August 20th, 2023

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  • It’s mostly been conservatives that have a problem with this, not progressives for the most part. I mean sure some progressives are against but they’re by far the minority.

    I know progressives and democrats, and conservatives and Republicans, aren’t the same thing, but you get the picture. I think most on the left would prefer to stand up to authoritian genocidal governments, whereas many conservatives crazily see a lot they like in Russian government and want the US to embrace them.








  • France, Germany and the ECB worry about Russian retaliation targeting European assets, and also the potential impact on financial stability and the euro’s status as a reserve currency. There’s concern that depositors from emerging economies may be encouraged to pull money out of western banks, fragmenting the global financial system.

    US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen downplayed such risks in February, arguing that “there are not alternatives to the dollar, euro, yen.” She said that if the G-7 acted together then the group would be representing half of the global economy and all of the currencies that really have the capacity at this point to serve as reserve currencies.

    https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/why-seizing-russian-assets-to-fund-ukraine-is-fraught/ar-BB1jHeKz

    I agree with you, they should just be able to tap the assets directly. Basically some European countries are worried about the effects seizing assets could have on the Euro. Most of these assets are held in Europe as euros. The loan is actually an improvement over the original proposal though. Originally France Germany, etc were pushing only for the 3 billion in interest a year on the assets to be given to Ukraine. The loan solution was pushed by other countries who wanted to give them more cash from the Russian assets as a way to give $50 billion in cash immediately, with those yearly interest payments from Russian assets being used to pay off the loan.


  • Sure there’s economies of scale, but that is an absolutely ridiculous mind boggling number of a single surface to air missile system. Even Ukraine at it’s highest ask says 25 (though they estimate all major cities would be covered by 7), and you think they should make 100,000 batteries?! Every year?! What would be the point of that? Who on earth would buy that many and why?

    Even if they were manufactured at 20% of their current cost, a massive markdown, that would be $20 trillion a year dedicated to a single kind of a single weapon type, nearly as much as the entire gdp of the United States, and you still need the entire rest of your military paid for! They going to make 100,000 f35s and train 50,000 pilots too or something?

    I’m gonna stop, this must be trolling.




  • Millions even, we haven’t been this warm in millions of years! And same for our co2 concentrations. All done in the blink of an eye geologically speaking. We’ve reversed a natural Co2 trend in only 0.004% of the time!

    The commenter above you and anyone in doubt desperately needs to see these graphs:

    https://earth.org/data_visualization/a-brief-history-of-co2/

    If we follow projections and do nothing to change our behavior we’ll get to levels and temperatures not seen in hundreds of millions of years, all bascially instantly when compared to the the ability of life to evolve and adapt. Earth will survive, it’s been through worse. Gonna be rough on the humans though. We were 10c temperature above where we were then, but it would be even worse now of we got back to those co2 levels, becaue of differences in orbit and solar activity.


  • Yes. By all means primary one of those democrats who voted for this out if you can, but if you got to the general election and the choice was between a pro Israel Republican and pro Israel Democrat, it would still be way better to pick the dem.

    100% of house Republicans voted for this, while only 20% of house Democrats did. Right now the Republicans control what bills come to the floor for a vote since they have a majority. If Democrats had the majority and controlled the speakership, this bill never would have even come up for a vote in the first place since so few in their caucus support it overall. A pro Israel dem is not ideal, but at least helps ensure the 100% pro Israel (and a bajillion other reasons for being horrible besides this issue) Republicans don’t control the agenda for what bills come up in the house and senate.




  • What I mean is even now these sporadic cases happen every once in a rare while and always will as long as beef is farmed. It is impossible for cases to go to 0 anywhere because very rarely a cow can spontaneously develop prions. Like the last case in the UK detected two years ago didn’t result in massive culls and restrictions and things. A prion case in a cow was found in the US just last year as another example.

    The 90s were a bit different because it was very widespread due to feeding of animals to other animals, and it was hard to track exactly how far it would have got. Same for humans, most human prion disease is extremely rare and sporadic, but if humans start consuming each other it can become common. In humans the sporadic form is called CJD (creutzfeld jakub disease), the kind believed to be transmitted by cows is called variant CJD, and there was a kind that developed due to a funerary cannabilism practice in a certain tribe in papau new Guinea called Kuru. Because of the cannibalism practices it was able to become very common, similar to what happened in cows when they were fed waste products from other cows.