BashfulBob [none/use name]

Curious that they have not yet banned the parenthesis.

Fair enough

lot of the army and its officers especially were former tsarists following the end of Russia’s involvement in WW1, but the bulk of the front line units were conscripts.

During the Russian Civil War? I’d be curious to hear how many conscripts were in the Red and White armies respectively.

But it does look like Russia used conscripts through Afghanistan. I suppose you’re right.

This feels like a two pronged assault against voting and being straight.

I do have to question the long term consequence of ad agencies associating waffish blonde girls with the most obnoxious and intrusive forms of digital advertising.

Hug of Death

DPRK isn’t doing active combat operations. The handful of DPRK mercenaries serving abroad are almost certainly there voluntarily.

They’ve got mandatory civil service, but that’s very different from going to the front lines to kill or be killed.

There’s YouTube tier content being cranked out by one or two insane people who really just want to make movies that can be good.

They tend to be short and punchy, rather than long form and complex. But the desire to make good art is too strong for people to simply ignore. They’re going to make it and they’re going to want people to see it and (if its good) its going to get spread around whether Disney wants to compete with it or not.

The real question is whether we’ll be able to get it quickly and easily, or whether its going to end up as the kind of media that you can only find if you know someone or have an invite to the right forum.

When a socialist state needs soldiers, it doesn’t seem like they need conscripts. People are willing and able, for the most part. It’s only when a state loses its socialist characteristics and begins to prioritize expansion over stability that we see things break down.

I feel as though we’re entering a period of low-budget indie movies that rock (your random assortment of A24s, really indie stuff like The People’s Joker, Hundreds of Beavers, etc).

And then we’ve got the AAA shit that is all style, no substance. AI means even the style is rubbing away.

I don’t think we’ll ever run out of “good cinema”. We’ve been making movies since the 1930s that have been incredible, and producing the back-catalog of Movie Mindset (anything before the 1980s, really) has become easier than ever. But I can see a point on the horizon where I’d never want to go into a theater again.

Jesus Christ don’t we have enough evidence at this point that replacing beautifully animated works of art with live action is always a bad proposition?

You only need to do this shit when you don’t want to pay a screenwriter or a director to do the designs for an original piece of art. “Oh, everyone liked The Movie: Animated? We can just gut the dialogue, set design, art, framing, story, iconic characters, and soundtrack, then tell people we made it better by using live performers.”

AI strips it down one more level and just changes how the art is rendered. Damn, the problem with Princess Monenoke was THE GRAPHICS WEREN’T GOOD ENOUGH. It’s not even “live action”. It’s just performance tuning.

Miyazaki getting the production crew from Homeward Bound and making a live action live animal film maybe could be fucking awesome. Idfk. But This. Ain’t. It.

Has conscription ever not been a total racket?

Capital =/= production or the real economy.

I think someone else referred to this definition before. But

“Capital (goods)” = “those durable produced goods that are in turn used as productive inputs for further production”

What is the difference, exactly? What is the 75$ difference? As a really shitty and lazy and probably somewhat flawed simplification- this is the “capital,” the “capitalization” you’re talking about.

No, that’s the marginal cost.

What’s more, a Marxist “all else equal” analysis would say the $75 difference in cost is ultimately a labor cost + profit. One big reason why Russia can build artillery cheaper than the US is simply due to its limited number of middle men between raw materials and deployed weapon.

That inflates the raw labor cost (the US MIC procurement system is a jobs program that rewards inefficiency) and extracts an admin fee at every step.

But that price differential isn’t capital. It’s cost.

Am example of capital would be the mineral gathering operation used to create explosives. Another would be the machinery to create the bomb housing. Another would be the training school for the engineers who assemble the bombs.

I’m feeling called out

That was more Right to Work legislation. The insourcing of Asian auto assembly was about Japan giving a bunch of Mid-Atlantic senators/congressmen a jobs program so they’d step off picking a trade war with the Pacific Rim nations.

re-capitalization may seem alluring to American nationalists but its actually dumb as hell.

China and India are recapitalizing to good effect. Russia is recapitalizing, and that’s why the country hasn’t collapsed under the weight of their stupid war. Germany is capitalized, and that’s why it can bully everyone else in the EU except France.

Meanwhile, the UK is just six banks in a trench coat and their economy is disintegrating underneath them. Saudi Arabia is trying to build out capital in excess of its oil drilling and desalination systems, but all MBS knows how to do is build Monaco over and over again in a big line. Hong Kong has fucked itself, because all the business assets are in Shenzhen and western nations no longer need a UK-backed financial bridge into China. Japan is increasingly just Tokyo plus Alabama, as all the capital wealth concentrates in a handful of metropoles.

Everyone else in the world does the actual work, Americans just need to do their part: consume

So much of what gets “consumed” from abroad is waste. Wasted textiles. Wasted foodstuffs. Disposable packaging and one-use commodities. Wasted energy from A/C cooling empty buildings and cars lined up in five mile long traffic queues. Technology that’s run at high capacity solely to put up fake shit on the internet. Technology that’s designed not to last longer than the next marketing cycle. It isn’t even stuff Americans get to enjoy. It’s Instant Trash that just molds in a factory somewhere. Grain during the potato famine. The Grapes of Wrath.

Americans have a bunch of jobs that desperately need doing - education, health care, infrastructure maintenance, logistics, waste management - that they don’t want to pay anyone to do. Consequently, everyone runs off and gets jobs in finance and advertising, because that’s the only shit that pays. So we have more and more of Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs putting up numbers on the domestic economy while fewer and fewer people know how anything in the country actually works.

But to say Americans aren’t “doing work” is absurd. Americans are chronically overworked. They’re perpetually exhausted. They’re a miserable, wrung out, and depressed. They’re not idle. They’re wasted. Americans are working overtime to produce excess waste.

I don’t think the US in its current form will ever actually onshore meaningful industry

We’re doing it with battery manufacturing as we speak. A big reason the Atlantic Coast is trending blue stems from re-shoring of automotive manufacturing, particularly with regard to EVs. In theory, we’d be doing it with semiconductor manufacturing, too, if we weren’t so far behind the curve.

What private investors want to do that when they can just buy real estate or insurance bonds or whatever, rent it or turn around and sell it all in a few years for a huge profit to some other investors trying to do the same?

Some private investors see value in real assets, even if they aren’t producing the immediate sky-high returns available in the IP markets. Yes, GE’s sort of blazed a trail of “don’t own anything except the debt of other industries” as a corporate model. But you’ve also got big energy producers like Exxon and construction companies like Bechtel that have huge investments in income generating capital projects. Even companies like Amazon and Microsoft are invested in data centers - which require material infrastructure, maintenance, energy, etc. For all the shit AI gets, its been an excuse to build out these enormous facilities for data processing that have value beyond whatever lies Sam Alton is telling people.

Trying to onshore industry to the US via protectionism won’t accomplish anything meaningful beyond “Americans can afford less shit.”

I disagree, but I guess we’ll see. I think onshoring means rebuilding the collapsed base of engineering, technical management, and logistics that we’ve let sag over the last 40 years. And I think it’s going to boost the quality of work for a vital sector of the national economy.

I imagine many of the Saudi elites have sympathy for Palestine or may even feel a religious conviction to stick up for them.

I don’t imagine that at all. The Saudi relationship with the Palestinians is a bit like the US attitude towards Puerto Rico.

After all Umma is one of the key principles of Islam.

Saudi Royalty’s relationship with orthodox Islam is fraught on a good day. Saying they’ve got an obligation… Idk, man. What obligation does Prince Andrew or Prince Harry have to Anglicanism?

The Iranians give about Lebanon shit, because they see Hezbollah as a valued ally in the region. The Egyptians and Turks and Syrians give a shit because they’re constantly in a tug of war with Israel over access to the Suez Canal. But the Saudis would be just as happy as any Zionist for Palestine to just vanish off the face of the Earth and call it a day.

It would be very funny to see Americans mald over rising treat prices, except…

1. This shit never seems to catch the biggest fish. They just send everything to a big warehouse in some exempted country (Indonesia, Korea, Canada, wherever) and have people put stickers on the widgets as part of the “final assembly process”, then insist that’s the country of origin.

2. People will pay $1500 for a “next gen” iPhone that has a slightly nicer camera and a chromium finish. The tariffs don’t seem to meaningfully impact our import rate.

3. Insourcing production to the US (assuming this is ever actually going to happen) is technically good for the American economy. Trump’s methods are ham-fisted and ill-conceived, but re-capitalization of the American economy would be an unmitigated good and would strengthen this cursed white supremacist state.

4. The whipped dog of the American proletariat only ever knows how to lash out at weaker and more vulnerable people around them. They continue to lack any revolutionary character that might actually harm the foundation of the bourgeois dictatorship.

I have no idea how anybody thought Ukraine could win anything, seriously.

The goal was never to win. It was simply to bleed an enemy via a proxy war. Operation Cyclone 2.

The winning move was to sue for peace immediately and avert as much devastation as possible

Debatable. After Georgia and Crimea, I’m not sure what the winning move was supposed to be shy of direct confrontation by NATO.

But when the game is to destabilize, eviscerate, and enslave whole nation states - and your regional arch rival has decided to Uno-Reverse-y your Neoliberal strategy - maybe the winning move is to stop playing this shitty, awful game.

Well There’s Your Problem: A podcast about engineering disasters, with slides