SeventyTwoTrillion [he/him]

the ratio of artillery is essentially a proxy for the casualty rate because this is an artillery battle. I remember an interview with a foreign volunteer in Ukraine who claimed that most Ukrainians never even get to see a Russian soldier, and when they do, it’s the slightest glimpse before they retreat and start blasting them with artillery again.

there’s a counterclaim that astshually it doesn’t matter that Ukraine is firing 10 times less artillery because they’re 10 times more accurate, but this is just a very strange claim; Russian artillery is superior to the West’s and any issues earlier on in the war with lots of misses have been largely solved by now

at the end of the day, who is constantly doing counteroffensives? Ukraine, not Russia. who is constantly needing to do mobilizations? Ukraine, not Russia. who is needing to kidnap people off the streets to funnel them into the military? Ukraine, not Russia. whose country is overflowing with graveyards? Ukraine, not Russia. most of Russia’s September mobilization - the only one they’ve done - hasn’t been devoted to the battlefield yet because they’re being properly trained and nurtured for some future role, which would be impossible if Russians were dying in large numbers as Ukraine claims.

truthfully I don’t know exactly how many Russians and Ukrainians have died, but claims that more Russians have died than Ukrainians is genuinely comical, like “Oh, I know this person is a complete dipshit and I know to never listen to them on any take if they can be so completely moronic here,” to me at this point, and I would genuinely be extremely surprised if the ratio was less than 1:2 in favor of Russia. Lukashenko thinks it’s 1:8, which is probably too high but like, he also probably has a better idea than me.

Typing is better than writing in a solid 75% of cases in my opinion. I agree that you tend to remember things that you physically wrote down better than things you type, but that can be mitigated against if you’re in a situation where you need to remember things with strategies like spaced repetition.

In a lecture setting I would prefer to physically write things down, but you also have to be careful with this and only try and summarize because many people have the wrong strategy and try and transcribe slideshows or the lecturer’s words verbatim, get halfway through a sentence, the lecturer moves on to the next page, you then have to try and remember the rest, probably get bits wrong, and by the time you’ve finished that then they’re on to the next page and you’re just not having a great time. If you get good at typing then you can keep up much better but that’s still not the right thing to do in the lecture hall, unless your lecturer doesn’t give out the notes or slideshows afterwards or record the lectures. then you’re just kinda shit outta luck.

In just everyday settings, like writing a shopping list, keeping reminders? probably on my phone or laptop.

Capitalism on the one hand, communism on the other… man, I just support a Third Position!

people like the hexbear news threads I guess

Russia has the power to stop the war and retreat.

Yes, but if they do this, Ukraine may kill hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people in the previously occupied territories, including Crimea. Such an outcome is obviously unacceptable to Russia. The Ukrainian fascist paramilitaries have seen the pro-Russian separatists as subhuman for many years.

Yeah the west and Russia where saber-rattling. But Russia choose to act and it.

Russia chose to act on it because it was quite literally the last moment they possibly could have done so, given the rhetoric at the time of Ukraine potentially joining NATO (and even Zelensky asking for nukes!). NATO attempted to provoke Russia into war for decades by marching their military forces towards Russia’s border and establishing anti-Russian governments in ex-Soviet countries. Many in Russia accuse Putin of cowardice because he didn’t act sooner against NATO and Ukraine and getting them into this mess now when almost every country of note has been converted into NATO vassals, far from opposing him for being a tyrant or whatever. I’m not saying that this makes those civilians correct, it’s merely outlining how Russia “choosing” to act on it might not have been a random act of cruel violence by Supreme Dictator Putin but instead an action informed by a whole bunch of factors and that the Russian government has generally been pretty non-violent up until this point even when America is directly spitting in their face and adding more and more countries to the Fuck Russia Club. The Russians might say that they heavily disagree with these countries having NATO membership because it imperils them - and it very obviously does - but when the Baltic states joined NATO for example, Putin didn’t march his army to conquer them in retaliation. When Finland joined, he didn’t send the tanks over the border. It was a measured decision by Russia to intervene in Ukraine, and it is important to have understanding beyond cliches.

The thing is putin will only use diplomacy on his on terms, and these terms alone will threaten the existence of Ukraines souveränity itself.

This is untrue. At the beginning of the war, in April 2022, Russia and Ukraine almost made peace along the lines of Ukraine regaining Kherson and Zaporozhye, and ceding control of the Donbass, which they already didn’t really control anyway due to the Donbass War that has been ongoing since 2014. Ukraine was also allowed to join the EU, but not NATO. The West - in the form of Boris Johnson - came along and told Zelensky to not make peace with Russia, and so the deal was cancelled. We know this because Putin showed off this unfinished peace deal to various African politicians earlier this year. Ukraine could have kept millions of people inside their borders and hundreds of thousands of men alive, and kept two oblasts that they now do not own, if they had taken this deal and ignored the West.

Even so, Russia stated numerous times that they were still willing to make peace. It is Ukraine that does not seem to want it, because their terms are always “If Russia completely withdraws their forces then we will begin to talk,” which is an absurd condition no matter whether you’re in the right or wrong in any geopolitical or military situation. You see this a lot in history, where countries say “Oh yes, we won’t declare war on you, you must only agree to a set of conditions that we know you will never accept,” because it makes them look slightly more reasonable to other countries for not just marching in there. I’m sorry, Ukraine could be the most perfect, utopian society that has ever graced the world and Russia could be the most barbaric, backwards, evil nation ever seen in world history, and I would still see Ukraine’s demand for Russia’s total retreat as ridiculous.

And victim blaming is never ok, even when you think the victim is an asshole.

The question of who’s the “victim” here depends on how far you’re willing to look back in history, what you think are relevant facts about the situation, whether you believe the 2014 coup was in fact a coup, whether you believe that Ukraine is plagued by fascist paramilitaries like Azov or whether they’re cutesy fun girl scouts, and quite literally hundreds of other things. I’m not even willing to be automatically contrarian and say “Actually, Russia is the victim and NATO is the aggressor!” because that’s also not correct, the situation is way too complicated. This isn’t Harry Potter vs Voldemort.

absolutely unfuckingbelievable. the entire entertainment industry just churns people through exploitative systems and phenomenally rich bastards and spits their husks out at the end, I would be amazed if piracy was affecting the outcomes of artists and musicians by even 1%. pretending that this is damaging the EU economy is also very funny, the Europeans are having zero troubles damaging their own economies by cutting off from China (read: acting as if they’re decoupling from China and then buying the exact same Chinese products through third countries at additional cost)

I thought Hexbear users didn’t assume gender.

apologies, we have pronoun tags on Hexbear so that we don’t have to assume, we can just know.

democracy is when most of your country disapproves of their elected representatives and authoritarianism is when most of your country approves of their elected representatives and yes, there are in fact elections in China and even (hold on to your hat for this one) North Korea!

Is democracy is the mere condition of being able to choose from two awful choices, or is it instead the condition of having a competent government of which most of the population approves of?

Could you see how it would be incredibly easy to create an authoritarian government if you decided to have effectively the same party swap power every couple terms, so long as you defined “democracy” as “the ability to vote for what party rules over your state”? Could you see how it would be much more difficult to fulfil the latter definition without actually addressing the concerns of the populace, which bad authoritarian states would have a hard time doing?

“authoritarianism” is the condition of one person, or group of people, having coercive or even violent power over another. all governments are authoritarian, obviously, and most are very authoritarian. Lenin’s definition of the state as the means for the outnumbered class (the rich, the elite, the bourgeoisie, whatever) to exert control over the working class is the most sensible and applicable definition I’ve ever found, and by that definition, and by the fact that people all around the world have to labor for the rich regularly to not starve or become homeless, all countries are generally pretty comparable in “authoritarian-ness”, making it an awful way of defining countries at all.

I really don’t think you guys are that out of pocket

Thank you. Most of us are pretty chilled out back on Hexbear, I spend my time trawling through news articles and trying to understand shit and many of us do the same. But as we are so surrounded by liberal talking points and views (in real life, with our families and friends, at work, or online on reddit, youtube, etc etc) that tend to be the most infuriating combination of a) utterly smug, b) utterly unquestioned, and c) utterly incorrect, and our origins were battling liberals on Reddit until we were banned, we tend to get a little frenzied when somebody comes along with a point we disagree with. Given that many - maybe even almost all - of us used to be liberals that got bullied and dunked on by leftists on that subreddit or on Hexbear, we generally believe in the power of insulting+educating (insulducating?) people into submission.

Every single one of us genuinely wants to create a better world, free of poverty, where everybody has a home and food and healthcare, without that requiring exploitation of people at home or abroad, for every demographic (except capitalists and fascists, but nobody is born either of those things). So our anger also comes from the frustration about how far away from these things and how liberals and liberterians and conservatives are so maddeningly dismissive of those things like “Yeah, that would be nice, but there’s a little thing called ECONOMICS” (as if many of us haven’t read many books on economics and history from experts old and new) or are like “That can be achieved with the profit motive and if people just worked a little harder!” and are so hyperfocussed on individualistic solutions rather than trying to implement systemic change.

And also American propaganda about other countries. Which I and others are especially attuned to due our aforementioned time spent going through western media in the news megathreads.

name your favourite anti-authoritarian system. you wanna have a revolution to create it? whoopsie doopsie, you’re literally forcing people (maybe at gunpoint!!!) to do something that they don’t want to do, you fucking authoritarian tankie monster. next you’ll be saying you want to get rid of corporations (extremely authoritarian over those business owners)

bro the United States has the largest prison population in the world and regularly overthrows countries they don’t like, the US is by far the most authoritarian country in the world by any sensible definition

this is what is meant by “permanent revolution” I believe

“the last time I looked at China’s economy was in 2005, but I reckon nothing much has changed there since then. hasn’t changed much since then in the West, so…”

This is just a silly argument. We’re already polluting those countries anyway with the current fossil fuel regime. We’re already putting massive quarries for the minerals currently needed for energy generation and transmission there (coal, copper, gold, etc). We’re already prospecting those countries for oil and gas. We’re already chopping down rainforests to get to all these resources, not to mention to clear land for cattle grazing for the titanic meat industry.

Mining has to be done somewhere to create a decent standard of living (though Western lifestyles require exponentially more resources than those elsewhere so we can make improvements on the demand side of things). What isn’t set in stone in that the extraction of resources has to be exploitative for the people living in those countries, nor that it has to be excessively environmentally damaging. Which it currently, absolutely is, because the capitalist profit motive dictates it to be so.

the unspoken (hell, sometimes spoken) assumption is that China would be doing a lot better with a Western-style neoliberal economy, which is an extremely funny assertion when all these economies are doing even worse than China is

there’s a manufacturing and possibly soon-to-be services recession everywhere. hyperfocussing on China while everybody else metaphorically (and literally) burns around them is just silly.

and, as others have said, the US is literally declaring economic war against China! again, it’s Schrodinger’s Sanctions! They both exist and are good, but also aren’t doing anything and it’s all that country’s fault! “Ooo, Russia is experiencing a fall in GDP in 2022, this proves that Putin’s war machine isn’t sustaina–” no, it proves that you’ve put sanctions on them! “Aha, Cuba and Venezuela’s economies are collapsing and they can’t afford enough basic necessities, this just shows how socialism is–” No, it proves that the sanctions that you actively boast about putting on them are working! “See, China’s economy is now not doing so hot (defined as “only” growing by like 5-6% or whatever), this is really a lesson in how Marxist econo–” Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that you’re putting sanctions on their industries instead, the thing you, again, boast about doing?

“See, this patient is blacking out when we put pressure on his carotid artery, this shows how their vascular system is simply inferior to our own (which isn’t being actively strangled)!”

Kautsky, just so Lenin would think I was cool

Showing that China is doing similar things to the US doesn’t seem like a strong argument if the thing the US is doing (in this case indefinite detention without trial in a horrible prison) is bad. Is the idea that post-federation there’s users who don’t view the US as doing bad things?

The problem is that liberals are operating on “Our country (the US, UK, a European country, etc) is better than China because of these reasons, China bad, 100 million dead” and so the idea is to first go “Actually, China isn’t doing anything worse than the United States is doing” and then later on go “…and, in fact, the United States is the one that’s by far the worst.” Basically to cushion the blow of having their worldview swept out from under them.

So the first step is to go “Oh, is China bad because they imprison people for revealing state secrets? Then look at all these people in your own countries that have done the same.”

And then the second step is to go “And, in fact, China has a lower number of incarcerated people than the United States despite having almost five times more people.”

of course, then they start blubbering about “buh buh buh, they’re lying and a-actually have trillions in prison and they’re killing them and xi is personally beating them because he’s evil and a monster and the CCP they’re bad and they–” but the seed of doubt has still been established

go outside then? the sun’s there

Do stars actually generate muons directly? From what I understand the muons on Earth are a result of cosmic rays colliding wtih particles in the atmosphere.

Muons are naturally generated by cosmic ray protons colliding with atmospheric molecules and creating pions, which then rapidly decay to muons and muon neutrinos. These themselves then decay into a bunch of other things.

If they do, how far do they travel before decaying? Even if they travel at relativistic speeds, they have a mean lifetime of 2.2 ns, so the math seems to say they don’t travel very far at all on average.

That muons can hit the Earth is one of the key pieces of evidence in favor of relativity, in fact. As you say, with a mean lifetime of 2.2 nanoseconds, they shouldn’t be able to hit the surface of the Earth, but because at relativistic speeds time dilation occurs from our frame of reference (or, equivalently, in the muon’s inertial frame, it sees the distance it has to travel be radically shortened via length contraction), they do end up hitting the earth.

Either way, are there any other sources of muons in the universe? I’m curious what the muon density distribution in the universe would look like.

I doubt it, because they decay so quickly. AFAIK you have to do it via the pion decay route, and all the muons we create are in particle accelerators. I guess it would be like how we create radioactive isotopes in hospitals on-demand for medical purposes that wouldn’t survive transportation to the hospital before decay, and couldn’t be stored long-term because, well, they would decay.

as an aside, Nature is rather more pessimistic about the discovery, which I think is reasonable.