I imagine the idea is to use a tried and true high quality but ultimately basic 70mm tube missile and aim it really smart which is a good cost effective way to deal with swarms.

You had the Hydra 70 to APKWS launched by the VAMPIRE.

Every time that radial border division map of Europe centered on Vienna comes up, now we’ve got an American answer in the form of a striped border division.

https://bostonraremaps.com/inventory/maas-utopian-european-union/

An extraordinary map of a proposed European Union … in 1920!

A striking, enigmatic and very rare map illustrating a complex utopian scheme for a prototype European Union after the First World War. It was produced by “P.A.M.,” an elusive figure, probably laid in loose to a 24-page pamphlet (not included here) describing his plan in elaborate detail.

https://lemmy.today/pictrs/image/dc2da395-9cf6-4a84-9325-81f8d11bf032.jpeg

cultural wasteland

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territories_by_historical_population

According to this, Nevada only had 110k people statewide in 1940.

In 1940, New York City had 7.5 million.

Gotta have people to produce cultural output.

These are not official state foods. They are what the source website has decided to appoint as the favorite food for each.

https://web.archive.org/web/20190622015744/https://www.cookingchanneltv.com/recipes/packages/50-state-foods

This is a list of official state foods:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._state_foods

EDIT: Corrected link; source page is down and had originally linked to wrong page. Used archive.org to get to original.

except Norway and Iceland.

I mean, hardly seems fair to blame them for that. This is an EU initiative thing, and they’re not in the EU.

This is like me saying “lots of US states turned out to vote for Harris, but the Canadian provinces and territories have not been pulling their weight at all”.

EDIT:

https://citizens-initiative.europa.eu/initiatives/details/2024/000007_en

European Union

European Citizens’ Initiative

Stop Destroying Videogames

Mbin shows only a comm… magazine logo and its name, but instance URL is hidden.

Hmm.

That’s a little annoying, but if you have your mouse hover over the name, it looks like mbin has a pop-up showing the instance.

Anadyr, which lacks permanent road access, is reachable only by aircraft or limited seasonal maritime routes

Hmm.

I’m not sure that that’s such a great idea from Russia’s standpoint. Yes, Ukraine probably can’t just do a repeat of what it did before, which was drive trucks through Russia loaded with drones. But the flip side is that Anadyr Airbase is a mile from the Pacific shore:

https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/75690390

If Russia has trouble intercepting Ukrainian USVs in the Black Sea, I’m skeptical that they’d be able to intercept USVs dropped off an innocent-looking cargo ship or something, and if those can launch UAVs, now you’ve got all your valuable eggs in one basket in an area that has a lot less buffer to defend. Probably doesn’t even place Ukrainian special operators at risk the way the truck operation did. It’s not that far off shipping traffic from Alaska to Asia:

I’d have put them somewhere remote and inland and put air defenses up there. US Minuteman silos are in the center of the landmass, away from oceans.

Gorelkin concluded the post by assuring readers that “the assets of Lesta Games will soon come under state control and then, most likely, they will be handed over to a specialised Russian company”.

World of Tanks, like other Steam games, does not run in a sandbox the way mobile games do.

This means that anyone who can control the ability to push updates to a game can run whatever code they want on anyone’s system who has the game installed, can access any data on the system that the user running Steam can access. Credentials, email, whatever. All you need is a backdoor or even an intentionally-introduced buffer overflow in the code that talks to the centralized servers.

A publisher’s control of a game on Steam is equivalent to access to the computers that play that game.

Just saying.

The Russian statement sharply criticized Belgrade for undermining traditionally close ties and accused it of profiting from the blood of brotherly peoples.

I mean, Russia is manufacturing artillery ammunition and using it in Ukraine. Surely anything that Russia would object to Serbia doing, Russia is also doing?

Thanks, fellas! I guess the first need would certainly be to fully archive the community in question, i.e.: https://lemm.ee/c/eurographicnovels.

Hmm. Yeah, if anyone’s posted images there to the pict-rs instance on lemm.ee, those will presumably be going down too.

checks

Yeah, like, you just posted this image yesterday. Like, post text federates, but other instances won’t have copies of the images.

EDIT: Normally, though, people are going to be posting to pict-rs on their home instance, so it’s just users on lemm.ee who are going to have the problem; images posted by people elsewhere should stay up.

Probably a good idea. It looks like this community’s mod hasn’t been active for a year, so I doubt that he’s going to be migrating this one.

https://lemmyverse.net/communities?query=adventure+game

…also turns up some point-and-click game-specific communities:

• !kentucky_route_zero@lemmy.world

• !mutazione@lemmy.world

• !spiritfarer@lemmy.world

• !kingsquest@lemmy.world

I don’t see a genre-specific community, though.

https://www.twz.com/air/what-ukraines-unprecedented-drone-attack-means-for-russian-bomber-force

Prior to the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Russia was estimated to have nine A-50s in active service. As well as the two combat losses since then, one of these aircraft was damaged in a drone attack while on the ground at a base in Belarus. As it stands, prior to yesterday, the best-case scenario involved seven of these aircraft in active service.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johan_de_Witt

The brothers were shot and then left to the mob. Their naked, mutilated bodies were strung up on the nearby public gibbet, while the Orangist mob ate their roasted livers in a cannibalistic frenzy.

Why would Zelenskyy even contemplate a deal with the US with the current fascist administration?

• Zelenskyy has no reason to care about domestic politics in the US. It’s not his job to produce domestic change in the US.

• Any kind of arrangement that the US makes with Ukraine that aligns future US interests with Ukraine’s future is probably a good move from Ukraine’s standpoint, at least in the short term, for Ukraine. If there’s no Ukraine down the line, then there’s nothing the US gets. If you’re in the middle of an existential war, it is a good move to borrow money from other countries, since now they have a considerable interest in your future well-being.

• A lot of what Trump does is actually political theater for his domestic political base, with a lot of rather misleading bark and little bite. I find it very distasteful, but often what he’s doing is to take an action that sounds very substantial, and then amounts to rather little, like his claims during Term 1 that he would “tear up” NAFTA that mostly came down to renaming it and some small tweaks, or Term 2 having his (highly objectionable, threatened) global tariffs increasingly look like they’re turning into negotiating trade agreements. Trump has thrown around enormous dollar values that have little to do with the value of any kind of proven mineral reserves in Ukraine, and I’ve read a bit of expert commentary pointing out that it’s absolutely unclear where he’s gotten any kind of valuation that looks anything like the large numbers he’s mentioned. However, it’s a pretty good bet that his base has no idea what the value of anything in Ukraine is, so he can go back to them and say that he’s just made a huge financial gain for the US in Ukraine. If you’ve paid much attention to how he runs domestic politics, a lot of what he does involves making highly-misleading statements to people in the US who are not terribly-well-educated to gain their support for policies that often don’t wind up looking a whole lot like the impression that he’s giving them. I’m not going to excuse that. I find it abhorrently dishonest, personally. But it does rather suggest taking a rather large grain of salt on a lot of statements that Trump makes.

• Assuming that any such deal actually happens, and depending upon how this is structured, future administrations that are not Trump may have the option to just terminate any agreement and obligations. I’m very dubious that even the majority of the Republican Party is concerned about this, much less the Democrats.

• Ukraine could probably find various ways to terminate it as well, de jure or de facto — they’re a sovereign state, which creates a lot of room for pulling levers. For example, maybe they impose a tax on the mineral extraction industry that just happens to eat up all the profit it makes or something like that. What really matters, I think, is what expectations would be down the line — does the US actually expect some kind of payment? It’s not something that would come up for some time, not until after the war.

• From what limited attention I’ve been paying, I believe that part of the proposed arrangement involved the US committing capital. Depending upon the terms of that and any extraction, it could potentially amount to effectively transferring wealth from the US to Ukraine.

• What Trump was grousing about — and I have no idea if that’s his real concern or not — is that past US aid was in the form of a grant, whereas a large portion of the EU aid to Ukraine was a loan, where Ukraine needs to pay it back, and that it’s a poor arrangement for the US to be gifting and the EU just lending. Now, Trump’s also glossing over the fact that the EU loans are on reasonably-favorable terms. He’s not mentioning that last I checked, the EU was ahead in total aid. And he’s not mentioning that you could probably challenge the dollar value of some of the US (well, and EU) aid in military form, since some of the military hardware was designed to fight Soviet hardware and would probably have limited use elsewhere. But he does have a point. I wasn’t very enthusiastic about the EU offering loans rather than grants when that went through — I mean, Ukraine’s in a pretty tight place — but I wasn’t out calling the EU extortionate either.

  Not to mention, I’d add, that Ukraine isn’t planning on joining the US in any sense other than maybe the limited benefits of being in NATO; Ukraine would join the EU, not the US, so there’s a considerably more-limited US economic return. Ukraine would like to join the EU and the European Single Market, giving the European Single Market benefits in terms of scale and resource access, whereas the US wouldn’t see any sort of direct economic benefits from that, as there’s no US-EU free trade agreement.

  Now, I should make the very significant point that in World War II, US Lend-Lease aid was initially presented as being a loan to help assuage US voters upset about all this stuff being given away, then later essentially forgiven. The same happened with the Marshall Plan. I have wondered whether it’s possible that the EU intends basically a repeat of this political strategy, or at least to do no more than to use the loan as political leverage WRT the Ukrainian government down the line during EU accession or something like that. But Trump’s got a very real point, that the form of US and EU aid has not taken the same form. If you’re angry at Trump for asking for some level of repayment of that grant in some form, you should probably also maybe ask whether the EU should consider converting its aid to the form of a grant.

Now, I personally don’t think that Trump’s ask is justified, especially after the fact. I’ve got no interest in having us ask for some sort of mineral rights in Ukraine. But I think that there’s a fair bit of context to take into account.

If an agreement is signed and made public, then I’m sure that there will be legal and economic analysis and we can see what it actually amounts to. My own take is that I’d rather not have the US involved in it in the first place. But I think I’d see what’s actually in it before I got too upset.

searches YouTube

A 1997 documentary about the dialect, The Ocracoke Brogue:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Uuzr_gl4Oo

Well, in Zelenskyy’s defense, I don’t think that anything he’d have done differently would have likely substantively have altered the outcome.

The UK also said that it’d send a “peacekeeping” force – I use the quotes here, because that’s the phrase they used, though it wouldn’t really fit the technical definition of a peacekeeping mission – but only if the US backstopped it…but the US has already said that it won’t backstop European forces in Ukraine, so it’s kind of not much of a commitment. I was watching a video on YouTube of someone hammering a British defense official…maybe John Healey? about that point. He kind of kept sidestepping the question.

And I’ve seen a lot of discussion in European news and discussion that seems to be less about Ukraine – a near-term concern – and more about how this impacts Europe on a much-longer-timeframe, like talking about reinvigorating defense industry, which doesn’t make me incredibly hopeful that the top priority here is Ukraine.

John Mearsheimer had some recent video that was completely dismissive of Europe, said that the UK and France are definitely not going to send any forces into Ukraine. He’s always been pretty negative on Ukraine, but it was another datapoint.

Michel Kofman said recently that Europe does have the ability to draw a line in Ukraine. I think that the real question is political will. This would require decisive movement in a limited time window.

This doesn’t sound like it’s really a new proposal:

Though variants of the proposal have been discussed without making progress since Russia launched the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, a fresh version of the plan has gained renewed impetus this week after Zelenskyy’s acrimonious meeting with US president Donald Trump on Friday.

So it’s already been discussed. I don’t know how much weight to ascribe to “renewed impetus”. It doesn’t sound like there’s yet a commitment.

That being said, it certainly beats there not being a “renewed impetus”. It could potentially develop into something real.

But at this stage, I don’t think that it’s yet over that hump.

[continued from parent]

Kendall-Taylor: Remind listeners too who was president in Riyadh. It was the head of the Russian Direct Investment Bank, which is a clear signal of the way that the Russians are approaching the administration.

Kofman: Yeah, they’re pitching them business deals. They’re trying to, in their mind, outbid Ukraine. Offering greater opportunities. And they’re trying to position sanctions against Russia as a big opportunity cost for us, which it isn’t. Even before those sanctions…if I were to show you the net volume of trade between US and Russia, it was tiny. Even though it had some critical material categories in there, like titanium and whatnot, things that are important to certain industries. But nonetheless, it was incredibly small. It was Europe that the principal balance of trade with Russia, not us. There isn’t a rush to the door of companies trying to get back into Russia – I’m sorry, you’re not going to see this. To me, Trump’s approach is much more looking for wins right now, and things that can be declared as wins rather than big-picture strategy. I also think that your question about Russia and China…isn’t really the way they’re thinking about it and wouldn’t work anyway. I don’t think that they’re trying to pull Russia away from China, and I’ve been very public in the past that I don’t think that that would work; I think that this is a magical misreading of Cold War history and I’m happy to get into why, but it’s…the sort of thing that briefs well and policy wonks can talk about but doesn’t work in practice. I don’t think that they’re trying to do that, though. From what I’ve seen, Trump does have some guiding views and preferences. If I may summarize them, and I’m no expert on the Trump administration, but it’s great-power politics over alliance bloc politics. It’s trying to end wars that he thinks are bad for everyone economically. Even if he doesn’t have the correct perception of who started the war, why the war took place, or what the consequences are of ending it, he’s prioritizing ending it in some shape or form. It’s pursuing naked-self interest over allies or traditional values. Kind of the old Lord Palmerston quote of “there are no permanent enemies and no permanent friends, only permanent interests”. A lot of conversations I have about the Trump administration seem to be people observing that someone has put a hole in the wall and trying to draw a target around it after the fact. It’s like post-hoc rationalizing of what’s taken place. I’m wary of that approach.

Last point. On my last comment about casualties, keep in mind that this is just a dart thrown at a wall by me, not statistics that you should take to the bank. Please don’t take that as “Mike Kofman gave a hard estimate” – there’s a pretty big cone of uncertainty on that.

Kofinas: Thanks for that. Next hour, want to talk about nuclear doctrine. Are we looking at a new approach to foreign policy that will transcend administrations, and what sort of world order will that create? Like, more realpolitik. Also want to talk about future of security in Europe. One thing that we can all agree on right now is that Europe has a lot of problems. [Kofinas then promotes a premium subscription for additional content.]