freagle

Funnelling weapons into the losing side of a war is how you get a forever war that devastates the losing side. The West has done it for years. They are killing Ukraine with this strategy.

The idea that Russia isn’t serious about peace sort of flies in the face of the last 30 years of Russian diplomacy. Since 1992, Russia has only had military conflicts with a handful of countries and only at their borders and never to occupy or ethnically cleanse. In the same time, the US has had military conflicts with over a dozen countries none of them around their border, with some countries completely devastated and leveled, at lease one active genocide, and with massive extractive occupation. Russia spent the 90s and early 2000s trying to join NATO to establish a framework of mutual security with the West and the West not only refused but basically strung them along saying that maybe someday if they’re good. Eventually Russia realized the West has no intention of establishing mutual security and now we’re here, where Russia is running out of options if it wants national security.

Security assessments from Western intelligence organizations has repeatedly stated that Russia is not discussing, is not planning, and has not the capacity to invade and occupy all of Ukraine, or any more of Europe. The idea that Russia is just trying to win territory and then it’ll just keep doing it is the premise of Command and Conquer: Red Alert, not a serious assessment of the reality of Russian capabilities and plans.

The path to peace was exactly what Russia was asking for over decades - a mutual security framework. All security is mutual. The reason France and England are at peace with each other is because they have a security framework that incorporates the security needs of both countries. The reason Europe and Russia are not at peace is precisely because the European security framework excludes Russian security needs and does so knowingly and explicitly. How many times have we heard “Russia cannot decide who gets to join NATO”. That’s literally saying “Russia has no legitimate national security concerns that we have to take seriously”. In essence, Europe cares if Europe feels threatened by Russia, but Europe does not care if Russia feels threatened by Europe. That imbalance is the cause of the conflict.

So yes, if we want peace, the answer is to stop the fighting, and the fighting would have stopped over a year ago if the West had stopped propping up Ukraine with weapons, but also, the fighting would not have even started if the West hadn’t been bringing in weapons and military and nuclear readiness to Ukraine in the first place. So it’s sort of silly to say the West should stop arming Ukraine to end the war because the war exists because the West was arming Ukraine in order to create the conditions for war in the first place.

It is the West that is untrustworthy here.

Well, that’s a complicated story. Nvidia took out $25Bn in loans to make the chips. Microsoft has enough cash to survive for 80 years without making a single dollar of revenue starting today. So the first batch of chips were paid for with 1st party cash reserves. But then the a.i. companies emerged and they actually didn’t have enough cash to buy the chips. So Nvidia invested its cash reserves in the a.i. companies, and the a.i. companies then used that investment money from Nvidia to buy chips from Nvidia. So in the second large tranch of purchases, Nvidia was paying Nvidia.

For data center construction, the a.i. companies can’t pay for data centers because they aren’t credit worthy enough for it. So data centers are predominantly being funded by the Magnificent 7 in one way or another. Some of the a.i. companies have partnered with a Mag7 sponsor to piggy-back on the Mag7 build outs and use their new data center space.

Mag7 data centers are falling into two categories: 1st party and 3rd party. Mag7 data centers built 1st party are being funded directly by the capex budgets of Mag7. They have strong limits on how many simultaneous capex projects they can do because this money hits their balance sheets and each project is huge. But 3rd party builds do not have those limits. 3rd party builds are limited by lending, which is limited by risk. Essentially what’s happening is Mag7 OpEx budgets are being committed to future leases on data centers that aren’t built yet, and then banks are lending money to builders against those leases. The leases are them sold into the securities market so that the banks can maintain liquidity and keep the pipeline flowing.

Which sounds a lot like the subprime mortgage crisis all over again. A whole bunch of financial institutions are sitting on massive securities that derive their value from the future revenues of leases for data centers that don’t exist yet, and the majority of data center projects are failing.

In the end, there is no direct precise answer to “who’s paying them to do it” but the accurate holistic answer is “the blob” or “the machine”. The corporate-finance-military-industrial-state elite bloc.

No, that’s what bankruptcy is for. But of course, they won’t make you pay damages, you’re too poor and they’re not stupid. Once damage goes above $X it becomes a felony charge and they’ll make an example out of you so that no one else is brave enough to copy you

No. Ostensibly they are for processing. Data storage is a solved. The amount of storage available today is massive, abundant, and low power. These data centers are to house the over 12GW of Nvidia chips that were sold and are currently sitting in warehouses doing nothing. They don’t want to accumulate your info, they already have it. They want to process it in real time along with everything else they’re storing and capturing using these Nvidia chips.

It’s not for storage. Storage is cheap, low power, and abundant. It’s for processing.

A little false equivalency there - Iran is selling arms to Russia, which is not the same thing as helping Russia attack Ukraine. The US is not merely providing weapons to Ukraine, it is providing logistical support, satellites, comms, targeting data, authorization to fire certain missile on a per missile basis. If Iran was a target for selling arms, then China and the US would be under constant attack by everyone in a conflict.

She is a Nazi, and she is supporting Ukraine. That’s commensurate. And the fascist regimes want her endorsement because she has a following, which means she’s figured a propaganda position that works for a meaningful amount of the population

Fuck, world war 3 is metastisizing

OH hah

Way to just accept the framing of the censor without any amount of critical thinking what so ever.

There is no way to avoid your writing getting copied if its in digital form because even on a single device it must make copies of it in order to function. So your choices are a) encrypt it or b) don’t digitize it.

Oh look, classified American biolabs in Ukraine…

You think Putin and Xi made the US invade and attack over 14 countries since 1992?

Sure, but that’s why we are the only country in the world to charge prisoners hundreds of dollars a day for the privilege of being in prison, on top of the price gouging for basic services.

86 year old AND 2 subsequent generations of his bloodline - his daughter and his granddaughter

I’m still trying to work my way through the morass of the OHCHR report that is the source of the claims of “thousands murdered by the regime”, and one of the more curious things is that it was published under the guidance of Michelle Bachelet, former president of Chile and certainly not someone I would have imagined would publish a report with such paper thin backing.

Lol, imagine thinking the ultraminority of the planet are “normal people”.

The US has passed a law that it reserves the right to invade The Hague if any US people are arrested by the ICC

Accumulated wealth is managed by specialists in the field of wealth management. If you make your money by being born into it, your family already has a wealth manager. The wealth manager is paid a small percentage of a very large amount of money as a salary. This is literally what hedge funds and wealth management offices are for.

So no, the wealth does not manage itself but the wealthy do not manage their own money directly. Further, wealth management is not something that requires even 10 hours per week and certainly not 50 weeks a year. So again, those that work have very little money and those with money do very little work.

Also, you think it’s riskier to manage money than to do roofing? You have no idea what risk is. You personally would never risk your life by working a dangerous job but you can’t see your own ideology blinds you by making you believe real risk is losing numbers on a spreadsheet.

By the way, at the level of wealth management, risk is easily mitigated with what are called hedges (hedge funds, get it). A hedge is when you decide to put some of your money into one place that has some risk of loss and put some other of your money into another place that has a similar chance of growth based on similar factors. For example, if you invest in corn, and the price of corn goes down, you could lose some money. So, whenever you invest in corn, you also invest in something that benefits when the price of corn goes down, so for example you might invest in pigs, who eat corn. Price of corn goes down, lose money, but also, cost of feeding pigs goes down so margin goes up so gain money. There we go. Risk managed.

Come to terms with it. Your belief that money comes from hard work is entirely wrong and not backed up by the evidence. It’s a fairy tale. We have a few heroic rags to riches stories, we embellish them and tell them to each other and our kids, because when we’re poor that’s all we have to give to our kids, stories. The reality is that the rich don’t work and the working don’t get rich and it’s been that way for centuries.

So a) you admit the point of capitalism is not to work for money but rather to stop working for money and b) every parent that works hard to make sure their kid gets more financial security at the start of their life reduces the amount of work their kids need to do and c) at the upper end of that spectrum, where parents buy their children rental properties or set them up with trust funds, is filled with all of the wealthiest children who, in fact, do not work for their money.

You know exactly how the system works because you have been studying it in order to make yourself financially independent but you fail to reconcile reality with your ideology.

The hardest workers under capitalism make the least - the parents raising kids while working two jobs. Manual labor jobs almost always pay less than bank jobs, and they require longer hours. Think about all the people you have ever met who are on disability leave - they worked in office jobs making $150k/year? No. They worked manual labor jobs for significantly less pay, longer hours, and their bodies are now wrecked because of it. Meanwhile the real estate agents who work part time in the richest parts of the country are pulling in a couple million, have almost zero risk to their bodies, and are in a position to get the absolute best deals on rental properties.

Money is totally unrelated to work except for a very tiny sliver of the spectrum. The biggest factor in your money is your position in the economy - which you first inherit from birth, and then navigate based on the means your family had to support you, and then navigate based on the network you were able to cultivate during the time your family supported you, and finally based on the network your were able to cultivate in your early career.

If you’re born into wealth, you already have the money, you don’t have to work. You are in position. You can work, but it’s not required, and the work you are likely to do will be far far easier than manual labor jobs and will pay far far more because of your positioning.

If you are born into poverty, not only will you be working to support your family by the time your 16, your family will be struggling to support you and you will lack the opportunities to build the network required to land high paying low effort jobs, which the rich child has in spades.

You don’t want to work hard anyway. If you did, you would be out there digging ditches with a mattock or laying concrete or doing manual demolition. Not for you. You’re going to work smarter, not harder. And when you have some money, you’ll use it to make sure it starts working for you so that you don’t have to work.

That’s the whole goddamned point of the system. Everyone is incentived to find a way to stop working. Doesn’t that seem like a contradiction to you? That the only way (in your words) to make money is to work for it and yet the whole point of having enough money is to not work? Really makes you think. Maybe the people with money aren’t actually working for it. Maybe the money they have is working for them and they’re doing whatever the hell they want because they love it and it’s rewarding and it doesn’t require them to work 14-hour days 6-days a week to put food on the table and raise their kids. Maybe in fact the people with the most money actually work the least.