Compared to a golf-cart or dirt bike, a Ladoga is much better-suited for mechanized warfare.

I don’t know. Like, yes, by definition, a dirt bike isn’t what a mechanized unit uses; that’s a motorized vehicle. But…I think that there’s a fair question of how well the roles can match.

Specifically for nuclear war, then yeah, obviously the Ladoga is better. It’s got environmental protection.

But I’m not sure that light armor will necessarily have the role it has over past decades in the future.

The point of light armor is to deal with rifle and machine gun bullets – as in ambushes – and near-miss artillery fragments. It will work well for that.

I don’t know what portion of actual damage to Russian forces is presently coming from those, though. I mean, if the armor isn’t stopping what’s killing the thing, it might not buy much. It won’t stop top-attack ATGMs. It won’t stop drones carrying heavier munitions. It won’t stop guided munitions like GMLRS or guided artillery.

If we can provide enough tube artillery and shells, that might change. But if warfare here is characterized by mostly highly-accurate, long-range weapons capable of penetrating the armor that vehicles have…that armor might not provide much protection.

For an analog, think of how it used to be common for individual soldiers to wear heavy armor up until things like crossbows and firearms, long-range weapons that could penetrate it, killed it:

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

As firearms became better and more common on the battlefield, the utility of full armour gradually declined, and full suits became restricted to those made for jousting which continued to develop.

It’s not impossible that the same phenomenon could affect vehicle armor. Maybe not all vehicles, but it might make it a lot-less-valuable to have light armor.

And unarmored vehicles tend to be faster, which helps limit their time in a dangerous zone.

I think that a dirt bike, which might be good as a vehicle for a single person, maybe two, has some serious limitations – it can’t load up anyone if they do get hurt. It can’t pull towed equipment. It has a limited ability to carry supplies.

But it can also traverse trails that four-wheel vehicles cannot. It can be easily hidden. It is inexpensive and can be easily provided in large numbers. It is light and can be delivered via air. Many people each on a dirt bike are less of a concentrated target than a group of people in an APC; against a weapon that light armor doesn’t stop, the dirt bike may be more resilient than light armor.

In World War II, there were some very substantial successes that various militaries pulled off with bicycle infantry, which is pretty analogous; Japan’s rapid movement in the Battle of Singapore is probably the poster child for that:

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

The capture of Singapore resulted in the largest British surrender in its history.

Conventional British military thinking was that the Japanese forces were inferior and characterised that the Malayan jungles as “impassable”; the Japanese were repeatedly able to use it to their advantage to outflank hastily established defensive lines.

Despite their numerical inferiority, they advanced down the Malayan Peninsula, overwhelming the defences. The Japanese forces also used bicycle infantry and light tanks, allowing swift movement through the jungle. The Commonwealth having thought the terrain made them impractical, had no tanks and only a few armoured vehicles, which put them at a severe disadvantage.[25]

E-bikes can be very quiet.

There have been a history of unarmored vehicles that we’ve used in combat. And I don’t mean the Jeep, but in contemporary times.

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

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

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M1161_Growler

In reality, Germany became entirely dependent on Russian gas, oil and coal. Think about it as Schroeder, Merkel, Nord Stream. For some reason no one really talked about it.

It was left to Donald Trump to point out the contradictions and dangers in that position. When he did, everybody laughed and pointed to it as proof of what an idiot he was.

While I get that it was obnoxious to have the German contingent there laughing at him as he warned him – prior to Russia draining down Germany’s storage and then using it as leverage – that was also not Donald-Trump-the-individual. That will have been at the tail end of a long chain of warnings from the American government that eventually made it up to recommending that the President publicly comment on it. Trump won’t have been the one to identify it; he’ll just have been the last messenger in a chain of many.

The New Balance of Power in Europe is going to look a lot more like 1848 than 1948. In place of the Austrian Empire, however, will be the alliance of the UK and Ukraine, bound in a hundred year Covenant to secure the peace of Europe.

Ehhh. I think that that’s stretching things.

There were also EU member states who acted; the article is specifically talking about Poland.

I think that there is a fair accusation that the EU as an institution was not very active on this. I think that it’s also fair to say that there are some members who took a long while to move. But the EU isn’t a monolith, either: some member states did move.

And the EU-as-an-institution isn’t static and unchanging, either. Like, I don’t know what changes are being made, but I would assume that having been burned once, EU politicians are probably looking at what they can do to avoid a repeat. Countries don’t normally just sit there are get burned over and over. I would be reasonably confident that Russia isn’t going to be able to use natural gas access as leverage to split the EU again. Maybe it’ll be changes to the Single Market, maybe political changes, maybe counterintelligence stuff, maybe mandates on some minimum level of supply diversification, dunno.

https://www.verizon.com/coverage-map/

This shows that Verizon has good coverage in part of Wanaque, moderate coverage in part, and no coverage in part.

The planning board’s decision was based on health concerns due to the possible negative environmental impact of telecommunication on the residents, especially the children studying at the school who could potentially be exposed to electromagnetic radiation. The town felt the residents would be ‘unsafe’ due to radio frequencies and rejected the company’s notion of building the tower on the land.

I mean, I think that the planning board is idiotic, but I don’t see why T-Mobile cares enough to fight it. If they don’t build it, okay. It looks like the school in question is right in the middle of town. Then Wanaque is going to have crummy cell coverage. Let them have bad cell coverage and build a tower somewhere else. It’s not like this is the world’s only place that could use better cell coverage. The main people who benefit from the coverage are Wanaque residents. Sure, okay, there’s some secondary benefit to travelers, but if we get to the point that all the dead zones that travelers pass through out there are covered, then cell providers can go worry about places that are determined not to have have cell coverage.

If I were cell companies, I’d just get together with the rest of the industry and start publishing a coverage score for cities for cell coverage. Put it online in some accessible database format, so that when places like city-data.com put up data on a city, they also show that the city has poor cell coverage and that would-be residents are aware of the fact.

I don’t really use calendaring all that much, but when I do, I use org-mode agenda in emacs, which seems to do all the stuff that he’s complaining about not having. It does a lot more than I use.

That being said, I get that that’s probably not what he’s after if he’s not an emacs user.

and open-source.

Between the lead lemmy dev, dessalines, using Stalin as his profile picture and this guy using Goebbels, we’ve got a pretty WW2-retro vibe going on.

Sure. Heck, occasionally I do actually do that, like if I post a piece of information that I’ve looked up and then refer back to it later.

Ehh. I mean, if they were just banning sex toys, I could believe something like that, but doesn’t explain why they’d ban stuff other than sex toys simultaneously:

Etsy is also banning nudity for human models, including “gluteal clefts and female nipples/areolas.” If you’re selling a sexy item of clothing, for example, you must censor body parts, use a mannequin, or opt for just photographing the clothing.

“Sexual language” concerning incest or “referencing familial relationships” will also be banned now. The examples Etsy lists are “Daddy’s slut” and “Choke me Mommy.” As of publication, these terms are still searchable on Etsy, and so is nude content. Searches for “porn” come up blank.

They are the largest residential homeowners insurers in California, insuring 1 in 5 homes.

“The rate filing that State Farm just made yesterday (Thursday), they’re triggering a rarely used part of the insurance law,” said Soller.

"It’s a regulation meant to address a company’s financial solvency. That’s what they’re saying and we’re going to look closely at that, and we have some serious questions about State Farm’s financial condition and we’re going to get to the bottom of it. "

That actually sounds like a rather bigger deal that I first thought from the title, if they’re on the brink of going under…

Hmm. If the concern is the Etsy brand value, I’d just spin it off into a new company that does permit it. If you’ve already built a network of people selling and buying stuff and the software to do so, terminating it just sends the value of that to zero.

I don’t have a problem with doing this, but I don’t think that it’ll have much effect in policy terms.

Like, the states that are willing to guarantee abortion rights in their constitution are the states that are unlikely to pass a law ban abortions in the first place.

and Democrats across the nation hope similar measures mobilize supporters on Election Day.

I suppose it might do that, though.

It looks like a fair bit of it was TV-watching, which is now being displaced.

https://cdn.statcdn.com/Infographic/images/normal/15224.jpeg

https://cdn.cablecompare.com/2022/2/1644941050238-1._Average_Daily_Time_Spent_Watching_Television%2C_United_States_2014-2023.png

A proposed tax hike sparked unrest, but Kenya’s real problem is a debt crisis.

Around $35 million of that debt is owned by foreign creditors, primarily China and powerful international groups like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

But Kenya’s economic woes didn’t start recently; the nation’s immense debt stems from an economic boom in the early 2000s, when the government borrowed money from a variety of international creditors to fund public infrastructure projects, supporting agriculture and small and medium businesses and external debt servicing but failed to invest those loans in ways that could grow the economy.

China can lend on whatever terms China wants to, but isn’t the IMF supposed to sanity-check spending when a country comes to them for money, and reject loans if they aren’t going to produce a return?

kagis

https://www.imf.org/en/About/Factsheets/Sheets/2023/IMF-Conditionality

When a country borrows from the IMF, the government agrees to adjust its economic policies to overcome the problems that led it to seek financial assistance. These policy adjustments are conditions for IMF loans and help to ensure that the country adopts strong and effective policies.

Why do IMF loans include conditions?

Conditionality helps countries solve balance of payments problems without resorting to measures that harm national or international prosperity. In addition, the measures aim to safeguard IMF resources by ensuring that the country’s finances will be strong enough to repay the loan, allowing other countries to use the resources if needed in the future. Conditionality is included in financing and non-financing IMF programs with the aim to progress towards the agreed policy goals.

So, I’d think that at least one of three things happened here:

• The IMF’s requirements weren’t sufficiently-strong.

• The IMF’s requirements weren’t actually enforced; Kenya did something else with the money.

• Something unforeseeable happened (I assume that COVID-19 might have been a factor, as that impacted economies elsewhere).

reads further

Ultimately, even raising capital is a short-term financial fix to the long-term political problems of corruption, waste, and mismanagement. Efforts to undo those patterns are likely to anger the ultra-wealthy, whose businesses depend on corrupt relationships with the government to thrive.

Well, okay, but taking anticorruption actions can be a requirement of loans. Maybe the government has to decide whether they want to keep those connected people happy or get a loan.

looks back at IMF factsheet

They even list that as a condition that they can impose:

https://www.imf.org/en/About/Factsheets/Sheets/2023/IMF-Conditionality

Examples

Improve anti-corruption and rule of law

Some will, some won’t. Not a hivemind.

You can buy discs online.

I don’t speak French either – I just wanted an English-language article about the French elections, but you’re welcome.

Yeah, I was gonna say, I’m sure that you can find media here in the US that is going to provide useful political coverage of France, but I don’t think that this article is gonna be it.

kagis for Le Monde English

Hmm.

https://www.lemonde.fr/en/opinion/article/2024/06/29/french-elections-who-would-don-quixote-vote-for-today_6676135_23.html

French elections: Who would Don Quixote vote for today?

Ugh. This is not really what I was hoping for.

checks the BBC

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c2q0rv05p19o

French PM in final appeal to stop far-right victory

That’s better.

About 9% intercept ratio during Desert Storm, which was 30 years ago, but both the Patriot and the Al Hussain missiles were pretty much brand new.

Regarding being brand new, what I mean is that the Patriot existed for an anti-aircraft role, but its anti-ballistic-missile capability wasn’t supposed to have been done by that point.