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2 days agoApparently it’s an American English-British English difference.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/on_sale
(British, Australia) Available for purchase.
(US, Australia) Available for purchase at reduced prices.
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Cake day: October 4th, 2023
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That’s true, though IIRC there are two planes, and I think that one of them – and the more-numerous one – is a variant of some multirole fighter.
kagis
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kh-47M2_Kinzhal
Launch platform
- MiG-31BM/K
- Tu-22M3M
- Su-34 (reportedly)
- Su‐57 (planned)
Looks like two confirmed, another possible, another eventually (though I can’t imagine using the rare, intended-for-another-purposes Su-57 if they could use the others).
Ah, okay, gotcha.
So, there are a couple issues:
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I’d guess that Russia is able to prevent a surface ship from approaching Russia in any ocean unless someone can fight an offensive air and naval war to get control of that ocean.
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I’m guessing (you said “container ship”) that the idea might be to use a concealed civilian vessel that then unloads some kind of surprise attack. While disguised military ships have been used to conduct armed warfare before, the last time I can think of an example was British Q-ships in World War I; I’m not sure that this is still legal.
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Turkey has closed the Turkish Straits to warships due to the conflict, so technically no warships are supposed to pass, from either side. I’m I believe that it violates the convention governing this to either tell Turkey that the warship isn’t actually a warship or if Turkey knows but preferentially lets warships through. That being said, I guess theoretically Ukraine could assemble such an attack using a ship somewhere far away from Ukraine.
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My guess is that if Ukraine had a lot of long-range cruise missiles, they’d probably be using them in their own theater of operations, as they’re pretty short on them.
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I don’t think that Russia is using strategic bombers for the glide bombing attacks, so whatever the benefits of hitting them, I’m not sure that it would be a counter to the glide bomb attacks. kagis Yeah, this has the (much more numerous) Su-34 being used:
On or just before Thursday, an air force Sukhoi Su-34 fighter-bomber lobbed a single FAB-3000 bomb with pop-out wings and satellite guidance at a multi-story building Russian intelligence had identified as a staging base for Ukrainian troops in Lyptsi, 10 miles north of Kharkiv in northern Ukraine.
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northern ice sea…north of st petersburg.
The Baltic Sea?
I don’t think that there’s any realistic chance that Ukraine can make use of ships in the Black Sea. Russia built their military to contest the US in the Pacific – they’ve got a lot of long-range anti-ship weapons. That surplus capacity is why they’ve been blowing anti-ship missiles on land attack. I’d be pretty confident that Russia can keep a Ukrainian warship from surviving in the Black Sea. Where Ukraine’s pulling off naval attacks, it’s using either small, very-low-profile boats or even-lower-profile, mostly-submerged USVs. Russia apparently doesn’t have the sensor capability to reliably pick those up (and I imagine that Ukrainian strikes on radars probably also complicate that).
I have wondered about maybe Ukraine using larger UUVs that surface to launch a weapon. Such a UUV would have to be something that could be transported on a trailer, so there are some size limitations. But it might permit for a more-capable platform than the small USVs that are currently being used.
I don’t know what kind of anti-submarine-warfare tools Russia has available in the Black Sea, but if they aren’t able to detect the existing USVs, I would assume that they aren’t going to be doing better with UUVs.
EDIT: There’s a reference to a Ukrainian UUV project in progress here; it says that Russia is improving their ability to detect the existing Ukrainian USVs, so UUVs are becoming more important.
President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, in a post on Telegram, said Russia had used more than 800 glide bombs on Ukrainian targets in the past week. He issued a fresh plea in his nightly video address for better weapons systems. “The sooner the world helps us deal with the Russian combat aircraft launching these bombs, the sooner we can strike – justifiably strike – Russian military infrastructure … and the closer we will be to peace,” he said.
Well, I don’t know what kind of counter he’s aiming for. There are basically two that I can think of:
Long-range SAMs with sufficient range (and maybe mobility) to strike an aircraft launching glide bombs without being placed at risk. Ukraine’s has had some old long-range Warsaw Pact SAMs, but I don’t think that we’ve got more stores or production capacity. There are Patriots, but those are the only anti-ballistic-missile counter Ukraine presently has; using them as a counter for aircraft will cut into that. I suggested earlier that the SAMP/T systems that France sent, firing Aster missiles – which theoretically have an ABM capability, but at least earlier in the conflict, apparently weren’t intercepting them – might work, if the range is long enough.
Aircraft armed with long-range air-to-air missiles.
Russia’s newest glide bombs, according to this article, probably reach about 90 km.
To use it to directly support the front, that’s about how close they’re going to have to get. Maybe closer if they want to strike behind the front.
The US has the AIM-120. The latest version reaches 160–180 km according to WP. We have other long-range air-to-air missiles in development, but not in production today.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-Range_Engagement_Weapon
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIM-260_JATM
Europe has the Meteor:
Maximum range: 200 km (110 nmi)+[4] No Escape Zone: 60 km (32 nmi)+[5]
A Ukrainian aircraft firing those will need to do so at high altitude to leverage high range, use the aircraft’s fuel rather than the missile’s. That height will make it visible to Russian air defense, and the aircraft has to avoid getting hit by Russian SAMs.
The longest-range SAM that I’m aware of that Russia has is an S-400 variant:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S-400_missile_system
That can reach out 400 km with the right missile according to WP.
Now, there are a number of ways one might measure range (from what height? Are these “minimum maximum” ranges or the actual limit? Is this a no-escape range or the furthest the missile can travel? What altitude can it reach at that point?) So I can’t say “this is the range that Ukraine’s going to need” exactly. But if Russia can legitimately reach out about twice as far as any air-to-air missile, it seems to me that that’s going to be a problem for air-to-air missile use unless countermeasures or stealth or similar can prevent Russia from making use of SAMs.
Ukraine has been hitting S-400s with ATACMS, so those are, in turn, under threat.
EDIT: Another twist is that Russia also has long-range air-to-air missiles, and any Ukrainian aircraft trying to hit a Russian attack aircraft with an air-to-air missile is going to have to worry about those coming back the other direction.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R-37_(missile)
150–400 km (93–249 mi) [1] Up to 200 kilometres (120 mi) (RVV-BD)
Given that the longest-range variant there can reach out 400 km, that’s a pretty big buffer for Russia to work with. I believe that those missiles are intended more for hitting “large” aircraft, like bombers or the like, so a fighter might be a little better off, but I’d assume that something like an F-16 remains vulnerable.
In a “Russia versus NATO” scenario, there are stealthy F-35s that that missile probably won’t do much good against. But Ukraine’s not using stealthy aircraft.
Bare-nosed wombats can excrete four to eight scat pieces at a time and may poop up to 100 cubes a day. After the wombat defecates, the furry critter collects the two centimeter-sized cubes and places them around their territory, possibly to communicate with other wombats or attract mates, reports George Dvorsky for Gizmodo.
I imagine it depends on whether the opposite gender finds walls sexy or not. I don’t have a good feel for wombat aesthetics. Maybe they’re into pyramids.
EDIT: This looks more like Stonehenge-level construction than Great Wall of China stuff going on:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wombat
Wombats leave distinctive cubic faeces.[9] As wombats arrange these feces to mark territories and attract mates, it is believed that the cubic shape makes them more stackable and less likely to roll, which gives this shape a biological advantage.
The engineering prowess of the beaver, Australian-style.
I bet the image of one surrounded by poo constructions makes them less-appealing.
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
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.
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.
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:
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The IMF’s requirements weren’t sufficiently-strong.
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The IMF’s requirements weren’t actually enforced; Kenya did something else with the money.
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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
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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.
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.
Lemmy is not designed to provide reasonably-hardened anonymity in the sort of way that Hyphanet, I2P, or maybe Tor or something like that is.
I would not recommend using Lemmy if I were seriously concerned about government prosecution for content on it.
Lemmy’s a good alternative for something like Reddit.
Being libertarian doesn’t need mean one’s an anarchist (or even a minarchist!).
And he’s also libertarian in the sense that the unadorned word has been used in the US, a right-libertarian, rather than how it was historically used in Europe in an unadorned sense, left-libertarian, where I’d say that it was somewhat-closer to anarchism than the more small- or minimal-government right-libertarianism.
I mean, the whole thing doesn’t need to be destroyed for a bunch of pieces to be broken off.
There is, but that isn’t why I split it – comment #2 was an afterthought, dealt with a peripheral issue.
It sounds like it does radar and that it’s the radar antennas at issue, and there’s some separate antenna that they can use to communicate.
Also, a previous satellite of the same design that was manufactured by Airbus worked. So they know the likely system and that it’s a manufacturing problem. They don’t need to design a replacement from scratch, just manufacture it. They have one satellite up. And while their older satellites in the previous constellation are past their design life and aren’t as good, they’re apparently still functioning, and hopefully will for several years.
So it doesn’t sound that bad.