Yeah, the whole "you can't have any money, and you also can't leave the country" bit... like just imprison him at that point? How is this in any way meaningfully different from just jailing political dissidents?
Even then, prisoners are at least supposed to be fed by the state (albeit not to a necessarily high standard...), this guy literally has to submit a document to gain permission to buy food?! (https://xcancel.com/hussedogru/status/1925845756927197233)
https://xcancel.com/yanisvaroufakis/status/1938607536887779553
@yanisvaroufakis
It seems that our rulers, here in the 'liberal' West, have homed in on a new way of turning a person into a non-person. Here is a man, Hüseyin Doğru, a German journalist (of Turkish origins, but not a dual citizen) whom the EU authorities have found a novel, immensely cruel, way of punishing for his coverage of, and views on, Palestine.
The German authorities learned a lesson from my case. Not wishing to be answerable in court for any ban on pro-Palestinian voices (similar to the court case I am dragging them through currently), they found another way: A direct sanction by the EU utilising some hitherto unused directive, one introduced at the beginning of the Ukraine war, that allows Brussels to sanction any citizen of the EU it deems to be working for Russian interests. Clinging to the argument that Hüseyin’s website/podcast used to be shown also on Ruptly (among other platforms), they are using this directive aimed at an ‘anti-Russian asset’ to destroy a journalist who dared oppose the Palestinian genocide.
In practice, this means that Hüseyin’s bank account is frozen; that if you or I were to give him cash to buy groceries or make rent then we would be considered his accomplices and subject to similar sanctions; it also means that if he were a civil servant, he would be fired; if he were a student he would be expelled from his university; if he received a pension it would be suspended; if he received any social benefit it would be frozen. It also, astonishingly, means that he cannot leave Germany! Last, but definitely not least, it means that Hüseyin cannot sue his government for turning him into a non-person but only challenge the European Commission in Brussels – where he is not even allowed to go!
Need I say more? Is it not abundantly clear that we live, today, in a nominally liberal Europe where, in a jiffy, your political and human rights can be rescinded, including your right to challenge your government in a court of law?
normal Western democracy hours 
The US is replacing both with the jltv they have already manufactured 10k of them?
It's the JLTV which is getting cancelled (I just put it under the general label of MRAPs since I assumed people would be more familiar with that term, the US military has way too many incomprehensible abbreviations for everything). Canceling that does make sense, the problem is that they're seemingly also canceling basically everything else to do with transport vehicles. The US at this point seems to have about 7000 proper APCs and IFVs at best (I guess technically there's also 2k M3 Bradleys, which I assume can be used as M2s if the need arises, as they're mechanically mostly the same vehicle, just serving in two different roles with separate designations), plus 2k base M2s in storage (which would likely have to be upgraded to a modern standard before being pulled out), 4.7k M113s that are woefully outdated at this point, and the 12.5k JLTVs and 9k other MRAPs (which were designed for COIN, and while they can be pushed into the role of conventional APCs as they have been in Ukraine, it's not ideal). The AMPV was supposed to add another 3k, but it was cancelled. More Strykers could have been made, but they were canceled.
7k sounds like a big number, but:
that amount of vehicles and more have already been destroyed in Ukraine
the US, as per its position as global hegemon, kind of needs a lot of stuff so they can maintain a military presence in Europe, the Middle East and East Asia all at the same time. China for example has about 5.6k modern APCs and IFVs, recently started manufacturing a new one, and another 7k of older stuff (plus who knows how many MRAPs). In the event of a future conflict, the US obviously wouldn't be able to deploy it's whole force entirely against China - that 7k split up between a bunch of fronts doesn't end up being so much.
Edit: actually, it turns out like 2.4k of the Strykers are an assortment of other variants, like mortar carriers, combat engineer vehicles, ambulances, air defense, etc.. 545 of those are the recon variant which is relatively close to the base APC in configuration, so let's be generous and count those as APCs - we have to subtract 1.9k from the US's APCs count
I think Ukraine has shown that very advanced heavy spgs have a lot of problems. The German one had maintenance issues. Guided artillery seems to have been much to costly to justify its limited combat effectiveness.
The Russians are using some guided shells too. In fact, the proliferation of drones is opening up a whole new avenue for guided artillery (https://tass.com/defense/1426745, https://armyrecognition.com/focus-analysis-conflicts/army/conflicts-in-the-world/russia-ukraine-war-2022/analysis-how-russia-is-using-new-laser-guided-krasnopol-m2-artillery-rounds-for-precision-strikes-in-ukraine).
Western systems have definitely not performed well, but that's all the more reason for continuing to look into developing new systems (although admittedly, the Western MIC would probably end up coming up with something even more over-complicated than the current stuff). With this being the 4th in a row failed attempt, the US is still stuck with the M109 Paladin which goes back to the 1960s (although it has admittedly gone through several extensive modernizations since then).
I could spin it off into a separate post later, but something I also thought about now that you mentioned it - do we have something akin to a "news megathread hall-of-fame"? It could be simply a collection of links to various effortposts around the megathreads (like a lot of the stuff by @[email protected], various other analyses by @[email protected], @[email protected] and many others, these are just the ones that come to mind right now).
Stuff can indeed get kind of lost in the megathreads, there's just too many posts, especially when we have a week-where-decades-happen and go up to over 5k like last week (but on the other hand, posts elsewhere might not get seen as much, as there's a lot of users who primarily interact via the megathreads), and stuff deep in nested threads especially suffers.
We sometimes end up, at the start of new megathreads, linking back to discussions from old ones anyway, because they got cut off by the move to a new thread, so just having a more organized place where old useful stuff can be linked to might be neat.
I drove myself ever so slightly mad calculating some very rough estimates related to the US bombings of Iran, and how they compare to various other US equipment, as part of a broader discussion, but it was buried deep-ish in a thread, so I'm linking it for visibility - https://hexbear.net/comment/6278398 (if this isn't allowed - feel free to delete this comment, or I can just delete it myself)
Will welcome any commentary, I feel like I must have fucked up something with the numbers or my assumptions, even if they are very rough estimates, but I dunno. I could never make it as an accountant, respect the number troops for all they do (well, except for the McKinsey ghouls calculating how many people to fire I guess)
these bombs are big but they aren't exactly high tech
Mechanical complexity isn't always a good metric for overall cost - something that's technically simple in terms of number of parts can still be expensive because of the cost of those individual parts. I'm not a specialist in manufacturing or anything, but I would assume part of the difficulty with tungsten is even being able to actually work with it in the first place - you need the kind of tools that can actually cut into it (although when you just need a big solid chunk for a bomb it's probably not so bad). Plus, there's just the plain physical limitation of how much material exists - if I have a trillion dollars, it doesn't mean I can buy 41 thousand Abrams tanks, because only like 10k were actually built and they stopped in '92. Now, obviously tungsten isn't that limited, but this is just for illustrative purposes.
I bet the bombs themselves are not even a significant portion of the cost of these strikes
This seems intuitively true, but I'm not sure if it holds up. What I'm finding is anywhere from 13 million, to 20 million, to a vague "tens of millions" for the GBUs, per-unit.
(btw, the M10 I'm finding as somewhere between 14 to 19 million depending on the specific phase of contract negotiations, an AMPV is ostensibly a mere 3.1 mil, adjusted for inflation, while a Stryker is... 6.9 mil?! for an 8-wheel APC, basically a fancy BTR, presumably much simpler than a tracked and better-armored vehicle like the AMPV? Maybe the unit cost listed on Wikipedia is for one of the fancier Stryker variants or something, but holy shit it must be great to be General Dynamics and bilk the military that much... anyway, clearly the "nothing compared to the complexity of mass producing vehicles like the ones you cited" point doesn't hold - again, it seems intuitively true, like "it's just a bomb, how much could it cost?", but you gotta factor in the MIC graft! Even the latest Abrams is a "mere" 26.4 mil (again, adjusted for inflation), which could be merely twice as expensive as the GBU on the lower estimate, or cheaper on the higher estimate if that "tens of millions" is above 30)
A B-2 flight-hour is anywhere from 135k to 170k (flight-hour costs do actually include logistics and maintenance, sort of - what they do is take the total cost of the whole fleet over a given period of time, and divide it by the hours, so you don't necessarily get a good idea of how much the maintenance costs proportionally to the regular flight of the plane, but it is accounted for in the whole cost as an average), which for the 37 hours long mission, taking the lower estimate, is like 5 mil per plane - with each carrying 2 bombs, and taking the lower estimate for the bombs too, that's 2.6 times the cost of the flight for the payload. Now, there's probably a bit more subtlety and nuance to calculating this stuff, but this is just to give a rough idea.
For the whole thing, obviously there were a lot of other planes involved, and calculating the precise costs of everything isn't really possible at this point - we don't know exactly what other planes flew, from which bases, how far, etc. But for example, an F-35 flight hour is supposed to be somewhere from 33k to 42k (I'm giving up on doing inflation adjustments at this point 
), an F-16's 25k, I'm not finding numbers for the EA-18G Growler but the regular F/A-18 is 19.5k, and obviously these planes, not being strategic bombers, would have flown much shorter missions. There's also various recon and refueling aircraft... let's, just for the sake of a very rough estimate, call it as 118 F-35s (125 - the 7 B-2s, not realistic at all but just to keep it simple), at the lower estimate - that's 3.9 mil per hour, and the actual main portion of the operation, involving all aircraft together, wouldn't have lasted more than a few hours, right? So like, I dunno, 5 hours, like 20 mil? Possibly the cost of just one GBU, depending on which estimate we're going by.
So, turns out the bombs weren't that small of a portion of the cost - gotta factor in the MIC graft!
Finally, a point I started making before I actually drove myself insane looking up the numbers and assumed the bombs actually were a paltry portion - even if they don't seemingly cost as much (which as we've seen, they actually do), we still have to account for decline in manufacturing. I feel like a lot of people don't realize that the US is, to a great degree, coasting by on the stuff they made in the late Cold War and the 90s. Westerners love to shit on Russia for "oh, they're not really making that many new tanks, it's just refurbs!", but... the US does the same thing - an Abrams hasn't rolled off the assembly line since '92! Everything has been refurbs of the original 10k they made during the Cold War. The B-2? Last one was made in 2000. The Bradleys were mostly all made before 1995.
Just because the US of the 80s and 90s was able to make thousands of tanks and IFVs, doesn't mean the US of today can. The US of the back then might well have been able to pump out a whole lot of these bombs (or whatever the equivalent with that period's technology would have been). The US of today... maybe not.
Also, another note on manufacturing - this bunker buster uses tungsten, I'm not clear on how much but it's presumably a substantial amount given the total weight. I've brought this up before, but it just so happens that the biggest tungsten producers are... China, Vietnam, and Russia (with Bolivia being 5th 
, and even North Korea showing up with a little bit 
).
Given the wide variety of industrial applications, tungsten's obviously pretty pricey, and we already have an example of lack of tungsten affecting US procurement - the NGSW program, which intended to introduce a new rifle and fancy cartridge that could penetrate modern armor. Except, instead of doing what is traditionally done when you want armor penetration, which is use a harder material (and given that steel alloys aren't sufficient anymore, the next step is tungsten), they went with highly-overpressurized rounds - essentially, instead of making the projectile harder, you make it travel faster and with more energy, in the hope that this will compensate. In practice, as more information is starting to come out with those rifles now in service, it seems like such penetration isn't actually really achieved, and tungsten-tipped variants will be needed anyway (https://www.armytimes.com/opinion/commentary/2023/02/28/the-not-really-next-generation-weapons-program/#%3A%7E%3Atext=tungsten)
So why did they bother with this whole thing in the first place, given that tungsten-tipped variants already exist for existing calibers (https://www.nammo.com/product/our-products/ammunition/small-caliber-ammunition/7-62mm-series/7-62-mm-x-51-armor-piercing-8-m993/, https://www.nammo.com/product/our-products/ammunition/small-caliber-ammunition/5-56mm-series/5-56-mm-x-45-armor-piercing-45/)? Well, because those are far too expensive to field in large quantities - precisely because of the use of tungsten.
Now of course, a handful of aircraft bombs are a very different manufacturing context from millions of rounds, but said bombs also obviously involve a substantially larger amount of material. So even if the US wanted to make a whole bunch of these, there's simply a hard limit imposed by availability of tungsten.
(also, something else about the tungsten producers - Canada's actually 4th, so I guess we might see the Fallout 1 intro but about ores instead of oil 
)
For example, they have way more of those bunker busters and manufacture 6-8/month
Do we actually know this for sure though? What seems to be available as information is:
They started being delivered in September 2011
There were 20 bombs as of 2015
They were manufactured at a rate of 2 per month, until an expansion of production facilities in July 2024 to 6-8 per month (https://archive.is/KB5Tg)
I kind of doubt that the "2 per month" necessarily indicates that every month since 2015 has seen those 2 manufactured - it's a pretty niche weapon, and I doubt they've been constantly manufacturing them all this time. After all, those 20 that we know about took 4 years, which is a rate of 5 per year - or 0.42 per month, not 2.
Additionally, I feel that it's reasonable to be skeptical of any claims of increasing capacity by Western MIC (and industry in general, how's the CHIPS act going?), given that they've been going on about increasing capacity (particularly of artillery shells) since soon after the start of the Ukraine war and yet not much seems to have materialized. If we're trying to get an idea of how US military procurement is going, recently the Army canceled or reduced to minimum sustainment rate a bunch of stuff, like:
Now, historically the Air Force has generally been able to get their way with regards to funding much more than the Army, so they're probably doing a lot better. But still, there are clearly a lot of problems in US military procurement.
https://xcancel.com/RnaudBertrand/status/1858019192370507904
Wow, looks like Xi was extremely straightforward during his meeting with Biden, probably the most he's ever officially been in a meeting with a US president.
According to the Chinese readout (https://www.guancha.cn/internation/2024_11_17_755645.shtml) here's what he told Biden were the 7 "lessons of the past 4 years that need to be remembered":
- "There must be correct strategic understanding. The 'Thucydides Trap' is not historical destiny, a 'new Cold War' cannot and should not be fought, containment of China is unwise, undesirable, and will not succeed."
- "Words must be trustworthy and actions must be fruitful. A person cannot stand without credibility. China always follows through on its words, but if the U.S. side always says one thing and does another, it is very detrimental to America's image and damages mutual trust."
- "Treat each other as equals. In exchanges between two major countries like China and the United States, neither side can reshape the other according to their own wishes, nor can they suppress the other based on so-called 'position of strength,' let alone deprive the other of legitimate development rights to maintain their own leading position."
- "Red lines and bottom lines cannot be challenged. As two major countries, China and the United States inevitably have some contradictions and differences, but they cannot harm each other's core interests, let alone engage in conflict and confrontation. The One China principle and the three China-US joint communiqués are the political foundation of bilateral relations and must be strictly observed. Taiwan issue, democracy and human rights, development path, and development rights are China's four red lines, which cannot be challenged. These are the most important guardrails and safety nets for China-US relations."
- "There should be more dialogue and cooperation. Under current circumstances, the common interests between China and the United States have not decreased but increased. Whether in areas of economy and trade, agriculture, drug control, law enforcement, public health, or in facing global challenges such as climate change and artificial intelligence, as well as international hotspot issues, China-US cooperation is needed. Both sides should extend the list of cooperation, make the cooperation cake bigger, and achieve win-win cooperation."
- "Respond to people's expectations. The development of China-US relations should always focus on the wellbeing of both peoples and gather the strength of both peoples. Both sides should build bridges for personnel exchanges and cultural communication, and also remove interference and obstacles, not artificially create a 'chilling effect.'"
- "Demonstrate great power responsibility. China and the United States should always consider the future and destiny of humanity, take responsibility for world peace, provide public goods for the world, and play a positive role in world unity, including engaging in positive interaction, avoiding mutual consumption, and not coercing other countries to take sides."
Funnily, all this is summarized in the official US readout (https://china.usembassy-china.org.cn/readout-of-president-joe-bidens-meeting-with-president-xi-jinping-of-the-peoples-republic-of-china-3/) with this short sentence: "The two leaders reviewed the bilateral relationship over the past four years". Talk about an understatement 😅. The language compared to the readout of the last Xi-Biden meeting in San Francisco one year ago is noticeably more forthright, especially on the U.S.'s lack of trustworthiness ("if the U.S. side always says one thing and does another..."). Looks like he's getting very frustrated with U.S. duplicity... The 4 red lines he enumerates are also new (not new individually as they've each been mentioned before, but packaging them together as "four red lines" and explicitly labeling them as such in a president-level diplomatic readout is new)
...
With the red lines on "Democracy and human rights" and "Development path/system", it looks like China is effectively telling the U.S. it will not humor them anymore in discussions about its internal system and so-called "human rights", and that it will consider any U.S. initiative aimed at interfering with China's internal affairs or otherwise shape China as hostile actions on the same level as Taiwan. This is also clear with Xi telling Biden that "neither side can reshape the other according to their own wishes".
On development rights Xi states that "the Chinese people's right to development cannot be deprived or ignored" and criticizes how "while all countries have national security needs, the concept shouldn't be overgeneralized or used as an excuse for malicious restrictions and suppression". He also said that "great power competition should not be the theme of the era; unity and cooperation are needed to overcome difficulties together. 'Decoupling and breaking chains" is not the solution; mutually beneficial cooperation is the path to common development. 'Small yards with high fences' is not befitting of great powers."
In other words, he's telling Biden that he believes the U.S. is attempting to curtail China's development in the guise of national security, but that this is "an excuse for malicious restrictions and suppression" and a red line as China has a fundamental right to develop as any other country. This is all, of course, also signaling to the upcoming Trump administration. The fact these are "red lines" means they're non-negotiable regardless of who leads the US: he's telling Trump too that attempts to "reshape" China or restrict its development will be viewed as hostile actions. And the emphasis on US "saying one thing and doing another" also puts the future administration on notice that China will judge the US by its actions rather than its diplomatic statements.
Conclusion: by framing these positions as "lessons learned" from the past four years, Xi is effectively closing the book on one approach to US-China relations - which he's obviously very critical about - and very clearly signaling to Trump a change is badly needed, particularly around the "4 red lines" and matching words with actions. The language is very confident, telling the U.S. they need to "treat each other as equals" and that they have no "position of strength" anymore. The US readout on this, as usual for the Biden administration, is very illustrative of exactly what Xi is complaining about: a complete disregard for China's stance on these issues and a refusal to engage with them, or even mention them at all. Not sure that "America first" Trump and the team of China hawks he put together will be much better...
https://xcancel.com/ArmchairW/status/1839453350854853047
There's actually a critical lesson to draw from this and other Ukrainian fiascos, of which the Bakhmut saga and the Zaporozhie Hundred Days come to mind: Ukraine will have ended up losing this war in large part because it consistently tried to fight beyond its means.
The Ukrainians started this war with an enormous army, well in excess of what the Russians could and actually did commit to the fight in 2022. That huge force (the "First Army") was badly mauled in early 2022, but it was rejuvenated later that year by a combination of ruthless mobilization and massive aid from NATO. This convinced the Russian Stavka to transition to the defensive and consolidate their position in Ukraine, withdrawing troops from more exposed positions in east Kharkov and right-bank Kherson. Any serious assessment of the situation at that point would have been that the Russians had consolidated into a basically impregnable position that the AFU was incapable of breaching (lest we forget in the wake of Russia's totally unhindered withdrawal from the area, their attempts at reducing the Kherson bridgehead by force in mid-2022 were bloody disasters), and the correct course of action was to start digging in and negotiate a peace treaty in the meantime.
The Ukrainian leadership instead threw a disturbingly large portion of the "Second Army" into Prigozhin's meatgrinder in Bakhmut and then ordered not one but two large-scale counteroffensives into Zaporozhie and the Bakhmut flanks using the post-Bakhmut remains of the "Second Army" and their NATO-supplied "Third Army." Those failed with enormous losses, opening the way for Russia to transition back to the offensive in late 2023 and begin systematically rolling Ukraine out of the Donbass. The correct course of action at this point was, again, to find a tenable defensive line and start digging. Zelensky instead ordered a "Hail Mary" offensive in Kursk with the remnants of the "Third Army" and significant elements from a lightly-equipped "Fourth Army," hoping Russian border defenses were weak despite their having ample warning of Ukrainian designs on the border region (courtesy of several earlier, smaller raids) and plenty of time to prepare. It proceeded to fail with enormous losses - Ukrainian forces breached the border, began to exploit, and ran square into a Russian haymaker counter-punch that stopped them in their tracks. The Ukrainians then reinforced failure, sending massive reinforcements into a death pit in an attempt to keep a sliver of Russian soil under their flag as a middle finger to Putin.
And while this was happening the front in the Donbass started to collapse with Russian troops making large advances and seizing key terrain, in no small part because the AFU's resources had been systematically redirected to a tertiary operation far to the north. We've seen, again and again and again, that when the Ukrainians got resources and generated forces, rather than admitting they are the weaker power here and working to strengthen their positions and conciliate, they instead squandered them on hugely ambitious and equally doomed offensives. In 2023 these offensives were aimed at restoring their pre-2014 borders when Donetsk may as well have been on the Moon for them, while in 2024 their ambitions transitioned to the outright insanity of conquering southwest Russia despite the fact they'd been on the military back foot for the last year. These are the moves of a power setting objectives beyond its means to achieve, and they will probably end up dooming Ukraine as a sovereign state going forward.
I just got back from Ukraine, where I was visiting some friends. Everything we have heard about what’s happening in Ukraine is a lie. The reality is darker, bleaker, and unequivocally hopeless. There is no such thing as Ukraine "winning" this war.
- By their estimates, they have lost over one million of their sons, fathers and husbands; an entire generation is gone.
Nazis and destroying the demographics of their own people, name a better duo
- Even in the Southwest, where the anti-Russian sentiment is long-standing, citizens are reluctant or straight-up scared to publicly criticize Zelensky; they will go to jail.
- In every village and town, the streets, shops, and restaurants are mostly absent of men.
- The few men who remain are terrified of leaving their homes for fear of being kidnapped into conscription. Some have resorted to begging friends to break their legs to avoid service.
- Army search parties take place early in the morning, when men leave their homes to go to work. They ambush and kidnap them off the streets and within 3-4 hours they get listed in the army and taken away straight to the front lines with minimal or no training at all; it is "a death sentence."
- It's getting worse every day. Where I was staying, a dentist had just been taken by security forces on his way to work, leaving behind two small children. Every day, 3-5 dead bodies keep arriving from the front lines.
- Mothers and wives fight tooth and nail with the armed forces, beg and plead not to have their men taken away. They try bribing, which sometimes works, but most of the time they are met with physical violence and death threats.
- The territory celebrated as having been "won back" from Russia has been reduced to rubble and is uninhabitable. Regardless, there is no one left to live there and displaced families will likely never return.
- They see the way the war has been reported, at home and abroad. It's a "joke" and "propaganda." They say: “Look around: is this winning?”.
- Worse, some have been hoaxed into believing that once Ukrainians forces are exhausted, American soldiers will come in to replace them and “win the war”.
There is no ambiguity in these people. The war was for nothing - a travesty. The outcome always was, and is, clear. The people are hopeless, utterly destroyed, and living in an unending nightmare. They are pleading for an end, any end - most likely the same "peace" that could have been achieved two years ago. In their minds, they have already lost, for their sons, fathers and husbands are gone, and their country has been destroyed. There is no "victory" that can change that.
Except the peace offer then (see under the The Objectives and Strategy of Russia section) was incredibly favorable for Ukraine (and naive on Russia's part), basically just security guarantees and no NATO membership, without any territorial changes. That ain't happening anymore.
Make no mistake, they are angry with Putin. But they are also angry with Zelensky and the West. They have lost everything, worst of all, hope and faith, and cannot comprehend why Zelenky wishes to continue the current trajectory, the one of human devastation. I didn't witness the war; but what I saw was absolutely heart-breaking. Shame on the people, regardless of their intentions, who have supported this war. And shame on the media for continuing to lie about it.
also lmao at the fucking community note
um actually the US says that only a few Ukrainians have died (based on propaganda fed to them by the Ukrainians)
He has a lawyer who will appeal the decision (and is presumably working pro bono, given that Hüseyin cannot access or receive any money to pay anyone with...) and is planning on suing the European Commission - but there is no clear timeframe on a response by the Commission (see from this timestamp: https://www.youtube.com/live/MZ0l78jIg3U?t=1711).
So I guess theoretically they could just drag this out for years - and, given that he's legally forbidden from holding a job and earning any more money than what he had at the start of the sanctions, and anyone sending him money or food could also be sanctioned... he and his family would eventually just straight up starve to death? Like I genuinely still can't grasp the absolute insanity of the way these sanctions work, we're not talking about some corporate entity here, this is one guy who's just... not allowed to have money anymore?!