I love that they added a separate line item for number of submarines killed. LOL.

'Cause I'm drunk on a Thursday (Friday very early in the morning), and I've lost control of my life.

You know what's hilarious? According to the book "The Cultural Revolution: A People’s History 1962-1976", During the height of the Chinese cultural revolution, it became the fashion to wear pins that featured Mao in profile. In fact, if you didn't have one of these, you were seen as a pretender; someone who didn't take the revolution seriously. The problem is, these pins were made of aluminum. Due to the popularity of these pins, China was temporarily denuded of available aluminum. Workers were stripping aluminum shielding off of their machines to make these pins, and there was a thriving black market where people could buy them. So basically, to show off how good they were at communism, they went to the most capitalist of places (the black market) to buy these things. Mao even, at one point, decried the industry, lamenting the lack of available aluminum to make airframes for fighter jets.

But that's the thing - as important as the struggle was to the people in the revolution, it paled in comparison to the need to prove to everybody else that you supported the struggle. If you didn't have one of those pins, you might as well just sign up to be part of the next struggle session.

I've seen that in a lot of threads, and there never really seems to be a common definition for what that actually means. Could you enlighten the class?

What a lot of people fail to grasp about why Ukraine isn't advancing more quickly despite having superior equipment and training than the vast majority of the Russian army is the realities on the ground. For example, NATO tactics assume no, or very few mines. Ukraine is the most heavily mined place on Earth now. NATO tactics assume air superiority. Ukraine has very few fighter jets, and won't receive new ones from Western countries for several more months.

The reality is that despite being better equipped and trained, there are still several extremely difficult obstacles in the way of them reclaiming their land, and so they're taking it fairly slow in an effort to not throw lives away unnecessarily. Even so, every square inch they liberate is paid for in blood.

Still, I'm optimistic about the next few months. Ukrainians just reached the first Surovikin line near Novoprokopivka, and the latest reports suggest they've already entered the eastern side of that village. If they can take it and the high ground in that area, they'll have about 12km of contact with the trench network. If they can make a breakthrough at any point along that line, they can assault the length of it from 3 different directions, and collapse a whole front.

Also, with the death of Prigozhin, there's a decent chance of more unrest in Moscow, which would likely move Russians off the front line to quell any dissent back home. That, combined with morale among the Russian forces being at an all-time nadir makes me optimistic about Ukraine's chances of advancing to Tokmak this year. And Tokmak is a lynchpin of the entire Russian defense in the area. It's a major hub, as it is where all of the rail lines from the east join the west. If the Ukrainians control Tokmak, practically the entire area south of the Dnipro will be cut off from supplies.

So yeah, fingers crossed!

Tell me you don't know how vaginas work without telling me that you don't know how vaginas work.

To get a base salary of $170k you know you need to work hard as an Engineer, this sucks.

LOL - this motherfucker talkin about hard work. You actually think sitting in an office for 8 hours a day is working harder than the guy delivering packages? GTFO with that shit.

Ok, but why does this slap so fucking hard? Holy shit.

I don't think it's in Ukraine's best interest to open a front on Russian soil. Sure, it would have the benefit of dividing the attention of Russia's troops, but there are other considerations. Namely, all of their western partners have been very vocal about not invading Russia, or using their gifted armaments on targets on Russian soil.

Don't get me wrong - Ukraine has been impressive as hell, but a significant amount of their punching power comes from their western allies. The last thing they want to do is piss them off.

In a world where those conditions didn't exist, I would agree with you 100% that taking territory in Russia would be a smart play. But in this world, with these circumstances, I think that would be a big mistake. They were happy enough to host Russian separatist groups who would then make those attacks because that gave them plausible deniability, but doing it with Ukrainian troops would be a bridge too far.

To be fair, if enough snowflakes have a meltdown, you get a snowlake.

Sorry. For my defense, I claim Godwin's law. Sometimes, when looking at something written online, it's hard to distinguish between sarcasm and sincerity because people are fucking crazy.

I concede that you've got a point that austerity isn't an all or nothing proposition. But your examples are laughable. No country that has implemented "austerity measures" has ever interpreted that as "ending corporate subsidies", or "taxing the wealthy", or in any way fucking with the wealthy or military's purse. It just doesn't happen. I agree, that would be an amazing thing. But it just doesn't exist in human history. What ends up happening instead is that they cut the educational budget. Or they cut social programs, like housing subsidies or food subsidies. Because governments aren't run by the lowest common denominator, who actually benefits from those programs. They're run by the wealthy. So no government is going to fuck over its supporters by cutting their benefits.