These borders are so blurry without my glasses

Who must go to the moon?

Ivan you forgot load nuclear warhead

Technically it should trigger Article 5

Article 5 has strictly defined geographic boundaries.

And an embassy isn’t actually considered sovereign expatriate territory anyway, that’s a myth.

It would be a huge escalation, for sure, and it would be against the norms of war since one of the oldest international norms is that you treat a diplomat generously, and the NAFO hawks would scream about it and NATO might choose to interpret it as grounds for escalation anyway because it’s not, in fact, a legal document but a political instrument anyway. But technically, legalistically, treating the NATO treaty as a contract rather than an instrument of US hegemony, it wouldn’t count.

Looking forward to Simplicius’ blog post about betrayal in 2 months

Massive escalation isn’t a real option. The idea that the USA can field half a million men in Europe isn’t real.

They could escalate to nukes or they could occupy a buffer zone in western Ukraine and dare Russia to use nukes.

Going head to head against Russia in Ukraine without nukes isn’t realistic. It would simply mean more meat for the grinder.

Putin didn’t deny it but his answer did seem trolling.

I’ve seen milbloggers speculate that if it’s true they probably go into action this weekend in Kursk.

You can choose a democrat administration with republican deep staters or a republican administration with democrat deep staters your vote matters

I demand my stories not to have characters. Just facts. Dates, quantities, in linear sequential order.

Woke shit like “back story” or “world building” doesn’t belong in my cartoons no sir.

The story of Superman should include ONLY the number of children saved as a multiple of how many bad guys were BLAMOED.

What the fuck is wrong with you?

I think Putin is being honest. He’s playing chess, the 2D kind, and so he prefers his opponents to be predictable. There are rules to this game even now.

Trump doesn’t actually have the power to force this war to stop, and even if Trump could insist on Zelenskyy agreeing to a cease fire is that a cease fire Russia wants given all it means is NATO has another 4 years to rearm Kyiv and increase munitions production?

And the deep state will exist and profoundly shape US foreign policy even under Trump since he doesn’t have the attention span or institutional support to actually change the course of the blob.

Putin is probably calculating some pretty straightforward calculus here. He’s already won this war, pending one year to conclude it maybe but nonetheless he’s won, and so better to deal with predictable neoliberal imperialists who will be forced to cut a deal than to risk Trump playing 5D chess (upending the chess board and shitting on the table) by nuking Iran or whatever.

What he wants is for spheres of influence to be clearly delineated between NATO and Russia. He’s more likely to get that from the “adults in the room” deep state than from Trump.

There are myriads reasons to be skeptical of that claim.

For a start, SpaceX is a private company and we can’t see their financials so claims about the true launch costs of SpaceX rockets are impossible to verify. You’re trusting Musk on that and you should know by now not to trust Musk.

Secondly their actual launch prices are not much lower than their competition. SpaceX claims this means a high profit margin but this cannot be verified.

Their competition have alleged unfair pricing practices, using debt and government loans to subsidize launches, claiming this is the reason why SpaceX can undercut the competition.

Very very very frequently when arriving at cost per kilo comparisons, people fudge the numbers due. For example, it’s extremely common to see price per kg derived from reusable launch cost but assuming the payload of a non-reusable rocket. Actually the reusable configuration has a dramatically decreased payload (about 2/3rds) and this has an important impact on price per kg that gets overlooked.

Another common error is comparing LEO vs geostationary launches or even more nonsensical comparisons such as claiming SpaceX LEO is dazzlingly cheap by comparing it to the cost of getting to the moon and back.

And reusable isn’t really reusable. Major maintenance and refit is required between each launch. The cost of labor is the most important factor here rather than the materials cost, plus the most expensive parts like engines would often only be worth their scrap metal costs, so the saving isn’t easy to quantify without seeing their books, which we can’t.

NASA and government contracts with SpaceX are juiced and NASA seems fine with this so it amounts to a public subsidy to a US company, which would explain how they are able to undercut rivals more directly than the questionable economics of rocket reuse.

Other private companies and government programs going back decades have looked at this problem and the answer has always been that the economics of massively reducing payload to save on boosters just doesn’t work out. No one has ever identified why SpaceX cracked the economic side of this problem other than Musk magic.

There probably are some use cases where rocket reusability moves the needle, specifically LEO for Starlink and small comms satellites really, but it isn’t a game changing or critical development and it definitely is not relevant for Mars or Lunar missions or for larger launches and probably not for geostationary either. It’s not that big a deal.