Of the 31 Abrams tanks the U.S. sent to Ukraine
At $10 million apiece, tanks like the Abrams are not easily replaced.
They're missing what makes these hard to replace. It's not the sticker price -- "just" 1 billion could buy you 1000. It's that the U.S. currently lacks the production capacity to quickly manufacture replacements.
Unintentionally a great demonstration of the "industrial capital vs. finance capital" conflict in this war.
Survivorship bias
The financial industry is heavily regulated by the US Gov’t
Lol
Not just a time invesent -- if you're biking 18 miles you're going to need a shower where you're going, or you're going to need a job where you can show up drenched in sweat.
And that's not factoring in rain or snow or having to transport large objects or people.
The response here to "people must be financially illiterate if they can't live without income for months!" is no, they aren't illiterate, they live in an economy designed to keep a ton of people in precarity.
Everyone understands it's nice to have some money set aside for rainy days. It's such a simple lesson that calling it "financial literacy" is almost condescending. The problem isn't that people haven't heard of saving, it's that decent-paying jobs aren't common, basic costs like housing and healthcare are rising rapidly, and even if you do everything right there are a thousand ways to get a fat bill dropped on your lap that takes you back to square one.
The people we need to think about bringing left are people who will take what we say in good faith, but who are still skeptical of it. If they won't take it in good faith, we're wasting time talking to them. If they aren't skeptical, they're already convinced.
When you're skeptical but actually willing to look into something, exaggerations or omissions can turn you away entirely. Everyone has a threshold where they say "I can't trust this person/source anymore, I'm going to tune out what they say even if parts of it might be true." It takes effort to sift through bad information, and why would they bother? You're not reliable.
There is so much horrific stuff capitalists have done that we can stick to what's indisputably true, and that doesn't really have any gray areas or excuses, and convince those people who can be convinced.
Many countries had periodic famines in their pre-industrial histories. China had plenty before the PRC, and the Russian Empire had some, too. Agricultural production can be thought of as a machine that would occasionally break down.
If you are given responsibility of a machine that occasionally breaks down, the machine breaks down once soon after you take over, and then never ever again, you fixed the machine.
On the corruption point: corruption is possible in any organization. It's a concern, but there's nothing about unions that make them more prone to it than anything else.
It's even worse than that -- there hasn't been a genuinely open Democratic Primary since 2008.
Except there is no AI teacher here, because AI doesn't exist yet. These kids are basically doing homework with a chatbot.
The second step was the law the country passed at the beginning of May—the one that The Publica makes sound like a horrifying, dystopian mess. In fact, the measure had the support of the Belgian sex workers union...
But the law also explicitly protects the right to refuse specific customers, sex acts, etc.
It stipulates that "every sex worker has the right to refuse a client," that "every sex worker has the right to refuse a sexual act," and that "every sex worker has the right to interrupt a sexual act at any time." It also says that "any sex worker has the right to perform a sexual act in the manner they wish" and that "if there are dangers to the sex worker's safety, the sex worker may refuse to sit behind a window or advertise."...
"If a sex worker exercises the right to refuse more than ten times in a six-month period, the sex worker or the employer may seek the intervention of a governmental mediation service," according to UTSOPI. "That service will assess if there is anything wrong with the working conditions, if there is a problem in the employer-employee relationship. The service can also offer professional reorientation possibilities."
I don't trust Reason's reporting on this very much, and the article is full of libertarian junk. I'm curious as to why the sex workers' union supported this, though. Maybe they think the protections it includes are sufficient. Like 100 other things, it'll come down to how it's enforced.
The point I bring up is that the peace terms are just going to get worse. The only way Ukraine turns this around is expanding this into a great power war, which is insanity, especially in the age of nuclear weapons.