TheHiddenCatboy

Exactly. Any half-way competent Russian commander would steamroll Ukraine because Russia has roughly 10x the GDP as Ukraine (or it did before the invasion, at least), and roughly 4x the population. That Russia has only managed to take a sliver of land on the west side of Ukraine and not the whole country suggests that Russia has dropped the ball in an epic way AND Ukraine has gotten crazy lucky. This war should have been over a long time ago if Russia was 1/10th what we thought it was back in early 2021 before the invasion. That it’s not and not only has Ukraine managed to hold Russia off but actually take over Russian territory puts the lie to Russian propaganda that they deserve a seat at the same table as the US and China. As the Infographics Show likes to put it, we thought Russia was the second strongest military in the world. Now we know it’s the second strongest military in Ukraine…

No. He’s saying that 100% of the personnel they had at the start of the war are wounded or dead. Bit of a difference! We know Putin has plenty of bodies to throw in this meatgrinder.

I’ve got some thoughts on this.

When I was learning about the world, some time in the early to mid 1980s, I learned something that was interesting to me. There was roughly 1 person for every year Earth existed. I also learned that that number was likely too high, and our life was about to get more complicated because too many of us were too hungry for the resources Earth had to offer.

But now, 40 years later, there is now almost TWO people for every year the Earth has existed. Now, every rare resource has two pops chasing after it. What’s worse is everyone wants what they had in the 80s (a house, a car, a large yard, etc) without being willing to give up on any aspect of the dream. People who have houses fight against higher density housing. Cars get bigger, not smaller. And thus every individual consumes more than they did in the 80s.

What happens when supply goes down (because NIMBYism and rampant consumerism), while demand goes up (because there are now twice as many people chasing resources)? Look around you. Everything is expensive. Housing. Fuel. Food. Education. Healthcare. What could be done with a single income in the 80s now can’t be done with two incomes today. World-wide, even. Japan, China, South Korea, Germany, Italy, Poland, Ukraine, and even China are suffering population growth rates falling below replacement rate because it’s too fucking expensive to have a kid in this world. House ownership is a forgotten dream for young people these days, and even for me. I’m earning 6 figures these days, but even that’s not enough to afford the down-payment on a house, especially with rents as crazy expensive as they are. Car ownership? In 2005, we looked at the costs of a car (not just the cost to own it, but the cost to maintain it, the cost to keep it fueled, the cost to drive it responsibly – insurance, and the cost to store it) and decided it was too expensive to own a car or even lease a car. When we need a car these days, we rent one, and give it up gladly at the end. We don’t run the AC in the heat of the day because electricity is too fucking expensive. And I don’t know if the 15kg I’ve lost over the past 2 years was due to being disgusted with how expensive everything is, but…well, I am disgusted with how expensive food is. That’s the one thing I can’t escape.

I hear ya on the whole ‘why did I bring kids into this world?!’ A fun (?) thought exercise I like to do is consider what life would have been like had the wife and I had kids. Back in 2005, we were in a good place for having kids. She was working for CompUSA and I was working for Qwest, and our total income was 5x our rent, easily. We were finally settled down, and things were looking up for us. Then Hurricane Katrina hit.

Let me be clear. We were thousands of miles away from where Hurricane Katrina hit. New Orleans flooding did affect my wife as she has family down there, but even had Katrina made it to where we were, it’d just be a moderate rain event for us. But that didn’t stop the massive corpo I worked for cashing in and cutting its workforce. We went from “you guys are doing a great job, we’re going to hire you as regular IT guys” to “pack up your desks, you’re done here” in less than a week. We went from on top of the world to filing for bankruptcy in 3 months. Had we had a kid in that time period, we’d likely have had to move back to Louisiana so the Grandparents could help with the kids while we went and worked minimum wage jobs just to try to keep a roof over our heads. I’m so glad we didn’t, but that’s a shame to poor ‘Victoria’, our hypothetical daughter who I would have liked to me. On the other hand, she’d likely have a touch of AuDHD like her mom and dad, meaning the next 4 years would have been hell on Earth thanks to Junior and his merry band of miscreants over at Dept. of Health. :|

None of this is to excuse the shitheads in the world. It’s just…when you have twice the pops chasing half the resources, even the most well meaning of governments will be fighting rampant instability, which makes Authoritarianism look appealing.

My comment to her is that we need to enforce anti-harassment laws in all spaces. I don’t care if you’re a man harassing a man, a man harassing a woman, a woman harassing a man, or a woman harassing a woman, the cops should come take you away and … educate you why we don’t do that shit in a civilised society. And you don’t need to make a person presenting as a woman use the men’s washroom, or a person presenting as a man use a woman’s washroom, to make that happen! In short, you don’t need to be a dick to people.

Fun fact. I saw a recent news article where a trans-man (i.e., born female, presents as male) went into the woman’s washroom because the only free stalls were urinals, which he couldn’t use. So he went to the woman’s washroom to use a stall there, and got harassed by the police because…well, he was a man in the women’s room. Except he wasn’t. He was born a she, and in North Carolina, you USED to be demanded to go to the washroom of your birth gender, and they’re trying to force that back in again, after it was partially repealed and allowed to expire back in 2020.

It’s not about protecting women. If it was, they’d just enforce the laws on the books about harassment, sexual or otherwise, and be blind to the genders of the perpetrator and victim. But we can obviously see that this is about legally harassing transgender people, and it just uses women’s rights as cover for the hatred. Your only answer as a transgender person to peeing is hold it…or pee yourself. Or move to a state, city, or country that doesn’t treat you like shit because you would prefer to be the other gender…or not be restricted to the binary structure in general!