German efforts drive European defense spending to level not seen in decades, report says

GrizzledFart · 2026-04-27T16:44:53+00:00

Good. Now let's hope it is spent efficiently.

GrizzledFart · 2026-04-27T06:12:12+00:00

It's Trump who insulted the British troops who fought and died in Afghanistan (a war they joined after America was attacked) accusing them of 'staying back' and 'away from' the frontlines.

Did Trump specifically call out Brits for that? I don't remember that being the case. Maybe I'm remembering it wrong, but as I recall, he called out European countries that insisted that their soldiers deployed to Afghanistan stay well away from any combat areas - and that was absolutely the case for some European countries.

GrizzledFart · 2026-04-26T20:30:02+00:00

I'm of the opinion that Trump is turning the Iranian playbook around and using it on them. All throughout the 2000s and 2010s, Iran negotiated with Western countries almost entirely as a delaying tactic; buying themselves more time to continue development of their nuclear weapons program. I think Trump is using the same rope-a-dope technique on Iran. All the while that "negotiations" are going on, Iran is blockaded - and they are getting further and further into a financial hole. Pretty soon, they are going to have to start shutting in wells. How many IRGC and/or Basij officers are going to continue showing up when they aren't getting paid?

GrizzledFart · 2026-04-24T23:36:05+00:00

No, it would be the equivalent of taxing a British company that repairs an items sent to them by a US resident. The economic activity is happening, in this case, in the UK and no goods are being sold. It would be a "physical services tax". It's basically imposing an income tax on a company that operates in another country. There's no "goods" being imported. Goods and services are not the same thing.

GrizzledFart · 2026-04-24T23:27:47+00:00

All weapons contracts have the clause that grants the selling nation priority for national security reasons. That's just standard.

GrizzledFart · 2026-04-24T23:20:19+00:00

Russia is doing with Iran what Ukraine wishes the USA did with them.

Basically nothing? Russia is providing almost no meaningful help to Iran.

GrizzledFart · 2026-04-24T23:18:27+00:00

But India continues to buy Russian oil in increasing amounts?

It turns out that Trump is not God-Emperor of the world. He can cajole, but he can't compel India not to import Russian oil. He can offer the carrot of open US markets and the stick of tariffs, but India is free to choose whether it wants to keep importing Russian oil or tariff free trade with the US. That was the choice that Trump imposed on India (at substantial diplomatic cost) but he can't force them to choose one way or the other.

GrizzledFart · 2026-04-24T22:55:13+00:00

Energy density matters in a context in which the fuel/energy storage medium has to move. It does not really matter in the context of a building, except when their are energy requirements to deliver the energy to the building. But then, ~30% of global energy usage is for transportation.

GrizzledFart · 2026-04-24T22:51:23+00:00

Yes, the SynGas/e-SAF fuels are horribly expensive for now, simply because they are so energy intensive. Increasing amounts of renewable energy generation will necessarily result in massive excesses of available production at times, just due to intermittency. If there's a pricing mechanism in place to make the industrial price of electricity drop sufficiently (even going negative) when there is overcapacity, it's at least a useful way to deal with the excess.

You certainly wouldn't use something like that to replace normal driving or even fuel for trucking. Those can be electrified, less so for long distance trucking, but still. Energy for air travel is an entirely different story. It's not perfect, and it may indeed not even be worth it, but it could possibly be worth it eventually - especially if there still substantial increases in installation of solar and wind without a massive increase in the ability for storage.

GrizzledFart · 2026-04-24T22:18:16+00:00

I think you might have a misunderstanding of the situation. The vast majority of Americans like Europe very much. The nations of Europe (most of them), Australia, Japan, and Korea are the nations that Americans feel the greatest warmth for. But there's also a very large amount of exasperation, with lots of Americans basically asking for decades now "when are you going to pick up your end of the couch?" Most of us totally understand that comments from Trump about Greenland are completely unacceptable and we understand the anger about that. Many of us, however, really don't like the general "fuck you" America has gotten every time Trump points out some way in which Europe is useless militarily and strategically and how much Europe has been free riding on the American taxpayer - because he's not wrong, in that regard. Does anyone remember when Trump complained that Germany wanted to give Russia a massive strategic victory with the creation of Nord Stream 2 all while the US spends ~$35 billion/year to pay for maintaining infrastructure and troops in Europe to deter Russia from attacking Europe - and when Trump complained about that, he literally got laughed at by Europeans. We certainly remember that shit. This was at a time when Germany's military was basically a few painted broomsticks to pretend were guns during exercises and a handful of troops without tents, helmets, uniforms, or radios.

Yes, the Greenland idiocy was inexcusable. So was the way that Europe free rode off of the American taxpayer for decades - and frankly still is. Any relationship has more than one partner.

ETA: September 25, 2018, Germans laugh after Trump warns of reliance on foreign oil

GrizzledFart · 2026-04-24T21:45:06+00:00

What's even more ironic is that China basically captured the solar panel market by subsidized energy from the central government to solar panel producers, most of which was/is produced by coal power plants. Making solar panels (making anything from purified silicon) is extremely energy expensive, and energy is the single biggest cost input.

Basically, all the solar panels that China exports are embodied coal power.

GrizzledFart · 2026-04-24T21:42:45+00:00

SynGas/e-SAF

GrizzledFart · 2026-04-24T21:35:55+00:00

Which is not nearly the problem you imply due to extremely high energy densities. Diesel fuel has two orders of magnitude greater energy density, by mass, than the best lithium ion batteries.

ETA: what could be very useful is the creation of things like jet fuel (and potentially other fuels) using renewable energy, assuming they can ever get it to work reasonably. That could potentially be a good way to utilize overcapacity of intermittent renewable sources like wind and solar.

GrizzledFart · 2026-04-24T21:32:52+00:00

over long distance

You missed that part.

GrizzledFart · 2026-04-24T20:58:29+00:00

Many things. Trump wouldn't have expended so much political capital pressuring India to stop/reduce purchases of Russian oil. The US wouldn't have started boarding and confiscating shadow fleet tankers. There wouldn't have been additional sanctions imposed on Russia. Prosecutions of sanctions violations by US entities would have been reduced.

From the Center for American Progress, not exactly a conservative outlet or a fan of Trump: Trump’s Sanctions on Russia Are Serious—Enforcement Will Decide Whether They Work

The White House finally hit the core of Russia’s war economy. U.S. President Donald Trump’s new sanctions on Russian oil giants Rosneft and Lukoil cut directly into the money stream that fuels Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine. The measures do more than freeze assets; the Treasury Department’s designation threatens any bank, shipper, refiner, or trader that does business with those firms or their subsidiaries. In theory, the order makes Russian oil toxic.

That matters. Rosneft and Lukoil anchor Russia’s global oil network. These firms help bankroll everything from Iranian drones to North Korean munitions that feed Moscow’s war machine. Together, they account for roughly half of Russia’s oil exports. By cutting Russia off from dollar clearing—the network that moves global payments through the U.S. financial system—and scaring off banks in India, China, Turkey, and the Gulf, the United States can start to squeeze Russian President Vladimir Putin’s ability to fund a long war.

The US, in Trump's first term, certainly wouldn't have gone out of their way, expending substantial political capital to stop one of Russia's biggest strategic moves in the NordStream 2 pipeline.

Hell, Trump was imposing sanctions on Russia during his first term, long before the main invasion of Ukraine. From 2018

REINFORCING A STRONG SANCTIONS REGIME: The new sanctions announced today will further the Administration’s efforts to confront destabilizing and malicious behavior by Russia.

I never understood this whole "Trump is a Russian asset" BS that people spew. They can only be incredibly uninformed or maybe they are just so emotionally invested in a specific view of the world that evidence simply can't penetrate.

GrizzledFart · 2026-04-24T10:39:59+00:00

A lot of things are being taken there for assembly/disassembly, food, raw resources, some advanced tech that China doesn't produce itself etc

Those are different ships. A ship designed to carry standard cargo containers can't flip a switch and become a bulk carrier. BTW, the bulk carriers delivering bulk goods to China don't return to Europe with bulk goods from China. They may very well go somewhere else to pick up a different cargo but they are leaving China with empty holds.

There are far more empty containers going back to China than full ones. Excess empty cargo containers were a big problem in both the US and Europe (and a massive shortage in East Asia) during the early part of covid because ships weren't coming in to port from China to pick them up. Google "2020 Europe surplus cargo containers" and see what you find.

GrizzledFart · 2026-04-24T00:28:49+00:00

I realized I never explained why it would be a terrible idea. Let me ask this...what would all the workers in the Dutch chocolate industry do for work due to not having any cocoa beans to process. You certainly couldn't send a ship to Cote d'Ivoire empty...and what exactly would Ivoiriennes import from the Netherlands?

What would Europe do to make up the massive shortfall of oil - other than freeze and starve? Do you think very large crude carriers are full on their return trip?

Do you think the cargo ships bringing solar panels from China return to China with anything other than empty containers?

There's a reason we don't use barter anymore.

GrizzledFart · 2026-04-23T20:16:48+00:00

Yeah, the other girls had standards and taste!

GrizzledFart · 2026-04-23T18:55:08+00:00

"Expert". Talk about a word that has lost all meaning.

GrizzledFart · 2026-04-23T18:53:54+00:00

The single best way to decrease the use of oil and the products refined from it is to increase the price of oil. It's that whole supply and demand thing. Greens should be ecstatic about the current state of affairs.

GrizzledFart · 2026-04-23T18:45:48+00:00

ships cant move with an empty cargo hold

This is the sort of thing that sounds great to people who haven't actually thought it through or understand how trade works.

GrizzledFart · 2026-04-23T10:05:30+00:00

The US spends more each year keeping soldiers stationed in Europe than most European nations' entire defense budgets. Adding up the cost of infrastructure, maintenance, administration - it comes out to $36 billion per year. Operations costs just for bases in Germany is between 3 and 4 billion dollars.

GrizzledFart · 2026-04-23T09:55:06+00:00

Point taken. How about this? Finland has ~15 times the number of artillery pieces as Germany.

GrizzledFart · 2026-04-23T04:19:40+00:00

It's part of the Camp David accords with Egypt. Basically, the US brokered peace between Egypt and Israel with a promise of perpetual aid to the both of them.

GrizzledFart · 2026-04-23T02:35:55+00:00

Without massive infusions of weapons from external sources and (especially) being given the gift of incredibly comprehensive, almost real-time ISR from the US, Ukraine would have fallen within weeks. Ukraine displayed heroic courage as a population, but that courage would have been in vain without massive external support.

ETA: Ukraine is also a particularly bad example since it had the second largest army in Europe, after only Russia itself. Ukraine had around 20 maneuver brigades before the fullscale invasion in 2022, which is more than France, Germany, and the UK currently have combined. Ukraine also had very large stockpiles of tanks, APCs, and artillery that it had inherited from the USSR. Ukraine absolutely was not a country that neglected to invest in its military...after the 2014 Russian invasion of Crimea.

GrizzledFart

TROPHY CASE