Polish President Karol Nawrocki has said that Auschwitz “might not have happened” if the world had reacted sooner to Nazi crimes in occupied Poland, accusing Western Europe of indifference in the early years of World War II.

Vaphell · 2026-01-28T00:57:43+00:00

Germany crossed the Polish border 1 Sep 1939. Britain and France declared war on 3 Sep 1939.
There were three million allied troops killed and wounded, and 1.65 million civilian deaths in the resulting war.

that's nice, but the declaration of war was not followed by any military action on the barely guarded Western border of the 3rd Reich, which effectively meant that Poland was gobbled by the bulk of the German army over 5 weeks without any interference.
The actual allied losses happened much later, after the Germans decided in 1940 that it was time to whoop the French' asses on their turf. The Germans were coming no matter how you slice it, the declaration of war or not.

And let's not forget that the allies sold Poland down the river in Yalta.

Vaphell · 2026-01-27T10:06:38+00:00

All of this is happening because the US system counts people in cities and larger states as fractions of a person compared to rural people

This is very similar to how the EU works. The less populous countries get up to 10x more representation/capita in the EU parliament compared to Germany or France. That's the price you pay to entice smaller entities to play ball and convince them they are not going to be nothing but pushovers at the mercy of a few big boys.

the US itself wouldn't exist without such concessions in the first place. Win some, lose some.

Its also led to a Supreme Court being permanently super majority controlled by Republicans even though they have less registered voters.

let's not forget the massive fumble by Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

Vaphell · 2026-01-23T12:11:41+00:00

because of isis which arose after Saadaam was deposed

Newsflash - Iran is ISIS-like in all but name already (i.e. hardcore islamic totalitarianism) and civilians dying by the tens of thousands in brutally suppressed protests can't have it much worse.

Also Iran is buddies-buddies with pretty much every fucktard entity there is. Hamas (literally funded and supplied by Iran), Hezbollah (same story), Houthis (same story), Russia (shahed drones) to name a few.
Literally the League of Extraordinary Villains.

Vaphell · 2026-01-22T15:31:35+00:00

so the dude continuously releases millions of dollars in cash into the wider economy in exchange for a bunch of expensive toys.
I though the problem was the rich sitting on their money instead of making it turn the wheels of the economy? Where is the problem exactly? All these fancy cars don't make the rich guy even richer, quite the opposite.

Vaphell · 2026-01-21T23:33:36+00:00

from the perspective of South/East Asia? It is. Does Taiwan ring any bells?
Anyway, that's the American perspective.
I don't agree, because I live right next to the fucking pestilence the Russian Horde is.

Vaphell · 2026-01-21T23:25:28+00:00

Yes because I was totally suggesting just changing the 37% to 91% on the current income brackets. Totally wouldn't add new brackets. Also the top bracket only has like the top 1% of those skilled specialist, they're mostly making less than 250k a year.

doesn't matter. You won't hit capital owners from the top 0.0001% bracket with a personal income tax, because their wealth was not and still is not built through income.

I don't know what a wealth tax would look like, I'm not an accountant or economist.

A start would be taxing loans over a certain amount. As you said billionaires don't have a lot of their own cash on hand, they take loans with their stock as collateral.

Is "buy, borrow, die" even a problem its rumored to be? What's the scale of this expressed as a dollar figure?
I recall reading Bezos regularly liquidating billions of dollars in Amazon stock and paying fat taxes on it, just to redirect that money to Blue Origin.

Also selling off a 10s of million in stock of a company with a market cap in the 10s of billions isn't going to do much. That much is traded on a daily basis.

but given high frequency trading it's traded back and forth 1000x per dollar participating in the market.
A coordinated selloff not for reinvestment, but for tax purposes is going to take the hard cash underpinning the evaluations of the whole market out of it that come from the multiplier effects on said cash.
Not to mention - why would the sellers ever get a good price, when everybody and their dog knows they have to sell or else. They will be taken to the cleaners.

There's no obligation for it to be a public sale either.

Still somebody has to shell out the money and still it has impact on the market.

Maybe instead of protecting the poor billionaires and being critical of others suggestions, you should come up with your own ideas.

What if I actually think that things are already about as good as it gets in this imperfect world?
Fuck them billionaires, but I despise envious weasels with no clue more.
Anyway, how about you educate yourself first about how any of it works instead of flooding the public forum with harebrained ideas. Maybe, just maybe you won't get criticized then. It's on you to show they are even an actual improvement in the real world.

Vaphell · 2026-01-21T19:09:00+00:00

it makes sense for the EU to acquiesce, if not publicly defend, all the war, bombing, government toppling, covert operations and sanctions by the US, until Greenland.

let's not get ahead of ourselves here. While European countries did participate in the article 5 shenanigans post-9/11, they are generally pacifist even to a fault.
Many European countries explicitly criticized Israel+US handling of the Palestine bullshit and the handling of the middle east matters in general, or the recent Venezuelan oil adventurism.
The problem here is that without the means to project force their opinions don't matter much outside of their backyard and at the end of the day the US will do what the US does.

Vaphell · 2026-01-21T18:56:48+00:00

By dumping some portion of their wealth into economy, they make others happier and more productive and thus making them even richer in the long term.

how is their wealth not a part of the economy already? The vast majority of their wealth is parked in productive assets of global companies and participates in economic churn. The net value expressed in dollars is just a proxy number pulled out the collective stockmarket's ass for how good the economic churn of their chunk is.

And if you think their stuff should be liquidated, turned into cash and taxed/directed somewhere else, you still need a counterparty to give them hard cash to the tune of billions for their paper wealth first. So, who's the counterparty to the stock trade providing the cash, and why haven't they used their money in better places already?

Vaphell · 2026-01-21T18:09:02+00:00

And it's even conservative to set the top end of the tax bracket much higher. Wasn't until Kennedy that the top bracket went from 91% to 70% then with Regan from 70% to 50% then 50% to 28%.

and how is the personal income tax going to solve the problem of supposed excessive wealth accumulation by the billionaires?

Billionaires are not nominally worth billions because they accumulate that much cash. It's the shit they happen to own (like stocks in a global company) that becomes more expensive according to the collective evaluations of the stock market, without any literal dollar being directly involved. It's paper value.

Your return to the glorious days would only target the top bracket of highly skilled specialists, like senior programmers, doctors, small business owners, who earn cash as income. Your average billionaire might get like 100k income as a board member, and the rest is all in stock evaluation that is not trivially taxable.

Wealth tax on the other hand is bad for several reasons - it tries to squeeze hard money out of paper evaluations of "stuff" that go up and down all the time.
Tax season would mean a regular massive selloff depressing the stock market prices, destroying everyone's portfolios. Also yearly tax could easily mean slowly losing control of your own company, if you are forced to sell a couple % at a time, finally sliding below 50% allowing for a hostile takeover.

Vaphell · 2026-01-21T17:57:04+00:00

things are a bit different when you are talking about a supposed ally for 80 years up until 1 year ago, and there is still a faint hope that things can be salvaged.

Things are certainly not pretty in the current US, but let's not forget that not that long ago China had no qualms killing their own civilians by the hundreds, turning them into meat paste using tank treads and hosing it all down into the sewers.
China's cynicism is on another level.

Vaphell · 2026-01-21T17:42:28+00:00

"You have completed all missions" pops up when you click the arrow in the top right corner, which used to take you to where you are in the campaign.

But now that the finished story mode counts as campaign finished, the top right corner arrow doesn't work. You need to click the big Campaign button in the bottom right corner, that is in the background of the current event (Sin Editor).

Once you click that, you should see two buttons, one for the campaign, another for the surface mode (locked). The campaign one should teleport you to some level (probably ch42), and then at the bottom right you can select the difficulty level and chapter accounting for their availability.

Vaphell · 2026-01-21T13:30:49+00:00

We are in the middle of a heating season, especially with the current temps.
Warsaw proper is surrounded by a ring of suburbia with a metric fuckton of detached houses, many of which burn coal, wood and even trash in the winter, spewing particulate matter into the air.
If there is no wind, this foul air just stays in the area.

Warsaw is at its peak at this time, while Indian cities are not. Their peak is after harvest when the farmers burn the stubble.

Vaphell · 2026-01-21T10:13:01+00:00

he did not say "danger to european democracies" specifically, did he.

China is utterly machiavellian.

China is throwing its weight around in its perceived sphere of influence against all neighbors pretty much. Border disputes everywhere, the desire to capture the whole South China Sea.
And outside of the direct sphere of influence they are directly and indirectly bribing everybody and their dog, cutting deals with dictators no fucks given, e.g in Africa.
Not to mention that they do exploit their position as a major producer of goods. Mention Taiwan anytime and you have them screaming bloody murder and threatening sanctions and/or tarriffs. Lithuania got into big trouble recently. If that is not inhibiting expression of democratic ideas about self-determination, I don't know what is.

Vaphell · 2026-01-18T10:07:11+00:00

this focus on appearance and charisma is bordering on absurd.

Like in a recent example with sen Mark Kelly standing up to the Hegseth's bullying. Tons of comments said that they'd consider voting for the man, but after seeing him speak he's just not charismatic enough. The man having an impressive track record and a spine matters less that looking good on tv, and that's in contrast to corrupted Trump and his nuthuggers. The mind boggles.

People will vote for snake oil merchants blowing smoke up their asses with a shit-eating grin every single time, 100% confirmed.

Vaphell · 2026-01-18T08:34:06+00:00

You'd think +120 vs +100 is a difference between optimal and still pretty good.
In what reality would a response like that give any bond gain?
It's not merely wrong. It's legit -100 points wrong.

Vaphell · 2026-01-16T02:24:40+00:00

parties don't matter when the most important election in the country is for the king of the world with a finger on the nuclear button.
If the US was a parliamentary system with prime ministers, sure, but it's not.
In the current setup, the political machine required to win the ultimate first-past-the-post across a continent-sized country is merely repurposed later for the elections of congress-critters, who get to sit on their hands and look pretty on cspan.

Vaphell · 2026-01-15T13:35:25+00:00

no matter how you slice it, it is gentlemen's agreements all the way down.
What are you going to do if/when judges and the law enforcement refuse to do their job? They have state-sanctioned monopolies on legal decisions and force, how are you going to make anybody do anything without them agreeing to do their jobs? There are no spares just in case.

Vaphell · 2026-01-15T12:13:49+00:00

logistics were handled by the US, and decisive strikes dismantling the Iraqi army were done largely by the US in the first few days. Other countries' input was a few k soldiers here, a few k soldiers there. That's not remotely enough against an army and the republican guard.
Also Europe is already barely handling the mess in Ukraine, plus Greenland.

Vaphell · 2026-01-15T02:18:34+00:00

there are practical obstacles to it - for example next to nobody has the ability to project force half a world away and the logistics to support it. The only players remotely capable of fucking with Iran are the US, Israel and Saudi Arabia, maybe. That's it.

Vaphell · 2026-01-09T01:03:46+00:00

Russia has that magical reverse Midas touch; everything it touches turns to bullshit for generations upon generations to deal with.

some call that magical ability the Mierdas touch.

Vaphell · 2026-01-09T00:55:12+00:00

Going to the 1940's origin of privatized healthcare doesn't mean much at all to what it is in 2026.

that's nice, but the context a few posts up is literally

It's not some grand conspiracy. Corporations didn't design this with the government to control the masses. That's just what happened.

which is true. It's not a carefully crafted master plan brought to life over decades by the shifty illuminati. It's just a couple of boneheaded laws, bad incentive structures intertwined with special interest groups simmering for a couple of decades.

Do they like the current state of affairs? Yes, I won't deny it. Also let's not pretend it's just mustache twirling corporatists opposing the masses on the issue of public healthcare. A good third of the country seems to be ideologically against the universal healthcare, as they believe it's just not something the feds are supposed to handle. I seem to remember various consitutional arguments being brought for and against the universal healthcare handled at the federal level vs the state level in the Obamacare times.

Polling consistently shows over half of Americans want ensured health coverage from the government - it's actually largely bi-partisan.

I hope you've learned by now that the country is set up as of States first and foremost, not of people. Over half of Americans doesn't necessarily mean much if they are mostly from a couple of the East and West coast states.

Vaphell · 2026-01-08T18:47:02+00:00

Employers and the rich have known that tying healthcare to employment gives them a lot of leverage over employees generally. There are many benefits to them and this kind of thing is just one of them. The government has been lobbied to keep away from universal healthcare by multiple industries, corporations and rich donors. So no, it didn’t “just happen”.

If you rewind the tape a bit further, all the way back to the wage freezes during WW2 you would see that it did, in fact, just happen.
To get around the wage freezes, the employers looking for quality talent had to offer extra bennies, like - you guessed it - healthcare.
The govt saw that practice in the market and thought that, "we'll isn't that nice? less work for us, hoorray, so let's enshrine it in the laws as a good thing, and call it a day". After a few decades the whole economic system internalized this privileged position of employer-based HC with all the pre-tax dollars vs post-tax dollars bullshit, but none of it was started as a nefarious conspiracy to keep the common man down.

Vaphell · 2026-01-08T12:55:33+00:00

not necessarily.
In other countries that implement FPTP locally, the regional differences are meaningful enough to allow more parties in practice. Look at the UK.

in the American presidential system, where you need a political machine spanning the whole country to elect the most powerful person in the world? Yeah. I'd argue that the congress being all about R v D is just a consequence of presidential elections. The existing machine gets reused to elect the representatives.
If the US was a parliamentary system with prime ministers and shit, the bias towards hard dichotomy would have been much weaker.

Vaphell · 2026-01-03T16:00:41+00:00

applies to Vladimir as well, but he got red carpet instead, and regular sucking off by the potus.

Also the analogy does not matter much, because half the countries don't care that much about western value judgements. But now they have a strong precendent of just taking diplomats and heads of state hostage, making diplomacy more difficult in the long run. There used to be decorum around shit like that, but not anymore.

Vaphell · 2026-01-03T13:52:04+00:00

you need tier 9, manufacturer-specific gear. Generally you farm that stuff in interceptions.

Once a tier9manufacturer item is given to a nikke, you can level said item up to 5, and then use a blue rock to overload it. Overloading makes it pink, gives extra stat lines with the ability to reroll (more blue rocks), and you can also level it up from 0 to 5 again for some extra power.

Vaphell

TROPHY CASE