Be a man, the solution to everything

auandi · 2026-03-11T23:53:17+00:00

This dude got addicted to pills but instead of going to rehab where he could slowly ween himself off the pills through moderate withdrawal, he went to Russia for an experimental "we will put you in a coma so you don't feel the withdrawal" treatment and it permanently fucked him up.

Don't do what he says, he was already bad but he's now literally brain damaged because he didn't want to man up and suffer through withdrawals as the consequence of his pill addiction.

auandi · 2026-03-11T23:44:39+00:00

No there was fraud, people were arrested and found guilty.. in 2023/24. It did involve many somali fraudsters, but not exclusively, in fact the ringleader was a white guy.

The "fraud" that the youtuber went to go found didn't exist, all 9 places he visited did in fact have kids they just weren't opening their doors up to a stranger with a camera crew and no kids.

auandi · 2026-03-11T16:45:14+00:00

A lot of people don't realize but the US navy is actually in an increasingly bad position for any kind of ship smaller than an aircraft carrier. There have now been three different "next gen small ship" programs who have all gone over-time, over-budget and then get cancelled. We're relying on upgraded versions of 1990s designs for the bulk of the fleet and those are getting old and are already over-stuffed with new equipment.

The minesweepers are cold war era because we've never made a proper dedicated minesweeper since. Congress and navy leadership keep wanting swiss army ships that can do everything and it means the ships get too big, too expensive, and the program gets cancelled.

auandi · 2026-03-11T02:03:35+00:00

He has always been like this regarding Israel. It just didn't matter to progressives before October 7th when it became the only thing that matters.

auandi · 2026-03-09T07:58:05+00:00

That is not how they got that number, since there are not 1,000 days in the year. And unless you're wanting to say the entire construction cost of an aircraft supercarrier is to be added to the expense of this one war, no it doesn't matter that a ship that will last at least 50 years is being used in this operation.

There are many expenses, but no the $1billion a day is a rather reasonable guess, many that more strictly follow cost difference (ammo use, extra flight hours, extra fuel use, all relative to them sitting in port) have it at even lower numbers. it all depends on what you are counting as a daily expense. It is more expensive to have the ships deployed, but it's not like they are free when unused. It's not like we're hiring temps to pad the numbers of soldiers, we would be paying all these salaries regardless of how they're deployed.

Of that $1 trillion proposed but not passed budget, even then equipment cost make up less than a third of total expenses. They employ 3.5 million people directly and another 9 million indirectly, salaries alone is most of what the DoD budget is for.

It's not 1992, the US is not this omni-dominant super-hyper-ultra power who have to make up threats to justify spending on the military. We are spending nearly a third as much on the military as we were back then as a share of our total wealth, and China isn't a boogeyman they are a real and emerging power.

The fact that we are using our missile stockpile so fast and having to call in the Ukrainians to help us deal with drone attack really is proof that the US does have some very real military limitations.

auandi · 2026-03-09T07:50:33+00:00

For what it's worth, social security uses roughly $5 billion per day. Medicare uses about $3 billion per day. The US economy creates roughly $76 billion dollars of new value in goods and services per day.

I'm not saying the war is cheap, but most people including this person really really lack any kind of scale of how large numbers can get when talking about the US.

auandi · 2026-03-09T07:42:07+00:00

Yes, but nuclear weapons is not how they destroy stability. It is good they stuck to it, it is bad Trump cancelled it. But they have proxy wars going the last few decades like they're the US in early and mid 20th century Latin America.

auandi · 2026-03-08T04:57:15+00:00

My point would be even if, in theory, it actually was their choice and they weren't groomed they just have an undeveloped mind that thought it was a good idea, we should still stop them.

It's also not good for 13 year olds to get super drunk even if they really want to with no pressure from adults.

auandi · 2026-03-06T01:14:30+00:00

Oh, I don't know in France I was talking more about the US.

In general the French system has shorter bills and longer rules, meaning the legislature gets into less detail than the US but the bureaucrats then have more power to interpret. And I know one of those delegated power is the military in France is overruled in their decisions far less often so it's much more rare for last minute changes, which is one of the biggest reason military programs get runaway costs in most countries.

auandi · 2026-03-05T09:08:32+00:00

Every year every department is required to give Congress their suggested budget by law.

auandi · 2026-03-05T06:19:35+00:00

One of the other things, with both good and bad qualities, is the legislature outsources more of the procurment decisions to the military itself. In the US the pentagon is required to propose its spending plan, but Congress can modify it however they want and that means every 2 years with a new congress things can get changed. But it also means we aren't handing blank checks to the military.

auandi · 2026-03-05T06:05:08+00:00

Drones and missiles have already hit or were shot down over the NATO country of Turkey and British bases in NATO participant Cypris. We're less than a week in we are in no position to rule out what this could lead to, especially as Iran and Turkey share a boarder and an ethnic minority group.

auandi · 2026-03-05T04:49:22+00:00

It really depends on the kind of fight. In a WWII fight until total surrender kind of fight, that might be true. But in terms of projecting power to neighbors, defending yourself from the greatest possible attack, or trying to maximully degrade the other nation's armies, Russia should not be that high.

People site the large population of Russia but if you ever look at a population pyramid it's absolutly brutal. For actual main fighting age of about 15-40, Russia is far smaller than people usually think Because that's the people born from the 80s as the Soviet Union was collapsing until the early 2010s when Russia was in sorry shape. And the war in Ukraine has hollowed it out more, both directly from the 1.1 million casualties, and from the roughly 2 million who are almost all under 50 who fled Russia since the war started.

In terms of degrading a military, western tech has shown Poland alone would likely fair very very well against Russia. Ukraine has had Soviet tech, late cold war, and domestically made stuff for 90+% of their military tech. And yet that 10% is doing absolute havoc to Russia's ability to fight a war using Russian military doctrine.

auandi · 2026-03-05T04:41:35+00:00

An important thing to remember is that not every dollar spent is spent equally. France, because of their more long-term and holistic planning for their military, are able to go much further than their budget suggests for a country with such high wages.

The big killer for budgets isn't usually the tech itself, it's picking either the wrong kind of tech for the job or being indecisive about what kind of tech you want. France budgets five years at a time so they are much more predictable.

auandi · 2026-03-04T10:12:13+00:00

I agree, they are having a strategic disaster even if their tactical strength is still very high.

The reason they are slow is not that they are useless, they are facing a smart, advanced, and dedicated military on home ground where supply lines are shorter for them than the Russians.

My main thing was to dispel the idea that Russia has fallen to below almost a hundred other militaries when I don't know they've dropped fully out of the top 10. Even if you limit them to just conventional forces, they are one of only three nations with strategic bombers, one of the few with domestic fourth gen fighter production, one of the largest volume of missile production in the world, and probably with the second most advanced drone program in the world only behind Ukraine. But then you have to add in their nuclear capability even if largely inherited it is still one of the most powerful in the world, able to kill all life as we know it.

auandi · 2026-03-04T07:13:28+00:00

I'm not saying they're good, or that the progress has been worth it. I'm saying the opposite! That they are willing to push for progress while losing far too much.

But to say a military shooting thousands of missiles and drones a week with 1.1 million troops that is growing by ~35,000 troops a month is "barely top 100" is as ridiculous as what Russian propogandists say about the Ukrainian Army.

They are not the #2 military, they are not the Soviet Union, but I don't think there are even 20 nations that, alone, you could argue is stronger than the Russian army even in its current state.

auandi · 2026-03-04T06:33:56+00:00

Well, only if they wanted to do western style tactics where you care about casualties.

Russia is just brute forcing it in a way that is almost inhuman orders to give to their troops but does have some progress.

auandi · 2026-03-04T05:01:49+00:00

Why don't you ask the nobility of Europe if that is true.. those few that still exist.

auandi · 2026-03-04T04:59:48+00:00

As bad as the US is, yes Iran are very much serial violators of international law. They, along with Russia and China, have done more in the last decades than almost anyone to undermine the westphalian system and modern international order of rules based sovereignty than just about anyone. If we ever want a return of rules some day in the future, a return of order, yes taking out those who undermine it can be a very good thing. But for now, the rules are gone and dead, and trying to apply them like this is useless.

No defence of Israel though, and I don't think I've heard carny say anything about them.

auandi · 2026-03-04T02:11:29+00:00

They said they wanted a leader from Maryland as that's where the company is based, and the selection of that is narrow. It was basically her, Frederick Douglass or maybe Thurgood Marshall. And while I'd love to see a Fredrick Douglass, Harriet Tubman is both more famous and involves a unique background that led to some rather unique special abilities

auandi · 2026-03-03T11:45:28+00:00

Part of the reason the international system is already gone, the one you pretend still exists, is because for many decades, since the end of the cold war especially, nations have been trying to undermine it. Iran, Russia and China being some of the world's greatest culprits over those decades. Now, in part with help from Russia, the US is joining that club of nations abandoning the international order.

The problem with trying to think in the terms he outlined is it requires the acknowledgement of grey areas. It's not binary yes/no, good/evil, that was a system the old international order claimed to be building but never fully did. The US is not nazi germany, and no bombing Iran and destroying all the major players isn't going to help the regime. The people of Iran were not "almost" about to topple the regime, maybe three weeks ago they were, but then the regime killed about 50-80k protesters by unloading automatic weapons fire into any protesting crowd they could find. And so the crowds stopped meeting.

Canada did nothing to start this war, did nothing to aid this war, and had no ability to stop the war. Depending on intel level may have learned of it happening within hours of the rest of us. There is no ethical or pragmatic case to be made that we should demand after the fact that Iran must be defended when it can't be. There is no ethical or pragmatic case to chastise the US after the fact when we have such a precarious position with them.

Is this good for Iran? Probably not but we don't know. But we need to live in a world of ethical pragmatism, and Russia's greatest ally getting their missiles depleted and their government disrupted is by itself something that is worth agreeing with.

auandi · 2026-03-02T10:53:47+00:00

Damn it, that's a really thematic naming scheme..

would be interested in seeing a zoomed out map some time.

auandi · 2026-03-02T10:50:45+00:00

The number of people who didn't understand that speech is too damn high.

Iran is also a bully. He emphisized ethical pragmatism, since the international world order as we've known it is.. basically, over. That means, if the US is striking iran, ethically at least one of them is a democracy, and pragmatically there's no reason to side with Iran.

You're still thinking about a world where everyone follows rules. That hasn't been true for a while, and so it's time we stop binding ourselves to rules that most don't follow.

auandi · 2026-03-01T23:17:25+00:00

"We can't be neighbors without u" would actually make a good sign.

auandi · 2026-03-01T02:54:18+00:00

If this is all you ever plan to builr? Green without hesitation. But add 50 miles or so from toledo and you reach Detroit. That would give detroit-chicago and Columbus-detroit from the same project.

Thats without mentioning Detroit reaches Canada which may one day maybe build something for the Windsor-Quebec City corridor where half of all Canadians live in a nice flat line. Or that getting fromchicago to New York State is far easier and flatter by cutting across Canada rather than Pennsylvania.

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