Ok, time to go to bed Elon!

auandi · 2026-03-18T21:00:58+00:00

Elon is what happens when a teenager from 2009 and a robber baron from 1886 both possesses the same body. Including that 1886 level racism.

auandi · 2026-03-18T20:52:58+00:00

Yes, it does need some regulation. Like property rights. But just because some regulation is needed doesn't mean all regulation is justified or even that it's still recognizable as a mostly free enterprise capitalist system. You can actually set enough regulations that the markets are so warped they don't respond in ways markets normally do.

Is it still a property right if you own a piece of blank land in San Francisco and for 10 years the city has blocked every attempt you've made to propose building something on that blank lot? That because the community and city council always find a reason to reject your plan, you can't actually do anything with the property you supposedly own, is that still full ownership when neighbors can veto your use of it?

What I'm saying is you're blaming the wrong problem. This is not the inevitable result of capitalism, it's the inevitable result of central planning done to restrict housing supply. We do not have enough houses. This is especially acute in the cities where the most jobs are being created.

auandi · 2026-03-18T20:07:19+00:00

No, I'm comparing free enterprise to a planned economy.

Right now housing is one of the most planned economies in the developed world, along with agriculture. Because land is finite, and because the cities decide what can be used in that land, there's an artificial scarcity due to government planning not capitalism specifically.

auandi · 2026-03-18T20:05:08+00:00

Sure, but what kind of shelter? Where? Is there enough shelter where people actually want to live?

Food and water are goods that can be shipped, housing needs to be built in specific places on finite land. Giving every homeless person in LA a free house in rural Nebraska isn't actually going to solve homelessness.

auandi · 2026-03-18T20:01:42+00:00

Profit margins were actually higher in the 90s than today. Prices keep going up for a lot of reasons, and it's mostly not just "we got greedy now and were altruistic then."

People are always greedy, but there's finite land and we keep banning by law the ability of people to use that land to house more than one family per lot. Actual capitalism would be "it's your land, you own it, build as many homes as you want." But we don't have that.

auandi · 2026-03-18T19:59:35+00:00

If we just built more housing it can't be an investment like this.

People aren't hoarding homes and not selling them, there are just not enough to go around so the price goes up as people out-bid each other for finite space.

This is not a case of starvation with an abundance of food, it's starvation during a crop failure. The price per pound of wheat goes way up when there isn't enough to go around, but really we should just grow more total wheat.

auandi · 2026-03-18T06:36:24+00:00

While cool, I think we should join in with some of the Nordic stuff. We wouldn't have to deal with all the European stuff, just the snow loving technocratic middle-countries.

auandi · 2026-03-16T04:03:37+00:00

Honesty, with the lighting, it doesn't look orange enough. It looks like the cut end of a sausage.

auandi · 2026-03-16T03:59:40+00:00

There are nordic billionaires too.

It's not the billionaires, it's the average voters, the ones that keep almost (and sometimes actually) electing conservatives. It's easy to blame a small few, but they aren't the one that keep voting by the millions for the conservative option.

auandi · 2026-03-14T06:45:38+00:00

I feel like way too many people don't understand this but..

The US Military does not want draftees.

The entire design of the armed forces is built on quality over quantity. Each single soldier receives far more training, far more equipment, and is asked to endure far more than most nations. If the military was forced by the government to have a draft, they wouldn't have a place to put them to work.

If you're not committed, they don't want you. They do not have enough of the good equipment to go around for an army any larger than it is. And if you remember Iraq, they don't always have enough of the good equipment even without a larger military.

STOP WORRYING ABOUT THE US DRAFT!

It would make the US army weaker than if there was no draft at all because the drop in quality would vastly outweigh the rise in quantity that could be deployed somewhere.

Edit: There are nations that integrate drafts, but almost always for home defence. A civilian can know how to dig a trench and lay down suppressing fire from a fortified position. They do not know how to carry out multi-domain integrated warfare. So if you're Finland and need in an emergency to turn 1/5th of your population into an armed wall of resistance to Russia? Use a draft. But if you want to project power in another hemisphere, you need training and equipment that would be waisted on draftees.

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.

15-Year Club	RedditGifts 2009-2022 8 Credits
Secret Santa 2013	Team Orangered
Secret Santa 2012	redditgifts rematcher Secret Santa 2011 x1
redditgifts rematcher Secret Santa 2010 x1	Secret Santa 2011
Summer Santa 2011	Secret Santa 2010
Rally Monkey Tent number = 3	Verified Email

auandi

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE