Ukraine War Flashes Neon Warning Lights for Chips (reuters.com) 101
Russia's invasion of Ukraine by land, air and sea risks reverberating across the global chip industry and exacerbating current supply-chain constraints. Reuters Breakingviews: Ukraine is a major producer of neon gas critical for lasers used in chipmaking and supplies more than 90% of U.S. semiconductor-grade neon, according to estimates from research firm Techcet. About 35% of palladium, a rare metal also used for semiconductors, is sourced from Russia. A full-scale conflict disrupting exports of these elements might hit players like Intel, which gets about 50% of its neon from Eastern Europe, according to JPMorgan. ASML, which supplies machines to semiconductor makers, sources less than 20% of the gases it uses from the crisis-hit countries.
Attrition (Score:5, Interesting)
One of the many possible plays for Ukraine, aside from attempts on Putin personally, is a war of attrition against Russian forces. Forcing its economy in a down spiral, which will cause it to sell its palladium and other resources cheap. So long term, in one possible scenario, this could turn out good for the chip industry.
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An even better scenario is the continuing decline of the Russian population. Depending on which chart you look at, Russia's population will decline anywhere between 5% and 11% by 2050. And that's on top of the deaths it's recording from covid. And now you have to add in the deaths from its invasion of Ukraine and the loss of men of child-bearing age to both death and mutilation.
While Russia will eventually overwhelm Ukraine through sheer numbers, if Ukraine could kill ~3,000 Russian soldiers the last time
Re:Attrition (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah, why is the overreactive media hyping up a new #3 cause of death that appeared rather suddenly and is largely preventable through vaccination? A bunch of Chicken Littles they are!
Doing your own research again I see (Score:2)
Stop spreading lies
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I didn't know facts were debatable.
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the average life span in the US is ~79 years.
an average 55 year-old would lose 24 years of life on average, hardly "a few years".
i guess you have some wiggle room because you cleverly lumped "55+ year-olds, severely obese, and smokers," so you can play with the semantics if you wish. i mean, may as well, since you cited nothing to begin with.
unless of course you want the old to die, which is not an unsupportable position, but one should be straight-forward about it.
Re:Attrition (Score:4, Insightful)
Fun fact, no one can infect anyone else with heart disease or cancer.
Also, which cancer? Throat? Breast? Lung? Thyroid? Pancreas? The list goes on. Cancer is a broad term. Pick one cancer and do a comparison. Covid killed more people than that one type of cancer.
But please, keep coming up with excuses for why an infectious disease shouldn't be taken seriously. That's what all those dead MAGAs did.
Re:Attrition (Score:4, Informative)
Also this presumption that "the media" does not care about heart disease or cancer is just the supiedest premise. There is an entire month devoted to breast cancer awareness. There are dozens or hundreds of nonprofits and interest groups devoted to cancer and heart research, prevention and awareness. A huge amount of medical spending goes towards both of these diseases and have been for decades with actually pretty remarkable progress.
Cancer and heart disease are in many cases are diseases borne of lifestyle and comparing the individual effort to change a persons entire lifestyle to a 15 minute appointment at your local pharmacy is laughably dishonest.
Re:Attrition (Score:5, Informative)
Openvaers? What, you couldn't find an inciteful Joe Rogan quote to support your conspiracy? Adverse effects due to vaccination are exceedingly rare - with over 526 million doses, if might surprise you to learn that the CDC has been tracking adverse reactions and has written a report (https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/safety/adverse-events.html). In fact, it is starting to look like republicans are dying at a rate far faster than democrats due to COVID, and this is so alarming, even Fox mentioned it (https://fox59.com/news/national-world/gap-between-covid-deaths-in-republican-vs-democrat-counties-larger-than-ever/
Re: Attrition (Score:4, Interesting)
Back in 2020, Trump called the governor of Georgia begging him to find 10,000 votes from somewhere. Maybe instead of calling the governors office he should have called the hospitals and the morgue, because Covid casualties in Georgia was 10,000.
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I've had this thought myself. Easy math: say there are one million covid deaths, and just toss 66%/33% death rates GOP/dems (I actually saw an article that did the math on this, and I recall the numbers being worse than that, but can't find the link). That's an additional 300k+ dead republicans. You add up Trump's lead in all the swing states against Clinton, that number is far less.
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That is one of the most satisfyingly hilarious thoughts I've heard for a while. It reminds me of the final ending of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
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Totally bogus. There's no evidence that deaths or hospitalizations were the result of vaccination, and the vaccine "adverse events" are anything as mild as a sore arm.
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Not entirely true. The real number of COVID vaccination deaths in the US is nine. They could be directly traced back to the J&J vaccine.
Zero deaths only applies to the mRNA vaccines.
Re:Attrition (Score:4)
Sure, and when I caught Covid in 2020, I had similar symptoms. Then my unvaccinated uncle (age 79) caught Delta and died. His wife also caught it and was asymptomatic. So on average, it's a mild disease which, incidentally, killed about 941,000 people in the U.S. alone.
Are you suggesting that if one of us had a family member die right after getting a vaccine, we and our doctor wouldn't bother to file a report about it, even though it is a legal requirement to do so, as stated in the FDA's FAQ? [hhs.gov]
These requirements are reiterated in the Emergency Use Authorization [fda.gov].
Of course, you could also look at statistics from around the world showing that excess deaths correlate with Covid death reports, not vaccine uptake. [medium.com]
And it's not just doctors who use VAERS. As WebMD said in January 2021, "Health authorities are encouraging anyone who has a bad reaction to the vaccine to file a report with the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) or call 800-822-7967." I'm sure this never results in multiple reports filed for the same person, so let's just move on.
Yes, there is a report from 13 years ago saying that "1% of vaccine adverse events are reported". Well guess what, adverse event reports have gone way up since then. One way to interpret this is that the government is working harder to encourage reporting, and that vaccines under EUA get more scrutiny. Another way to interpret this is that elderly people are more likely to have taken Covid vaccines than other vaccines, which brings us to the topic of base rates.
Have you heard of "base rates"? I didn't think so. It turns out that people die of natural causes every single year -- even in pandemic years! And most of the people who die of natural causes are elderly. And the people most likely to have taken a Covid vaccine are also elderly... you see where I'm going with this?
If you've got your calculator handy, let's begin. The average annual death rate in the United States in 2018 and 2019 was 719 per 100,000 or 0.719%. Since the population is about 328 million, the expected number of deaths in a normal year is about 2,358,000, and the expected number of deaths in a typical week is about 45,350.
About 510 million Covid vaccine doses were administered in 2021. If people died at the usual rate after getting the jab (0.719%), then about 70,517 of them would die by sheer coincidence within one week of
Re: Attrition (Score:2)
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Fun fact, no one can infect anyone else with heart disease or cancer.
Errr⦠some cancers are caused by viruses and are indeed contagious (HPV). Same with some causes of heart disease (influenza and covid). To name a few obvious ones.
That's kind of irrelevant, because it ignores the time delay between cause (HPV infection) and effect (cancer), not to mention that ~98% of cancer isn't caused by HPV, or that the cancer itself isn't what spreads. There are only two known ways to transmit cancer from person to person: blood transfusion and transplantation.
Beyond those two mechanisms, someone who has cancer cannot spread cancer to another person. Someone who has cancer *may*, either currently or at some point in the past, have had a commun
Re: Attrition (Score:4, Funny)
Best was Trump, who according to himself was outplayed by both China (which sent him the China Virus) AND a dementia patient, calling the governor of Georgia begging him to find 10,000 votes. Meanwhile, the casualties from Covid in Georgia: 10,000.
Now we are supposed to have him, who both lost to an Alzheimer patient and got bitchslapped by Xi Jinping, back in 2024 because China wont want Round 2 of Dunk the Clown at our expense?
Yeah.
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To be fair, when you're counting votes, dementia is actually a benefit.
"Did I count that pile of votes marked Biden already? Better safe than sorry."
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Fun fact, no one can infect anyone else with heart disease or cancer.
Not actually true. HPV virus can cause many cancers.
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The virus can (which is why we should vaccinate against it), but the cancer it can cause doesn't spread
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> Fun fact, no one can infect anyone else with heart disease or cancer.
Funner fact, social distancing, masks, vaccines and boosters didn't stop COVID transmission. The virus will come, the virus will become endemic and this will all happen with or without the gross overreaction, destruction of businesses, loss of freedoms etc.
If you were looking at AGGREGATE lives saved, the trillions spent on COVID and patching up the economy could have been used to build and retrofit hospitals and buy modern equipment
Re:Attrition (Score:4, Interesting)
An even funner fact, masks do stop covid transmission. You know how we know this? Other than the multitude of studies done in several countries showing this very fact, the governor of Missouri spent taxpayer money to perform a study on whether masks prevent covid infections. The study was so successful in showing this very fact, he prevented the study [news-leader.com] from seeing the light of day.
Here's a chart [reddit.com] showing the effectiveness of wearing masks in preventing transmission, whereas this story [theguardian.com] talks about a global study which showed a 53% drop in infections when masks were implemented.
Now, before you go and whine, "BuT tHeY DiDn'T sToP COVID!!!", try again. If the entire population had worn masks the transmission rate would have been single digits. However, because MAGAs don't believe in science, that is why the transmission rate was still so high.
As for your final hail mary, 2,500 - 3,500 people were dying each day (a high of over 4,000 was reached when the con artist was in charge) and yet MAGAs kept claiming it was all a hoax, it was no big deal, even while hospitals were overflowing with covid patients and had to suspend scheduled operations. There were, and still are, governors who went out of their way to avoid any science-based evidence to protect their people, including firing the very health professionals you claim to want to support because they contradicted the lies those governors were putting ot. Witness the reject in Florida who has some homeopathic "doctor" as the head of their health department.
A better net effect on healthcare would be to have the population listen to those who know what they're talking about rather than believe the rantings of those claiming goat paste will solve their problems. But nope, like drug users, they know better and as a result, they keep dying. Which, in a roundabout way, is helping this country come out of the covid pandemic.
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Fun fact, no one can infect anyone else with heart disease or cancer.
Not sure what the relevance is given every death results in one less person on earth. A cancer or heart death results in a dead person just the same as a covid death.
Also, which cancer? Throat? Breast? Lung? Thyroid? Pancreas? The list goes on. Cancer is a broad term. Pick one cancer and do a comparison. Covid killed more people than that one type of cancer.
Obvious from context answer is all cancers combined.
But please, keep coming up with excuses for why an infectious disease shouldn't be taken seriously. That's what all those dead MAGAs did.
Parent made no such claim. There is a difference between questioning the wisdom of focusing too much on lesser sources of doom and asserting lesser sources should not be taken seriously.
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And what do you think Putin is doing right now? You don't think the Russian troops and the terrorists they're supporting aren't going to torture and kill all the Ukrainian soldiers they capture? How about the mass rapes which will take place when the terrorists are given free reign?
I only mentioned the decline in the Russian population due to a number of circumstances including male deaths due to alcoholism and suicides. Add in the deaths from the war and Russia's decline will happen that much more quickl
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Hang on dude. Your really ignoring the demographics and the makeup of the armed forces involved.
Donbas, and those areas are majority russian population. Those areas do in fact see the Russian troops as their people, and vice versa. I'm a little more concerned about Kyiev (or Kiev, however you wanna spell it), which is demographically very pro western.), and there may well be a more intense local guerilla resistance there.
But the Russian armed forces like most armed forces are a professional army, and will b
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And what do you think Putin is doing right now? You don't think the Russian troops and the terrorists they're supporting aren't going to torture and kill all the Ukrainian soldiers they capture? How about the mass rapes which will take place when the terrorists are given free reign?
You want russian people to disappear because Putin is a dicator?
Re:Attrition (Score:4, Insightful)
Putin has been supplying weapons to the separatists for over 8 years now or did we suddenly forget MH17? [go.com]
This is a long-term strategy as well as diverting attention from his own economic issues. [reuters.com] The whole Crimea takeover situation proved that he has had designs on reclaiming Ukraine. That makes him look strong so expect a new photo release of him sitting shirtless on more horses.
He's already signed a key gas deal with China before the Olympics in Beijing so he has an outlet for some financial relief on sanctions but he needs to sell oil and gas which oil s now up over $100/bbl [bloomberg.com] on the April contract so high pump prices will be here for a while at least.
This is a guy who has failed economically at home and only has the oligarchs propping him up. If the west can consolidate sanctions, make them effective, and hold the line he'll probably be forced out of office. I doubt however that Ukraine's military can truly fight a war of attrition, not without a large influx of military support and that will escalate the situation further.
It'll all be okay (Score:1)
Don't worry, last night Biden sent the Ukraine his thoughts and prayers [whitehouse.gov] and promised to talk to other leaders this morning about doing something.
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Even if nukes are left off the table, we suddenly have started WW3.
A minor nit-pick... we didn't start this.
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Well thanks for putting words in my mouth, but no, it's up to Biden to put forward solutions on this and prove that they work, he's the one who put himself out there as someone who could and said he'd restore US soft power, etc.
Given that Biden is just watching it play out on TV, I'm not exactly convinced. This is looking like the failed withdrawal from Afghanistan again.
Here's ONE better idea (Score:2)
> What do you expect to have us do?
I'm neither a lifelong politician nor an expert on foreign relations, but with 10 seconds thought I came up with an approach better than what Biden did.
Last week, before Putin invaded, Biden announced that the US would not provide any military assistance to defend Ukraine if Putin invaded. Essentially telling Putin "go right ahead and invade any country you want, we aren't going to give you any trouble".
Here's ONE better approach:
While Putin is considering whether to i
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Maybe you think we need to once again put our own people in harm's way? Another ten thousand of our people sacrificed to the gods of war? You have no point when you say this. You're trying to do your mic drop, but you're not even attempting to offer a solution. Why? Because you don't have any. What do you expect to have us do? Be f-ing specific. What we are doing is bolstering NATO presence in surrounding countries. We are putting economic sanctions on them, which have already started. We have supplied the Ukraine with a ton of missiles and ammunition. If we get too involved then we're at war with a major superpower. Even if nukes are left off the table, we suddenly have started WW3. But you think you're being clever with your obvious right-leaning politics. Maybe put Fox news down for a couple seconds and go teach yourself some history and learn what's actually happening in the Ukraine before trying to be so damn clever.
I can tell you what you should have done. You should either have sent enough NATO army to Ukraine to stop Putin from even thinking about invasion, or if you don't have the cojones for that, you should have bloody well agreed to sign agreement to keep Ukraine out of NATO. Not told them to stand up against Russia, while giving Putin all the assurances he needs that you won't lift a finger if he invades. Threatening "sanctions", my ass. I bet Putin's pants are brown now.
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Don't worry, last night Biden sent the Ukraine his thoughts and prayers [whitehouse.gov] and promised to talk to other leaders this morning about doing something.
Considering that Trump most likely would have supported Putin in the invasion, it could be a lot worse.
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your point is? We know Putin wants Ukraine, we agreed to help protect it under the 1994 Budapest Accord. Are you saying all Accords shouldn't be honored?
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Wow by a sheer coincidence the United States has been arming the Ukraine for the same time period. Fancy that.
Actually, Obama right after first invasion sent Ukraine his thoughts and prayers, and also, immediately embargoed exports of lethal weapons to Ukraine. Trump resumed selling them arms, Bidet stopped again.
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Companies are abandoning China for other countries and China is going to have problems in the future to pay for gas from Russia (China is having problem paying for coal)
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This is a guy who has failed economically at home and only has the oligarchs propping him up.
Are they still propping him up? No one wants to be this guy next [youtube.com]. It's not clear Putin will get out of this situation without a bullet in his head.
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The theory that we can stuff cheaper by killing is the theory war is based on, and had some validity until the 20th century. The US tried it in Asia through the middle of the 20th century and in the Middle East off and on for decades.
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Maybe we should ask the Uyghurs, the Tibetans, and Taiwan if China wins through peace.
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How do those countries demonstrate that China wins through peace?
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"One of the many possible plays for Ukraine, aside from attempts on Putin personally, is a war of attrition against Russian forces."
In a week, there will be no more Ukraine, no playing.
I don't get it at all, what if Ukraine joined NATO?
Why is that a No-no?
We can see Russia from Sarah Palin's bedroom window, so NATO is at his doorstep since ...forever.
Answer: Nuclear disarmament (Score:2)
After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, When ukraine disarmed their nukes Russia promised not to invade and in return nato promised not to make ukraine part of nato.
Wow (Score:2)
Whoever wrote that title must have spent a few hours coming up with it, why can't we just have regular boring titles.
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I would bet that this falls more into the trying too hard than the lazy stab category.
impossible to get neon elsewhere (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually we buy rare gasses from the Ukraine and Russia because it is cheaper to buy it from Cryoin Engineering and Akela-N than to build a facility to produce it ourselves. These gasses are not an exclusive resource, it's a problem that can be solved with capital investment and time.
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Your Subject is misleading? Seems to be the opposite of your intention, but maybe it's some kind of meta-commentary on what is, after all, pretty much a clickbait story. Or an ironic Subject? In confusion, I'll let it stand (and even though I'm mostly going off on a tangent). Still, yours appears to be the best of the early comments and too bad it isn't FP.
However the key to your concern is "time", which you mentioned, but softly. But the profits that drive our economy HATE time. They want the money NOW. Wa
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Your Subject is misleading?
It sounded funny at the time. sorry. I was trying to show that our assumptions on the seriousness of rare gasses for the chip industry are overblown.
But the profits that drive our economy HATE time. They want the money NOW.
More nuanced is that the chip industry puts a lot of money into R&D to bring a design out in 9-18 months. Worst scenario is to get to the end of a design only to find that the economics of manufacturing are no longer favorable. You can sit on the design and wait, which usually means you'll be a generation behind your competitors. Or you can skip onto the ne
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While I have some money tied up in the stock markets, I would gladly get it out if I could. But keeping the money tied up has become part of the scam, and if I don't play the game by their rules, then they can burn me even worse. (At least I did manage to sell off all my Morgan Stanley stuff last year.)
Overall I largely agree with you, but not so much on the profits part. That's where things have gotten most out of whack. In conventional AKA old-fashioned companies the profits were small deltas from large v
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Actually we buy rare gasses from the Ukraine and Russia because it is cheaper to buy it from Cryoin Engineering and Akela-N than to build a facility to produce it ourselves. These gasses are not an exclusive resource, it's a problem that can be solved with capital investment and time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] tells me the only source of neon is air and specifically "commercially extracted by the fractional distillation of liquid air" it would surprise me if becomes much of a problem.
It's in the air (Score:2)
It's literally in the air, albeit at ppm concentrations. Googling around I saw something about the USSR having created these plants because it was a byproduct of steel making for some reason. Unfortunately, Google these days is almost nothing but SEO so the simple phrase search "trace gases in natural gas" was unproductive for me. Is there some way to work the "new" Google that I'm missing, or is it really that bad? Anyway, as others have said we can start up our own Ne production it will just take time
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I put in a little more effort after that post and while I did not get an answer to my specific question, I got some links to papers about the isotopic composition of noble gasses in natural gas (but unfortunately, no data regarding the ppm levels of trace gases). Believe it or not, Yahoo was best! That's how far Google has fallen. The quality of results is better on Yahoo now.
DDG is my default, and I used to flip over to Google for more results, sacrificing the privacy aspect. I found Bing to generally
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To see how the US/NATO responds to the Ukraine invasion, And it looks like they got their answer.
Heh... (Score:3)
You think the Ukraine invasion is gonna cause chip shortages? Wait to see what happens when China gets funny ideas about Taiwan.
They're watching the situation in Ukraine with great interest as the NATO answer here might be very similar to the one Taiwan could receive.
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So chip manufacturer stocks UP or DOWN!?
Obviously TSMC down because all their plants are dead... but does that drive the existing companies with plants UP in the short term?
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Chances are much much slimmer as the possible negative outcomes for China are much much slimmer.
It's a testament to the power of global trade to stop armed conflict. As much animosity there is betwen China and Taiwan their economies are intertwined in many ways. FoxConn, Pegatron, TSMC, Quanta, Compal and several other Taiwanese firms have strong relations and factories on mainland China.
As much as America enjoys cheap manufacturing in China they just as much, if not more, have economic reliance on contin
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The scenario in Hong Kong is much different, with a transition from British control of the area to China's admittedly under a special administrative region, but Chinese nonetheless. Hong Kong was never really a recognized, independent nation and was destined to fall back under CCP control eventually. It also does not have nearly the distance of water between them and the mainland.
Doesn't excuse what happened to Hong Kong and we should be aware of it when dealing with China but the economic and geopolitica
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Re: Heh... (Score:3)
Or, Taiwan belongs to itself? You must be the type to ignore it when somebody else is getting abused? Thank goodness you are in the minority, not everyone is like that.
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I don't think NATO is going to be particularly worried about Taiwan, as Taiwan is geographically outside of NATO's jurisdiction.
But the similarity is undeniable. Putin does not recognize Ukraine's independence, and I don't think China officially recognizes Taiwan as independent of it either. (I was going to say Russia in general does not recognize it, but one of my office coworkers is originally from that region, and she corrected me the last time I had mentioned this when the conversation had shifted
If it isn't one thing...it's another. (Score:3)
As if the global chip shortage wasn't already fun enough, now we can deal with raw materials shortage?
I guess we just always like to create problems for ourselves because who doesn't like to deal with more problems.
*sigh*
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That's why this war will be Russian suicide (Score:5, Insightful)
Whatever Russia had to offer the world will be replaced from other sources. Oil, gas, neon, whatever. It will all be worthless because today Russia has made itself intolerable. No amount of sweet-talk is going to fix what Putin broke by attacking Ukraine. Russia has exited the market.
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Re:That's why this war will be Russian suicide (Score:4, Insightful)
Russia would be China's new bitch...
China cares for nothing but China. China will not hesitate to exploit Russia's weakness mercilessly.
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No amount of sweet-talk is going to fix what Putin broke by attacking Ukraine. Russia has exited the market.
This is correct, but it already started when the Ukraine people threw out Putins sock puppet in for refusing to sign the association agreement with the EU and Russia annexed Crimea in retaliation (2013-2014). Russian GDP had it's high in 2013, this will be an acceleration of the fall https://www.macrotrends.net/co... [macrotrends.net]
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Russia cannot sustain a war. They're hoping for a quick in and out. A prolonged war would deplete what little reserves Russia has left.
The best thing that can be done would be to declare Ukraine a no-fly zone to keep Russia from bombing it. Russia cannot sustain a much slower ground war.
Putin wants a "quick win" because that's all Russia can afford, so an air strike will pretty much be all that can be done. Even the Russian people are against war.
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Russia cannot sustain a war. They're hoping for a quick in and out. A prolonged war would deplete what little reserves Russia has left.
The best thing that can be done would be to declare Ukraine a no-fly zone to keep Russia from bombing it. Russia cannot sustain a much slower ground war.
Putin wants a "quick win" because that's all Russia can afford, so an air strike will pretty much be all that can be done. Even the Russian people are against war.
And pray tell who's gonna enforce it? Bidet didn't even have the cojones to *threaten* war if Putin invades, you think he will have the courage to actually go into it?
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What nonsense you imagine. What's hard is sustaining a remote war, this is just extension of their territory and they have vastly superior armed forces and can supply without challenge. They can maintain the situation indefinitely of being in the two newly acquired territories and destroying anything that could approach, which is what today's removal of Ukrainian air power and securing route through Chernobyl area was about.
Russia is getting what they wanted, while all senile ol' Joe can do is repeat "sa
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And that's why China is doing so poorly right now
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Ignorant and wrong. Even now Europe continues to receive Russian fossil fuels, their economies would tank without it. The fuels are most fungible thing on Earth, and they can sell to anyone willing to buy, and plenty of countries don't care what the USA and friends think. China, Pakistan, Iran, etc. will gladly be customers.
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> From the speech President Putin gave a few days ago, it seems conquering Ukraine has been on the Russian agenda for some time
Yep.
> why American media are suggesting that it's President Biden or the Democrat Party that is causing this war
I'll let them speak for themselves about why they are saying that.
What I have noticed is that President Biden drew a line in the sand and declared that if Putin invades Ukraine, he'll draw another line. He specifically said the US would NOT get involved in a milita
Only reason.. (Score:2)
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Umm, no. Pretty sure the only countries the US gives a shit about are those that do have resources.
Nobody helped Putin more than all those European countries that shut down their nuclear power plants, then needed to import Russian oil.
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