nObOdY hAs SeEn NoRtHkOrEaNs https://www.lrt.lt/en/news-in-english/19/2399261/first-north-korean-troops-killed-in-russia-says-lithuanian-source https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/nov/05/north-korea-troops-russia-ukraine-war-kim-jong-un-putin

mercenaries would be something like wagner. there are international volunteers within normal units of UAF, with normal pay and responsibilities just like any other unit. these chinese were promised unusually high salary and russian citizenship at the end of the contract. ukrainian foreign legion is entirely official, while this chinese recruitment seems to be covert or at least not very highly visibly public. ukrainian foreign legion also takes only people with former combat experience (iirc), it’s unclear so far if chinese recruited have any, probably not considering that china has stayed out of any major war or deployment since forever. these are not the same things

additional layer is that according to comments first track is also used in chinese nature documentaries

in some cases, on the power of the “fuck that other other guy” school of geopolitics, this can be avoided. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_Iran–Pakistan_border_skirmishes “you see, we actually targeted separatists” “yeah we also targeted separatists let’s call it even” it also requires certain degree of diplomatic finesse that trump lacks, and there’s no good reason for strikes in the first place considering that dea coordinated with mexican police (?) previously, so they could just continue doing that

of course MBA came up with this

an airplane doesn’t flap its wings

behold this fever dream animation

now you’ve got me thinking if storage in fridge is necessary at all, if these are salts. worst thing that can reasonably happen is that salt picks up some water from the air, on top of water condensing on sample when vial was opened while still cold. freebase would probably be air-sensitive, but for compounds that are known sensitive i’d put them under argon/nitrogen, tape vial shut (with normal electrical tape, not parafilm) and store in freezer instead. sigma lists storage temperature for MDMA analytical standard (weak solution of freebase in methanol) as -20C, but some of this might be legal cover with excess requirements for cases where you’d have to be absolutely sure that analytical standard didn’t decompose (like in evidence in drug cases)

there was a reddit ama with an ukrainian dude who was in charge of procurement of certain drones for ukrainian army. among these were uavs from anduril, and uaf decided not to buy them, chiefly because these drones don’t work and cost something like 20-50x more than equivalent ukrainian designs that do work. the reason why they don’t work is russian jamming, about which anduril people presumably were informed, yet somehow they still were complete assholes (to foreigners only) through entire process. which also means that ukrainian elint captured how russian jamming works, gave that data to anduril who proceeded to do fuck all with it, possibly leaking this intel in some signal chat

the reason why these were on the table to begin with is that (part of) american weapons aid is provided in form of money to be spent at american manufacturers, it’s not pallets of cash like fox news would like you to believe. (private donations to places like united24 do work this way, but also for example denmark does provide money with no strings attached, at least not these). (yea i’m effectiving my weaponized altruism, cranking up these numbers of dead russians per thousand euros). reasons for that are slight wage discrepancy between poltava and berkeley, compounded by scale (how many drones does anduril make per year, 20? ukrainians make low millions, probably with thousands to hundreds of thousands per type). most of costs in drone development is driven by software. doesn’t help that thiel’s people are swamped in vc money, therefore they don’t have to work efficiently, neither have their drones, or even they don’t need to work at all. ukrainians don’t have the luxury to blow millions into ai swarming that doesn’t work and instead put that effort into signal processing to avoid jamming, which does work, which they can check pretty quickly too.

this is the disruption they’re cooking. invest in eastern europe or something

i thought it’s A Guy in India

another solution:

take duck, carrot and potato at once. if boat is fine if you put duck and carrot in but will sink if you put in duck, carrot and potato then you’re already on horrifyingly narrow engineering margins and probably shouldn’t use it in the first place

in the worst case you can put duck on a leash if it’ll run away otherwise

there’s technology transfer from koreans https://www.polska-zbrojna.pl/home/ArticleShow/42536

also not everything can be done with drones, for some time-sensitive targets you need speed that MLRS delivers

yeah, you better do

there’s not that many of them and one Trident missile costs only $31M

both 198Au and 199Au have half-life in order of 3d, waiting 1y will decrease radioactivity to nothing (5E40 times for 198Au and 1.3E35 times for 199Au. others are shorter-lived and fission products can be probably separated chemically to an acceptable degree). it’s also pretty decent deterrent against stealing it, and decay product mercury is stable and easily separated. i’m not even sure if irradiating gold with neutrons would make it worthless because of that. might even go up in value because there’s now a story behind it. bigger problem would be that it’s scattered everywhere

10 years? since 90s more like

yeah that’s because that’s not what happened, there were multiple targets, not just one. that signal chat directly mentions “mutliple targets”, it could be 5 it could be 15. if goldberg stayed in this chat maybe we’d know how many exactly

weapons mix suggests that at least some of these were chosen to limit collateral damage (two F18 sorties, Tomahawks launched - these could be used against hardened targets, like bunkers or caves, and targeting shifted from weapons to leadership, but probably not completely - but also drones, and drones can’t carry heavy weapons like F18 can)

i think there was an update or two since

also the minimum deterrence always kept up by brits is that there’s at all times enough nukes in submarines to destroy moscow. french have some more fine-grained options

triple the defence budget