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DeterioratedStucco
@SoftwareTheron@mas.to  ·  activity timestamp last week
@JdeBP
I don't understand this. India has no land border with the Russian Far East and would have to go via China or its traditional opponent Pakistan to get there. How can this work?

@cstross @quixoticgeek

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LeonianUniverse😁
@LeonianUniverse@caneandable.social replied  ·  activity timestamp 7 days ago
@cstross @oldladyplays I really hope what was laid out here is actually gonna be the case. Let us hope that the Ukrainians com out of this victorious. One thing is for sure, this will all end up in textbooks in the future for sure, no doubt about it.
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don_k4rlos
@don_k4rlos@mastodon.ie replied  ·  activity timestamp last week
@cstross The author is mixing desirable ending with realistic. And not providing sources for the most egregious claims.
Anyway, this quote especially got me "The Russian troops are facing an oncoming winter without fuel to keep them from freezing, or food to keep them from starving, without reinforcements that aren’t coming, without ammunition or armoured vehicles"
Every point made here is MUCH more applicable to Ukraine unfortunately.
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Martin Seeger
@masek@infosec.exchange replied  ·  activity timestamp last week
@cstross I don't see it as clearly as it presented in that post.

There are positive (for the Ukraine) indicators especially in the economic area.

But even broken countries can fight for a very long time if the will is there. And the will of the general population is hard to judge and there are very few indicators pointing to any breaking points soon.

That said: it would be very rational for Russia to make peace. But rationality is at least not their forté at the moment.

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Aidan Whyte
@bitcoaxer@mastodon.ie replied  ·  activity timestamp last week
@cstross It really looks like we're at an inflection point. Financially, demographically, and even with the physical equipment the war is being fought.

Perun did a very interesting assessment of the untenable burn-rate of Russian use of old Soviet-legacy mothballed equipment to enable the invasion.

Long story short; the enormous Soviet-era stores are almost barren, and Russia can't manufacture close to current loss rates.

A Russian crunch is coming.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TzR8BacYS6U

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titaniumbiscuit
@titaniumbiscuit@nerdculture.de replied  ·  activity timestamp last week
@cstross Interesting argument about the disruption of Russian logistics and deteriorating economic conditions.

I'm missing the China support factor in the analysis. China is quite happy to have Russia on its side in the UN and as a resource supplier. They are very reluctant to have it collapse...

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Cykonot
@cykonot@mas.to replied  ·  activity timestamp last week
@cstross europe and china carving up the violent drunken fur hat, and I'm okay with it
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Sku_te
@sku_te@mastodon.gamedev.place replied  ·  activity timestamp last week
@cstross The problem is Russia will buy fuel, weapons and so on from Iran, North Korea and China
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fdr
@fdr@mstdn.social replied  ·  activity timestamp last week
@cstross I want to believe. I hope it is not only wishful thinking, and I find the idea of nuclear weapons in the hands of post-Russia warlords quite scary
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Charlie Stross
@cstross@wandering.shop replied  ·  activity timestamp last week
@fdr Bear in mind that nuclear weapons require frequent maintenance or they stop working reliably, fizzle instead of detonate, or just won't go bang *at all*. And frequent means every year or three: they don't have a multi-decade shelf life.
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Eleanor Saitta
@dymaxion@infosec.exchange replied  ·  activity timestamp last week
@cstross
I don't think a genocide in the US will prove to be a sideshow.
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Simon Richter
@GyrosGeier@hachyderm.io replied  ·  activity timestamp last week
@dymaxion @cstross Can the current American fascist movement exist without getting marching orders and moral support through bot farms from Russia?
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lemgandi
@lemgandi@mastodon.social replied  ·  activity timestamp last week
@cstross This is a really optimistic post about the Ukraine war. I sincerely hope it's correct.

The AI bubble collapse is definitely coming, and pessimism is warranted there.

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Björn Gohla
@6d03@mathstodon.xyz replied  ·  activity timestamp last week
@cstross

Beware of wishful thinking.

The reference to past examples of military defeat on Russian soil caused by overstretched supply lines is certainly interesting. But I'm skeptical how much we really know about the impact on Russian capabilities on the front lines by the sometimes spectacular deep strikes by Ukraine.

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Charlie Stross
@cstross@wandering.shop replied  ·  activity timestamp last week
@6d03 The UKR deep strikes are economic warfare: by hitting refineries they're denting Russia's export earnings hence ability to finance the war. The Russian front-line military will still get fuel even if civilians are freezing in the dark—but the Russian govt. may run out of money with which to buy Bayraktar drones or foreign-manufactured missile guidance systems.
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Björn Gohla
@6d03@mathstodon.xyz replied  ·  activity timestamp last week
@cstross

I hope Turkey isn't selling Bayraktar to Russia 🤔

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Knud Jahnke
@knud@mastodon.social replied  ·  activity timestamp last week
@cstross

Do we have a utopian/dystopian description of what the collapse of the AI bubble will actually mean in terms of fallout? I've just watched a 60 Minutes bit about the current bubble and a comparison to 1929. And there the CEO of Blackrock states that US pension funds should invest people's 401 pension money in AI. That would ruin a whole generation.

Not that much housing fallout as 2008, but what else except OpenAI going belly-up, which I'd very much appreciate?

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Caoilte O'Connor
@caoilte@mastodon.social replied  ·  activity timestamp last week
@cstross It's possible, of course. But he doesn't present sources and I've not seen any evidence that the Russian economy is on the verge of collapse. From what I've seen Russia has been successfully increasing the number of troops on the ground and their airstrike capabilities. And far from stalling their rate of advance has been accelerating.

It's important for Ukrainian morale to have these, "one more heave" narratives but we should demand evidence. It's our inflation paying to lose this war

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Graydon
@graydon@canada.masto.host replied  ·  activity timestamp last week
@cstross and markets are emergent phenomena around what a group of capitalists believe about the future, so once the belief goes unstructured at all (Russian collapse/loss of oil supply/AI bubble/loss of financial services, any will do) it all goes unstructured.

Plus the cold fact that your military is what you can pay for and the US is ALSO in for economic collapse (everyone is; the question is when the agricultural collapse bites hard enough, not if) and things start to get interesting.

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Quixoticgeek
@quixoticgeek@social.v.st replied  ·  activity timestamp last week
@cstross ooh. I hadn't even thought about the possibility of juxtaposing the fall of Russia and the ai bubble collapsing the US economy. That's gonna make for some extremely interesting times.
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Charlie Stross
@cstross@wandering.shop replied  ·  activity timestamp last week
@quixoticgeek Consider that the fall of Russia is largely down to economic mismanagement—they failed to transition from a resource extraction economy to a skills economy, and they're losing the war because resource export chokepoints are vulnerable to air attacks—and the AI bubble is due to investors seeking shelter for their capital.

I don't understand it but these look like huge pieces of a 21st century jigsaw puzzle (energy transition from oil to renewables, end of Moore's Law hitting tech).

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Grievous Angel
@grievousangel@ravenation.club replied  ·  activity timestamp 6 days ago
@cstross @quixoticgeek OK but in the short term Trump or china may still bail out Putin. UKR is bleeding and is running out of soldiers too. It’s still very tight.

Biden was an asshole for stopping UKR hit oil infra in case it drove up oil prices…

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JdeBP
@JdeBP@mastodon.scot replied  ·  activity timestamp last week
@cstross @quixoticgeek

Everyone forgets #India. There's a plausible case to be made that India just waits out the now inevitable demographic timebomb that has been ticking away for years in the Russian Federation, and just takes over the Russian Far East by dint of being the majority people left there.

I first came across this idea via a random recommendation of #ElviraBary, but xe is not the only person talking about this.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=JKRqEj5PpDU

#RussiaUkraineWar#Russia #demographics

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DeterioratedStucco
@SoftwareTheron@mas.to replied  ·  activity timestamp last week
@JdeBP
I don't understand this. India has no land border with the Russian Far East and would have to go via China or its traditional opponent Pakistan to get there. How can this work?

@cstross @quixoticgeek

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JdeBP
@JdeBP@mastodon.scot replied  ·  activity timestamp 7 days ago
@SoftwareTheron @cstross @quixoticgeek @oldladyplays

The same way that it is already working. Depending from whose figures you believe anywhere between 70 thousand (Russian labour ministry) and 1 million (Ural Chamber of Commerce and Industry) Indian workers will have gone to Russia by the end of this year. Whilst Russia has had a mass exodus and is set to suffer its millionth war casualty soon by many reports.

#India#RussiaUkraineWar #demographics#Russia

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ruebezahl 🌷
@ruebezahl@chaos.social replied  ·  activity timestamp last week
@cstross they didnt fail, a corrupt mafia state simply is systemically unable to develop a skills economy.
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ploum
@ploum@mamot.fr replied  ·  activity timestamp last week
@cstross @quixoticgeek : AI bubble popping up will take with him the SP500 which will take with him the crypto world thanks to the Strategy Company (which is the weak link of the whole crypto bubble).

But crypto and AI will let behind them huge unusable datacenters with their power source. Suddenly unused.

Electricity will become as cheap as air or even have negative prices on some highly congested network.

Burned fuel electricity will be stopped but renewable can’t be stopped…

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