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Ukrainian soldiers don't need training from NATO; NATO soldiers need training from Ukraine. We are setting ourselves up for a much bigger and more expensive war by failing to stop Russia (and China) now. And we're squandering our opportunity to learn how to fight drone warfare.
As for money, we're holding hundreds of billions of dollars of Russian assets that can trivially be sent to Ukraine. It's more money than Ukraine has ever gotten in military support. Indeed, one objective by Russia in all these fake peace negotiations is to present the narrative that the money can't be spent lest it prevent a peace deal.
A second factor is that Belgium actually taxes the interest on those frozen assets, tbe majority of which it has, adding billions to its federal budget.
Anyway, if the west is serious, it can easily deport these parasites on society and use the money saved to defend themselves via Ukraine. Unfortunately the incentives to do that aren't there: Ukrainian refugees are a rare example of financially profitable immigration.
I came back from Ukraine just the other day. That trip I visited Kyiv, Kharkiv, and Sloviansk and Kramatorsk (~20km from the eastern front lines).
This is just the latest in a long campaign by Russia to make Ukrainian cities unlivable. Ukraine's third biggest city, Odesa, was almost entirely without power for about a week straight after Russia did a massive attack against power plants and substations in that area.
Worse though was losing water: on top of the attack against power, Russia also attacked water infrastructure such as water pumps, water towers, treatment plants, etc.
In Ukraine pretty much all businesses have backup generators, so losing power isn't that big of a deal. Losing water however really makes life hell. I personally know a mother with a baby who had to endure a week without running water in a 5th floor apartment. Every time you want to flush a toilet you need to drag up another few kg of water in jugs.
On top of that Russia is constantly attacking Ukrainian civilians directly, from Shahed attacks on apartment buildings, to the Human Safari campaign of suicide and grenade dropping drones again ordinary people, to regular attacks against markets. I personally took these photos in Kyiv and Sloviansk:
Closer to the front lines gas stations are particularly high risk. This particular one in Kramatorsk had already had to rebuild their wall after an attack. The concrete blocks and sandbags are very much needed:
Russia is simply evil.
Fortunately, Ukraine can certainly win this. For example, Russia's economy is in such bad shape that they're starting to use horses rather than proper vehicles:
If you've been paying attention, you'd also know about the endless hits on Russian oil and gas. The biggest obstacle is the unwillingness to accept that Russia is evil and needs to be destroyed. Ukraine damn well should be attacking all Russian infrastructure. Failing to do so is prioritizing the lives of evil people over good. This bullshit is so ridiculous that while Russian literally dumps anti-personnel mines over Ukrainian cities with drones, Ukrainian forces can't even publicly publicly admit to using anti-personnel mines against Russia.
Ultimately this is no different than how the far left prioritize the lives of rapists and murderers over their victims. The only difference is that this absurdity is mainly coming from the right, rather than the left.
Killing Russians faster makes the world a better place.
They are nowhere near a genuine peace. This is not a war between honorable people with a reasonable dispute. This is a war between Russians who want to continue their centuries old practice of stealing land and subjugating people, and the people who don't want their land stolen.
Thinking you can "negotiate" your way to peace here is ridiculous. Russian imperialism is just as evil as any other thief or rapist. They're taking what isn't there's because they have no sense of ethics, and because so far, they've been able to get away with it.
What's really going on is Zelensky and co are using peace talks to show how evil Russia is (eg the very clever demand for free and fair elections in occupied Ukraine). Russia meanwhile is using peace talks to try to delay aid getting to Ukraine long enough that they can get a military victory.
The actual path to peace is to kill off the part of Russia's population that subscribes to this ideology. No different than how the most effective way to reduce rape and murder is to imprison and kill rapists and murderers.
They're just evil.
Batshit.
If you're a Google employee and you're asked to comply with a request like this you have a moral obligation to quit. Equally, a future government should imprison the employees who didn't quit and complied with this warrantless request.
Fuck that.
Most countries have a less invasive procedure for that for getting residency. Let alone just visiting.
I probably won't be visiting the US any more if they go ahead with that for Canadians.
They're selling off their gold reserves because the invasion is going quite badly for Russia and they need the money. The "bingo card" of Russian oil refineries that have been hit by Ukraine is pretty brutal:
Ukraine is also hitting their oil and gas export infrastructure, e.g. the temporary shutdown of the port of Novorossiysk, 2% of the world's oil supply. Yes, Russia also has been able to do partial repairs of damaged infrastructure. But these things all add up.
Russian businesses aren't doing well either: https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2025/11/18/russian-companies-face-record-debt-burden-as-high-rates-squeeze-profits-think-tank-a91165
When ~50% of your tax dollars go to an invasion that has been stalled for years, bad stuff happens.
So?
Epstein funded lots of stuff to try to show off to people around him. Bitcoin Core didn't know where the money ultimately came from. Which is true of any project accepting anonymous and pseudoanonymous donations. (Of course, he also had fully served his prison time at that point.)
I have no idea where much of the funding for OpenTimestamps comes from. Or Libre Relay.
https://geyser.fund/project/opentimestamps
https://geyser.fund/project/librerelay
The supermajority of donations are anonymous. That's ok.
It's very bizarre for a supposedly pro-privacy media outfit to make a big deal about this... Smells like clickbait.
Note: these on-chain BIP-Knotz futures are not binary futures! They actually have three possible outcomes.
- Win
- Lose
- Chain Split
In the third option, a hash power minority mines enough blocks that Knots splits off into a separate currency. In that circumstance, both sides "win": the Knots side wins more Knots coins, and the Bitcoin side wins more Bitcoin.
Of course, as measured in Big Mac purchasing power, the Bitcoin side is almost certainly going to be the winner... But this (quite likely!) outcome does change the pricing for these futures a bit, in theory.
Trusted, off-chain, futures could take this situation into account too...
"Other ways" being from another Ark user that either A) got the sats themselves first through a trusted Lightning swap or B) used the chain when they could have instead opened a real Lightning channel
Nope. You clearly don't understand how Ark works.
As I said, in the current implementation you can get settled funds easily by doing any on-chain transaction. Either sending or receiving on chain funds.
Once more Ark rounds are common, you'll also be able to get settled funds by waiting until someone else needs to do an on-chain transaction and piggybacking on theirs. This option is much more efficient in terms of on-chain transactions, at the cost of tying up liquidity (in many, but not all, circumstances). For many use cases waiting N blocks for fully confirmed funds is perfectly fine.
Sorry, but Ark just isn't clearly bullshit like Drivechains is. It's worth investigating. It may not fully pan out, and probably will only ever be useful for a subset of applications. But hate at this stage simply isn't warranted.
Not necessarily. I could have had gotten settled funds in other ways. At the moment due to low usage doing an on-chain payment (either sending or receiving) is the easiest way. But that's not a requirement for Ark. And even now the trade-offs for liquidity are different than lightning, which means it may be useful.
Ark has HTLCs. As the person paying, that swap was not trusted for me. The service doing the swap is trusting the ASP to not collude with me to double spend until they fully confirm the coins. But that's not a deal breaker.
I did a 10k downzap on this post with Ark.
At this point they do not deserve to be lumped in with Drivechains. It's an experiment that's doing a reasonable job exploring tech. The hate can wait.
That's batshit crazy to feel conflicted about that. California's laws on age of consent are insane.
Minors having sex with others close in age to them is totally normal; criminalizing that is batshit crazy and the police officers and judges participating in the prosecution of that are themselves child abusers. The only ethical thing they can do is refuse to enforce the law, or quit.
It's not good at all that archive.is doesn't provide any way for the rest of us to mirror it.
Also, it would be very good if it did OpenTimestamps. Particularly in combination with a signature signing each archive.
I agree.
We can better account for the costs of certain types of transactions, e.g. use of the UTXO set. But we fundamentally can't stop people from publishing data with Bitcoin. Indeed, the entire reason why Bitcoin works at all is because PoW proves that transactions were widely published, ensuring that double-spends (if they existed) would be seen and rejected.
That's exactly what my OFAC point was getting at. The end-point of what the pro-filter crowd wants is dynamically adjusted blacklists. Which is exactly what the pro-OFAC crowd also wants.
They're the same thing.
Nah, actually that was the result of a lot of prep.
The thing to remember here is I was scheduled to go second. Doing a big pre-prepared formal statement in that circumstance is something I really dislike in a debate like this: my role is to respond to Jimmy. Hence why I tried to get him to nail down what he actually meant by "spam", so I could respond appropriately. Which is a strategy that has worked well in other cases for me. But in this case I really threw off the moderator.
The way I (and many like me) prep for this kind of debate is to go over the likely arguments from the other side and 1) come up with responses, 2) make sure you have the facts memorized. Jimmy repeatedly made basic technical mistakes; he either clearly did not do #2 properly.
Fundamentally an error I think a lot of people are making here is treating this like a highschool debate team. I'm not trying to win points in a scored debate where rhetoric matters more than facts. I'm trying to actually sway an audience. It looked like slightly more people agreed with me on the end than before, so on that basis I'm happy.
Western companies with exposure in Russia were knowingly trading with evil. They deserve their losses. And, once Russia is actually defeated, many of those losses can be taken back by force.