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Cake day: March 5th, 2024

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  • It may be because they are running out of reserve Soviet equipment and are forced to rely on meat assaults to keep up the pressure.

    I’ve noticed the number of artillery system destroyed per day is about half (~25-35/day) of what it was for most of the past year (~70/day).

    Same with APCs, the number seems to have halved and the “vehicles and fuel tanks” number has risen to compensate. To me, that indicates the Russians are riding into battle on unarmed vehicles (motorcycles, golf carts, regular cars/trucks, etc.) and are more suseptible to becoming a casualty than earlier in the war.

    If that were the case, the Russians pressure/assaults may not have increased as significantly as the casualty number increase would indicate.



  • I suspect the storage facilities are close to being completed emptied of working or easily fixable pieces and all that’s left is scrap/spare part pieces.

    They may be receiving, or could receive in the future, artillery pieces from allies (ex. NK) that could change their ability to keep up losses.

    Regarding China, I don’t think China would militarily invade a stable Russia (not civil wared). I think it’s more likely they will economically dominate them, with the implicit threat of militarily/covert action if Russia tries and recover their economic sovereignty in those dominated regions.











  • Relevant section of the article where it lays out what has been changing and what still needs to change:

    … graft has been all but exterminated in some of the worst affected areas - for instance, government services such as issuing passports, permits and licences.

    He also tells the BBC that significant progress had been made in reforming education and police.

    Problem areas

    Mr Kalmykov admits, however, that the government has been less successful in eradicating corruption in using natural resources (e.g. in mining and forestry), regulating monopolies and in large infrastructure projects.

    “Progress has been slowest where big interests and big players meet,” he says.

    According to him, “in the next five-ten years the government should focus on cleansing the judiciary, which will make the general system of public administration healthier”.




  • Besides the additional Norway airplanes, this was new information to me:

    The primary bottleneck to the Ukrainian Air Force’s fielding F-16s in quantity is not limited numbers of airframes but how many combat pilots and ground crew Kyiv can spare from the actual war, to train on transition to the F-16, Cavoli said.

    According to Ukrainian mil-bloggers, the first six F-16s with pilots and ground crew will reach Ukraine in June or July. Earlier deadlines had predicted the arrival in April or May.


  • That’s a good point about disease and I think it could be a potential cause of the low genetic prevalence.

    I don’t know about your roaming free option. I think if that were true, there would still be wild packs today or there would have been roving dog packs mentioned in historical text (possible but I don’t recall any mention of them). Alternatively, they would have inter-breed with European varieties and had a more significant impact on genetics, but that’s not seen.

    While I agree that Europeans liked to remove/exterminate “uncivilized” things, that mostly applies to people. I suspect if the American dogs were significantly useful they would have made use of them.

    This conversation allowed me to recall that the plains tribes utilized dogs as pack animals. Then once horses made their way onto the scene those tribes switched from dogs to horses for that role. I’m not sure what other “jobs” American dogs performed but I suspect if they were significantly utilized as pack animals they were probably breed for such and with that niche gone they may not have performed well in other “dog” tasks, compared to European varieties.

    To conclude, for American dogs to be such a small percent of the current dog genome, I think, the European varieties had to significantly outlive their American counterparts. Whether because they were replaced by better performing European varieties/horses, because they died from European diseases, or a combination of those options.