Russians.

Yeah. Pioneer species providing shade, soil retention, and water slowing. Very important.

Yeah. Looks like the USD and rouble have been trading fairly evenly the last few years, within about 20%. So they’ve probably been inflating roughly at the same pace, I guess…

Regardless it seems like the basic thesis, that Russia doesn’t seem likely to have any more room for increasing spending, is accurate.

Although I guess a deflated dollar would look like an inflated rouble, and vice versa. On the other hand they can both inflate/deflate relative to yuan or euro.

I don’t think so… deflated would mean it takes fewer roubles to buy an item, not more. A 100 trillion economy would become a 120 trillion economy on paper with no other changes.

The US dollar has inflated like 25% in that period, maybe that is related.

Trading taglines and signature files while downloading gifs at 300 baud (she was worth it) and my ip address was ‘3’.

(5 points for the reference)

I just don’t see decoupling happening (in my lifetime).

This is a bit of a “all or nothing” fallacy. It admits to degrees. It’s like someone saying that they can’t be vegetarian because they like bacon. Dude, just cut out everything except bacon, it’s fine.

Countries reducing their exposure to USD is still a good step, given how unreliable a partner the USA has been the last decade. You don’t have to fully dump all your USD bonds to add resilience to your financial system.

US power stems directly from its dollar position. Its status as reserve currency is a force multiplier. The immediate step is to reduce exposure to it, which disproportionately reduces US power in the short term.

The longer this goes on, the more systems decouple from the USA and correspondingly the less power and influence they have.

Good luck. It must be small consolation to know that if they win, many more will die.

Canada has a ridiculous number of guns distributed among the population, especially in the back country. Those old Lee-Enfields still work fine and aren’t well documented.

An insurgency in Canada would get messy fast. Smuggled drones from the States and China. Improvised explosives from agricultural producers. Canadians can blend into the US easily and the border would become instantly porous to nonexistent.

(Martial law)

I wear leather boots, ankle high. The shoe store fixes em when the bottom wears out. Had em 11 years and they’re still fairly pristine. Just gotta oil em every winter. Probably should do that more often.

It was $600 and $50 or so every couple years. Figure I’ve gotten it amortized down.

How dense is it? Might not burn you if there’s low thermal mass.

Supposedly the kill ratio at Pokrovsk has been around 15:1 as well.

Bring it. He’ll tariff us anyways for being rude to his ambassador or some shit anyway.

Fuck Hoekstra and fuck Trump.

‘You’ has a similar ambiguity, being a plural word originally, but most people muddle through that.

I do think we should bring back thee/thy/thou as singular, but whatever.

True, the precision could be the difference in the end.

Why would you deny him an emotional support invasion? It’d be like taking a stuffy away from a dog. You monster.

Reminds me of accounts of ww2 mass bombings, which were largely ineffective and expensive, reportedly. Military production is back in hours, and civilians become that much more radicalized against the bombers.

It simply does not work to bomb civilian infrastructure, in addition to it being a monstrous act.