wildncrazyguy

Glad you’re feeling better, Ernest. Where’s the best place to donate to your efforts? Is it still buymeacoffee?

I see nothing with this other than the title is semi misleading. Latvia is training these draftees to be reservists, not professional military members. They are intended to augment the professional military.

As much as I would have hated this when I was young, looking back it could have helped me and a lot of other folks. I wish we had a two year requirement for public service, though I wouldn’t limit it to military. I’d expand it to forestry, trail building, boys and girls clubs, trade guilds, etc.

Service encourages civic engagement, it’s fosters a sense of duty to one’s country, it teaches a skill or trade, and maybe, just maybe, it will foster some sense of pride and discipline as well. Two things lacking right now in the states are a sense of comradery and civic engagement (I’m not talking about the whiny social media kind).

Afterwards, perhaps an additional incentive would be that it would count as one year of core curriculum at a Uni, and/or maybe a discount to tuition. For the trades routes, it would count as years towards journeyman, etc.

Moreover, I don’t think this is really a unique idea, Israel employs it. I think the Soviet Union did to some extent as well.

I’m 20 years past the time when people are typically conscripted, so I’m likely at no risk of mandatory service now, nonetheless I’d gladly serve as a mentor and pass down the knowledge I’ve gained over the years to a group of youngsters.

So that all is to say, just as the Latvian foreign minister is saying, there can some real advantages to employing some flavor of conscripted service, and, if employed well, I think we’d all be better for it.

Unfortunately at the geopolitical level, things are not always so morally easy, as I suspect you already understand.

Even in my brutish example, it depends on the lens in which we see things. In an orthodox culture, it may be the parent’s duty to harshly discipline a child. Perhaps meddling would be seen as a faux pas. Or perhaps leaving matters to authorities would be considered cowardly. Even still, maybe it just depends on the day and who’s tribe witnessed the event. The human experience is paradoxically wonderful, isn’t it?

You are walking on the street in the public square of your town. You encounter a child and someone who you perceive as a parent having a struggle. The struggle escalates and you see the parent start bludgeoning the child with their fists. Other than the absolute trauma of the experience, you fear the child is going to receive some long term injuries from this. How do you act?

Hey, when the funds are stored in Russian banks, you are certainly welcome to freeze them all you want. But for some reason they typically aren’t. Huh, I wonder why?

The problem with giving away the assets, and I’m just parroting Simon Whistler here, is that they have never been used this way while in war time. This would be essentially funding one side’s war machine and could come back to bite western countries if they opt to overthrow a bad actor in the future.

For example, what if Bashar Al-Assad decides on the heavy use of chlorine gas on the majority Sunni in his country. The West opts to overthrow. The West are then the aggressors. Does Euroclear then freeze US assets and give them to Assad according to the precedent set by Russia v Ukraine?

The judiciary likes to follow precedent and consistency, it fairs less well when there is nuance and subject to interpretation. From a geopolitical standpoint, do we really want the judiciary determining who the good guys and the bad guys are?

Yep, those Russian tanks that crossed into Ukrainian sovereign land were tanks of peace.

I mean, I’m not a Musk fan in the least, but the article does say that the receivers are being sold through an intermediary in Dubai, perhaps unbeknownst to Musk and SpaceX.

Any chance it could be a fragment of Theia?

Powerful insight /u/DogPeePoo

Interesting, what's your take on contango?