Panto_Villan

It wouldn’t affect my point even if they did, but I’ll believe Ukraine never exaggerates their kills and NATO knows exactly what’s happening at all times when someone brings me evidence of that big plane full of paratroopers that was supposedly shot down near Kyiv at the start of the war. It pretty transparently never happened, and the fact the US military repeated the claims before everyone realised it didn’t happen demonstrates pretty clearly to me that they don’t have perfect information either. There’s other examples too, but that’s the one that most obviously springs to mind.

My argument was actually that they might be exaggerating Russian losses to improve their own morale given they’re steadily losing territory. Noel was the one that brought donors into it. As for NATO knowing exactly where every Russian plane in the air is at all times, and knowing instantly when they’ve been shot down - I don’t believe that for a second. And even if they did, they’re not going to slap Ukraine down in public for exaggerating their kills. Every country at war exaggerates their success to some degree, and Ukraine is no different.

No, it won’t make a big difference. Nobody said it would. However I feel like it should be obvious that “we’ve taken your weapons and wasted them” is a much worse pitch for more weapons than “we’ve put your weapons to good use, can we have some more?”

Nobody wants to give money to a lost cause.

I think there’s also a very real chance Ukraine are inflating the numbers they’ve shot down. They’re in dire need of good news, and this sort of “kill” is very hard to evidence.

I really enjoyed it. It was a long film but never boring, and although I feel like they made the ending a bit more open-ended than necessary (although to be fair the books ending was also slightly more open ended than I remembered). Left it feeling a bit like the middle film of a trilogy, when I was expecting the first two films to be more self-contained as a pair. Anyway, great performances from the cast, great visuals. I don’t know if I’ll be rushing to watch the film again because “entertaining” might be the wrong word for it, but it’s definitely a classic that won’t soon be forgotten.

There’s no excuse for Israel not allowing unlimited amounts of food into Gaza.

“America respected again”

There’s lots of incredibly dumb footballers out there, and if everyone was juiced to the gills I struggle to believe someone wouldn’t have said something incriminating (accidentally or otherwise). Like, wouldn’t some lower league clubs who can’t afford a sophisticated doping operation have a massive incentive to dig up dirt on their richer rivals who can? Etc?

Meh. I'd still take him on a loan and let him try and prove himself here if he was interested in playing more regularly and said he wanted to come back (and be within our wage structure). I never had any hard feelings about the way he left, and that's especially true now it seems like we got the better end of the deal. However I think he's most likely lost his hunger at this point, so I doubt that's something he'd pursue.

I wasn’t being serious - he’d probably score and then get sent off for rubbing his balls on the opposition keepers head or something! As others have said he’d probably be higher in the pecking order than some outfield players purely because of his mentality, but I think something would have to have gone wrong for him to make the initial five.

Yeah I’d have Martinez taking the first penalty for maximum psych-out effect.

I’m sure you know this stuff far better than I, but it’s worth bearing in mind the way the Ukrainians use their fighters (at least as far as I’m aware). They mostly use them well behind their lines to intercept cruise missiles, because as you say unless you fly extremely low then you’re vulnerable to air defence if you approach the contested area. Sure, flying higher would give them more time to react to incoming SAMs but the Russians have a LOT of anti-air so I don’t think the Ukrainians want to get into firing range of them at all. The point I was making regarding range was more about the relative altitude of the aircraft involved. The Russian planes are flying high and the Ukrainian ones have to fly low; if there’s a 30,000 ft altitude difference then that’s ~10km of additional distance the missile has to traverse. That’s about 25-30% of the range of a Sidewinder, right? It means the Ukrainians would need to get even closer to the front lines to try and intercept the bombers launching missiles at Ukraine from near the border. So I think in this specific situation what I’m saying is correct, isn’t it? Even if it’d be inaccurate in most cases.

Yet again this thread shows me something a satirist would be laughed out the room for suggesting.

It's meant to be about 20% of Trump's networth; it's not a huge problem for him. The fines might exceed his available cash, but then that just means he'll either have to sell some property or liquidate some investments. That might cause him some extra losses if he has to do it in a hurry but ultimately he'll still be worth around $2bn, so he certainly won't have to sell most of his assets to raise the money, just some of them. And honestly I'm not sure there's that many things you can afford to do when you're worth $2.5bn that are suddenly out of reach when you're only worth $2bn. Unfortunately, I think he's going to be getting quite a substantial amount of money from Truth Social soon too. The SEC have given them permission to do something or other - a merger that would let them list the company, or something. Expected to net him a few hundred million I believe.

Probably just another stunt by the Democrats to get Ukraine aid passed etc etc

I almost always tip 10% unless there’s a service charge. Although I increasingly find that people just hand me the card machine with the no-tip amount already entered, and in that situation I can’t be bothered to get them to go back and change the amount so I can give a tip (I don’t usually carry much cash).

This might be what the Russian satellite is - a electronic warfare satellite with a nuclear power source, rather than a nuclear-armed satellite. That would certainly make more sense.

Was it a paperwork blunder? I thought they just didn't have decent intel on the RAF. The Germans were famously bad at spying on Britain - I think there's some stupid fact like literally every single German spy sent to Britain was immediately picked up by MI5, because they nabbed one of the first ones to land and turned him into a double agent. So they ended up with advance warning of every new agent the Germans sent over and it all turned into a bit of a clown show. In terms of actually tracking the number of planes shot down from Luftwaffe reports - that's also surprisingly hard to do, as pilots would usually exaggerate the number of enemies they'd shot down. It wasn't necessarily intentional, it's just in the chaos of a dogfight there'd often be multiple pilots attacking the same target and when they saw it explode they'd all think "great, I got a kill" and you'd end up with one kill being reported as two or three different kills. That's why Britain ended up having to put spotters on the ground to watch the dogfights and make sure the numbers being reported were as accurate as possible.

That's an exaggeration. Admittedly I'm not an expert but I reckon it'd probably generate far less debris than a conventional missile would - it'll vaporise everything within its range, which isn't that big in space because there's no air to make a pressure wave, rather than destroying it with shrapnel like missiles do. They mostly generate radiation, which there's plenty of in space anyway. But even if you assume it does act exactly the same way as a conventional missile, a single nuke really isn't going to make low earth orbit unusable (just like the anti-satellite missile tests didn't render space unusable), and certainly not indefinitely. Remember NASA seriously considered using a spaceship engine that was powered by nuclear explosions (called Project Orion), which should indicate how much less of a problem nukes are in space compared to in atmosphere.

Cool. Can't wait to see how the MAGA types spin this as another reason to make sure we don't send any more aid to Ukraine. Nukes in space are interesting. They're relatively ineffective in a vacuum because they can't create the pressure wave that actually causes most of the damage inflicted by a nuclear weapon, but I wonder if the idea is to generate some kind of EMP effect? I'd have thought having a satellite-based nuke would be a scarier prospect; I imagine it'd be much harder to shoot down than a traditional ICBM where you can detect it on the way up and extrapolate the trajectory. Although to be honest I suspect the idea was more just "launch a nuke into space on a satellite and watch the rest of the world shit themselves about how scary we are" than having a specific use case for it.

That’s a really interesting question. Apparently (again according to Wikipedia) they explored joining the Axis but initially didn’t because they were reliant on imports from the US and they were still rebuilding their military after the civil war. By the time joining became a realistic possibility, the tide had already turned against the Axis so they decided to sit things out. So maybe it wouldn’t have changed too much overall?

@Captain_Townsend Perhaps you’d like to explain why you’re posting confused reactions to my posts? I’m always happy to listen to alternate viewpoints if you’ve got counterpoints to offer.

Thanks. Yes, I've found it interesting too - although I've got a busier day at work so I doubt I'll be posting as much today I think one other thing to bear in mind is that Britain may have been at its lowest ebb if you're picking the latter half of 1940, but the scale of military conflict between major powers was almost incomprehensibly different in those days. The British Army was 1.6 million men at the time, and although I can't find an exact figure of how many were stationed in Britain you had 550,000 that had been evacuated from France plus all those who were originally stationed in Britain / Northern Ireland rather than France. And that doesn't include the Home Guard, who were another 1.5 million volunteers (or the Navy). The major industrialised countries could call up vast numbers of men and build astonishing amounts of hardware incredibly quickly - the forces in Britain went from having 350 tanks in June 1940 to having 700 two months later. We were building 400 Spitfires & Hurricanes per month between June and October in 1940. We could build more planes and tanks than the entire Irish armed forces had in just a couple of days. How could Ireland ever compete with that? Basically, don't mistake Britain being on the back foot against another superpower as Britain being weak. It's hard to relate to today, but Britain was still incredibly powerful compared to everyone except for the handful of other world powers. I don't think Britain would have wanted to invade Ireland unless it was absolutely necessary, but if Ireland had announced they were joining the Axis then I honestly don't think they'd have lasted a week. Our military and industrial base was so large it just wouldn't have stretched us much.

I think you’re making the assumption that Britain had deployed all their forces elsewhere at the start of WW2. Although it makes hypothetical discussions more interesting, I don’t think it was true. It seems like we had quite extensive army forces deployed in Northen Ireland at the start of the war and they weren’t committed elsewhere until D-Day. Similarly the Home Fleet was operating in UK waters, and contained a lot of large ships until 1944. It was already protecting the seas we’d have needed to control to blockade Ireland. I think the reason why we were worried about Ireland falling to the Nazis is the same reason why we’d find it relatively easy to conquer - it’s right next to Britain, and not very well protected. Hard to know for certain but it seems like the forces earmarked for defending Britain itself would have been adequate for taking Ireland, so I don’t think it would have required deprioritising anything else. Yes, there would have been partisan activity if we’d actually attacked Ireland but Britain had 200 years of invading and conquering much larger countries than Ireland. I doubt it would have been any harder to control than France or Poland or any other (much larger) country that was occupied in WW2. EDIT: that said, one interesting angle to the hypothetical is how much invading Ireland would have poisoned relations with America?