Russia has literally won wars because the opposition underestimated how much Russia was willing to engage in scorched earth tactics.
What is this brazen propaganda of Russian militarism doing on hn?!
This is nothing but vandalism... an infantile nation acting out without fear of punishment.
This is Elon "we're training our alpha product in a production environment, thank you for dying to train the neural net" Musk we're talking about. Do think this darling of the "civilized" West gives a single nanoparticle of care to scorching space when there's shares to be pumped?
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[1] https://www.space.com/spacex-starlink-satellite-collision-al...
Musk is not motivated to turn LEO into an orbiting junkyard. Of course, to your point, neither are the Russians, yet here we are...
Bringing Spacex into this is just disingenuous. The two are in no way comparable.
Kind of a nonsensical argument, if anyone else were putting out as many or more satellites then they'd be involved in a similar proportion of incidents. The part that matters is how SpaceX responds and coordinates with others to prevent collisions. You can't look at the raw numbers to get that.
Planes pass within a kilometer of each other all the time, but it isn't an emergency because we have people whose job it is to make sure they don't actually hit each other, even when flying in nearby airspace. Same with satellites.
Where can you buy Starlink shares?
There's the EU, and the rest of the world is failed states.
Especially after the events of the 20th century, there's not much moral high ground left at the international level. Trump certainly sucks, but he's too incompetent to be genuinely dangerous. Strictly bush-league compared to some of the "enlightened" European leaders we've seen.
(Also, there was no EU when Hitler, Mussolini, etc. were around, and the EU is not a monolithic bloc with a meaningful identity today either.)
Trump won't be the last of his breed, of course.
(Also, there was no EU when Hitler, Mussolini, etc. were around, and the EU is not a monolithic bloc with a meaningful identity today either.)
Given the relatively short time that's elapsed since the last world war started by Europeans, I think this amounts to a special pleading.
I have this vaguely whimsical conjecture (that fills me of shame, I’m myself Italian) that Italy is a country of “forerunners”. If you look back, many of the behaviors and characters that animated our tormented history have become models for followers in other countries: the Roman Empire, Mussolini, Berlusconi…
Continent of Europe, sure, I agree: even within EU member states, Poland and Hungary are currently worrying me.
It’s just that painting the border around the EU feels like the wrong level of distinction for me, given the EU isn’t really a country, it just sometimes has country-like power delegated to it by its members. (And yes, this also applies upthread to the attempt to divide the world into [civilised <=> EU] => [!EU <=> !civilised]).
Who knows what he would do if he was an absolute dictator. Power corrupts and messes with your head.
All the countries involved are smaller so the absolute impact over people's lives will be smaller. But there are also crazies.
Meanwhile, the French and German authoritarians seem to be getting like 20% of the vote and climbing.