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Comment by ch4s3 | Hacker News Reader

Even supporting the Ukrainian side, it’s clear that they’re taking heavy losses and doubly so on the civilian side. What I think people are correctly surprised by is how well the Ukrainians are utilizing NATO training an arms, and how badly the Russians are performing.

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> Even supporting the Ukrainian side, it’s clear that they’re taking heavy losses and doubly so on the civilian side.

While that is truly horrible, it does not affect victory. Insurgencies fighting for their homes can absorb enormous losses, invaders cannot. (Anyone fighting or their homes can - look at the damage taken by Japan, Russia, Germany, etc. in WWII - Japan suffered two nuclear bombs and still didn't surrender until they thought Russia might invade.) Look at US wars against insurgencies in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq: The attrition was enormously one-sided, and it didn't make a difference. You can't win a war of attrition against an insurgency, afaik, unless you essentially kill everyone (and even Putin won't do that).

It was expected that Ukraine would be reduced to an insurgency within a few days. The fact that they are still fighting military-to-military and with significant success is an enormous bonus. In the end, they may have to fight as an insurgency but the cost to Russia is expected to be much too high.

> Insurgencies fighting for their homes can absorb enormous losses, invaders cannot.

That’s more or less what I’m saying here.

We don’t have a cryptographic proof on each statistics both sides news give us.

How would that even work? Do you expect dying soldiers to bravely sign "I am dead" blockchain transactions with their private keys?

Sadly, there’s no money in speculating on proof of life, real-time blockchains.

I remember in the 90s when we were thinking about notification schemes to prove we were still alive and would post daily keepalive posts to show we were still alive. That wasn’t much fun so we didn’t keep doing it for long.

Electrocardiography (ECG or EKG).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heart_rate_monitor

And how do you verify the data?

I know you were probably joking, but this is such a common pattern in proposed crypto use cases:

  1) Collect some data
  2) ??
  3) The blockchain has magically ensured the data is true!

Whether it's supply chains or property records or war casualties, crypto does absolutely nothing to prevent people from lying.

Public national crypto identity ledger. Soldiers cannot fake signatures between the ECG or a body implant and the government chain. For most of the casualties, it can provide truth more trustful than government news. How could government or soldiers lie here?

frozencell, just stop it already man. You are making terribly outlandish & insensitive suggestions. Period.

This is a real war. People are getting bombed. No one has the time for monitoring EKG bands. Evacuation is looking bad already. This is not a video game where you monitor player's health stats. Instead of apologizing you are simply doubling down on your crazy remarks.

Let unzoom and think of wars in general, how could 3D vision helmets synchronise with ECG to have physical-first proofs of damage?

By the way, this thread is not developed for emotional or entertainment but technology purpose, they are NGOs to refer to fortunately for the first; and only NGO online security is not really off-topic here.

[0] https://www.peopleinneed.net/what-we-do/humanitarian-aid-and...

I know this is going to be a violation of the rules, but this is truly one of the most divorced-from-reality, stunningly dumb things I've ever read.

I have never cussed reading views on HN. That is a more Reddit phenomena & this parent comment belongs there.

Makes me wonder how insensitive one has to be to make a terribly casual dismissal of the current calamity & dangers to thousands of Ukrainians. Some people have a reserved section in hell for belittling or condescending human suffering.

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