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Comment by stickfigure | Hacker News Reader

PPP is misapplied here; you literally get more PPP by having less economic power.

You think a hot war won't happen over Taiwan? I mean, I hope you are right. But if China wants to invade, it's going to turn into a hot war including the US and probably a number of other regional neighbors.

My guess is that MAD will keep the war conventional even though people have nukes. After all, Russia has nukes and they haven't used them despite their failure on the battlefield.

I'm curious where you are from? You don't sound like you understand the mentality of Americans. Your reasoning sounds quite a lot like the theories of victory circulating among Japanese leading up to the attack on Pearl Harbor.

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PPP is the exchange rate normalized cost of a basket of goods in different countries. The way you have a high PPP is by having an economy where people can buy a lot with a little. Whether that lot happens to be eggs, steel, or artillery shells. The US is avoiding a hot war with Russia over Ukraine. They will never, ever, engage in a hot war with China over Taiwan. They'll feed weapons to Taiwan and let the Taiwanese fight to the last man, somehow try to frame the eventual defeat as a victory, wash our hands of it, and rapidly move on to the next war.

And if you think Russia is failing, then I'm not sure you know what victory looks like when fighting a competent adversary. The Ukrainian army is being fueled by endless and increasingly brutal forced conscription, and backed by Western weapons, tech, hardware, and intelligence. But instead of the present, let's go 4 years back after the invasion and when the West decided to get overtly involved. Imagine I came to you and said 'hey stickfigure not only with this war last for years, but in 4 years Russia will have the strategic initiative, control a massive chunk of Ukraine, and be continuing to push forward' -- what do you think you would have said? 'Russia must be failing' wouldn't really be a logical response then, or now.

  > Imagine I came to you and said 'hey stickfigure not only with this war last for years, but in 4 years Russia will have the strategic initiative, control a massive chunk of Ukraine, and be continuing to push forward' -- what do you think you would have said? 'Russia must be failing' wouldn't really be a logical response then, or now.

"Four years" alone would've raised eyebrows.

If four years ago anyone had said that Russia would invade Ukraine with everything it got and that four years later it would still stuck fighting for the first eastern provinces, with casualties exceeding a million and no end in sight, they would've been dismissed as an insane doomer. And yet here we are.

By now, the war against Ukraine is among the worst disasters in the entire military history of Russia, far worse than the 1979 invasion Afghanistan and the 1904 Russo-Japanese war, which until recently were regarded as the worst catastrophies of the modern era. Notable Russian fascist Maxim Kalashnikov goes much further. He says that Russia tried to subjugate Ukrainians, but failed, and Ukrainians will return for revenge. He calls it a "cultural and civilizational defeat": https://x.com/wartranslated/status/1985270960321130516

I take this as more or less confirmation that you are not American and are so detached from American culture that you haven't the faintest idea what Americans will do over Taiwan.

That adage about being doomed to repeat history would be funny if it wasn't so sad.

I thought your question was quite childish as it's effectively a masked ad hominem to avoid dealing with the fundamentally illogical points in your argument. I expect deep inside you know full well that you're living in a bubble, and that bubble's reality and the world's reality have long since diverged.

Part of the reason people are doomed to repeat history is precisely this effect. By the time Hitler was greenlighting the Volkssturm, he certainly knew it was over. But he refused to step outside of his cognitive dissonance, to the net result that vast numbers of Germans ended up dying for absolutely no reason whatsoever.

You've offered unsupported opinions about American attitudes and future behavior. Since you're setting yourself up as an expert on Americans, I'm impeaching your credibility. Strictly speaking this is not ad homenim.

Reread the thread. You've built something up in your mind that isn't accurate. Obviously I'm American, though it's completely inconsequential to what I have said.

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