There was a report some time that they use RC plane turbines in their drones. Imagine you’re running a small nerdy business for RC plane parts when you suddenly get a big order for turbines from Ukraine.

Russia is doomed if they can’t even manage to protect these.

Nobody mentioned udm14.com ?

I mean the decision was stupid from an engineering point of view, but the reasoning is not entirely off. Basically it follows the biological example: if humans can drive without Lidar and only using their eyes than this is proof that it is possible somehow. It’s only that the current computer vision and AI tech is way worse than humans. Elon chose to ignore this, basically arguing that it is merely a software problem for his developers to figure out. I guess in reality it is a bit more complex.

Well yes, but the end result after driving unattended in traffic for a while is the same still, that’s the point. You could argue that a FSD Tesla makes it a bit further, I guess that’s true but still it’s far from what Elon was selling to the people.

That argument is stupid. My robot lawn mower “can drive itself” but it can’t follow traffic rules and would crash after a while if set to drive on its own in a road. Just as a Tesla. What Musk was implying was “it can drive itself without violating traffic rules and causing crashes” and clearly it can’t.

The situations are vastly different though. Despite everything Israel and Russia are still on entirely different levels of atrocities (not that it’s a competition). If anything, the russian practice of torturing and parading your (sometimes dead) captives is indeed a parallel more to Hamas than it is to Israel in my view.

Because Bundeswehr incompetence. I believe the state of the german military can be explained by considering that after the cold war it was absolutely gutted and never meant to be an efficient armed forces because there was no support for that, not politically and not among the german people. The remains were just meant to be some kind of feel-good alibi towards NATO partners. And it’s not even about the money but about how it was setup as an organization. Just compare french and german military spending and military capabilities to get an idea how inefficient the german military is. And then also think about which types of people would make a conscious choice to spend their professional career in that environment and what their motivations are. I don’t want to offend anyone but I think it’s not far fetched to say that many are in for the comfy low effort paycheck with no intention of actually pulling their weight when it matters. It’s absolutely sad and wasteful but at least it seems that finally change is started to improve and to take national defense more serious again. But the necessary changes are immense and will take quite some time. So, saying this as a german citizen, maybe manage your expectations towards the professionalism of the german military at least for a couple more years 🙁

Yes, no doubt about that! And there are many more reasons besides taurus. Not sure if its a generational thing though or rather just the shitty state of our political system.

I think there are some interesting aspects to this. First, is the info about french and british personell being active in Ukraine actually new? I think I remember reading about this quite often already some time ago but I don’t have any sources right now. Then the second one is, that shortly before the leak Scholz gave yet another explanation on why he doesn’t want to send taurus and it was actually quite a lenghty and detailed interview that was also pretty big in the media, in germany at least. And basically his arguments were that taurus requires german personell in ukraine which is too risky. But what’s said in the call actually contradicts this, the generals at one point discuss that with some training ukrainians could handle taurus on their own. So that’s good to know but also makes me wonder if the purpose of the leak was also to somehow hurt Scholz?

You’re not wrong, at least building military things does add value to society especially in times like these. Maybe working some bullshit job is worse in that regard 😉 Still I would prefer to live in a world that wouldn’t need both of these things.

Well I guess if you consider “the west” as one common block then yes, maybe it is a net-zero game. And maybe that really is the fair assessment. But from the purely european point of view it sure was nice when we had a peace divident that we could invest elsewhere.

Well a good share goes back that’s true, but certainly not everything. I mean the plants could’ve also built school busses and ambulances instead of military vehicles, right? I was just pointing out that “no downsides” is a bit optimistic, the costs are very real. And it is a pity that in this day and age we still have to put up with that 🙁

I mean I can see why it is necessary but the downside obviously is less money for social programs and improving peoples lifes. I guess we can thank Putin for that 🙁