Saeculum [he/him, comrade/them]

His motivations are beyond our understanding

Our standard for confirmed deaths is stringent—it requires an official publication or social media post from a relative with corresponding details, accompanying photos or dates of burials from local messaging groups, or photos from cemeteries.

Your link does not estimate overall casualties, only deaths that can be expressly confirmed through Russian social media. It provides a good minimum, but it’s important to consider that a large number of those conscripted are from extremely rural communities and remote ethnic minorities within Russia who do not have access to social media, and so wouldn’t be represented in those statistics at all.

Your same source mentions that their investigations suggested 47000-50000 deaths as of May 2023, and a great deal of the more intense fighting has happened since then.

Assuming Russia has a better death-to-casualty ratio than the average WWII army thanks to modern medicine, we’re looking and anywhere from 1:6 to 1:10, which would put casualties as of May at 300,000-500,000.

If Russia actually lost 87% of troops than the army would be collapsing now the way Ukrainian army is. You can’t just replace your trained and experienced troops with untrained people and continue to have an effective fighting force.

Every Russian adult male has served in the armed forces as part of the compulsory year of national service, so their conscription pool can be assumed to have some experience already, and seeing a near total replacement of fighting men about two years into the conflict is consistent with historical armies in trench warfare. Britain and France in 1916 had exhausted essentially all of their pre-war trained soldiers by 20 months into the war and were relying on conscripts.

This isn’t contradictory reporting though (in this case). Both statements could easily be true.

The conflict has been mostly immobile trench warfare for the last year, and casualties have been resultantly high across the board. Both countries have gone through multiple rounds of conscription.

Wagner alone self reported 60,000 combined deaths and casualties, and they’re a small fraction of the total fighting, though probably the worst hit.

Ukraine’s not any better off though, and Russia has a far greater capacity to replace their dead, so even with those numbers, Russia is probably eventually going to win.

Same reason it’s ethical to kill billionaires and eat the rich.

If I had come about through the unwilling merger of two people, and my death could restore those people, it’s probably ethical to kill me to make it happen.

I don’t think it’s necessarily reasonable to call the two component people dead either. Death is a not a particularly well defined term, but we don’t tend to apply it to people who might get better.

Why don’t we just harvest your organs and give them to people we deem more useful, ya know?

The knowledge that you live in a society where you could be legally killed at any point for the greater good, and the resultant fear and uncertainty probably would cause more harm overall than doing so could actually alleviate.

One for one, sure. One for two? I can see the argument.

I love the game and completely agree. Apparently, there was a complete rework of the main narrative somewhere in development, with the original idea not including the emperor at all, but instead having a character called daisy, who you’d have a number of dialogues with throughout the game in a dream sequence at the bank of a river.

Daisy being the representation of the tadpole, she’d try to convince you to stay down by the river with her, and the final decision of the game would be whether or not to give in.

Not sure how accurate what I’ve read is, but I like that idea better.

The 90s saw some 20% less violent deaths during the troubles than the 80s did, though it’s true that the 70s were the worst period.

The years of lead weren’t bloodless, but relatively few people died even compared to the troubles, let alone something like Chechnya

The uprisings were relatively bloodless though. The troubles continued well into the 90s so it’s not really point towards either side. Russia had an attempted coup in the early 90s.

The 90s were comparably much more sanguine.

I really don’t think they were.

They like violence against Arabs and Muslims, but also hate Jews.

I was more referring to prosperity when mentioning Russia and Ukraine. The decrease in living standards, and massive increase in alcoholism and deaths of dispair hardly paints a prosperous picture.

Unless I’m forgetting some especially disastrous conflict in the 1970s and 1980s in Europe, I don’t think you could argue that the 90s were more peaceful than either.

peaceful and prosperous

Unless you’re Russian, Ukrainian, Albanian or anywhere in or around Yugoslavia.

Nature is just a process of change. There is no improvement or deterioration, and it’s not building towards some final goal or state.

Similar insects would quickly fill the niche.

I’m mentally old and out of touch with the kids, there are new emojis all the time and I have no idea what any of them mean. I spent all this time learning English and now half of the things people post are some sort of picture puzzle I lack the context to understand and have to guess the meaning of.

The Americans are getting destroyed Russian equipment and dead russian soldiers for the cost of old military hardware and a small fraction of their military budget. A stalemate is an acceptable situation fror them.

True, though not to the same extent.

I know undervolting can make some electronics, including lightbulbs last longer, but I don’t know if that would countermand the extra wear from the changing voltage.

Some older wiring and devices can interact poorly and cause fluctuating voltages. The more stable the voltage, the less wear on the components and vice versa.

International law is an anarchist system. If you possess enough power and social standing you can ignore and manipulate it without consequence