I don’t expect that Trump being in office will substantially change US policy on Ukraine. This is not a major election factor. I think that what you’re seeing is politicking, and that the major driver of US policy on Ukraine is the bureaucracy, not political leadership. That doesn’t change from administration to administration.
Yeah, it might.
https://www.wilsoncenter.org/blog-post/chinas-balancing-act-between-us-and-russia
The United States’ efforts to limit China’s shipments of dual-use goods to Russia seem to be having an impact. Russia is finding it harder to obtain the semiconductors and machine tools needed to sustain its war effort. Additionally, Putin’s plan to boost his failing gas revenues by building a second pipeline to China remains stalled.
Yet China is a winner in a situation created by Russia’s brutal war against Ukraine. China has expanded its market presence in Russia and secured affordable Russian hydrocarbons, but only to a degree that maintains its diversified portfolio of energy sources.
Aborted Trade Growth
Chinese-Russian trade has seen explosive growth since the launch of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. With bilateral trade surging from $145 billion in 2021 to $240 billion in 2023, China has solidified its position as Russia’s main trading partner.
The primary areas of cooperation include energy, agriculture, technology, infrastructure construction, and transportation, Putin pointed out during his visit to Beijing. What this really means is that China is Russia’s top source for the types of goods that the United States identifies as “high-priority” items. These goods—including semiconductors, telecommunications equipment, and machine tools—can be used in both civilian and military sectors.
In December 2023, monthly exports of these dual-use products from China to Russia reached over $600 million but have since fallen to over $300 million per month. Despite this decrease, China’s support for Russia’s war effort through these supplies has been substantial. Russia’s dependence on China for these products has surged from 32 percent in 2021 to 89 percent in 2023.
But China also has no reason to do that, and some good reason not to. I bet that they won’t.
China may not have a direct interest in the outcome of the war itself.
However, it does gain from Russia being dependent on China.
The reason that Putin has been willing to have that dependence is because China isn’t actively aiming to oppose the invasion. All China has to do to gain here is, well, nothing.
For China, that’s a pretty low-cost way to gain a bunch of influence in Asia. My guess is that China’s goals probably look something like this:
Make sure that this doesn’t turn nuclear (which would potentially affect China).
Don’t have China become involved in the conflict.
Make use of the period of time where Russia is cut off from the West to extend short-run Russian dependence (like, obtaining substitute parts from China) to long-run dependence (tying Russia to Chinese systems and services) insofar as possible.
If China decides to act in concert with the West, then it gains nothing – China probably doesn’t care much what happens in Ukraine – and loses this new influence in Russia, which Beijing probably does very much want.
since this type of interference is geographically relevant, it clearly has nothing to do with the war.
So, I’m not sure what the rationale is – it might be worrying about long-range drones, like those light aircraft, flying around Belarus, but I’ve definitely seen some sources say that they believe that the Kaliningrad jamming is a function of the war.
This article, from late May, has the Finnish government saying that they believe that it’s related to the war.
Jamming GPS signals over the Baltic Sea is “most likely” a side effect of Russia’s anti-drone activities, Traficom, the Finnish Transport and Communications Agency, said today.
“The interference intensified when Ukraine’s drone attacks on Russia’s energy infrastructure began in January 2024,” Traficom said in a press release.
Estonia also blames Russia for the signal jamming, but the Finnish agency doesn’t agree with the Tallinn government in defining the interference as a hybrid attack.
“It is possible that the interference observed in aviation currently are most likely a side effect of Russia’s self-protection” that is used “to prevent the navigation and control of drones controlled by GNSS [Global Navigation Satellite System] or mobile frequencies,” Traficom said.
Well, as things stand, there’s no right in customary international law to a radio frequency. If Russia wants to produce disruption, Russia basically can. It’s going to annoy countries, but there isn’t really a lot that can be done aside from pressure, sanctions and such. Hell, even if there were such a right, it’d ultimately need to be backed up by ability and willingness to use force at some level, by someone. I’m not sure that countries are willing to wage war over radio broadcasts, no matter how disruptive.
In theory, a country could probably run a pretty powerful broadcast off a ship. So I don’t think that Kaliningrad is even all that special here – Russia could be doing the same even if it didn’t have a little enclave of territory and didn’t mind annoying whoever is using the signal.
My guess is that Russia will stop when the war ends. That is, my assumption is that Russia isn’t willing to do peacetime jamming for the purpose of just being obnoxious.
If it’s enough of a problem, it’d probably be possible to set up navigation systems that are more-limited, don’t have the degree of military utility of something like GPS. Maybe reactivate LORAN, say.
In the case of transatlantic aircraft, I’d assume that those normally have INS navigation systems; while limited in accuracy, those should be usable as a backup to GPS in most roles.
I was using it on Linux too!
Looking at the New York Times, they are massively hammering Biden. Like, a huge chunk of the front page is negative pieces on him.
The law requires web-based age verification on sites with at least one-third of their content devoted to adult sexual material. Now the Supreme Court will solicit arguments and briefs about the case.
My hot take is that it won’t fly, but that Texas can also potentially revise the law to make it pass.
The problem is that this is targeting websites serving non-porn material if the site also serves porn. Like, there’s porn on Reddit, for example. But this doesn’t say “we restrict access to minors just to porn”, but “we restrict access to the website”, where someone like Reddit can do finer-grained filtering. It’s hard, I think, to argue that this is the “least restrictive means” to solve the issue.
For a law that that restricts speech to pass the First Amendment, it has to pass strict scrutiny, and “least restrictive means” is one requirement of this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strict_scrutiny
In U.S. constitutional law, when a law infringes upon a fundamental constitutional right, the court may apply the strict scrutiny standard. Strict scrutiny holds the challenged law as presumptively invalid unless the government can demonstrate that the law or regulation is necessary to achieve a “compelling state interest”. The government must also demonstrate that the law is “narrowly tailored” to achieve that compelling purpose, and that it uses the “least restrictive means” to achieve that purpose. Failure to meet this standard will result in striking the law as unconstitutional.
The standard is the highest and most stringent standard of judicial review and is part of the levels of judicial scrutiny that courts use to determine whether a constitutional right or principle should give way to the government’s interest against observance of the principle. The lesser standards are rational basis review and exacting or intermediate scrutiny. These standards are applied to statutes and government action at all levels of government within the United States.
The ACLU lawyer references a “reasonable” criteria, and apparently that’s one element of the “rational basis” review, so I’m guessing that they’re attacking it on those grounds.
It sounds like it does radar and that it’s the radar antennas at issue, and there’s some separate antenna that they can use to communicate.
Also, a previous satellite of the same design that was manufactured by Airbus worked. So they know the likely system and that it’s a manufacturing problem. They don’t need to design a replacement from scratch, just manufacture it. They have one satellite up. And while their older satellites in the previous constellation are past their design life and aren’t as good, they’re apparently still functioning, and hopefully will for several years.
So it doesn’t sound that bad.
I assume that it should read “executive order”.
I wouldn’t.
Aside from broken controllers, which I don’t think can reasonably count, the Atari 2600 joystick.
One button, a lot of resistance to push on the stick.
After that, an elderly Logitech gamepad from the 1990s that had a D-pad that rolled diagonal way too easily. IIRC it had a screw-in mini-joystick that could attach to the center of the D-pad. Don’t remember the model. White case, attached directly to a joystick/MIDI port.
After that, I think the NES controller. I have no idea why people like those or actually buy recreations. Yes, nostalgia, but the ergonomics on it were terrible. Hard buttons, sharper corners on the D-pad than is the norm today, and a squared-off controller made the thing downright uncomfortable to use for long periods of time.
I was pretty happy with my most-recent Logitech gamepad – I think an F310 – but I had another from the 1990s that was terrible, had a D-pad that rolled to diagonal movement far too easily.
Democratic Attorney General Josh Kaul filed a lawsuit challenging the statutes in 2022, arguing they were too old to enforce
I mean, laws don’t have a sunset date.
Unless there’s a split between the upper and lower state legislatures and governor, why not just either pass a new law making abortion either explicitly illegal or repeal the old law so that it’s explicitly legal? Like, what’s the point of having court cases over some law from 1849?
What’s the makeup of the legislature?
kagis
Ahh.
So the Republicans control the upper and lower legislative houses. The governor is a Democrat. The Republicans have a two-thirds supermajority in the upper house, but only a majority in the lower house. So basically, nobody has enough oomph to push through a change (at least if the division is along party lines, which it may not be in Wisconsin).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wisconsin_Legislature
So based on that, the Republicans need two more seats in the 99-seat lower house to have a supermajority there as well and be able to override a governor’s veto, or to get a Republican governor, which avoids the veto issue. They’re very close to being able to pass legislation without Democratic support, but not quite there.
The Democrats are nowhere near having a majority in both houses, so they probably can’t pass legislation anytime soon without Republican support.
Nvidia is worth about $3 trillion at this point. France’s GDP is about that each year.
Unexploded remotely-triggerable ordinance with a camera on it.
Ruling in the case Ukraine v. Russia (re Crimea), the European Court of Human Rights unanimously found June 25 that Russia is guilty of a pattern of human rights violations since 2014 in Crimea, as codified under the European Convention on Human Rights a
Russia withdrew from the ECHR. Presumably whatever specific incidents they’re talking about were before that, but I’m not sure how much Russia is going to care about that.
Russia also terminated ECHR jurisdiction in 2022.
LONDON, June 7 (Reuters) - Russia’s parliament on Tuesday passed a pair of bills ending the European Court of Human Rights’ jurisdiction in the country, a rupture provoked by Russia’s war in Ukraine.
I’m not sure whether that ended authority over cases on issues prior to that time or not, in each of the eyes of Russia and the ECHR. But I wouldn’t be surprised if Russia’s position is that it did, as there wouldn’t be much point to also terminating jurisdiction after leaving if it didn’t.
That alternative would replace Ohio’s current system for drawing congressional and legislative maps, which relies on elected officials, with a 15-member panel of Ohioans without close ties to politics.
Honestly, I feel like if districts are gonna be drawn, it’d make more sense to just choose some algorithm and have a computer do it.
Like, if you want to have non-partisan oversight of the algorithm selection, great, but I’m not at all sold that partitioning up the election map requires anything beyond a simple, mechanical process.
reads further
Fed up with politicians manipulating maps to ensure reelection, a crowd of Ohio voters took a key step toward offering a redistricting alternative on the November ballot.
The commission would draw maps that “correspond closely to statewide partisan preferences of the voters of Ohio.” Unlike redistricting proposals approved in 2015 and 2018, this requirement is explicit and mandatory.
If you divide up electoral districts to try to clump similar voters, you kind of guarantee that you’re ensuring re-election. In fact, from past reading, that’s what gerrymandering tends to do. It isn’t primarily that politicians try to get an edge for their party overall. It’s that they try to ensure that they have safe seats without serious competition, even if that ensures that politicians from the other party also enjoy the same situation. Think of an oligopoly, where companies divide up territory or something like that, and each has a monopoly. Like, if you’re going to mandate that under this district-drawing system, what you’re functionally doing is minimizing the power of the public in elections relative to that of incumbent politicians.
kagis
Yeah.
https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2023/07/biggest-problem-with-gerrymandering/
Biggest problem with gerrymandering
Researchers found tactic, widely used in 2020, made little difference in partisan numbers but yielded safe seats, less-responsive representatives
Basically, what gerrymanderers principally aim to do is to reduce how much a politician in an electoral district tends to need to care about what their electorate wants, by eliminating realistic challengers.
kagis
One of the most consequential outcomes of this redistricting cycle has been the continuing decrease in the number of competitive congressional districts. Under new maps, there are just 30 districts that Joe Biden won by less than eight percentage points in 2020 and, likewise, just 30 districts that Donald Trump won by less than eight points.
All told, there are now fewer competitive districts than at any point in the last 52 years. If the good news is that both parties emerged with reasonable opportunities in coming years to win control of a closely divided House, the bad news is that they will fight that battle on the narrowest of terrains under maps artificially engineered to reduce competition.
In the end, a closely divided House remains up for grabs, with reasonable opportunities for both parties to win control in coming years. However, barring unforeseen political shifts, most voters will watch that fight from the sidelines due to maps that artificially reduce competition. If Americans hope to reverse the long-term decline of competitive districts, reforms to create fairer, more independent map-drawing processes will be essential.
That’s a good deal if you’re an incumbent politician who wants to be in a position to make use of political influence without being at political risk. But it’s the worst deal you could get in terms of your own influence if you’re a member of the voting public.
Ted Linscott, the retired bricklayer from Athens, said Appalachians tell it like it is: “When we see BS, we call BS and the way our districts are drawn is BS.”
I’m not saying you’re wrong there, dude. But being happy about this proposal is kinda, well…I’m gonna need Gary Larson to help me out on this one.
https://lemmy.today/pictrs/image/6a694b63-9618-4b6a-a685-a26f1be54bb9.jpeg
Video of the accidental ascent
Apparently it’s an American English-British English difference.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/on_sale
(British, Australia) Available for purchase.
(US, Australia) Available for purchase at reduced prices.
No. Trump was not largely the factor involved in aid being held up – that was the Freedom Caucus, which was aiming to hold it (and a number of other things, including the budget earlier) hostage to get domestic policy gains that they wanted, given that the Republicans had a very narrow margin in the House and their support was required for a deal.
The Freedom Caucus didn’t actually care much about the fundamental issue of Ukraine aid, but they wanted to force spending reductions – they took the position that we could aid Ukraine, but if so it had to come from cutting government spending, reducing regular spending. It couldn’t be additional spending.
Trump’s faction has not been especially friendly with the Freedom Caucus, and supported the guy who just defeated its leader, Bob Good.
https://news.yahoo.com/news/republican-survive-trumps-wrath-bob-221830141.html
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-election/trump-endorses-primary-challenger-gop-rep-bob-good-virginia-rcna154285
https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/4729084-bob-good-donald-trump-virginia-oklahoma-georgia-tom-cole/mlite/
https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/4727667-bob-good-virginia-donald-trump-kevin-mccarthy-john-mcguire-freedom-caucus/
You can find some people who are friendly with Trump who have opposed Ukraine aid. Vance is one possible running mate pick for Trump, and he has, in the past, pretty consistently advocated for not getting involved in Europe and Russia, and rather focusing on opposing China. On the other hand, Burgum, another possible running mate pick, has been a hawk on Russia. So depending upon how things play out you could wind up with people who do have a voice in advising Trump, will have access to him, and have taken policy positions against support for Ukraine. But I don’t anticipate Trump himself to be much of a factor on Ukraine, and I think that it’ll be recommendations from the Department of State and the like that will be the most influential in a potential second Trump administration.
US foreign policy usually isn’t a major factor in elections, and generally doesn’t swing back and forth around elections.