this post was submitted on 19 Sep 2024
86 points (93.9% liked)

Ukraine

8208 readers
656 users here now

News and discussion related to Ukraine

*Sympathy for enemy combatants is prohibited.

*No content depicting extreme violence or gore.

*Posts containing combat footage should include [Combat] in title

*Combat videos containing any footage of a visible human must be flagged NSFW


Donate to support Ukraine's Defense

Donate to support Humanitarian Aid


founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
top 9 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Honestly, I consider the CEO of JP Morgan a bigger existential threat to humankind than any of those places.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago (1 children)

That's fair, but consider how much banks empower Putin by continuing to prop up the petrodollar which helps keep the Russian economy afloat.

Then consider how much these c-suite ghouls get a hard on for LLMs and AI and how much those muddy the waters of what is actually real, factual information and contributes to disinformation and misinformation on the web.

Maybe some would consider bigger a stretch, but I don't.

Putin can go get fucked in the ear though.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

Oh, I agree.

But at the same time, the CEO of JPM isn’t conducting an unprovoked genocidal invasion of a neighboring country.

They’re both clearly very fucking evil, but in different ways.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Well I came to say "takes one to know one" but bigger threat than Russia and NK is a big call.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Sorry for repeating this comment I just made to another reply, but I don't think I can put it any more succinctly:

Consider how much banks empower Putin by continuing to prop up the petrodollar which helps keep the Russian economy afloat.

Then consider how much these c-suite ghouls get a hard on for LLMs and AI and how much those muddy the waters of what is actually real, factual information and contributes to disinformation and misinformation on the web.

Maybe some would consider bigger a stretch, but I don't.

Putin can go get fucked in the ear though.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

Well, I'm with you on Putin can go get fucked. But I think you're misinformed on the "petrodollar empowering Putin".

The dominance of the US dollar as the currency for settlement of international crude oil contracts advantages predominantly the US and secondarily countries with strong currencies in open exchange with the USD. It disadvantages weaker currencies and those with poorer trade terms with the US such as Venezuela and Russia now the latter has been cut off from the western banking system.

Putin being forced to trade his crude in non dollar denominated contracts is one of the (several) reasons the sale price of muscovy crude is now significantly lower than the equivalent from other countries. (TL;DR the sanctions are working).

China has long been lobbying unsuccessfully to break the petrodollar/USD as world reserve currency and failed so far.

The major US banks are just agents of a (very successful) US foreign policy post WW2. They are indeed evil, but not for this reason

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

Then consider how much these c-suite ghouls get a hard on for LLMs and AI and how much those muddy the waters of what is actually real, factual information and contributes to disinformation and misinformation on the web.

Banking C suites don't love LLM and AI because they create disinformation. They love them because they want to replace expensive human labor with cheap computational cycles. There is a growing level of acceptance LLMs and AI won't be able to accomplish this.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Russia, Iran, North Korea

Ehhh.

I mean, North Korea doesn't have the resources to do much most of the time. Yeah, they're well-positioned for this conflict, because they've spent a relatively-high chunk of resources they do have on artillery and maintained that over time, built a stockpile. Artillery is a bottleneck on Russia in Ukraine. So they're potentially a factor in Russia's invasion in Ukraine.

But they just don't have the ability to change much in the world, most of the time.

Not that Iran or Russia are exactly in prime condition either, but they aren't at the kind of level where feeding the population is regularly a problem.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Korea

Per capita GDP: $640

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran

Per capita GDP: $5,310

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russia

Per capita GDP: $14,391

Big difference between those.

Any resources they want to spend on fighting with other countries needs to come out of that, and they have some basic costs like feeding their population that they have to cover before the option to do other things with remaining resources comes up.