paulieweb
58912
818
68
Nov 10, 2023 11:54 AM
paulieweb
58912
818
68
archSkeptic
I'd sooner see that kind of money go to scientists for reasons I don't understand at all than to bailing out corporations
ChewyTheWookie
As I recall we had a bigger one nearly finished in the late 70s that Reagan diverted funding for the failed Star Wars project. I bet if he hadn't that by now we'd have room temperature Superconductor technologies such as cheap clean fusion power. I also bet that part of the intent was blocking developments potentially disruptive to fossil fuel barons.
LawFiveGuy
I don't know anything about colliders and such, but that paragraph made me grateful I have no one in my life that says 'bro' while talking.
triggrhaapi
I support the building of a larger collider. We've already learned so much from LHC.
TheVirg
I'd rather spend 22 billion on this instead of the military making brown kids into skeletons.
Spanky44
Just one more missile to bomb children bro come on, just one more missile... see how dumb this post sounds? Money spent on science is money well spent.
Poipoine
Still less expensive than twitter. Someone could have been Mrsupercoolider but instead is Superdouche
PapaJoeNH
"New knowledge is the most valuable commodity on earth. The more truth we have to work with, the richer we become.”. From Cat's Cradle, by Kurt Vonnegut
Onlyhereforthelaughs
Nationwide Transmutation Circle.
Seanspeed
I laughed, but seriously, they are important. There is basically no other way to test certain physical models, because we NEED to know whether certain quarks, bosons or leptons exist/can be created, etc. If we cant test these models out, we're basically leaving large chunks of physics questions unanswerable, and this holds up our ability to progress the whole field. But yea, they're pretty shit in terms of general bang for buck. lol
ElbowDeepinaTinyOctopus
373 years later, we're gonna have a goddamn artificial ring around this entire planet called the OK I Promise This One's The Last Collider.
littlefoxpounce
Now I'm curious how long it took them just to dig out the tunnel for the LHC. That's an insane level of engineering
JH1414
I was once sitting in one of related meeting, the project planning goes to 2040s, or 2070s …
and the cost of digging some international tunnel…
cousteau
Just design one 40,000 km in circumference already. Come on, we all know you're dying to.
cbale2000
These guys sure are dead-set on making sure Switzerland gets sucked into a black hole of their own creation I swear.
Lyssian
Bet you can make one hell of a philosophers stone with that one.
bolbis
Whenever any scientist says the words "dark matter" replace them with "ether" and then see how crazy it sounds. Now I fully expect to get downvoted to all hell for making an accurate analogy, because there is ZERO PROOF that dark matter exists. It is LITERALLY a fudging to make formulas work. What other job could you make a hypothesis, test it out, find out it is only 4% accurate, and then say "well the 96% is just magical fairy dust we haven't found yet" and keep getting funding?
helkafen
You're welcome to propose a new theory of gravitation. If there's no dark energy/matter, then our understanding of gravity is incorrect.
bolbis
Not what I am saying. The current accepted cosmology model is that gravity is the only force in the universe that is affecting celestial bodies (also that there is no friction in space). When we developed the technology to test this thesis, only 4% of the spin/movement/expansion of the universe could be explained by gravity. Dark matter was invented to plug the 96% inaccuracy of the model (fudging). Maybe, just maybe, gravity isn't the only force affecting celestial motion. Scientific heresy.
oplekv2
I mean, it actually does need to be physically larger because physics. It's not a sunk cost fallacy thing.
oplekv2
It's like needing a larger version of the LIGO arrays to be able detect larger gravitational waves.
Housemaster
Are people upvoting this ironically? I didn't know there was such a backlash against scientific particle accelerators on imgur.
AllMaktAtTengilVarBefriare
People can find stuff funny without agreeing with it
Seanspeed
I thought it was funny. It's not clear that the OP was meaning this as a serious message about not funding any new collider or anything. At face value, it does kind of seem preposterous how we build these gargantuan, complex, super expensive installations just to smash a couple particles together. So yea, as a joke based on that, it was funny.
MichelGoussu
Come on bro, just one more comment, and I swear, the problem will be settled. Just one comment, the las one we need before everybody agrees it's just for fun.
Futchm
They need to keep the name Future Circular Collider even after it is built
3Davideo
I've heard a (very, VERY long term) proposal for building a particle accelerator around the Moon's equator. Larger radii accelerators allow the particles to reach higher energies because the deflection forces needed to keep the particles travelling in circles are lower, and higher particle energies are needed to explore more exotic high-energy realms of physics, such as the very high energies where fundamental interactions begin to look like each other.
mostlyrottenadvice
22 billion for large hadron is nothing. We’ve spent trillions propping up car companies to fill fields of of rotting cars, bailing out banks, adding lanes to highways, and failing military projects.
SinStar87
Damn, I knew Switzerland was rich but trillions??
mostlyrottenadvice
It’s not just Switzerland who pays for the collider
SinStar87
Ah, it's a reference to the US?
mostlyrottenadvice
The US is the most egregious but many CERN member countries do some of this shit too
Hatrax
Sadly, the USA would already have that bigger collider if it hadn't been shut down by a short-sighted congress in the 1990s. What good would it have done, you ask. Well, the LHC is the center of the particle physics world. All of those scientists, their families, and their money would be here instead of there. All of the jobs to build and maintain the equipment and infrastructure, staff the buildings, etc. would be here. Those scientists attracting others to work and study here, 1/2
WoofBastard
Your post made me curious (thank you) so I did at least the section on the controversy at Wikipedia, which was a very interesting read in the many factors that eventually contributed to its cancellation (yes, Congress had to cancel it, but there were many causes). But I agree with your post about projects such as this being a magnet for all sorts of other follow-on benefits.
Hatrax
those scientists teaching at universities and attracting more money, prestige, and further investments, etc. Unlike building a sports stadium with taxpayer money, where most of the benefit goes to the owners of the team, investment in science infrastructure pays out long-term over a wide range of disciplines and industries, from construction to academia to janitorial and security- not to mention the hard-to-predict but extant positive applications of the scientific discoveries themselves. 2/2
andthentheresmaude
The town I grew up in was right next to Fermilab- and you nailed it.
Lordlabuck
Well can they not make the particle move around 3-4 times in the LHC before smashing them up? You could get your 100 KM, save $22B and I get my fake internet points.
bingotown
Traveling at over 99.999% the speed of light at full power, particles already go around the LHC 11,245 times per second.
cyberimg
I think they already do that.
WithFurtherAdo
In short, that's not really the problem here. It's the angle of the curve, which eats up a lot of the energy to accelerate the particles and thus results in weaker collisions.
forcebully
This. Synchrotron radiation. The simplest solution to reducing energy loss due to it is simply making the radius of the accelerator larger.
forcebully
Nope. As the particles round the curves, they lose energy due to synchrotron radiation. The solution is just a bigger accelerator. There are some things that can be done to help reduce the energy loss, like using RF cavities, but as you get to higher energy levels, you actually loose more energy due to the radiation. So the simple solution is a bigger accelerator.
forcebully
This is also an even bigger issue if we're talking electron-positron colliders ()Which the LHC is not because of this). Lighter particles experience signifacntly more energy loss to synchrotron radiation that heavier particles like a proton-proton collider (The LHC).
PapaJoeNH
Anyone who says "can't they just.." doesn't understand the issue
BDBottom
Like AYGDI engineering: "All You Gotta Do Is..."
Lordlabuck
Exactly and hence my question. :-)
TankardHoot
We have collider at home
powerrangerpl
elbowdeepinagoose
deechill
I hear this picture
mikeatike
That's super
badgesweedontneednostinkingbadges
When I was a kid we had the dangerous version: glass balls on string. The Clacker.
yoyo42
Can't get enough energy to discover new particles with a SAFETY clacker!
RedLetterMediaReactionGifs
SoupKitchen84
Mythanris90
Jinxies
Speedy atoms go clacky clack
Bystandr
Perfect for goblin brained researchers !
TheOneTrueZippy8
Wait until you read The Tragedy of SSC.... the Wise. ( https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-supercollider-that-never-was/ )
freezingpilot
While we are at it, the Experimental Breeder Reactor II in the USA cancellation set back clean energy decades.
betelgeux
Criminal how that went to hell. The states could have been doing amazing work and maybe even beat LHC to the higgs discovery.
gerf
Clinton said it was one of his biggest regrets.
darsfog
I wonder what ever happened to the 24 kilometers of completed tunnels. Did they collapse them, repurpose them, or are they just sitting empty waiting for youtubers to go tramping through them.
MidoryMoon
BobbyBroccoli's video on America's Missing Collider is a pretty cool watch if you want to watch a 3 hour movie on how political bullshittery ended up wasting 21 billion dollars... https://youtu.be/3xSUwgg1L4g
Mxlespxles
Bruh I cab just watch the news for that kind of depressing shit
wantfastcars
BobbyBroccoli's whole channel is spectacular. America's Missing Collider, The Man who Tried to Fake an Element, the Jan Hendrik Schon videos, the Hwang Woo Sook cloning scandal... hell even his new NorTel video. If you asked me "Do you want to watch an hour and a half video about Canadian telecommunications companies?" I would have told you no, and that you're insane for telling me I'd be waiting with baited breath for the Part 2.
Whiskeyramen
It's a really good watch with some great info graphics
PedalBoxShow
I just rewatched this yesterday, it's a superb documentary
mikeatike
Came here to post exactly this. BobbiBrocoli is incredible and has a criminally low sub count because youtube punishes creators that do long form videos.
ontarioOT
The US military calls that a Tuesday (technically, it's closer to 4.3 days of spending, not just one).
packetpusher201
.
TheOneTrueZippy8
Who *wouldn't* want to watch that ?
marthafarquar
Favourite thing about CERN is that they kind of know what they are doing but also know anything is possible in quantum physics so when they suffered a series of accidents and breakdowns they seriously considered the possibility that someone from the future was trying to stop them making a huge mistake and published two papers on it - https://arxiv.org/abs/">02.2991">https://arxiv.org/abs/0802.2991 https://arxiv.org/abs/0707.1919
derekjohn
This is the level of risk management that Wall Street banks and financial houses should consider: "Oh no! It's a Black Swan Event"
MUNDOGOESWHEREHEPLEASES
Good idea to get more funding when things aren't working 😂
For anyone wondering arxiv is a "prepublish" website, and not a peer reviewed scientific article.
CaverExtrordinaire
Lol imagine being one of the guys that caused a mistake and having to answer questions like "but are you from the future??!!"
RHodeidra
This is wonderful
AstroExplained
I mean that's the same 2 people writing something, and at least for the arxiv:0802.2991 paper has 21 citations in ADS - all 21 papers have the Nielsen person on it (so 100% self-citations). I mostly state this because "they" (as in CERN) have not seriously considered this. Saying "they" here is like when you see pop science websites run headlines like "Physics claim ____" or "Astrophysicists claim ___ " about something absurd, and it's one or two people claiming something w/o support.
marthafarquar
The papers are by Holger Bech Nielsen Danish theoretical physicist and professor emeritus at the Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen and Masao Ninomiya currently Managing Director of Okayama Institute for Quantum Physics so I'm pretty sure they know more about it than most.
AstroExplained
The comment above me said "they" as in CERN. Two people, regardless of position, is far from scientific consensus or the main opinion of that community. And even senior theorists, (in my experience especially in certain fields), can sometimes continuously posit extreme theoretical ideas without experimental support. The papers posted, at least by citations (not always accurate, but can show trends), appear to be quite ignored by that community
AstroExplained
So the statement "they seriously considered..." Is far from supported by linking 2 papers by the same 2 people that almost are solely cited by those 2 authors. Its like when you see headlines saying "Cosmologists now believe the universe is ___" and it's a fringe theory not supported by data or the broader community.
Narbotaye
This proves scientifically that they are fucking nuts.
niknights
Why?
Narbotaye
Just read @AstroExplained s comment. I have to correct: It proves scientifically that two people there are nuts. Time travel is impossible. No matter what they "prove" there.
bolbis
No, they just refuse to challenge their flawed formula about motion/spin in celestial bodies in space. Rather than develop a new model, lets invent dark matter and chase magical fairy dust that doesn't exist. Science is repeating the same mistakes it made when they believed Earth was the center of the universe. They made up ether before to explain the data not matching the formula, now it is dark matter.
MickeyCallahan
Lol, Dark Matter is real, dude. Once we got enough data that it stopped lining up neatly with visible matter, the notion that we could just modify the gravity formulas to account for it went out the window.
bolbis
Okay, sure. Then God is real too. I mean, where is the proof? My point is simply that the same people that laugh a theist out of the room (for legitimate reasons) believe a dogma that is fudging numbers to back a formula. Hate on me all you want, but science has already done this once before when we believed that the Earth was the center of the universe and the data did not back that thesis.
AstroExplained
Astronomers note: while we have no DIRECT detection of dark matter, it is still held as the most viable theoretical model since NONE of the modified gravity theories have been able to have as much general success, at least without also including similar things. This is why there is still a lot of work on dark matter and dark energy, but also growing theoretical work on modified gravity theories. So far, the latter have had limited successes.
bolbis
Or maybe, just maybe, another force is also acting upon celestial bodies besides gravity. I know, scientific heresy. I am not proposing that I have the answer, but simply stating that we might be repeating the same mistake as when science tried to prove that the Earth was the center of the solar system (inventing another aether/ether to make up for the data not matching the hypothesis). Particle physics & string theory have made lots of claims without proof for decades but money printer go brrr.
PapaJoeNH
I'm going to guess that there are valid scientific reasons to build this that some of us aren't aware of.
RedAppleSoda
Many people will say there are good reasons, but if you’d like to hear from a scientist with a different opinion, here is Sabine Hossenfelder: https://youtu.be/lu4mH3Hmw2o?si=8OOkO5gZpij-y1hd
spookyactionatadistance
I wouldn't take her opinion for anything even if you paid me. She is puking her shit opinions on anything that will get her views such as gender affirming care. She is not of any relevance in the scientific community. She just has a lot of, often baseless opinions
RedAppleSoda
I didn’t say every one of her views is wreathed in gold. I said she represents an alternative viewpoint, and btw, even her peers in the scientific community who disagree with her will admit her critiques are valid: https://www.npr.org/2023/09/23/1199469798/youtube-star-scientist-sabine-hossenfelder
hardytardigrade
I mean... yeah. Not understanding why this might be useful does not mean it's not useful.
SwedishGuyYesIDoHaveLongBlondHairWhy
There are valid reasons, for sure. But how about actually doing a linear collider first, to carry us over? ILC and CLIC are *right there*, but nothing is happening anymore due to politics mainly
theflavorsavor
Portals > aliens > alien sex
zHurk777
Science is great and all, but there has to be limits to the taxpayer's $$$Bs.
Strategicgnomer
There's a lot of physicists that don't think there's value in it. They get a lot of attention, but pouring this money into a bigger collider to prove a, honestly fairly weak theory, just means that a lot of money WON'T go into better, more useful projects. This isn't anti-science, it's pro- efficient spending. Dark matter is a fun theory, but it's quite unlikely. There are more likely theories out there we could be testing with far less funding.
UmAcshually
I'm sure there are. That isn't a good standard for public investments, though. Even if we don't pit this against other public services, the question is "If you have extra ~30 billion (megaprojects don't tend to stay in original estimate) to allocate to science, would pouring it all on this the best way to spend it". And there would have to be pretty spectacular justification to say yes to that.
Seanspeed
Advancements in understanding of physics is basically like a long-term investment into humanity as a whole. It requires a very big picture perspective.
forcebully
Think of it this way, the LHC maximum energy is 14 teraelectron volts. The FCC is planned to be 100 TeV. It would help measure the Higgs boson more precisely, possibly discover new particles or forces predicted by the Standard Model, possibly discover supersymmetry, etc. There is never a reason to say no probing higher energy levels.
RedAppleSoda
What about opportunity cost? That seems like a good reason to say no.
ElbowDeepInAHeadlessHorseman
If you want the very long, but also interesting version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3xSUwgg1L4g. Short version is yes, there's valid scientific reasons, but projects of this magnitude need to be managed from top to bottom by ppl who know wtf they're doing. Politicizing the process leads to disaster.
Seanspeed
So dont try and build one of these in the US, got it.
ClosetGuitarPlayerYesItsThatBad
Yah this post has a lot of anti science RedHat energy
sebastianthelobster
I think there's more a vibe of 'if we're going to spend 22bn on research, is this the best way to do it?' which is fair
Strategicgnomer
Yeah it's this exactly. Too much money going to dark matter research, not enough going to other, possibly better research routes. Just because dark matter sounds like a cool idea. It's like the multiple universe side of string theory, it's fun, so people want to fund it.
ljj4
I thought the humor of this post was coming from the juxtaposition of using that meme format on something that actually is worthwhile and makes sense to get larger and larger asks. Or was I reading too much into it?
Youhavinagiraffe
Guessed they'd be the same people who would have raged at the Apollo mission for being a waste of money... and then vote for whichever politician promised to fucktuple the military budget to win the cock-measuring contest against the Commies
Seanspeed
The worst thing we could have done was let Russia get a rolling advantage over the US in military capabilities, especially with rockets. This would have increased chances of war heavily, and especially nuclear war.
LazyUsername99
Yeah, I legitimately don't have a problem with the cock measuring contest with Russia. The problem I have is that once we won the cock measuring contest we kept obsessing about having a bigger cock so much that we STILL spend 2.5x as China at Number 2, and 10x more than Russia at Number 3. There's spending for a reason and there's spending solely to support an industry.
Seanspeed
I am a huge proponent of fixing massively inefficient military spending. But I do not support actually shrinking our military. It is ultimately the most significant peace keeping force in the world, simply by its mere existence. And most people dont understand that. If we were to cut our military and allow China to dominate, this world would be much worse off.
JonWallace1985
There are various theories about dark matter, some of them have theoretical particles that at energy levels not possible at LHC, but may be with more power. LHC was built to find Higgs, we need something to specifically look for SUSY.
RedAppleSoda
That’s revisionist history. Scientists very much believed that the LHC would verify SUSY. It wasn’t as if they built the LHC saying, “we expect to find the Higgs and nothing else.”
In fact, you can find loads of old articles that say SUSY is in danger if the LHC experiments continue to find no evidence. Those experiments failed to verify their theories, so scientists just modified their theories so that a larger collider would be needed to verify them. That’s the point of the meme.
JonWallace1985
No, they thought it MIGHT. Indirectly, through Higgs. It was to measure the weight of a Higgs boson. There were two models, heavy boson implied SUSY, a light one didn’t. It was annoyingly almost directly in between the predictions. No one thought it could create a neutralino. Even then most SUSY models then didn’t start at the EM-Weak realm.
RedAppleSoda
Discovering the Higgs may have been the primary purpose, but they definitely also built the LHC with the intent to uncover supersymmetry: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/pdf/10.1098/rsta.2014.0037
RedAppleSoda
Section 2(a), second paragraph.
malfunctionm1ke
We germans just gave our military 100 billion for whatever they want. 22 billion is just peanuts and it creates jobs in a lot of segments
LjubljanaJeNajlepseMestoNaSvetu
Still dont get what kind of an idiot let you guys rearm yourselves.
bedframe
You guys did build a broken airport for funzies after all.
kilgoth1
Laughs in america
PPlank
Hang on a minute...
lemmerustlethosejimmies
There's the minor matter of an aggressive Russia a country or two away so I don't think most Europeans find increased military spending to be at all unreasonable. Just because Russia is struggling with Ukraine doesn't mean Russia can't still cause loads of damage and death. Better to have a beefed up military for deterrence or to fight further east, because if you think $100 billion is expensive, rebuilding east Germany and dealing with the deaths is FAR more expensive.
AllMaktAtTengilVarBefriare
Sadly Germany didn't solve the biggest problem with their armed forces, the way too strict bureaucracy, that 100 billion is going to sit mostly untouched for years unless you speed up some procurement procedures.
n0n53n53
it might also create a giant black hole in the middle of the continent, or not who's to say
SpecialContainmentProcedures
That's 100 billion spread out over years. Pretty sure Muricans give that to our military... every 1.3 months.
astrangehop
I'm the foreman for our local area's particle collider construction company, and lemme tell ya — we'd kill for a piece of that action.
AgainstMethod
Even by government budget standards, 22B isn't peanuts.
talldean
APassingPlasticBag
Laughs in America (cry’s in American cause we have nothing but military budget)
Youhavinagiraffe
It also has the potential to unravel some of the fundamental mysteries of the universe for the first time ever. We didn't go to the moon because it created jobs, we did it because it was an amazing and worthwhile achievement for all of humankind
Seanspeed
Not jobs, but it wasn't just 'to do something cool', either. Space race was fundamentally a boost for military research and development. In the late 1950's, Russian rocket engineering was superior to the US's and this was a very dangerous situation in terms of first strike potential with nuclear weapons. Space race was a good excuse to get America an unassailable lead here, and it worked.
bingotown
Well… we did it to beat the Soviets, really.
AllMaktAtTengilVarBefriare
I thought we did it because it is hard
PapaJoeNH
Job creation should never be overlooked. Many of our jobs are not necessary, but we do them to keep the economic engine running.
hardytardigrade
Maintaining unnecessary jobs to stoke an artificial-supported economy that highly disproportionately benefits the very top levels doesn't seem ideal for most. It doesn't seem like something "we" need, more like something "they" want.
PapaJoeNH
You nailed it. But that's how capitalism works
BigEasyZuka
Oh yeah?!?! Well we 'Muricans give our military $773,000,000,000 so we can *checks notes*
... Not have free basic healthcare.
basiccricket8444
Just in case every other country in the world decides to pick a fight with us at once. Which....kinda makes me uneasy
JHRD1880
You can afford your military and get free health care. Your government (and a sizeable amount of citizens) just don't want to.
Bystandr
Notes are wrong as almost all the other developed countries in the world show that public health care is cheaper, too.
BigEasyZuka
Kinda part of the point. People think it's an either/or. Our taxes just go to military spending instead of a healthcare system regardless of which one is most cost-effective.
kilgoth1
Cheaper yes. Better for businesses? No. Yaya capitalism.
zHurk777
Um, I'm pretty sure the number is closer to $825,000,000,000 if not higher.
BigEasyZuka
If we go all of DoD I think it's like $1.8T.
ProphetofEntropy
your problem is you are letting souless capitalists set the values for your country, theyve been cutting spending and lowering their own taxes for decades. even military spending is down as a percentage of americas GDP. tax the rich.
BigEasyZuka
"letting" is a strong word. I have voted against as many of those policies as I possibly can.
ProphetofEntropy
but you continue to regurgitate their lies that the reason the US doesnt have single payer healthcare is their military spending. you dont need to be paid troll to spread their propaganda.
BigEasyZuka
You. Don't. Get. The. Joke. Part of the point is that I'm making fun of the fact that people think this is true. The whole fact that we focus on killing rather than healing.
crankyoldgeezer
Yeah but your military is dealing with an ascending Russia which aggressively talks on tv about going to Berlin.
hardytardigrade
OMG just like our military
TheWombatStrikesAgain
If they attacked NATO right now, we'd have at least two months before Lithuania calmly brings up the idea of assistance, no pressure.
SamuthNBS
Imagine what would have happened if Britain and other allied nations didn't fund nuclear physics research because of an ascending Germany
Emrys12
Ascending or descending?
theredacted
Yeah and Germany okie-d a fuel pipeline that goes straight from Russia into Germany and I thought that was really funny considering historical events and why the Russians took so long the first time
crankyoldgeezer
Also Science budgets should be valued on their own merits, not as a way save money ‘wasted’ on the military.
alt86er
But it puts things into perspective. When we have billions upon billions to be spend on means and ideas to kill other people, I certainly don't see any problem with a much smaller amount being spend on trying to understand the universe a bit better. Sad truth though: Also this gained understanding will be used for war, if it can be used for war. That's just the shitty human condition right now.
crankyoldgeezer
I agree 100%. I wish we’d stop subsidizing the oil companies who are gauging us. I am also reminded that GPS’ was originally invented to guide bombs and now is in virtually everything.
alt86er
It's not a misconception, that war breeds innovation. It does. Because you get really creative, when it comes to ensuring your own survival.
ByThePowerOfSCIENCE
With their recent record, it sounds more like propaganda for the folks at home.
crankyoldgeezer
Yes, exactly. They are preparing their nation for a long fight.
ByThePowerOfSCIENCE
I meant propaganda to keep them distracted from the clusterfuck in Ukraine that may get them kicked out.
crankyoldgeezer
You’re right. Although the school textbooks are preparing for a long haul.
DrBlackJack
Oh God. If they can't handle Ukraine, I can only imagine what would happen if they tries to invade Germany! Putin would have to be suicidal to try at this point!
ThomasThundersword
if Russia tries to fuck with a NATO country. the F22 might finally get to eat.
knupauger
Right. That's why he will continue to subvert our media and politics until we open the door for him and welcome him inside.
IMadeAnAccountForThisFuckingSobStory
Hey Poland what are you preparing for with all those weapons?
"to win"
crankyoldgeezer
They are raising a generation of fascists who dream of Empire & consider the former Soviet Block countries rightfully theirs. Putin is just the face of a bigger societal problem. Rural Russians have been convinced that their poverty & despair can be remedied by taking from others.
Perkunas687
So many people in the USSR died in WWII (8.6 million military, 26.6 total, out of like 200 million) that generations of kids and young people grew up with the state and propaganda as their 'parents.' Those generations in turn had kids, and so on. So, much like USA with generational racists, you have generational pro-Empire Russians. And like USA, not everyone racist, so not everyone in Russia pro-Empire, but there are many.
Seanspeed
I mean, they are 'handling' Ukraine, just not super well. But that's also with Ukraine having almost no air force and a hand tied behind their back with limitations on equipment and their ability to use them. So yea, they'd get wiped by NATO. China is really the US/NATO's real peer adversary now.
lemmerustlethosejimmies
Just because they can't conquer Ukraine doesn't REMOTELY mean Ukraine is fine. Their population, infrastructure, homes, so many things are destroyed or horrendously damaged, let alone all the dead people. Even if Russia can't conquer Germany, it's entirely possibly eastern Germany would be devastated and who knows how many civilians dead. Better to spend a shitload on their military given recent events for deterrence or to have them fight alongside NATO so the war hopefully doesn't reach Germany
Seanspeed
Yea, that last sentence is it. Germany has VERY high motivation to keep Poland and the Baltics as buffer zones from Russia(and its puppet Belarus). Even without NATO, Germany would likely join any war should those countries be attacked by Russia. And they need to show they are serious about this, as this is the biggest deterrent to Russia ever even trying.
[deleted]
[deleted]
crankyoldgeezer
Nukes aren’t usable and everyone knows it.
Nivvi
Currently they wouldn't get far past Polish border anyway. With shit US and NATO put in, MIM-104 Patriot on airports close to the border just for the starters
Sanotassard
they would get so far past the polish border you could leave the destroyed vehicles in place and the would be a border wall
Emrys12
They can barely get past their own border
EmanNiemThcin
Given that most planes of the Luftwaffe are out of order, the amount of tanks we field is ridiculously low (< 300) and for some reason the change from MG3 to MG4 and MG5 still isn't finished, to give you some of the highlights, I'd say their chances aren't too bad. The joke around here is "The Bundeswehr's job is to delay the enemy until the Army shows up."
Seanspeed
Thirty five F-35's will be pretty huge.
Hammerwell
I still think they're too expensive. Weren't there other options?