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Comment by jansen555 | Hacker News Reader

Pollonium and thermobaric bombs easily come to my mind. Funding terrorism on steroid making Iranian look like absolute kindergartener are something I immediately think of after the previous 2 options. I can probably write a master thesis in an afternoon for possible options Putin can take. Imagine people doing this kind of think tank on daily basis for Putin. Remember when Soviet were dirt poor then they can match USA militarily, Russia now is sig ificantly richer with more sophisticated weapons. Look up who ferry American to space for the past 2 decades. Hint...not Elon.

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> Remember when Soviet were dirt poor then they can match USA militarily, Russia now is sig ificantly richer with more sophisticated weapons

They were poor, it's true. Tragically, because they were a centrally planned economy, the USSR could starve its citizens to funnel wealth to its war machine.

Russia is richer (about as rich as the state of Florida) but less centrally controlled, so it will find it harder to concentrate wealth into state initiatives at the expense of the lives of its citizens.

> the USSR could starve its citizens to funnel wealth to its war machine.

That would a stronger point, if one could not also unfavourably compare the size of the USA's military and social welfare budgets. And also the ease of expanding the former, vs. the difficultly in expanding the latter.

You aren't talking about the same types of thing:

1. The US also has loads of value which is not mediated by the state. A shop can decide what to sell, and you can decide to buy it, without any central planning or money spent by the state. All of this value could be (and was) decided by the state in the USSR.

2. "social welfare budgets" are not in the same league as what happened with central planning. From Wikipedia:

> In 1928, Stalin introduced the first five-year plan for building a socialist economy. In place of the internationalism expressed by Lenin throughout the Revolution, it aimed to build Socialism in One Country. In industry, the state assumed control over all existing enterprises and undertook an intensive program of industrialization. In agriculture, rather than adhering to the "lead by example" policy advocated by Lenin,[31] forced collectivization of farms was implemented all over the country.

> Famines ensued as a result, causing deaths estimated at three to seven million; surviving kulaks were persecuted, and many were sent to Gulags to do forced labor.

We know that it rarely makes sense for other people to even plan software timelines for teams of 4 developers, and the team members are the best people to estimate timelines, pick tools, and solve problems. How much more does that scale up for a whole country's economy? How much more damage can someone do if they are choosing centrally to deprioritise wealth creation over the latest thing the state wishes to accomplish?

Historically, all terrorism was created and funded by USA. USA subsists on chaos in other countries. There's no benefit for Russia in this fictional terrorism, also we don't have it in our cultural code.

For the US and UK it was always a preferred modus operandi: to make other people and nations fight for them. Like before WW II they explicitly stated that they would be happy to see both USSR and Germany mutually annihilate themselves, so that US can come to what is left and occupy the remnants.

Islamic terrorism is also a child of USA.

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