"Many in Silicon Valley feel the same about him (David Sacks) as you do."
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[1] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/3/23/moscow-concert-hall...
He tends to follow a bit of a pro Russia narrative and annoy others including here the Ukrainian journalist Ponomarenko, who Paul Graham backs up.
Here's a write up on Sacks and some of the issues https://vatniksoup.com/en/soups/144/
A bit of a problem with Sacks is he's not very informed on the history of the situation. I heard him on a podcast that he first heard about Ukraine in like Jan 2022 but proceeds to propagandize his position noisily over people who have lived there for decades.
Someone else quoting another idiotic post by Sacks
To take a concrete and financial tack: The alternative to funding Ukraine right now is an increase in western annual defense spending of 1% of GDP. Indefinitely.
But this is also possibly the first just war since world war 2.
By the time the election season is over and we have another chance at funding Ukraine, it will have been a year of blocked funding. Personally I find it fundamentally unserious that a participant in a war leaves for a year or more, let alone the world's top superpower.
I can't see what winning would even look like
Many lessons came out of the first two world wars about how modern warfare would be fought. One of them was that it didn't matter how many well-rested soldiers you had willing to fight. If you ran out of ammunition and your opponents have enough left to annihilate you, you'll probably lose.
We'll never know for certain, but there's a real possibility that if it hadn't been for the Lend-Lease program, the USSR would have run out of weapons and supplies, and Hitler would have defeated the Soviets.
Obviously, there's limits. One soldier sitting on warehouses of ammo isn't going to take out a force of ten thousand. But at the outset of the war, active Russian troops outnumbered Ukrainian troops by only 4 to 1. In the right circumstances, those are winnable numbers. And even better for the Ukrainians, Russia couldn't send all of their troops in. They needed to keep the bulk of them in Russia for defense.
Estimates of causalities in the war range from 1:3 to 1:5 in favor of Ukraine. So even if Russian troops outnumbered Ukrainian troops 2:1, all Ukraine has to do is continue killing Russian soldiers at the same rate, and eventually Russia will run out of soldiers to send.
That's what "winning" looks like for Ukraine. This is a war of attrition. They win by exhausting the enemy before the enemy exhausts them.
But it relies on Ukraine continuing to have enough ammo to kill the Russian soldiers at that rate. This is a war of attrition. Russia's firmly on a wartime economy, and unless the bottom falls out on them, they'll continue to produce weapons and ammo for the duration of the war. Enough for every solider they field? Maybe, maybe not, but they won't run out.
Ukraine, on the other hand, relies on the West for weapons and ammo. If it runs out, it loses, and that's why so many people are upset about Western countries dropping support. It's a winnable war for Ukraine, but only if Russia's enemies stay committed.
Russia's economy is actually doing quite well.
https://www.voanews.com/a/russia-economy-grew-in-2023-despit...
I don't think there is any actual way that Ukraine is going to beat Russia in any actual sense. They have been losing territory (https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-60506682) and Europe is suffering without Russian gas.
I don't have a horse in the race, I just think it's absurd to think you are going to "win" in any sense. Ultimately I think Putin would drop some sort of nuke on the Ukraine before admitting defeat.
And I never said Russia's economy is doing terribly. It did grow. Some fear that it's being propped up by war manufacturing, or is otherwise in a pattern that it can't hold indefinitely, but I don't have enough insight into it. My point was actually to assume that Russia will continue to be able to produce weapons and ammo for the duration of the war, but it could still lose a war of of attrition when it becomes too costly in human lives to continue.
And yes, Putin might nuke Ukraine. The Russians were floating a plan of detonating a single nuke to "shock" Western Europe into fearful inaction. I don't think that will work. If anything, it will only further anti-Russian sentiment and possibly lead to war.
Yes, the West has set and ignored red lines with Russia in the past, to their own detriment. But this will different. If Russia detonates a nuke after failing a military operation that they themselves started, it will show they're not good stewards of a nuclear arsenal. Essentially, they would have proven to the world that they can hold it nuclear hostage to their whims. To not reply in force would throw the MAD doctrine into doubt.
Ukraine, is just depending on a hope and a prayer from other countries to support them, which is faltering and realistically they have lost a ton of young people and many of the kids don't want to fight, they want to escape.
I don't see any realistic situation they can do anything to Russia. Russia's economy hasn't collapsed. So I'm not sure what they can do.
Mostly irrelevant to their ability to defeat Ukraine in a conventional war, though it may constrain outside aid to Ukraine somewhat.
> and their ability to manufacture traditional weapons is far less than the United States.
This is not something that works in their favor.
> Ukraine, is just depending on a hope and a prayer from other countries to support them, which is faltering and realistically they have lost a ton of young people and many of the kids don't want to fight, they want to escape.
Russia has also lost a ton of young people (far more than the USSR lost over a decade in Afghanistan, a major contributor to the political collapse of the USSR), and seen lots of people trying to escape. Or firebombing recruitment centers, etc. They've also lost a lot of not young people — quite a lot of their senior/experienced combat pilots, and an unusually large proportion of field grade and general officers.
I meant to say thier cost to manufacture is far less. Which works in thier favor
If you assume that the only effect of the war is spending and that the spending has no productive value (the second might be approximately true the first is... not, even approximately), then... sure, that seems true by definition.
If you drop the first assumption, then the other effects of the war (and more specifically, the delta between with the spending and without) is important to determining if the spending is a net win or a net loss.
One of the common stories of wars up through the ages is this: Country A has merchant shipping and a navy. Country B raids the merchant ships. Country A declares war on B. The war is a loss for everyone, including A.
After the war, merchant shipping resumes. Is it going to be raided again? Those who might raid it know that A will declare war even if it's clear that war leads to pain and suffering for A itself.
Avoiding war is great if you can either protect your interests with a credible threat or in other ways. Remaining credible is a challenge if you've backed down a few times.
The USSR had more people than Afghanistan, too, and was much more legitimately a superpower than Russia is today.
The USA had more people than Afghanistan, and was even more of a superpower than the USSR when it invaded Afghanistan.
The USA had more people than Vietnam.
China had more people then Vietnam.
The Arab states in 1948 had more people than Israel.
The Arab states in 1967 had more people than Israel.
The Arab states in 1973 had more people than Israel.
I think your metric for when the attacker is guaranteed to win a war where it invades another country is... not well calibrated to historical evidence.
Here Russia can just sit back and obliterate the Ukraine's cities. The point about people is that Ukraine isn't going to be able to push Russia back, which for the most part they haven't.
So I don't know how you can 'win' anything.
“Guerilla warfare” is just what happens in an modern invasion/occupation/regional separatist warfare when the local/peripheral side is sufficiently weak in conventional military terms relative to the invader/occupier/central authority.
That the Ukrainian side of the Russo-Ukrainian War is not forced into guerilla war is not a positive sign for the Russian side.
Russia has more people but the collective west backing Ukraine have more money and tech.
I'm not sure how it plays out. The Russians probably have the upper hand at the moment as the Ukrainians are running out of ammo due to the speaker and Trump supporters blocking aid.
Ukraine may make things expensive enough for Russia that they choose to back off. Attacking their oil refineries is going quite well at the moment.
I don't see a chance for them to win here realistically unless somehow Russia goes bankrupt or someone takes out Putin.
Its been less than two weeks since the last aid package.
> By the time the election season is over and we have another chance at funding Ukraine
I wouldn't discount the chance of a discharge petition succeeding. Heck, I wouldn't even entirely discount the chance of the spate of resignations continuing and Republicans losing their House majority before the election, though that's less likely.
You've seen the Patriot missiles that the Ukrainians have used to such good effect. Those were made thirty years ago. They were expensive to make, then. Sending them is a great thing to do, no question about it. But if you want to talk about billions of crrent expenses, then I it's wrong to talk about money spent in the nineties. You should instead think about their replacement cost. You need to replace them now. But how long was their shelf life — would you need to replace them soon anyway?
your UPS bill must be huge.
The US has a ton of mil equipment, built for the European theater, that is sitting in storage. Significant amounts (over half) goes back into replacement with new & upgraded kit for the US Mil
The latest aid package (insifar as appropriation was required, it is from remaining authority on other appropriations) was a $300 million value package announced 11 days ago: https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/us-prepar...
Ukraine seems more a pawn here than a prime driver.
His latest tweet connecting the terrorist attack to Ukraine, with no evidence. Is just repeating the Kremlin talking points. For someone who should analytical, it is just strange.
The All -In pod, often tease him about being a robot. I genuinely believe he is on the spectrum.
I have never heard or read his words showing empathy, even for the terror attacks in Israel and he is Jewish.
It's interesting how often this happens. People start from a reasonable premise and then slowly but surely move to an extreme version.
I sometimes think the only way to avoid this kind of derangement is to maintain an attitude of ironic detachment towards politics/current events. Almost everyone I know who deviates from that -- including smart, good people -- is a little bit crazy.
He is supposedly big fan of Kissinger and Kissinger worked for Nixon who was famously a huge antisemite and also cemented the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by intentionally torpedoing the deal that was on the table. All while being holocaust refugee.
Interesting enough wasn't it President Obama who started reducing the US involvement and taking more of a home first policy vs. the previous Republicans that viewed the US as the World's Policeman? IMO leaving both the US and the world in a much worse situation. The attacks against Obama also paved the roads to some of the techniques we see used today across the board. I don't know if this is just my impression but it seemed that was an inflection point, along with many other factors, in creating what are essentially fake realities for different people.
Meanwhile those people believe their own hype and start to share their “insights” in areas far outside any expertise they may have.
Many have very little formal education and haven’t read the books or considered the ideas an average undergraduate has. Due to their success and power almost none are used to having their ideas challenged.
This is exacerbated by the fact they tend to come from backgrounds which made their success much more likely (wealth, support, developed nations, a familial history of education etc) which means they see certain political opinions as “the truth” or “reality” because they aren’t aware of how they affect the world for people outside their bubble.
Sachs is the poster boy, along with Musk, of this. Both born in apartheid South Africa. Both determined to suggest that has no bearing on their worldview.
I've pondered this. I have a theory that the naivety of their position comes from coming from a country a long way from Russia. In Europe a lot of people, maybe most have some relative killed as the result of a Russian invasion or that of their allies.