I saw that passage, which addresses that durability doesn't degrade through recycling cycles. But what I was curious about was whether this epoxy is more susceptible to weakening when exposed to heat in working environments, perhaps at lower threshold temperatures than common epoxy. Similarly, I wondered whether there were any chemicals which are commonly encountered in working environments which could serve as dissolving agents and damage this epoxy.
Maybe Trump is just doing what's good for America and he's strategy is exactly being unpredictable and chaotic. This is stressful for others and they make political concessions to please him in exchange for a period of stability.
EU for example bulged for exactly this reason and accepted 15% one-way tariff for access to US market. Before the deal the uncertainty about the level of coming tariffs was deemed worse for European companies trading to US than the negotiated tariff itself.
European political leaders including the head of NATO have also practically turned to giving rimjobs to Trump's ass wishing he would not throw tantrums at them in important meetings: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c17wejpw79qo
Ultimately this all just strengthens US hegemony and makes other countries weaker, which is the explicitly stated goal he keeps repeating..
Perhaps, although I can't see the point in damaging the American economy or currency. More likely, he's only talking to his proctologist and posting what they decide.
Throwing away 80+ years of mostly-Republican soft power and foreign policy seems foolish. Making it difficult to ship or sell to the US only makes sense if they want to detach from the world's economic system. They're welcome to try to be Tibet, but folks might find it difficult to get what they want. And losing the reserve-currency status for the USD will hurt. So will being unable to (easily) sell debt.
But is that really happening? If that was actually true, Trump would obviously have no leg to stand on. But what we have seen instead is exactly the opposite - countries are scrambling to strike "trade deals" with Trump no matter how terrible terms they get (like the one-way 15% tariff EU "achieved".)
There is really no downside at all for Trump. If it actually starts hurting US economy at any point, he can easily just signal reversing the policy and everyone will let out a big sigh of relief and markets rebound. If it causes some long-term harm for US, he will be long gone by then. But if he is succesful in establishing a new US-first world order he will be forever remembered as one of the greatest American presidents in history.
Yes, it is happening, in both business and political spheres. You're maybe making the mistake of looking only at the very short term while forgetting how entrenched these systems are. There can't be overnight changes, right now the world has is forced to "play along."
I'm not sure where to start with giving you sources for actions being taken because it seems that you want things to have already changed before you believe it. You've surely read any the strengthening of intra-EU defence arrangements? Things like that mean that in the future the US won't be able to bully for leverage like they are today. It's short term versus long term thinking.
Also not sure what "actually starts hurting" the economy means. Is the hurt that's been caused so far not actual hurt? No true Scotsman economics.
Surely the S&P 500 index regularly closing at all-time-high levels while this "hurting" was unfolding is a valid counterpoint?
Meanwhile, all European stock indices continue to underperform their American counterparts. The return on STOXX Europe 600 index over the past 10 years has been about 58%. The S&P 500 in this same period returned 237%, and more importantly has continued to outperform STOXX Europe 600 throuhgout 2025. Surely investors would be abandoning the US stock market like rats on a sinking ship if Trump was wrecking the US economy?
> Things like that mean that in the future the US won't be able to bully for leverage like they are today.
I would fully applaud this, if it actually does happen. But so far European defence co-operation has been and continues to be weak and incoherent. It is most blatantly apparent in how Hungary and now Slovakia have been able to derail EU-level co-operation in supporting Ukraine.
However I must admit the recent €600 Billion defence package is one rare step to seemingly right direction.
> Surely the S&P 500 index regularly closing at all-time-high levels while this "hurting" was unfolding is a valid counterpoint?
If you presuppose that the markets are both rational and moral then maybe. But when the president of the US is using his personal social media website to tell people when to buy and sell before he rolls the dice it becomes difficult to take this point seriously.
> But so far European defence co-operation has been and continues to be weak and incoherent.
That's exactly the point, there are now more meetings than ever about resolving these issues because the old hegemony can no longer be relied on, Denmark is having to ask repeatedly for clarifications on the constant threats to invade Greenland... Again, you're expecting things to change overnight when policy changes at this level take years to implement.
> It is most blatantly apparent in how Hungary and now Slovakia have been able to derail EU-level co-operation in supporting Ukraine.
Is it? That doesn't seem to have any bearing at all on the topic at hand. Just because Hungary has gone rogue at the behest of mother Russia doesn't in any way suggest the rest of the EU aren't turning away from the US.
> However I must admit the recent €600 Billion defence package is one rare step to seemingly right direction.
Yes, you could even say it's evidence of the move towards more cohesion in the future following events which only took place several months ago...
The disentangling will be gradual & organic. It'll be the fear that the U.S. can shut down weapons they have sold that are used without the U.S.'s explicit permission. It'll be the fact that Trump raises tariffs over tech regulation & internal criminal cases. It'll be because few will consider the U.S. a reliable partner for trade & military support. It'll be because the U.S.'s own tariffs will raise the prices of American products & services to uncompetitive levels and what American brands don't suffer from such inflation will still suffer from association with the U.S. itself.
Trump does have additional leverage in the fact that the dollar is the global reserve currency, but he's actively testing how much friction he can introduce into the global trade system before that changes.
On that note, it's interesting that every country Trump has targeted for higher tariffs (China, Brazil, India) is a member of BRICS.
What do you make of the bold faced lie that the external country is paying the tariffs that Trump is putting in place? Part of the same desire for maximum chaos? When does chaos stop?
It's not a bold faced lie, it's a relative truth. An importer needs to pay the tariff upfront, before pushing the increased price to the final consumer. This has an immediate effect on the exporter.
The amount of mental gymnastics y’all seem to constantly have to do to try and find some way to make sense of the inherently nonsensical looks exhausting.
It seems pretty stressful for Americans as well. I guess we too are being asked to make concessions for a period of stability... that doesn't sound great. Maybe the trains will run on time if we make enough concessions.
You make the preposterous claim that "what's good for America" is increasing its hegemony at the cost of other nations.
What's good for America is protecting her people's liberties and increasing their satisfaction in life. The first is clearly going downhill; Trump's plummeting popularity amongst his followers suggests the second is, as well.
They're in his self-interest because he can, and did, turn around and convince people to bribe him for exemptions and reductions. I recognize this sounds crazy when I say it, but you can literally look up the video - Tim Cook gave him a big block of gold on public TV to get iPhones exempted from tariffs on India.
Why are you fixated on the relative amounts, as if that's relevent? A bribe is a bribe is a bribe.
It's a gesture that says "I understand I need to give you this because you are in charge, and I need to go through you to get anything done". That's not how America works, and the fact anyone is giving any amount to get favors through Trump rather than maintaining a level playing field is the problem.
The first instance of this came in the form of tech companies renaming the "Gulf of Mexico" to the "Gulf of America." It was a small thing, but it was a gesture that showed they knew what they had to do to play ball in Trump's economy was to live in his constructed reality where it's the Gulf of America.
Then came the legal bribes where companies paid millions to settle the lawsuits he filed against them. Then came the tech bribes where they are literally giving him bars of gold for favored status.
Next will be him directing internal company culture and policy. Watch out to see which companies stop celebrating pride, it will likely be those who paid him bribes first. Then he will ask them to stop selling to certain "undesirable" customers, and they will oblige.
Because an explicit and stated method of this administration is to flood their opponents with things to fight, in the interest of pushing through big things that are important to them while their opponents are busy fighting everything and overwhelmed with the minutiae.
An effective response to that is calibrating ones outrage and asking "Out of all the things I could be fighting, what is the most impactful and important?"
Hence, I think it's a waste of time causing others to think about a token symbolic bribe.
Focus on the $250M+ bribes that are also happening.
The Apple bribe isn't less problematic because the dollar amount is lower though. The magnitude of the damage is not measured in dollars, it's measured by the reach of corruption.
Apple's bribe is the crack in the door that lets fascism in to American businesses. Apple, for its part, carries a certain amount of weight in the marketplace. What they do sets a tone, and the tone they've set is they are not above giving obvious bribes to a felonious racist wannabe dictator. If Apple is willing to play ball, most other corporations will as well.
Imagine if things were the other way around and they told POTUS to shove it. Maybe other corporations would do so as well.
What’s impactful to fight isn’t necessarily the same as what’s the highest dollar amount of bribe. I can’t demand that the Qatari government go to prison for giving Trump a plane, but I can (and do) demand that domestic businesspeople who give Trump gold bars should be arrested the day a Democratic president takes office. Tim Cook needs to spend some time in prison, and more importantly other executives need to know they’ll join him if they try to bribe or otherwise assist Trump.
Consider that a mere act of public theatre in which a token is exchanged.
Getting a grip on the magnitude of the Trump family profiteering through all the obfuscation and destruction of record keeping practices is an ongoing challenge in reporting.
At the end of Trump’s first term, CREW calculated that Trump made more than $1.6 billion in outside revenue and income during his four years as president. Recently, however, The New Yorker staff writer David D. Kirkpatrick tallied up a new number, encompassing ventures from both Trump’s first and second terms: $3.4 billion.
Great links! I expect post-presidency investigations will turn up a lot more favorable trades from his web of associates.
Even if Trump doesn't need to put his hand in the cookie jar so obviously, many around him aren't as disciplined or experienced in obsfuscating policy-based trading.
$2.5M is not a blip, it's a bribe by any measure. We need to call things what they are. Trump has done worse for less.
Anyway, the $2.5M isn't the point, it's bending someone like Tim Cook to your will so that they would just give it to you and thank you while bending over. To some degree, he's now directing Apple Inc, since he can get Tim Cook to act according to his will.
No. They probably lose that much between rows in their spreadsheets.
So, if it's not material to Apple's finances, what does giving it to Trump mean? Symbolic gestures are symbolic, but you haven't bent someone to your will until you've made them give you something that hurts.
Tim Cook gave $2.5M, control of his company, and his dignity. He stood there and handed a gold award to a convicted felon, rapist, insurrectionist, and likely pedophile. That's now Cook's legacy. It was grotesque, and an embarrassment of epic proportions. If that didn't hurt him, he must have lost his soul long ago.
They gave him what he most desires: respect. Every news watcher saw one of the most powerful CEOs, a genuinely accomplished person, treating him as the more powerful party. His whole career was spent playing at being a successful business man but being known as a lightweight – his dad gave him a billion dollars give or take and he managed not to quite lose it all several times until finding some breathing room in the 2000s when Russian oligarchs started using NYC real estate for money laundering and then the video editors at The Apprentice made him a star cosplaying as a brilliant businessman. He was never in Tim Cook’s league before, or even within a couple levels, but now he’s able to demand favors from almost anyone. For someone with the raging insecurity complex he’s demonstrated for so many years, that recognition of sheer power is the best high of all.
I had thought that tariff revenue goes directly to the executive branch for the president to spend without congressional oversight, but actually this is not correct.
In reality, all federal revenue - whether from income taxes, tariffs, or any other source - flows into the U.S. Treasury and becomes part of the general fund. Tariff money doesn't create a separate pool of funds that the president can spend at will. Just like with tax revenue, any spending of tariff proceeds requires congressional appropriation through the normal budget process. The executive branch cannot spend money that Congress hasn't specifically authorized, regardless of the revenue source.
The goal of tariffs is to strengthen your own domestic manufacturing economy. Under high tariff regime, domestic manufacturing gets a pricing advantage over imported goods. The best scenario is if you can get other countries to not place reciprocal tariffs on your goods - meaning foreign companies are disadvantaged in your home market but your companies have uninhibited access to the consumers abroad.
Yes, he gets full power to do this without Congress meddling as long as there is an emergency. Or he lies, in an inconsistent and unconvincing manner, about there being an emergency and everyone just accepts it.
Well too be fair he has a history now of posting when to buy and sell on his social media website before he makes the tariff announcements so it certainly seems that way.
Bigotry. They are completely open that LGBT and other minority rights offend them, and they want to punish those who support such rights. These people are far more concentrated in urban centers.
Spite politics is the ultimate form of post industrial vanity. People are so well off and have so little to worry about that their biggest ask from their leaders is to bully those who they don't like.
Though I don't agree with it, I think many conservatives feel the same way about e.g. trans rights - that it's a form of post industrial vanity.
Excellent observation. Either side can (and does) easily accuse their opponents of this.
Some don't like anti-immigrant, anti-gay, anti-climate rethoric. Others don't like trans-rights, anti-hate-speech, anti-christianity rethoric. For either side, those are not real problems which their opponents are concerned about.
That's an underappreciated aspect of current public discourse.
Whoa, had no idea this existed. Wild stuff. Might be "somewhat" confusing to read assembler code like that without knowing about this particular technique..
Both register windows and the delay slot exist on SPARC processors, which you’re much more likely to run into in a data center (running open-source software).
Itanium was the really odd one — it not only used register windows but could offload some of the prior windows onto the heap. Most people would probably never notice… unless you’re trying to get a conservative scanning GC working and are stumped why values in some registers seem to not be traced…
'Anyway this chip architect
guy is standing up in front of this group promising the moon and stars. And I finally put my
hand up and said I just could not see how you're proposing to get to those kind of
performance levels. And he said well we've got a simulation, and I thought Ah, ok. That shut
me up for a little bit, but then something occurred to me and I interrupted him again. I said,
wait I am sorry to derail this meeting. But how would you use a simulator if you don't have a
compiler? He said, well that's true we don't have a compiler yet, so I hand assembled my
simulations. I asked "How did you do thousands of line of code that way?" He said “No, I did
30 lines of code”. Flabbergasted, I said, "You're predicting the entire future of this
architecture on 30 lines of hand generated code?" [chuckle], I said it just like that, I did not
mean to be insulting but I was just thunderstruck. Andy Grove piped up and said "we are not
here right now to reconsider the future of this effort, so let’s move on".'
Sun had some funny stories around this too. When they came up with their multi-core system, and they used code from 10-15 years earlier for traces. And then said 'well, nobody actually uses floating code' so we don't need it. Of course over those 10 years Floating point became much more common and stand. Leading to a chip that had one FPU for 8 cores, basically meaning, even minimal floating point would destroy concurrency. Arguably Sun had already lose the chip war and this was just making them fall behind further. They did market it in quite well.
And a lesser known thing that I couldn't find much information on is that Sun also worked on VLIW chip during the 90s. Apparently Bill Joy was convinced that VLIW was the future so they did a VLIW chip, and the project was lead by David Ditzel. As far as I am aware this was never released. If any Sun veterans have any idea about this, I would love to know.
When there is such complaint about closed firmware in the Raspberry Pi, and the risk of the Intel ME and other closed CPU features, I wonder why these open designs are ignored. Yes, the performance and power consumption would be poor by modern standards.
These designed are not ignored. They were used for a few things here and there. But the usefulness of 'over the wall' open code without backing is always a bit limited and for processors that cost 100k to tap out, even more so.
By now there are much better more modern design out-there and for RISC-V.
VLIW is maybe cool, but people will be relieving themselves on EPIC's grave for the pain that it inflicted on them.
Like if you tried to debug a software crash on Itanium. The customer provided core dump was useless as you could not see what was going on. Intel added a debug mode to their compilers which disabled all that EPIC so hopefully you could reproduce the crash there, or on other CPU architectures. Otherwise you were basically screwed.
That HP-Intel arrangement was weird. One time, an Intel-badged employee came out to change a tape drive on a (Compaq->HP->HPE) Compaq SSL2020 tape robot. Okay, I guess they shared employees. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I was going to make a reference to Patterson & Hennessy, but it's too bad that the 5th and later editions are hidden behind a DRM paywall. You don't "own" books anymore.
Interestingly, your phone number is actually not stored on the SIM card. It instead holds a globally unique ICCID number which your operator links to your account (phone number) on their systems.
This actually makes it possible to transfer your phone number between SIM cards or even operators, and means your cell phone is blissfully unaware of its own phone number.
Here's a much better article from the Finnish public broadcaster giving more context: https://yle.fi/a/74-20161606
My comments:
The important thing to note that at this point it's just a political posturing and an announcement of intent. They haven't shown any concrete technical plan how this would actually be executed.
> "Of course, we are very pragmatic and realistic, we cannot do this in five years. Planning will continue until the end of the decade, and maybe in 2032 we can start construction."
Once they have the cost estimates and effects on existing rail traffic studied, I bet construction will never start.
"Unification to standard gauge on May 31 – June 1, 1886 [United States]
In 1886, the southern railroads agreed to coordinate changing gauge on all their tracks. After considerable debate and planning, most of the southern rail network was converted from 5 ft (1,524 mm) gauge to 4 ft 9 in (1,448 mm) gauge, then the standard of the Pennsylvania Railroad, over two days beginning on Monday, May 31, 1886. Over a period of 36 hours, tens of thousands of workers pulled the spikes from the west rail of all the broad gauge lines in the South, moved them 3 in (76 mm) east and spiked them back in place.[6] The new gauge was close enough that standard gauge equipment could run on it without problem. By June 1886, all major railroads in North America, an estimated 11,500 miles (18,500 km), were using approximately the same gauge. To facilitate the change, the inside spikes had been hammered into place at the new gauge in advance of the change. Rolling stock was altered to fit the new gauge at shops and rendezvous points throughout the South. The final conversion to true standard gauge took place gradually as part of routine track maintenance.[6] Now, the only broad-gauge rail tracks in the United States are on some city transit systems."
An impressive feat, that is unlikely unachievable on a modern train network.
The tolerances are just a bit tighter, the risks and liabilities are higher, and the workforce just isn't "there" - this is from a time when rail was a huge money earner and could afford to employ a huge number of people. Today? Not so much, pretty much anywhere in the World.
There are ready-made machines that pull up track, and replace sleepers... it shouldn't be a major project to allow it to change the gauge of the rail as it resets it.
Once Spain and Portugal move from Iberian gauge that market will increase a lot. Which is kinda inevitable with the added environmental pressure on flights.
There are no ready-made gauge changing machines, though. Not exactly a big market for those.
So what? I'd there isn't a machine, you build one.
Large industries like mining and shipping and the military don't just stop because they can't buy a needed item off the shelf because there isn't a market for it. They build stuff all the time.
I worked in a factory for a few years, and can tell you that if industries followed your "can't do" attitude, commerce would stop.
Let’s say you have a problem and the only way to solve it is with a thingamabob. The thingamabob doesn’t exist, so you need to make the first one. Unknown to everyone, the military, the O&G/mining industry, and the rail industries all try to build one at the same time. Do you think they all cost the same? What about the time to design and build them?
The oil and gas people will call up some machinists and engineers the same day. Time is money and they need the problem solved. It doesn’t need to look pretty. I don’t think anyone would disagree that they would be the first with a thingamabob. First one might break, they’d get Bob on a Cessna from the nearest machine shop with a replacement.
The military would have some meetings, which would spawn more meetings, and eventually put out some requests for proposals. They’d review the proposals and ten years later they’d have their thingamabob. No doubt it would be the most expensive.
The rail industry… the modern, passenger rail industry in wealthy western countries? There might be proposals, or designs or prototypes with large amounts of money spent, but I think it is reasonable to say the thingamabob would never actually be built and used. Look at CAHSR or Stuttgart 21 or Turin-Lyon.
Switzerland has some for narrow (meter) gauge to standard gauge. I think it's to make the Glacier Express run without changing train. Had a bit of teething problems at the start but seems to be working well now.
That's not a "change gauge for a 100-wagon freight train" scale operation, and it's not "off the shelf" tech, but we're fairly close I think?
>There are no ready-made gauge changing machines, though. Not exactly a big market for those.
I'm not a train guy, but I'm pretty sure the machine that lifts the track up and allows them to swap out the ties is like 95% of what would be needed for a gauge changing machine.
> this is from a time when rail was a huge money earner and could afford to employ a huge number of people.
Well, back then the US had freshly banned slavery, so there was an ample workforce that could be hired for dirt cheap.
The Soviets and the Wehrmacht pulled off similar feats in WW2, but back then the rails and sleepers didn't have to be built to last many decades, so in addition to loads upon loads of forced labor from concentration camps and gulags, the work effort was massively reduced because easier technology could be used.
The BART discussion was where I first learned about the North American 2-day gauge change. A truly inspiring feat for so many engineers to come together across such a large amount of land area to Make It Happen.
Makes it even crazier that Bart would choose a non-standard gauge 75 years later. And now they're stuck paying for custom trains with less flexibility and longer lead times.
BART was always going to need custom trains for other reasons beyond track gauge. Electric third rail at those speeds isn't standard. 125kV pantagraph would mean big expensive tunnels and stations due to clearance requirements.
I also don't know where you're getting 125kV from. Many trains throughout the world use 25kV, especially high-speed ones (actually high speed, like 200+km/h), but BART uses 1000V, which is closer to a typical subway system.
Probably the biggest challenge is that there is way more rail traffic today and it's more tightly coupled in logistics chains and people's day to day lives. Disruptions are more expensive and harder to tolerate. And that's on top of the technical challenges, tolerances leave less room for error today.
It might be easier to change today than it was in 1886. Back then, trains were really the only means of travel between cities. Today, there are less passenger trains than back then, though more freight (even with trucks and planes). But freight diversions/delays could be scheduled well in advance and have alternative means. Not to mention, since then we've developed variable gauge train tech. A subset of trains could run during the cutover.
It's likely more costly today, but less disruptive.
Passenger travel is easy mode. The economic consequences of disrupted freight dwarf anything you could imagine from disrupted passenger travel of equal duration. That's why the US has always strived to do a really, really good job with their freight rail system, and US freight is still to this day generally considered the best freight rail system in the world, even as passenger rail lags well behind.
Remember that freight is more than just moving pallets of finished goods to Amazon warehouses. It doesn't matter if you've given the cows a month's advance notice, if they don't have feed they're still going to starve; and no matter how many KPIs you dangle at the silos, they're only going to hold x amount of reserve grain.
Any competent shipper facing a train issue will just put the load on semis instead for 3-10x the price. Freight rail mainly exists as an low cost bulk carrier of convenience these days. Ships outcompete rail for bulk goods along inland waterways, and semis outcompete rail for network volume, ease of delivery, and adaptability to constraints.
> Any competent shipper facing a train issue will just put the load on semis instead for 3-10x the price.
Did you not see how the markets recently reacted to certain components merely doubling in cost due to tariffs? In what world do you live in where the agricultural margins are high enough that the cattle ranchers can just casually absorb a threefold cost increase? Clearly they're eating the loss, because if they passed those costs onwards in the chain there'd certainly be huge economic consequences, as I said, and you wouldn't have felt the need to try and correct my premise. Anyway, I'd like to visit this world of yours, though only if you'd be buying the meals.
> Freight rail mainly exists as an low cost bulk carrier of convenience these days.
This is what happens when one tries to create a narrative from DoT statistics.
The reason why rail freight tonnage is less than truck tonnage is long-haul vs short-haul. You deliver lumber from the timber yard to the finishing facility once. That's rail. You don't load up trucks with semi-finished logs on an industrial scale, you don't load them with coal, you don't load them with industrial quantities of gravel or sand or steel either.
Once you have the logs processed into boards, then you use trucks to carry those boards to various short-haul destinations, where some of the boards are further processed into fence pickets and bird houses and old-timey sign posts that Roadrunner can inadvertently spin around so Wile E ends up taking a completely wrong turn. All of that stuff then goes to storefronts and warehouses (also short-haul) and as a result, the short-haul tonnage can count twice, three times, or even more, depending on just how many steps are being taken between "tree" and "birdhouse".
> Ships outcompete rail for bulk goods along inland waterways
Which is great along inland waterways, but if you're not located along them, you're probably using rail to get the bulk goods to the shipyard.
Feel free to look up the ton-mile by distance numbers. Rail exceeds trucks by fairly narrow margins only for hauls between 1,000-2,000 miles. Below that distance, trucks dominate. Above that distance, trucks also dominate. Even in that band, it's like a narrow difference of like 35% vs 40%.
Note that the inverse situation is common at west coast ports, with short haul rail lines running to intermodal facilities so things can be loaded onto trucks for long haul. The cost of transloading to domestic containers often dominates keeping it on rails.
> The reason why rail freight tonnage is less than truck tonnage is long-haul vs short-haul. You deliver lumber from the timber yard to the finishing facility once. That's rail. You don't load up trucks with semi-finished logs on an industrial scale, you don't load them with coal, you don't load them with industrial quantities of gravel or sand or steel either.
Around here the timber arrives at the railyard by truck and aggregates are usually mined and transported locally, which is truck heavy. Grain is also majority truck these days from the BTS stats I can see, but basic materials isn't my industry.
Regardless, ton-miles aren't doubled counted. It's one ton, transported one mile. If rail took freight that extra distance, it'd get the same share (subject to all the usual caveats of industry numbers).
Assuming an unlimited supply of semis and drivers to fit the demand. With limited supply big companies will be able to a compete for the available trucks at really high prices but small-mid businesses will be left out.
Small-mid businesses generally are not shipping on rail to begin with, unless they've been bundled as part of a larger shipment by an intermodal carrier. If you've ever tried to talk to a rail carrier, they really don't want to deal with companies under a certain size.
>Assuming an unlimited supply of semis and drivers to fit the demand.
If the US really wanted to get it done, they could involve the army and various state national guards. They have tons of trained semi and heavy truck drivers, way more than most people would assume. Most states also have tons of trained drivers for their massive snow plows and highway repair trucks and stuff. The only thing stopping these massive projects is money and lack of imagination.
I see several trains go by per day on my pretty sleepy tracks. You have no clue the amount of semis that would need to be built to accommodate your proposal, they just do not wait in the wings. Do you think all the bulk shipments are being done for fun and someone isn't waiting for 5000 gallons of HCL and 2000 tons of coal?
I'm well aware that it's a couple hundred trucks to replace a single train. I'm not sure you understand that this is what already happens. Rail carries around a quarter of freight ton-miles in the US. Trucks carry much more than that. All of the stuff that isn't bulk, time insensitive freight, or anything that surges in excess of the carefully scheduled rail capacity already has to spill over onto trucks. That includes things like disaster recovery shipments, unusual seasonal demand, and so on. There's also a population of truckers that work these temporary jobs, as well as a certain level of excess vehicle capacity in the fleet carriers to service it, plus whatever truckers can be pulled from other work to meet the demand.
Anyone looking at massive losses will pay the sticker shock to put it on trucks. Anyone who can afford to shut down instead will wait. That's the system working as intended.
Thanks for the response. I'm curious what percent of stuff that would normally end up on train ends up as spillover onto trucks. Any idea? I think stuff is quite finetuned already and there may only be an extra few percent of capacity in trucks. I agree, in a lot of cases it might work to just bite the bullet and wait or try a different apparatus. However the stuff on the trains typically is not slackable. That is, you aren't transporting computers and sofas via rail.
I was told a while ago "trains are great if you want to move a trainload of stuff, trucks are great if you want to move a few truckloads of stuff". I guess trains also need loading/unloading facilities and stations close to your origin and destination, and perhaps a hump yard somewhere.
Cargo ships beat everything hands down if there's a port close to your origin and destination, and lots of water in between.
> "Today, there are less passenger trains than back then"
I don't think this is true in Europe. Certainly in the UK, passenger rail volume since the 2010s has set records higher than in any previous years, exceeding numbers that were last seen before WW2. Today there are fewer miles of track than there were in that era, but modern signalling technology allows more trains to operate safely on the same tracks, and modern trains run much faster on average.
As for freight, the US actually moves a significantly greater portion of its freight by rail than Europe does. Rail has around 40% modal share for freight in the US vs only 17% in Europe. One reason for this is that in Europe many lines are congested with passenger traffic, leaving few slots for freight trains to operate - except late at night.
> As for freight, the US actually moves a significantly greater portion of its freight by rail than Europe does. Rail has around 40% modal share for freight in the US vs only 17% in Europe. One reason for this is that in Europe many lines are congested with passenger traffic, leaving few slots for freight trains to operate - except late at night.
It's also that rail tends to be more competitive for long haul traffic, and the US operators have big trans-continental freight networks well suited to that. In Europe there's a sharp drop off in modal share as freight crosses borders. Each national railway operator is in practice fiercely protective of its own turf, and there are a lot of hurdles to overcome. So in practice cross-border freight is largely done with trucks instead.
Despite the EU commission wanting to get some competition going on the rails and better interoperability requirements etc etc. for at least the past 30 years, the operators are still in the "discussion about preparing to setup a committee to discuss interoperability" phase.
> As for freight, the US actually moves a significantly greater portion of its freight by rail than Europe does. Rail has around 40% modal share for freight in the US vs only 17% in Europe.
Europe also has far more freight-friendly waterways. US rail is designed for dirt-cheap bulk transport for things like coal and grain. In most of Europe that's done by barge - but US geography doesn't really allow for that.
Since it's only 90 mm, I wonder if one could add some sort of a 45 mm lateral adapter between the rails and the ties on both sides. At least for low speed track parts...
Imagine one short "train" whose tail is able to pull up one rail of the track behind it. Then another train whose front is an automated thingamajig to take the loose rail and nail it down a specific distance from the fixed rail. How much play there is in the loose rail depends on how far apart these two train are. Notice that the nailer runs on the narrow rails while the nail-puller runs on the wide ones.
So odd - was listening to an account of this in an Audiobook just yesterday - "Why Nothing Works" by Marc Dunkelman. Was essentially making the point that this sort of thing would be several magnitudes of difficulty harder to pull off today, and certainly wouldn't happen within that timeframe.
'86, in the south? Let's not be racist and assume the labor was Chinese - surely it was 95% recently freed black slaves paid almost nothing + 'free' prison labor. (/s, a little).
This was 20 years after the Civil War. It consisted mostly of skilled and semi-skilled workers laborers that were White, African American and other immigrant labor. Chinese laborers were mostly concentrated in the West not the South. The reconstruction of the southern rail network involved many people who were part of the Southern economy and employment structure at that time
1886 is after The Compromise of 1877 which ended Reconstruction and lead to the rise of largely white supremacist Redeemer governments.
Though versions of the Convict Lease System had started earlier, even before the Civil War, it was in full force by 1886 and even accounted for a significant portion of many states’ annual revenue.
The supply of this labor was dramatically influenced by new laws that were selectively enforced, such as vagrancy laws that might apply to anyone traveling without immediate proof that they had an employer, “pig laws” that made petty thefts often convicted with poor standards of proof subject to extended prison sentences, and in some cases offenses like “mischief” and “insulting gestures”. There were even people who were impressed into this system as a result of violating the terms of a labor contract, which possibly becomes even more difficult to distinguish from slavery.
If you were caught up in this system, you were virtually powerless. Federal troops were long gone, there were instances of lawfully elected governments that had been overthrown by insurrection, and if you exposed the absurdity of this system and threatened it, you could easily be publicly lynched with no chance of repercussions for your murderers.
Ah yes, the 'absurdity' of enforcing laws and contracts; how dare a post-war society try to reestablish order without the constant supervision of federal troops. And of course, 'insulting gestures' clearly the backbone of any sinister system of oppression. It's amazing anything functioned at all without a daily constitutional check-in from the moral high ground
"'86, in the south? Let's not be racist and assume the labor was Chinese - surely it was 95% recently freed black slaves paid almost nothing + 'free' prison labor. (/s, a little)."
I made a more nuanced and historically grounded point, whereas your post was a sarcastic oversimplification. So no — you didn't say what I said. I emphasized the diversity and complexity of postbellum labor in the South; you gave a glib summary that oversimplifies it as mostly “recently freed black slaves paid almost nothing + ‘free’ prison labor.”
Your point is flat out misrepresenting the situation. Especially by listing White workers first. At that time, the only white workers in the south who would have been moving rail and driving spikes would have been on a prison work detail or in a similar severely legally compromised situation. Even getting white workers to couple cars didn’t happen until much later.
Again, you didn’t say what I said. I described a complex labor force with various roles and racial backgrounds. You gave a sarcastic oversimplification, and now you’re shifting to a narrower historical claim that contradicts your own original tone.
“Even getting white workers to couple cars didn’t happen until much later”
That’s an overstatement. While Black workers were indeed disproportionately given dangerous roles like coupling cars in the South, it wasn’t unheard of for white laborers - especially poor or immigrant - to do that work too
The labor structure wasn’t as racially absolute as you’re implying
The costs were already studied in 2023 and were deemed cost ineffective[0]. The report contained three main strategies (VE1, VE2, VE3) with A & B plans for the first two. Costs would be in the range of 10-15+ billion with 15-20+ years allocated for construction time[1, p. 47].
I agree that a new line at least from Tornio to Oulu would make sense.
There's also a lot of heavy industry in the Gulf of Bothnia, like Raahe and Kokkola.
There is one reason for optimism here: Finnish rail network is in quite poor shape and needs major work done anyways. So switching gauge allows funneling more EU funding into these projects that would need to be done either way. I imagine that e.g. the infamous Suomi-rata and ELSA projects will be revived as gauge switch.
I'm sure EU taxpayers will be presented with a solid business case demonstrating value for money before our €billions are spent on a project such as this.
Oh, wait, this is the EU.
Most likely a deal would be thrashed out between key players via Whatsapp but that "due to their ephemeral nature"[0] we aren't entitled to read any of their messages.
>Once they have the cost estimates and effects on existing rail traffic studied, I bet construction will never start.
It is not that hard. Countries like Spain have already two different gauges and have the necessary technology in the trains to change between different systems.
One of the main goals of this is to not have the russian gauge available in case russians attack, so that logistics deeper into Finland cant happen easily with the same train, so backwards compatability is not desired.
It's not like this results in a categorical difference in difficulty. Gauge switching infrastructure is common at borders. Yeah stopping and switching is slower than driving right through but it's not the end of the world in the long tail of military logistics.
Russian military logistics _heavily_ depend on trains, everything that can go on a train, does so. Flight and vehicle stuff is mostly an afterthought.
Any hindrance we can put on the Finnish-Russian border to stop them just unloading 12 cars of fresh troops in the middle of the country is a good thing.
Another fun note about Russian logistics, they aren't palletized or mechanized. Thought being that cranes don't look good in parades. The train side seems smart or at least interesting, the pallets incredibly dumb.
Well yes but the US usually fights in faraway places to bring freedom (though the only thing they manage to 'liberate' is oil, see how Afghanistan and Iraq turned into hellholes as soon as they turned their backs)
Russia just likes to kill the shit out of their neighbours which is a lot easier logistically.
Why invest in forklifts, container infrastructure etc. if your military has a near-endless supply of uneducated conscripts you can order to shuffle around shells and other items?
(Of course a more thorough analysis would probably come to the conclusion that better logistics is worth it. There's still an opportunity cost for those conscripts who could do something else instead, like dying in zerg rushes on the Ukrainian front. And even though those conscripts are 'free' they still require chow and a place to sleep etc.)
Trent and a lot of Ukranian war commentators have a habit of saying $X is catastrophic for the Russians (this is the worst on YouTube). Then those catastrophic things don't come to pass.
Related, I have seen one guy, over and over say "Why isn't Ukraine hitting Russian electric train transformer stations". I don't have a good answer, most of Russia's rail network is electric, transformers blow up easily, there are many of them, and they would be very slow to replace. Ukraine clearly has deep strike capabilities, and Russia cant defend every transformer. I don't think it's a humanitarian issue, or at this point even an issue with the US telling Ukraine they can't hit those targets.
Yeah sure, but it doesn't take away from the fact that the Russians do not use pallets for logistics and therefore struggle with logistics as a result.
So I stand by my statement that his assessment is not wrong, even if it isn't as outcome changing as some may hope. It is however one of the many straws heaped upon the camel's back.
As for the transformer issue, I would imagine that these are somewhat related. Their train based logistics are inefficient, so Ukraine doesn't need to stop the trains running. If they did the russians may find a more efficient solution.
Crippling the Russian train system would be very much worth it. Russia would have to switch to limited diesel locomotives, and it would really hurt regular civilian logistics in those areas.
Transformers are not very hard to replace or make though. All they are is some copper wound around iron. It will just be some added frustration and annoyance for them but no gamechanger. If they start doing it a lot Russia will just build a bigger electrical workforce and more backstock. They have plenty of people and the authorianism to make them do whatever they want. It's just a pissing contest. Russia did lots of cyberattacks on the Ukrainian electrical network in the years before the invasion. Didn't do anything either but send a message.
I would compare it to the Natanz cyber attack which reportedly cost a fortune and caused lots of business losses around the world. It only set the Iranian uranium refinement back a few percent.
Then Obama comes and talks to them, strikes a deal. That solved the issue entirely and cost much less. Of course then Trump comes and messes it all up again but that's another story.
Russia is importing shells from North Korea. Transformers are more complex than you give them credit for, and Russia has a very limited ability to manufacture anything, it would make a difference.
Gauge switching requires trains outfitted with specialized axles (increasing the cost to invade), requires trains to stop (increasing the train's vulnerability to attack), and requires switching stations which themselves are juicy targets and can't be repaired nearly as trivially as an ordinary length of rail.
And if you're Russia wanting to invade Europe, it's better to do the Gauge switching right near your own border rather than on the far side of Finland. So while this may make it harder to invade Finland, it makes it easier to invade Europe as a whole.
The far side of Finland? That’s the Baltic Sea. Sure, there’s a little bit of Sweden, but it’s so far north that there isn’t much rail infrastructure there - certainly little enough that it could quickly be destroyed at the beginning of a war.
The objective they try to achieve is not to slow down Russia's invasion into Europe, but to stop them at the border by being able to move assets throughout Europe relatively quickly. If they gain a proper foothold and full access to "euro gauge" rails, it's a different fight.
Of course, if it does go that far, tanks and trains can move rolling stock, rip up the tracks, blow up bridges and other infrastructure behind them if they're forced to retreat.
This. I am struggling to see how this is anything other than posturing by politicians. It’s hard to imagine this is strategy devised by military leaders.
It's less about what the Russians can do and more about how fast European and NATO countries can move assets to a potential invasion front line; as it stands, they're slowed down at the borders needing to switch to the different gauges.
But building such trains, at scale, takes a load of resources. Resources which could otherwise be used to build tanks, guns, missiles, and similar high-priority products.
I would also imagine that large-scale retrofitting of traincars with variable gauge adaptations is something that would be hard for foreign intelligence services (including the Finnish one to miss) - and would then serve as a signal that Russia is indeed preparing for an invasion.
The difference between Finnish and Russian gauge is 4mm
IIRC the diff to European standard is closer to 10cm, still doable but a hurdle compared to just driving a trainload of troops to the middle of Helsinki it's a bit harder
First sentence from the article:
The Finnish government has announced the conversion of its rail network from Russian gauge (1,524 mm) to European standard (1,435 mm).
The really annoying thing is that it's too close for "simple" dual gauge rails (e.g. 1435 + 1000); 1435 + 1524 is possible and in fact exists (e.g. the one single SE-FI railway bridge that exists is dual guage: https://openrailwaymap.org/?style=gauge&lat=65.8273204537081...), but AFAIK it's expensive because the mounts interfere and need to be quite custom.
Even if you were to 4-rail every line, you'd potentially run into loading gauge issues (you would have to offset the current centre of the bogies, go too far one way and you collide with platforms, too far the other way and you collide with oncoming trains)
Bleh, but kinda confirms my point too. I do think there are some 3-rail setups in other border regions though? I should check… then again it doesn't matter that much if it's 3 or 4.
As for the loading gauge, yes, of course. On the plus side, this is Finland, most of the lines is in the middle of nowhere and single track even. Maybe the best option for them is to just build 1435 in parallel whereever possible, and just merge where not otherwise practical (bridges, tunnels, populated areas & stations). I don't even think it's that infeasible considering Finland's layout. I'd wager there are only a handful of specific locations that need expensive work.
> Train tracks are normally not precise to within 4mm anyway
Yes they are. Of course practical tolerances including allowances for wear and there are large enough that things can be made to work, but in terms of nominal construction tolerances for example, 4 mm can easily eat up all your construction tolerances or even exceed them.
I obviously don't have a in depth knowledge of Finnish rail, but have you ever looked at rail in the US? I can show you tracks with completely missing ties. Tracks that move vertically by a foot when the train goes over them. Tracks that visually snake all over the place. The difference is made by slowing down the train. Derailment at 3 mph rarely matters. The biggest risk is the conductor doesn't know it happened & continues to drag the car along the tracks
Where? Finland specifically, or elsewhere? Both my local tram system in Germany as well as DB as the national infrastructure operator in Germany have construction tolerances of only +/- 2 mm. Maintenance tolerances on the other hand can be quite a bit larger, at least in the plus direction (on the order of 15/20/25 mm).
> One of the main goals of this is to not have the russian gauge available in case russians attack
This doesn't seem like it can be a goal given
> maybe in 2032 we can start construction
I mean unless the plan is to assume Russia won't attack until e.g. 2040 when construction will be complete && Russia can't implement multi-gauge trains that Spain is already using now?
Even if Russia's conquest of Ukraine were to end tomorrow, they would take a few years to recover before mounting their next offensive. And Finland isn't first in line on their list of next invasion targets, that would be either Georgia, Moldova, or the Baltics.
And in any case, just as in computer security, a security posture does not need to be unassailable, it just needs to be expensive enough to deter the enemy. NATO countries (well, the ones that haven't already been compromised by Russia) will be happy to fund the gauge switch, as would the EU in general for the sake of greater economic integration. Meanwhile, it increases the costs on Russia and slows their advance. It's a win no matter what.
Given the disaster that is the Ukrainian invasion, this doesn't really hold true. As long as leadership is OK with a total logistical clusterfuck, you don't need to worry about "years to recover" for your next offensive. The next offensive starts today. You can figure out the details as you go.
>"Meanwhile, it increases the costs on Russia and slows their advance. It's a win no matter what."
Following logic it also increases your own costs and wastes money that could've been allocated to produce weapons and other more effective preventive measures.
Fortunately, a country can pursue many things simultaneously, which is often more generally effective than pursuing a single thing to the detriment of all others, thanks to diminishing returns.
Where did I say about single thing: "...weapons and other more effective preventive measures..."
Looking from the other angle - should Russia attack it'll trigger article 5. Russia can not win conventional war with NATO. It is just laughable. They're not that suicidal. And if they are it'll escalate to nuclear and then the railroad will be your last worry.
Russia can however win the US dithering, western Europe being scared of cruise missile strikes while their propagandists ask if it's worth dying for a few little towns.
Without the US Navy, NATO loses any war in the Baltic Sea. If Putin thinks the US won't respect Article 5, then he'll attack anyway. And if the US Navy is annihilated in a war against China, he'll attack anyway. Finland needs all the separation from Russia it can get.
Russia can't just attack anywhere it wants to. Putin is not Kim Il-sung, he can't count on any order to be blindly obeyed. It took years of propaganda, unfortunately armed with a couple of actually good points (mostly supplied by the neonazi nationalist wing in Ukraine, who wanted a war), before he could try actually invading. He had to walk a dangerous game with his own, in particular with his own neonazi supporter Prigozhin, who could easily have come up on top in their inevitable conflict.
He's absolutely not harmless, but neither should we allow ourselves to be distracted by phony countermeasures against the Russian threat, like this gauge shift thing clearly is in my opinion.
As you suggest, Russia's invasion of Ukraine was bolstered by Russian sympathizers in the east. Every country bordering Russia is incentivized to break free of any sort of alignment with Russia in order to reduce the threat of local insurgency which will aid Russia in its invasion. For example, the Baltic countries removing Russian from their list of official languages, in addition to decoupling from the Russian power grid. There are a lot of steps to be taken, and a lot of them will take decades. Fortunately, Russia's capacity to wage war measured against their number of potential targets means that it would take them decades to reconquer it all, assuming Europe steps up to fund the defense. Train gauge alignment is just one of many steps towards this end, and the sooner the better.
It was the case during the Soviet occupation and briefly during the transitional period, but otherwise - no, it wasn't. For example, in 1990, Latvia simply restored its 1922 constitution (still in effect today, although with some amendments) which enacted Latvian as the sole official language. This has also been the case with Lithuanian and Estonian constitutions, respectively.
The anti-Russian policies in the Baltics are dumb, they provide Putin with a good point to use in his propaganda, which is infinitely more useful to him than any railroad on foreign soil.
He's co-opting the red army's defeat of Nazi Germany for his own popularity purposes. Which is impressive, considering he's also disavowing communism. It would hardly have been possible, if it weren't for fringe (but not fringe enough) movements in Eastern Europe playing along with it. Not because they're pro-Russian, far from it, but because their old nationalist groups often were aligned with the nazis, and they want to rehabilitate them. Putin and these groups totally agree that the conflict should be framed as being between Russia and these groups.
> The anti-Russian policies in the Baltics are dumb, they provide Putin with a good point to use in his propaganda
This is dangerously naive. Propagandists like Putin don't need real grievances, they're happy to invent grievances and brainwash the population into believing them. In light of this fact, there's zero downside and nonzero upside to decouple from Russia (at least for any state which intends to remain independent) which makes it a no-brainer.
Said brainwashing can still be more or less effective depending on how much material it can build upon.
More importantly, though, it can only be effectively applied on Russian territory, while real grievances among minority Russian populations in other countries can be exploited into fifth-columnizing them.
What you're really saying here, is that Russians are fundamentally different people than you, because they fall for any dumb propaganda, whereas you don't.
Or maybe you accept that you are human too, vulnerable to the same thing, and maybe you are the brainwashed one, but you don't care?
Going down either of these roads ends you up with the neonazis in the long run (and yes, Russia has a lot of them too).
So no, it's not naive to point out the good points that feed the propaganda. What's naive is to think that dictators can manufacture good propaganda out of thin air anyway so it doesn't matter what "our side" is guilty of.
Putin is a gangster, not a cult leader. He's in it for himself, the people around him are in it for themselves. No one thinks he's selfless, least of all regular Russian people. It takes effort to keep something like that together. Unfortunately, he gets help from his foreign enemies.
> What you're really saying here, is that Russians are fundamentally different people than you, because they fall for any dumb propaganda, whereas you don't.
No, I don't read that at all. There's plenty of Russian propaganda that Westerners have fallen for hook, line, and sinker, chief among them the idea that all Russian speakers are actually Russian and want to be a part of the Russia.
The point is that the propagandists don't need to base their propaganda on truth. A salient historical example here is actually World War II: the Germans tried to provoke Poland into overreacting and causing a major incident in Danzig to justify their invasion of Poland. The Poles refused to play ball, so when the appointed hour came, the Germans made up some atrocity and used it as the basis of the declaration of war, faking the evidence early in the invasion. Given that Russia has already used a similar pretext regarding Russian speakers in Ukraine, it's not a surprise that the Baltics are nervous about Russia doing the exact some thing with regards to Russian speakers in their territories.
> No, I don't read that at all. There's plenty of Russian propaganda that Westerners have fallen for hook, line, and sinker, chief among them the idea that all Russian speakers are actually Russian and want to be a part of the Russia.
Oh yeah, other westerners, but not you. You take the foreign policy think tank line that Russians actually want to be balkanized. Just after saying that Putin has succeeded in brainwashing the population to go along with whatever he wants without need for excuses based on good points.
Given the ample reporting of Russian speakers in places like Odesa switching to speaking in Ukrainian as a result of the 2022 invasion to distance themselves from Russia, or the difficulty the Russian occupiers of Ukraine has had in finding people willing to work for them, or the fact that the current president of Ukraine is himself a Russian-speaking Ukrainian, or the fact that in the 1991 referendum, a majority of people in every Ukrainian oblast (including Crimea!) supported being a part of Ukraine rather than Russia, I don't think it's that hard to say what the general appetite of Russian-speaking Ukrainians becoming part of Russia is.
Or, to use an analogy with a different language, Putin's argument is akin to saying that a majority of Irishman want to be a part of England, because they speak English.
Don't confuse language for cultural identity.
(And, FWIW, I have fallen for this propaganda in the past; I've just been successfully educated since then as to why the simplistic linguistic map is fundamentally the wrong way to look at the conflict.)
But, similarly, don't confuse cultural identity with political one. That is really the crux of the issue here - self-identifying as Ukrainian or as Russian is very much a political question in Ukraine, and has been since their independence. This is also why you have this weird situation where several prominent Ukrainian military commanders and politicians have close direct relatives in Russia who are pro-war politicians there and who often were themselves born in Ukraine (or, conversely, the Ukrainian ones were born in Russia). So somebody may be Russian not just linguistically but culturally and ethnically as well, be born and raised in Russia, and still self-identify as Ukrainian today and speak the language solely as a marker of their chosen affiliation. And because it is a political identity in those cases, it can be very fluid - i.e. those very same people might be ones who have voted for Yanukovich 15 years ago precisely because he was seen as pro-Russian-language.
Ironically, this war will probably end up doing more to truly hammer out a single cohesive Ukrainian nation out of all the ethnic Russians in Ukraine than all the efforts of Ukrainian nationalists before it - assuming that Russia loses the war, that is.
I think this overstates the challenges, especially given the last 10+ years of despots doing things they shouldn't just be able to do. Waking up one day to find that the US has invaded Canada is now a non-negligible possibility.
I think they are up to the challenge of whipping up some BS casus belli and scaring would-be protesters into submission.
Like most such things, it's probably mostly symbolic, so politicians can say they're doing something in defiance of Russia (which is a very popular thing to do in Finland right now, or most of the west for that matter). I guess they'll back down on it when by 2032, everyone realizes it doesn't matter since wars will be fought with small autonomous drones and any railroad would be sabotaged in an instant.
What kind of ranges are you expecting from these small drones so logistics suddenly doesn’t matter? Even if something can hypothetically travel thousands of miles, designing disposable weapons with that kind of range has a real cost.
Sure, logistics matter. I'm sure Russian-gauge railroads in Finland would be mildly convenient for invading Sweden, provided you can first invade and utterly defeat Finland quickly enough that the railways survive.
But if Putin could do that (he can't), railway gauges would be the least of our worries.
As to railways surviving it’s relatively difficult to effectively destroy rail infrastructure. Making the call to cripple your internal infrastructure is tough especially in such a dire situation, it’s also a really large target. Taking out some strategic bridges is easier but most local issues can be quickly fixed when you talking million men armies.
Always loved going over the border from France as a kid and they would lift the whole train up and slide the old wheels out and put the new ones in and off you go!
Also it is one party (The Finns) presenting a rail initiative competing with their government partner's (National Coalition) older initiative. It is very unlikely that they both will be implemented.
Fear of a foreign invasion by a country much larger than your, and one that occupied you once for 200 years and attacked you again just 20 years after independence tends to clear the mind.
My only surprise is that they haven't already converted. It's not just about military aspects of an invasion, it's also about ease of deportation and ethnic substitution that would have to be expected afterwards in case of a Russian victory. That pattern is all too clearly established.
Crazy thing is, I don't live in Finland yet this description could describe our situation almost identically as well. And I can think of yet _another_ place on Earth with a similar situation.
Fear of foreign invasion is also why the Soviet Union invaded during the Winter War ("Greater Finland" irredentism was a thing, and St Petersburg was militarily exposed).
Fear is why Finland allied with the Nazis.
Fear is why the Soviet Union also signed a pact with the Nazis and invaded Ukraine.
>Your argument is the same as Iraq being a realistic threat against the US.
Your argument appears to be that your enemy's fear driven by losing 27 million people during an invasion/war of extermination is exactly equivalent to your country's fear of weapons that were imagined solely for the purposes of justifying an invasion.
My argument was that it is quite easy to get a domestic population to treat all of the enemy's legitimate fears as utterly irrelevant while treating bullshit domestic fears as existential.
In a way I think you helped make this point for me by forgetting about those 27 million deaths.
I can name about 8 who dont. The rest all belong to or tried to join a military bloc which helped rape Iraq, Libya and Afghanistan for no particular reason other than because the gang boss demanded it.
It's more of mystery why particular kinds of westerners are especially sanctimonious about Moscow while bending over backwards to excuse nearly identical behavior from the west.
> The rest all belong to or tried to join a military bloc which helped rape Iraq, Libya and Afghanistan for no particular reason other than because the gang boss demanded it.
Quick essay for 20 points, those countries all decided to join NATO BEFORE Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan.
WHY did they decide to try to join NATO? Who were they running away from and why?
The promise to Ukraine was that they are going to be protected by their chosen gang rather than be cynically used to try and take down a rival gang.
The lie was laid bare once they were actually attacked. Article 5 protections - the only reason they are fighting this war - came off the table as soon as it became clear that the rival gang wasn't going to be taken down.
Quick essay for 30 points: write to a grieving mother campaigining against gangs explaining why even though her son joined the crips for protection and got murdered by a blood in the initiation phase, she needs to STFU about kids staying out of gangs. The reason is simple: she needs to STFU because several other 14 year olds who joined the crips for the promise of protection haven't yet had that promise tested.
Ukraine wasn't in NATO and NATO members Baltics have not been attacked, even though they're a lot smaller and more vulnerable
The Western alliance is doing some horrible things worldwide, but your point of view regarding Eastern Europe is horribly mistaken. I'm fairly sure you have no idea what you're talking about, and you're probably not from there. I'd basically classify you as a tankie: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tankie
I'm doubly going to classify you as a tankie as you're dodging the question of WHO Eastern Europe was running from (and WHY).
Also another quick essay for 40 points: who has voluntarily joined Russian led alliances (except for Armenia, which is currently reconsidering its life choices).
Ironically this slur is only ever used by imperialists who support the empire they live under.
If we were having this argument inside the Soviet Union in 1968 you'd be calling me different slurs for an identical reason - because I wouldnt have supported sending the tanks into czechoslovakia. and you would, coz your calculus is "my empire justified, other empire unjustified".
This isnt any different to when I was called a Tankie in 2003 coz I didnt want to send the tanks in to Baghdad by people who accused me of being pro Saddam.
You apparently dont have the capacity to see pacifism, only traitors.
No, fear is not why Soviet Union allayed with Nazis. Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact was agreement in which Nazis and Soviets divided central/eastern Europe between them. They even had join parade after conquering Poland in Brest (Brześć). And yes, they ware allied.
They were fighting Japan at the time, were unable to fight a war on two fronts and Britain had at that point chosen to follow a strategy of appeasement towards the Nazis.
And your idea is that they had zero reason to fear invasion from the west? Even though that is precisely what happened just a few years later?
First of all this were USSR-Japan skirmishes not war, second they did not have to worry about Japan as was shown by Soviet–Japanese Neutrality Pact of April 1941, third if they were worried about Japan then "spending" army on invasion of Poland, Finland, Baltics, Bessarabia were counter productive, fourthly at the time of Ribentrop Molotov pact Britain ceased following appeasement strategy as shown by declaring war to Germany at 3-rd of September 1939 as fulfillment of security guarantees given to Poland in March of 1939.
It is totally ahistoric to pin any actions of USSR on fear or just reaction to external events. If WWII was continuation of WWI (in my and many opinion it was) both Germany and USRR were revanchist powers that wanted to reverse outcome of WWI. Many forgot that Russia later USSR lost WWI badly. Plus Stalin after very, very, bloody consolidation of power in 30ties was ready (in fact it was imperative for regime stability) to start outward aggression/expansion.
Furthermore historian believe that Stalin knew that confrontation w/ Germany is inevitable but (more popular opinion) was estimating it will happen one year later at least or (less popular, even fringe opinion) was amassing forces to attack Germany and was cough by Nazis w/ "pants down". Either scenario would be explanation for initial successes of Operation Barbarossa.
Fun fact - last train with grain from USSR to Germany crossed border few minutes before start of Operation Barbarossa.
In summary - Soviets and Nazis were allies till 1941 - both parties know it was tactical alliance not unlike USSR - GB/USA against Germany and at the very end Japan. Note that after WWII there was cold war between former allies - not unlike like hot war between former alliance parties of Nazis and Soviets.
Second fun fact: Orwell's "oceania was always at war with eastasia" from 1984 is direct reference to how alliances were changing during WWII.
>First of all this were USSR-Japan skirmishes not war, second they did not have to worry about Japan as was shown by Soviet–Japanese Neutrality Pact of April 1941
...two years after Molotov Ribbentrop.
If they had nothing to worry about Japan it logically follows that they had nothing to worry about Hitler either as was shown by the Molotov Ribbentrop pact.
In 1939 the Soviet military was a disaster, also. It's difficult to overstate just how exposed they were.
>Furthermore historian believe that Stalin knew that confrontation w/ Germany is inevitable
They were right to be afraid.
>In summary - Soviets and Nazis were allies till 1941 -
In summary, out of fear which was entirely legitimate. Fun fact: the only difference between them and Finland is that Finland gets excused for allying to Hitler out of fear by its western allies.
When speaking to Americans, I explain the wartime co-operation between Finland and Germany as, "The enemy of my enemy is not necessarily my 'friend', but we can do business."
They didnt stop being allied to the Nazis after the winter war was over. Fear maintained that alliance.
Just like fear of "greater finland" made the Soviets invade in the first place.
It's fear all the way down. The only difference is the validity of those fears. Obviously your country's enemies' fears were always invalid while your country's allies' fears were always justified.
> Just like fear of "greater finland" made the Soviets invade in the first place.
And the fear of Poland made the Nazis invade Poland, right?
Their propaganda no doubt presented things this way, but that was far from the truth. Much like Nazis had to stage a Polish attack on German radio station[1] to justify their invasion of Poland, the USSR had to fabricate the shelling of Mainila[2] to justify the invasion of Finland, because neither Poland nor Finland were apparently threatening enough on their own.
No. The closest living analog to the Nazis today is our allies in Israel and like the Nazis they arent shy about endless expansionism for the sake of creating lebensraum for their ubermensch. Theyre not very shy about the holocaust theyre committing either.
Russia never went on an extermination drive in order to create an ethnically pure ethnostate.
The biggest western geopolitical mistake of the 2020s is assuming that Israel isnt run by Nazis but Russia is.
>Their propaganda no doubt presented things this way
Every country presents its propaganda in its own way. Pointing that a country that you consider an enemy publishes propaganda without reference to your own serves merely to underscore that accident of birth dictates which flavor of propaganda you believe.
Technically I'd prefer to be living in a newbuild in Mariupol paying taxes to a different government rather than having the Israeli army drop bombs on my head and starving my entire family until we are all dead.
Small distinction to you perhaps, but to me it's a bit more than just "technical".
> Just like fear of "greater finland" made the Soviets invade in the first place.
Which "fear" prompted the Soviets to invade Romania in 1940? Which "fear" prompted the Soviets to invade Poland in 1939? Which "fear" prompted the Soviets to invade the Baltics in 1940?
Ah, now I remember, the "fear" of not being the premier colonial power.
Ukraine was not and still is not economically strong enough for war. It just suffered an unprovoked invasion by its neighbor and had no option but to either capitulate or fight.
I hope I am not biased but it really does not seem comparable to the border situation in Kashmir where both sides are showing aggression towards each other and weighing the costs of going to an all out war.
> Ukraine was not and still is not economically strong enough for war. It just suffered an unprovoked invasion by its neighbor and had no option but to either capitulate or fight
The Western consensus about the outcome of the invasion that of a rout.
> both sides are showing aggression towards each other and weighing the costs of going to an all out war
Outside an Indo-Chinese land war, the only paths for industrial war emerge from New Delhi. Either in reacting to a miscalculation by Islamabad. Or because India's going imperial. The latter would be shockingly like Russia invading China in both scale and capacity to get drawn out by outside backers.
If India's going imperial, why would Pakistan bother with hosting terrorist elements to provoke a hostile "belligerent" (according to you) neighbour, and letting them attack a civilian zone?
Indian leadership hasn't been going on TV prior to the Pahalgam attack and putting out bellicose statements like Hindus and Muslims can't live together - Pakistan did. Also India isn't stupid to invade a nuclear armed country with a first-use policy.
The above incursions are the usual dance we see with India and Pakistan (and China), that we see every few years. Except this time, Pakistan triggered it by attacking civilians, just like 26/11, while even Indian support of Pakistani terrorists such as the Balochistan Liberation Army has never led to a large-scale slaughter of civilians in Pakistan.
Pakistan messed up big time, they'll chalk up the L, it will be a few tense words for some time, and then things will get back to where they were before.
> If India's going imperial, why would Pakistan bother with hosting terrorist elements to provoke a hostile "belligerent" (according to you) neighbour, and letting them attack a civilian zone
Underlaying this line of reasoning is an assumption that Pakistan makes coordinated, coherent, and more or less rational decisions. But Pakistan is run by the military with civilian leadership being a farcical fig leaf. They routinely fall into prolonged periods of martial law, and arresting former prime ministers is the norm. What's more, Pakistan's military is divided into numerous factions which are operationally independent and have their own internal politics going on.
Therefore, any analysis of the form "[hypothesis] is unlikely because it would be irrational and uncoordinated" is extremely dubious.
Exactly my point. A single terrorist attack is no grounds for India going "imperial". India has always been very predictable. Pakistan on the other hand remains a volatile mess, and some rogue elements push shit like this once in a while. Except this time, the rogues are the ones ruling. All this does is make Pakistan a pariah state further. Even the Gulf states stood with India this time, when usually they stand on the sidelines and send mere condolences.
On a side note, the Gulf states being involved in negotiations pretty much means the end of the US as a diplomatic hegemon for the region.
How suspicious and provocative of Ukraine to increase their military training after Russia's first unprovoked annexation of part of their country. How fiendish of the West to assist them in preparing to defend themselves.
I don't think there were western armaments in Ukraine even though Russia invaded Ukraine over ten years ago and they have been fighting ever since.
In the second phase of the invasion both sides still used old Soviet equipment until West finally decided that sanctions are not enough to stop Putin
By the time of Russia's most recent invasion, NATO had been doing some minor training with Ukraine to "westernize" their military. It only took a little bit. They also provided bits and pieces of equipment, primarily anti-tank missiles. Donald Trump in his first term tried to coerce Zelensky into opening up an "investigation" into Hunter Biden by threatening to withhold those weapons. There were impeachment hearings.
Then leading up to the actual invasion (Which US intelligence called weeks in advance, don't know why everyone is insisting that it wasn't expected, maybe they should reconsider who they pay attention to) the US was convinced it would be a steamroll fight and then Ukraine would run an insurgency, so they provided thousands more anti-tank missile launchers.
It wasn't until Ukraine had mostly stopped the invasion convoy that the west took them seriously, and it took even longer for the west to start providing supplies.
I would say the default behaviour just isn't very ergonomic. Suppressing warnings for example requires piping to /dev/null (whereas `path` supresses permission warnings by default), if you want to limit the number of results you have to pipe the output to another command, getting xargs-like behaviour (obviously), or putting quotes around lines with embedded spaces, there are simply more hoops to jump through. It's much easier to type "path -sf .jpg .jpeg .png" than whatever would be required to get the `find` utility to do the same. (Or, say, finding all node_modules folders with "path -z n_m", it's just so much more satisfying.) But yes, these are mostly just syntactic-sugar kinds of issues. Aside from that (and perhaps the lack of cross-platform compatibility), I would say there is nothing inherently deficient about the `find` command. It's a work-horse which probably has more features than `path` does. But the latter really is growing on me. It is actually quite fun to use, if I may say so myself!
Looks like it has a pretty good interface as well. It does however seem a just a bit too top-heavy (lot's of dependencies) not to mention a few more bugs than I particularly care for. But sheesh, 37K stars, it must be good for something!
It's good for finding files fast, and piping the resulting file paths into other tools for further action / handling. It does what it claims to do and does it well. :)
> We have carried out ten [thermomechanical] recycling cycles, and the epoxy has not lost any significant mechanical strength in the process
Chemical dissolving is only needed for carbon fiber composite. 90% of the resin was cited to be recoverable in this process.
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