Yes, but they don’t actually want Europe to be able to defend itself, they want European money to buy American weapons

It took me longer than it should have to realise that that measuring tape is in inches and your hand is not actually tiny

Hmm, looks the vicious sort to be hunting for bargains at the supermarket

Never doubt cats on the matter of being comfy

While I’m by no means an expert on the matter, as I understand it there is some solid reasoning here: whatever the best solution to fighting drones turns out to be, it’s probably going to require you to bring some heavy equipment and power generation to the frontline. We’ve got various directed-energy systems, guns similar to the CIWS on ships but scaled down, interceptor drones, jammers… But at the end of the day, all of them require you to be able to carry a bunch of heavy shit to the frontline and for it to be durable enough to survive there. At that point you’ve got something a lot like a tank again

This actually seems like a step closer to that future, doesn’t it? Most of the EU operates some variant of the Leopard, especially as the old Soviet and other Eastern Bloc ones age out and get replaced. This project with Italy is to be a variant of the successor to the Leopard, rather than a totally independent design like Italy’s current tanks. Hungary is doing a variant of this too, and France has signed up to collaborate on a tank with Rheinmetall (although the fighter program that collapsed makes this specific case less promising in my eyes). It seems like a general coalescence around the German designs

Even if it made literally no practical difference at all, we should do it to reaffirm our actual reliable alliances

The thing about money is that it only has value because we collectively agree that it does. If you have a dollar or a euro or a yuan, it’s valuable literally only because other people will give you stuff for it. There’s not really anything special about it otherwise, it’s just really useful to have some way of trading things in easily-transferable numbers

Crypto is theoretically the same in terms of what makes it valuable, except for that far fewer people agree that it is valuable and there’s much less agreement on how valuable it is amongst those who do

You need to hang out in different parts of lemmy, anywhere except wherever the fuck you’re currently going

Actually no, but for an exciting reason: this is a species only just newly identified this month!

The one with the incredibly high hunting success rate is the black-footed cat, which is from southern Africa. The one in the pic is a tilcayo, from Bolivia. It looks similar to another species of wildcat in the same area, but one that had brought into a wildlife sanctuary (by a guy who found and cared for it as a kitten and didn’t initially realise it wasn’t a domestic cat) and a scientist realised that it was not actually the same thing

That’s an interesting comparison I hadn’t considered, but isn’t it more like the current EU than the hypothetical federalised EU under discussion?

To be fair, any air superiority scenario is always about some kind of specific geographic area, and Russia is big enough that there are likely to be targets beyond the range of the fighters that enforce air supremacy

Also there is a third country which operates strategic bombers: Russia. It has been using them against Ukraine, and Ukraine’s Operation Spiderweb (the raid with trucks full of drones) was specifically an effort to take out a big chunk of that strategic bomber fleet

“Lol no. Actually it was exactly what you said”

Mate the EEC was one of the European Communities, and it ended because it became part of the EU. That’s not a separate attempt. That’s the same one.

…so there has not been an attempt like the EU

I’m no expert either, just trying to assume that the experts in charge of each country are operating rationally (which I assume you’re doing too). As far as I understand, the advantages a full-on human-piloted jet has over drones for something like striking Russian oil refinieres are:

• Far bigger payloads. A drone can damage the refinery, but you need a shitload of drones or one big plane to destroy it

• The ability to get past air defence. Ukraine has been rapidly switching up where it attacks to avoid Russia’s air defences. Hit one place for a while, Russia moves anti-air stuff to defend it, start attacking somewhere else. If you’re attacking with something much more capable, you can choose the targets that you think will hurt Russia the most rather than the ones Russia is defending the least

Russia has substantial drone production of its own and hasn’t stopped using its own air force. Similarly, Ukraine is still absolutely using what aviation it has

It’s also worth remembering that we hear a disproportionate amount about drone usage because a) it’s new and b) they inherently all have cameras on them streaming to a computer, so it’s incredibly easy to get footage of them working

In what fucking world was Napoleon’s attempt not a series of conquests?

Which attempts have been similar to the EU, and not just conquests? The closest I can think of is maybe the Habsburg dynasty, and I think we can agree that that had its own unique issues going on

For what it’s worth, there have been many United States that aren’t the US of America. Mexico’s full name is United Mexican States, and historically there have been USes of Brazil, Belgium, Colombia, Indonesia, Central America, and a few more

That said, I’m a native English speaker and the article is in Spanish. I don’t know if the original Spanish has an implication of “be like the USA” or if it’s just a way to say “Federalised EU”

Ukraine doesn’t have the numbers of advanced jets that NATO has. Drones have proven to be an astonishingly useful weapon, but it doesn’t mean they’re necessarily the best weapon for any given job, it means they’re the best weapon that Ukraine has access to at sufficient scale.

Western donations of jets to Ukraine are certainly not nothing, but Russia had a colossal aviation advantage going into this war. Ukraine’s air force does not have the ability to shut Russia’s down and fly where it pleases like the collective NATO air forces do