Russia seems poised to invade Europe in the near future. If they do, and succeed, Rome could become part of the new Soviet Union(which Putin has explicitly said he wants to bring back)
Once that happens, it's likely to lead to poverty. At least that's what happened in the last USSR
Let's entertain that idea. Suppose they did invade most of Europe.
How would they keep everyone under control? You won't find that many people eager to participate in satellite regimes or new social experiments, like you had in post-WWII.
I don't think Russia will even consider invading western Ukraine. They'll keep the Russian speaking part which they can easily govern.
Russia is neither poor nor failing, and saying that is underestimating the real actual danger they present.
Russia has vast natural resources and enough buyers for those resources even if the EU manages to completely stop (at significant cost). Their industry turned to wartime mode, resulting in the fact that they now have more armored vehicles than in February 2022.
Will they actually physically reach Italy? Probably not. Will they try to buy it out and bring a (even more) fascist autocratic regime there? Probably yes.
It's both poor, failing and with a population affected by chronic depression. But for that reason (desperation) they should not be underestimated and should have been handled in a way less gentle way.
> Russia has vast natural resources and enough buyers
Not saying that it's not what has kept them standing until now, but the buyers make the price in this case. So who knows what the price could become in the future.
> Will they try to buy it out and bring a (even more) fascist autocratic regime there? Probably yes.
Are you still talking about Russia with their monopoly currency? "Try" as in one probability over one billion to succeed and be disposed of a few days later. This ability to influence foreign countries effectively and not in clownish ways is a nice story for kids.
>Russia seems poised to invade Europe in the near future
only if the near future includes the year 2150 because as of right now the Russian defense ministry is celebrating the liberation of individual bakery plants on their state media
Russia’s kleptocracy has impoverished the country so much that it now needs attrition in its male population to keep people from rising up against the current leadership. War is how you keep poor citizens from rebelling against you. When the war is over, historically the returning soldiers (especially in Russia) overturn the leadership. So there is never an incentive to stop a war. Especially a losing one.
Those cover Russia's motivation, which is indeed strong. You can add that Putin wants the glorious Soviet Empire days back, and that without additional buffer zones Russia is very vulnerable to land invasion (in Summer). Russia has plenty of reasons to conquer much of Europe
But I don't see Russia's capability to do so. Their kleptocracy has impoverished the country and has repeatedly lead leadership (including Putin) to overestimate their own capabilities. Male population faces attrition from war and alcoholism. Leadership has a habit of dying in mysterious accidents or falling out of windows, reducing the amount of experienced leaders available and discouraging anyone with a brain from rising up too far. And they are barely able to advance in Ukraine.
There are legitimate concerns that Russia might attack other countries once the Ukraine war concludes. They might even make some initial territorial gains because they are in full war economy while Europe has only scaled up enough to support Ukraine, and has depleted ammunition stockpiles. But I don't see them getting very far
The fact that it's a fragile kleptocracy basically reduce to 0 any possibility of a normal future. Puppet state at best, if someone is willing to take them. I expect they already planned what to do with the returning soldiers, not that they will like it or accept gracefully what's in store for them.
There's a fine line between parasites short-term maximizing how much blood they can suck out of their host, and parasites ending up net losers because they got too greedy and undermined their host's longer-term health.
Historically, military grafters and war profiteers haven't been know for either their long-term thinking, or their judgement about fine lines.
My impression, from reading many "college X is in grim shape" stories over the years, is that poor financial management is behind most those. Alumni, students, and most of the decision makers around a modern US college are far too focused on prestige, more-is-better, and "sounds cool" metrics. Vs. Vice-Chancellor "No", the college CFO, is the least popular person on campus.
So long as both enrollments and tuition are growing at ten-ish percent annually, you can get away with a whole lot of poor money management. But when things aren't going so well...oops.
Ah, the benefits of having a sober old CEO. And a business model that doesn't need to be buoyed nor stabilized by spinning and hyping a succession of hot new trends.
But they still need to replace employees who retire and such.
EDIT: The reality behind the 'no time/energy to "train" me' is often that small companies do too little hiring for IT-type positions to support any sort of formal training, or even coherent documentation of their current stuff. (It may be quite different if you'd been hired as their junior-most bookkeeper or lathe operator.) And their tiny IT staff needs to be jack-of-all-trades problem-fixers - so if you need formal structures and training to get things done, then you're a poor fit anyway.
As I understand it, judges typically defer to law enforcement. Anyway, replacing a leader would have very little impact on the laws, practices, training, or political mandate. Might just make for an unusual headline.
In my daydream, elected Sheriffs don't want to be dumped out of office - so they ignore crap-quality Intel, don't hire deputies based on phrenology, double-check the paperwork before releasing prisoners, ...
Right? In my reality, my County Sheriff has on multiple occasions hired deputies who had either resigned in lieu of termination for various problems, and on a couple of occasions, actually terminated. During COVID he denied vaccines to even immunocompromised individuals, but worse (yes, I know that masks are not "100% effective"), forbade the use of masks in his (overcrowded, typically 3 people in 2 person cells, one sleeping on a mattress on the floor, and smaller isolation cells designed for 1, often having 2 or even 3 inmates) county jails, with all the predictable results.
And in the wake of BLM, when Mayors and PD Chiefs were actually doing a fairly good job of trying to community build and form relationships, got on his bullhorn at protests and said that any Sheriff's Deputy who attempted to do so would be subject to disciplinary action and that he was going to be enforcing "zero tolerance" for any protest.
In my mind, the bigger issue with twin studies trying to show that (say) IQ is highly genetic is that humans do not reproduce by cloning. And regression toward the mean is very much a thing for heritable traits.
In other words - Junior should not be presumed to be smarter, fitter, more deserving, or destined for success, just because his parents did well. No matter how attractive that conclusion might sound, to people who consider themselves to be the "better" sort.
That doesn't sound like a problem with twin studies exploring the degree to which IQ is genetic, that sounds like a problem with people treating aggregate tendencies and associations as a basis for individual discrimination.
The problem is most people's zealous desire to read socially self-serving conclusions into any data they can find on such subjects. And when they really like the Q.E.D. punchline, humans have very low standards for the "logic" used to reach it.
iq is "polygenetic" with the consensus estimates at 50-80% based on genes
success has components of luck as in "right place, right time" for someone with the right qualities and connections, and many of the very successful are quick to admit this
I am a 3rd generation machinist along the paternal line, and although the machines I operate are in expensive labs, those my father and grandfather operated were probably just as challenging. Engineering also seems to often run in the family. How much is nature and nuture? "It varies" is a safe response
Whoah, no, there is definitely not a consensus for 50-80%, and most of what's being published now refutes the 80% end of that range --- the 80% estimates come from underpowered studies like MISTRA that improperly assumed independent environments for twins reared apart.
We have essentially no mechanistic understanding of gene/intelligence interactions. Rather, we have cohorts of people tagged with traits (educational achievement, tested IQ, height, etc), all sequenced, and then we can run correlation surveys across all their genomes to identify correlations between alleles and traits. When you do that, you get 10-30% heritability numbers; the gap between that and the range for MZ/DZ twin studies (the 50-80% you often see) is "the missing heritability problem".
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