I love when people are confident in their judgements. Especially when it comes to style and taste, it's great to see people drive a stake in the sand, and do so with emphasis. It feels almost, I don't know, liberating perhaps.
> What did they do to earn the right to say "I don't like this color"?
Everyone has this right. The author just claimed it.
lol they aren't randos. One is a long-time culture writer and interviewer with a solid reputation and bylines everywhere. The other is an industrial designer for apple and used to be literally a color forecaster for a major fashion brand.
I'd like to offload a required security software to a stand-alone device that exposes the software endpoints directly to the host via PCIe. The goal would be to ensure that if an attacker gets into the host, they are unable to modify the security software or limit its functionality.
Ideally the card would have a TPM module and supports some sort of signed boot/firmware validation.
I know I'm being a bit coy, but hopefully that helps you understand the requirements a bit better?
Not as strong As you might think. The Cronus is a very strong cheating device for consoles, and it’s ubiquitous enough to be sold in some big-box retail stores.
A lot of these Cronus-like devices do more than just translate input these days, many of them will attempt to manage weapon recoil for you (by adding downward and/or side to side input to the virtual aiming stick input at the same rate as the weapon recoil is pushing it up and/or to the sides) or generate other input intermixed with the user's input like adding very subtle circular motion of the aiming stick to try to enhance the benefit of the reticle friction aim assist that exists within the games themselves.
These sorts of generated inputs could in theory be detected using heuristics to watch for inputs that appear too patterned to be fully human. Whether any company is bothering with this, I have no idea. The only one I'm aware of that even appears to attempt to detect these types of devices at all is Epic and I have no idea what methods they use.
That's what I mean by "modifying controller inputs". All it can do is change what a controller does. They can't change the video, or affect the game logic in any way.
And it seems like it would be pretty simple to detect this in the game itself; this sort of detection doesn't need any anti-cheat with deep system hooks.
> this sort of detection doesn't need any anti-cheat with deep system hooks.
Correct, it wouldn't need any deep system hooks, nor are the console manufacturers likely to ever give game developers the ability to hook into the system that deeply, nor do they really need to since modern consoles are secure enough in practice that wallhack/aimbot type system level code cheats haven't been a concern for a while now on the major console platforms.
There are various bits of anti-cheat logic that game developers could be putting into their console version like the aforementioned analysis of input devices to look for helper devices, and things like looking for likely "lag switch" attacks by keeping track of the ongoing latency of packets coming in and out, but these are all passive heuristic checks that would exist within the game itself, not driver or kernel level anti-cheat as is common on PC.
Practically all anti cheat for a long time has primarily worked by monitoring what is running on the computer/device, and ensuring the integrity of the game and its data.
You don’t need anti-cheat with deep system hooks to monitor input. That can be done from the game itself trivially.
Denuvo, one of the primary cross-platform anti-cheat systems, deals with ensuring the integrity of offline progress, obfuscation and encryption to prevent data mining, and emulator prevention. In their own words:
> Protect sensitive game logic to reduce data mining and detect peripherals that give the cheater an unfair gameplay advantage.
Cronus gives a strong advantage to the cheater, basically turning recoil off. Sure there are more powerful cheats, but cheating is cheating and if you’re going to ban cheaters then Cronus users should rightfully be included in that.
“This particular cheat only helps people that are already good at the game” is also an ancient trope as far as rationalizing cheating goes, so hope you’re enjoying your Cronus lol.
I don't have a Cronus. Frankly, I don't really need one or care to have one.
Even with a Cronus, you still need to be able to aim and place your shots. It certainly helps you land more shots, but basic tactics easily overcome a Cronus.
I'm really surprised to see these repeated baseless accusations on HN. I can assure you that I've never used or own a Cronus. I have a 0.89 KD in WZ. I'd be much better with a Cronus.
I don't disagree that a Cronus is cheating. I'm simply stating there are different levels of cheating. Since Cronus is hardware it's both hard to detect and limited on its impact. Cronus also don't let you magically wall people or auto-headshot.
Software based cheats are significantly more impactful to the game play. Software cheaters can see you through walls, auto-aim, auto-shoot, auto-move. There's simply no way to counter someone who knows exactly where you are and can hit a perfect shot every time.
Activision should address both, but software cheating is a far larger problem.
In this scenario it sounds like Activision is addressing both by treating them both as a group. Not sure why you're trying to draw a distinction for actual Cronus use. If Cronus is cheating, it doesn't matter which cheat is a larger problem or whether there are different levels of cheating, the treatment for cheaters is the same: ban them.
I think it's reasonable for Activision to treat them as a group. I know I'm arm-chairing, but I think it's worth treating them as distinct.
Hardware based cheats, like recoil control, can be countered with in-game mechanics. For example, enforcing a minimum amount of recoil and using an RNG recoil pattern. My understanding is Cronus rely on grossly predictable recoil patterns.
Software cheating extends well beyond recoil control and requires active detection mechanisms.
Random recoil is less fun, it stops being a skill that rewards mastery and becomes another fudging factor in a skill-based game.
And for what? Because you think Cronus is too hard to detect?
No cheat should be tolerated, let alone compromised with to the point of fudging the game. Should racing games counter Cronus by removing difficult corners that rely on predictable turns? Should games avoid entire categories of mechanics just to work around Cronus? Fuck that, Activision should continue investing in protecting the creative integrity of their product, not conceding. Anti-cheat systems have gotten incredibly sophisticated with incredible gains in cheat detection, and it didn't get there by giving up.
"Should racing games counter Cronus by removing difficult corners that rely on predictable turns?"
Your argument is that games are bad so they should have serious restrictions on them to make them stay bad....
This is nonsense. Games should be, first and foremost, fun. You will build and play better, more interesting games where there are fewer predictable turns (literal or figurative), when there isn't such an unhealthy obsession with protecting terrible mechanics.
For a very few cases where there is e-sport(s) like activity, fine, create your TiVO like experience (in multiplayer, e.g. combat simulators, racing).
"Anti-cheat systems have gotten incredibly sophisticated with incredible gains in cheat detection".
Anti-cheat systems are a large part of why I rarely play any AAA titles - they are slow as all 'F, buggy, and honestly completely trashy games. And if I bought one of these games and was randomly locked out of it, you can bet I would be demanding the blood of the developers be spilled.
The instant I found out that a device like the Cronus existed, it brought me great joy to know someone created it and turned it into a business.
That thing exists to solve a very real problem: the game mechanics the Cronus mediates or exploits are being used by game devs to cover up otherwise-boring gameplay.
> I'm really surprised to see these repeated baseless accusations on HN.
I just made the hackusation because it seemed funny to me. Your insistence on further explaining the difference in severity between the different types of cheating just makes it seem even funnier.
Banning based on user input seems the worst idea ever. Say hello to false positive. Also, in near future you'll probably have AI player that will beat most human players. If you ban based on that, you'll defacto put a upper bound to human skill you'll accept in the game, so competition will be restricted to not-so-good players.
This sadly is a bad idea, as it’ll get your entire store account banned (Steam, battle.net, etc). Chargebacks work great until the whole account matters.
Surely, taking escalatory retribution like that is illegal, somewhere...I hope...?
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Non-escalatory retribution would be banning you from the game you filed a chargeback for - I can't get mad over that.
But an online store doing unilateral revocation of access and licenses for a consumer's entire library (without refunding it 100%) in response to a single chargeback is just begging for countries' consumer protection agencies to come knocking, and even if that's a term in the store's EULA I can't see how they could be upheld by a court as an conscionable (and therefore legally enforcible) contract clause - especially given the dim-view to which online and click-through EULAs/TOS are viewed by most countries courts' today anyway.
Speaking as someone with too much time on my hands (thanks to a cushy job, I'm pleased to say, rather than funemployment) I secretely want to be dicked-over by a megacorp like this so I can get amusement (and a worthwhile life experience) by availing myself of the court system to hold these companies to account. Now I just need to find a similar way to make Microsoft undo the crappy shell in Windows 11.
I think the sort of "legal" argument here is imagine if you were running a SaaS and somebody did a chargeback despite using the service. I think most people _would_ lock the account and refuse to do business with the chargebacker as a default reaction!
Of course the reality of these other places being the marketplace and the service provider and the game publisher is a classic anti-trust issue.
Imagine if the SaaS charged 100x the agreed price for the last month, refused to fix the charge, and when you issued a chargeback, they deleted all your lifetime data.
Yes? I do not understand how you would think that anything but an extremely antagonistic relationship would result from a chargeback. Not saying they "deserve to keep the money" or whatever (of course not), but a chargeback is pretty much crossing the rubicon in terms of a business relation between two parties.
Not saying "don't chargeback ever", and obviously in your scenario the SaaS is at fault, really.
> accounts locked for Hardware chargebacks will not be unlocked until the associated hardware is returned.
Wait, does this mean that if someone hacks your Steam account, and uses your saved payment info to order a Steam Deck shipped to someone other than you, that you have to choose between losing your Steam account forever or losing the money?
Steam often asks for the card's CVV2 even for saved cards. I don't know what the exact criteria are, but I'm pretty sure any order over a certain amount (which a Steam Deck would definitely be) would trigger this.
I have actually been thinking if I should start a new Steam account or several. The blast radius of losing the current one for some reason would be devastating. Also wondering if it would be at all effective (not too hard to see the same credit card used between two accounts).
Steam could alleviate the new account requirement by having a "cheat" counter. If you do more than, say, five actions that look like a cheat, then a real person on their side looks at the problem. Or, have a cheat counter that waits until twenty or fifty cheating actions before auto-banning, if they want to make it cheaper for them.
It's possible to have teams that save millions of dollars a year and not be worth it to keep them.
For the sake of argument, let's say a statistics team has 5 people.
Cost of Employee at FB, including insurance, office space, 401K match, salary, bonuses = 250K/year (probably very conservative).
Cost of Data and Software Infrastructure to support them (including people to respond to Infrastructure support tickets), let's just be very conservative = 100K/year.
Cost of People Management overhead to support them. Includes salary of at least one manager, not to mention the time of a program manager, project manager, product manager, or whomever else. Let's just say 500K/year.
Total = 1.85 Million/Year.
Let's say this team of 5 people comes up models that save the company $4M a year. I once had a VP tell me that to justify a Data Scientist on the team, they needed to have a savings of 10X what they cost the company to have that person on staff. I know this logic and math seems very weak and hazy. Mapping costs is a strange thing. But this is how some decision makers think, and this is how people get cut.
The team was all mathematicians. We did the math. I helped one of our data scientists put a model into production that saved $15M a year from that model alone, and we had a dozen people like that. We were working on signal loss models that had potential to save billions. I genuinely do not understand the logic of cutting this team to save costs.
Eric, my best wishes to you, I've also enjoyed reading your texts, at these older times when you were allowed to write about your work.
Having had some similar experiences to yours now, I don't believe there has to be strict logic behind the managerial decisions leading to big changes. That's not how they are made, and that happens more often and with more impact than we typically register in our own environment, as we are busy doing our specific tasks. I know that it can sound cynical but I think it correctly reflects the reality.
In one specific case from my previous work, I know from those present where the decisions were made, that a decision about hundreds of people working further of not on many running projects was made after one high manager left and the few remaining who were the only one deciding literally had a short talk: "OK, who wants to take over these, I won't, do you?", "no", "no", "me neither." "OK, then let's dismount all that." And so it went. And similarly, it's not that it was not profitable for the company, it was clearly documented. The decision of each of those involved was then explainable with "it didn't match our vision of where we want to concentrate our company's effort." It is sometimes as simple as that. The "high managers" so often score additional points whenever they decide that the company makes less of different stuff.
Steve Jobs was, of course, famous for abandoning different projects in Apple on his comeback, and it provably gave the results. But I also see the companies overnight losing the proficiency in some fields based on managerial decisions impulsively made, performing even worse later. I don't have any grand narrative based on these experiences to push, except to state my belief that sometimes the "reasons" are extremely simple and very, very mundane, to the point of causing huge disappointment to those who heard so many decisions presented as strictly a result of precise measurements and deliberations, who knew they did their best and were aware that "nothing was wrong."
It does leave one questioning why they correctly invested as much energy in what they did, and if they made right decisions during these times, from a newly obtained perspective.
>I genuinely do not understand the logic of cutting this team to save costs.
I've been in a situation where a company was under pressure, was trying to make a big pivot, and there where multiple rounds of layoffs.
At one point I could only make sense of it by picturing a somewhat blind lumberjack getting an order that says "There's a forest that needs 15% of trees cut. Go cut." Good trees get get, bad trees get cut. Thankfully we are not trees and if we get cut we can move on. We don't die just because we got chopped down.
Unfortunately, top-down mandates are imperfect and should be avoided as much as possible. Net profit matters to an operator who cares about today's profitability, but not at all to someone whose paradigm is "thinking in bets" and future payoffs. And the street has been rewarding people who ignore today's profits in favor of the narrative about tomorrow's growth.
From afar, it looks like Meta's leadership is a bunch of future thinkers who got told to cut today's costs, and it's not a well-practiced muscle for them.
Perhaps in the future the company would not be adding any new models or require optimization of any new surfaces, so they don't expect to be spending enough on new initiatives to justify optimizing them. And all the existing initiatives have been optimized efficiently already (though that does seem unlikely when I type it out).
"Signal loss" is the overarching term for all the factors that lead to the company being less able to make good inferences about users. Not just the obvious consideration of "how do we serve an ad that is relevant to the user?" but for any data-driven decision that affects a user's experience.
The biggest recent cause of signal loss was Apple changing the rules for apps on their phone, but there are plenty of other causes.
The idea of a signal loss model is to identify ways to work around signal loss and still do a good job of making a decision with the data you have, when some of the data you were relying upon disappears suddenly.
Perhaps an example would be - we no longer have location data for users, but we do have time of activity, so we can presume that during daylight hours in the USA most of our activity is coming from there, things like that.
These employees are making a lot more than $250k just in base salary. Cost is probably closer to $1M each, all in. "A few million" in net cost savings isn't much for a team that probably costs $5M a year.
It would definitely be better to find another internal home (assuming the team is portable without its mother team that got cut), but sometimes these decisions are made quickly without a lot of granularity. They aren't necessarily going to find one sub-team that saves only ~1x their cost in net profit and figure out how to transplant them to another org.
He seems to have taken away the important lesson - if you're not primary you're in danger.
How in the world are you getting from $250k salary to $1M total cost? Stuff like office space and equipment/services, health insurance, HR overhead are constants per person, they don't scale up with salary. Are you assuming that some big bonus or grant package is necessary?
The trick with discussing any numbers like this are variables that none of us can know without more intimate knowledge of a firm. For example, my spouse works for an SV firm. His team is 100% WFH, 100% of the time. They have no permanently allocated office space in any of the company’s buildings anywhere in the world.
However, they’re paying out bonuses twice a year, annual (PB)RSUs, (specifically for us) around almost $30k/yr in employer contributions to health insurance and our HSA combined, music streaming subscription, and so on.
The benefits, the bonuses, the extras, they all add up and are all very company specific. I’m not saying you’re wrong by any stretch. But with the number of extra benefits, healthcare, and everything else that’s different from employer to employer, we are all just guessing.
Facebook employees make a lot more than 250k. Someone with Eric lippert’s level of experience probably makes well over 600-700k in total compensation - just see levels.fyi!
Doesnt this paragraph indicate that they were making millions of dollars in savings OVER their cost of operating?
"The PPL team in particular was at the point where we were regularly putting models into production that on net reduced costs by millions of dollars a year over the cost of the work"
I am familiar with this org from my time at Meta and I think the author paints a rosier picture of their achievements than I would. Let’s just say there is more than one side to the story.
There's something weird about cost-cutting metrics where they just aren't as impactful as they sound. FB has enough money floating around that many teams will write big systems inefficiently in the name of "moving fast" and then go back to optimize later. This is also a hack for performance reviews as you get to claim impact twice - once for making the thing, and again for saving XX million dollars (even though it's just cleaning up your own mess). Management is somewhat aware of this hack.
I would say at FB it's shockingly easy to find a 10 million dollar efficiency win if you're looking for one, and I certainly shipped multiple things in that range. This wasn't really the probability team's charter though so they wouldn't get fully rewarded for it.
The probability team had some genius engineers working hard on some very interesting long-term investments, but AFAIK they hadn't really shipped any of their core products so they were a good target for layoffs. I am shocked FB fired the engineers instead of just moving them around though...
> I am familiar with this org from my time at Meta and I think the author paints a rosier picture of their achievements than I would. Let’s just say there is more than one side to the story.
1. No need to beat a man while he is down.
2. Based on a few verifiable claims the op has made, I’m guessing you are missing or willfully ignoring some of the big picture details. I might be wrong about this, but I would certainly bet 100 push ups on it.
A man who is still kicking isn't really down. No need to talk bad about a person who left silently, but anyone who kicks up a fuzz should expect people to respond if they disagree with the fuzz.
Yeah I overlapped with that team at FB, and they were freaking amazing. That being said, I suspect that it was a Thunderdome type situation where two teams enter, one team leaves. It doesn't end up reflecting the value delivered as much as the perceived value.
I think that’s the critical word here. Perception is reality when it comes to these things. I have no idea but I’d assume decision makers do not perceive enough future value coming from this team to make it worth keeping them on. They could be wrong but no one will ever really know.
It wouldn't surprise me if someone glanced at the "Probabilistic Programming Team" name and said "I don't know what that is but I doubt we need it" and added them to the chopping block.
Moreover, there are still a lot of decisions being made that are basically down to politics rather than engineering merit, or there were while I was there.
Based on input from my friends at Meta, this is a direct side effect of the way individual performance is quantified.
Each person is required to "excel" along four axes, the two relevant ones for this story are likely "engineering excellence" and "impact"
* "Impact" means you made KPIs go up. Specifically KPIs relating to getting user eyeballs onto content / ads. Reducing costs, designing good systems, reducing developer friction all do not count towards your impact.
* "Engineering excellence" is where every other aspect of being a good developer is lumped in. Saved the org $10mm? Sorry, no impact for you, just a point in engineering excellence.
Unfortunately, as you can probably guess "impact" is the weighted the highest when determining the value of an employee. I would guess Eric and his team fell afoul of this aspect of the internal political game at Meta.
Meta is never going to solve their apple problem by cutting costs. To get back to their old numbers they need users on a platform where they make the rules, not apple.
The author made it fairly clear why he thought they were let go; they weren't in the critical path anywhere.
The only rationalization is that Wall Street is punishing meta for spending too much on R&D related to VR and cutting costs to the bone is one way to appease the market gods.
Who do you consider the head diver then? I figured the guy that lead the mapping of the caves and the rescues the head diver personally, but I'm open to understand other people's opinions.
> I'm surprised that this article doesn't even mention the ongoing, continual attacks on the civilian Ukrainian electrical grid, in a concerted effort to take it out with thousands of cruise missiles and loitering drones.
I would guess that it was an intentional decision to avoid. Grady goes to great lengths to prevent anything political in his videos, and the Ukrainian war happens to be politically charged in America currently.
The Russian war is actually one of the least political things in the US right now, there is great bi-partisan support, and it's hard to imagine anything else that garners such broad support from all but the most fringe of fringe (the left-right red-brown alliance against Ukraine is so tiny that it can barely be found).
But it is a very timely issue. Maybe in a couple years, after it's no longer timely, he will dive into it a bit more, such as with the Oroville dam failure, when there's a lot more solid retrospective data to look at.
My experience differs. The right leaning members of my family strongly support Russia and the left leaning strongly support Ukraine. It’s caused a lot of strife in my family. And I don’t think the right folks feel like they’re on the fringe. They do watch a lot of Fox, but they’re not Q folks, afaik at least.
I've seen discussions from a specific professor going back years (long before the actual invasion) talking about the dangers of exactly that. After it happened this specific person (forget his name) then started talking about how it was a consequence of the things he had been talking about for years.
You can disagree with the guy, but he's an academic who apparently has an expertise in that area, and I question whether or not you're dismissing it due to your own political bubble rather than because there may be some truth to it.
Absolute nonsense, Russia will invade what they call "little Russias" because they believe they are superior and that the people in those land belong to them, and that the resources belong to them. NATO has nothing to do with Russia's urge to invade and oppress other cultures, but NATO is a way for such countries to defend themselves. So if a professor claims to have expertise and not understand these basic facts that all former USSR states understand, then the professor is just repeating Russian propaganda.
For example, on national TV in Russia this week, they are laying the groundwork to invade Kazakhstan right now, claiming that they need the uranium for Rosatom and that the "same nazi process in Ukraine could happen in Kazakhstan," meaning that the President of Kazakhstan is refusing to be a puppet of Putin lately.
These dynamics are extremely clear to anyone who spends even a small amount of time talking to someone from Estonia, Latvia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Georgia, Chechnya, etc. But those voices are almost never heard, and instead Russian propaganda gets the air time.
That's an argument to authority, but there are many many more authorities that would disagree vehemently, and could back it up with specific statements. For example, Timothy Snyder, who is a historian specializing in the area, but really any sort of fair sampling would find that most Russian Studies professors would not be willing to uncritically repeat Kremlin propaganda like the "realist" school of international relations.
Plus, the idea that Russia had to invade a country to stop NATO expansion, if that's what's being asserted, is so farcical because countries want to join NATO to avoid getting invaded; it's a rather comical reversal. NATO expansion would stop really quickly if Russia would cease wanting to conquer neighboring countries; saying that Russia has legitimate security concerns just means that someone believes all these sovereign nations bordering Russia are not actually sovereign and should be part of Russia, which is again just repeating Russian imperialism as being right because it's right.
Plus, Putin has been pretty explicit in his writings on Ukraine, as he pretends to be a historian. Putin just wants to eliminate Ukraine as a nation and force Ukrainians to be subservient to Russians, it's all there out in the open in his writings. Denying this is kind of like trying to argue that Mein Kampf wasn't Hitler's real thoughts, and that Germany had to invade Poland and then the USSR simply for their own security concerns.
But if you can recall the name of this academic, it will be pretty quick to refute the specific claims made by other authorities in the area.
I honestly can’t comprehend how it is possible to support Russia in the US after the Cold War and Putin. I literally have a blank space in my mind when thinking about that.
I agree and my guess is this “support of russia” is really just opposition to sending billions to Ukraine. Some might argue that’s the same thing, but to many on the right it’s not.
> The $21.7 billion in Pentagon funding is “for equipment for Ukraine, replenishment of Department of Defense stocks and for continued military, intelligence and other defense support,” according to a summary table accompanying the supplemental request.
And anyway, if the USA wants to keep benefitting from their empire they have to pay the costs to maintain and expand it. No more money, the empire shrinks and other countries take what's American now.
It's so weird to me. I thought this was a part of MAGA. The world being dependent on the US military industrial complex is a core part of how the US was in any way considered to be great.
You'd think it'd be a good thing to realize how good US weapons are and for the PR that is being created.
There are lots of dark money flows from Russia to these politicians, at least for any that I have bothered to check. Fortunately they are extremely fringe at the moment. But it is far far cheaper to buy these politicians than it is to build a fighter jet, far far cheaper to buy social media influence and campaigns than it is to buy cruise missiles.
Russia's propaganda machine was caught off guard because Putin grievously miscalculated in ability to take over Ukraine, and kept the invasion so secret that there was barely any propaganda. But the propaganda campaign is kicking up again, and you can see it in some of the ghost comments on HN, even.
The USA de facto surrenders to Russia in the Ukraine war and Europe starts to buy gas from Russia again (if the USA can't protect us we have to buy protection somewhere else). Russia use European money to start buying European politicians again. Eventually they'll politically control all of Europe. Maybe not the UK.
China gets East Asia because a retreating USA must be seen with suspect there too.
The USA maybe keeps the Americas, which however are not very happy with them even now (the countries that don't speak English.) Some countries will try to jump ship to Russia and China. More colonial wars to follow.
Overall effect: reduced reach for American companies, products and services. A small side effect: we won't be here to discuss this on HN but on a site of another country/language. Eventually: switch to a different worldwide common language (France experienced that demotion around the 60s/70s - French was the previous lingua franca) and further reduction of reach. Eventually: a poorer USA.
Seen from outside the USA this doesn't look MAGA to me. The opposite of it. Hard to assess the impact on inequality, healthcare, tuition, etc. Maybe the USA will go the way of the European Nordic countries or they'll implode. I won't get into that.
Are political control of all of Europe and East Asia (a term that refers to 4-5 countries...) things the US has now?
Note that Wikipedia's statistics have China comprising just over 90% of the population of East Asia. In what possible world would China not be in control?
By analogy to the Manchus, you'd need an invasion from Japan or, I guess, Korea, that was supported by the PLA.
Political control of Europe is not a thing the US has now, but a friendly climate, yes. The avoidance of leadership capture by Russian assets, more importantly, which keeps the climate more friendly.
I disagree on that, I think they fully support Russia and Putin, meaning at this point in time Russian imperialism, and the money is just an excuse that is palatable.l to the public. These same politicians will praise and push for increases military spending that is two orders of magnitude higher, for no definite strategic purpose. The only reason for them to complain about the money right now is because they are trying to support Russia without saying they are supporting Russia.
There are plenty of folks who support “states rights” (to slavery) but don’t support fascism. They just don’t realise that they are fascist themselves (government by corporations, profit before people, find some minority group to blame for all your problems, etc)
There are also folks caught up in pro-fascist organisations simply because they want to express their general anger at the world for not living up to their expectations.
> The right leaning members of my family strongly support Russia and the left leaning strongly support Ukraine.
Yeah, I doubt anyone really supports Russia, it's more like you are projecting them NOT supporting Ukraine and wasting money in that blackhole of corruption as "supporting Russia".
"You are with us or against us" - there is nothing in between for Democrats/NPCs.
All of the above? They feel Russia is a defender of conservative values and has been treated unfairly by NATO and was pressured into a proxy war with the West.
Odd, I know lots of right folks and none support russia, they just don’t support sending more money to Ukraine, either bec they believe the accurate reports of widespread corruption (which Biden himself attested to 6 years ago) or bec they’re isolationist and don’t really believe our interventions have helped “spread freedom” anywhere. And would rather we dedicate our resources to bettering our own clearly failing country.
A similar list could be compiled by Russia for destroyed/captured Ukrainian equipment. This doesn’t negate the fact that there is rampant corruption throughout the entire Russian military.
Here’s an idea: tax the rich and pay off our debt. Don’t tax ppl and spend the money right away. Maybe stop trying to do the same things that have been clearly failing for decades. Throwing money at random problems in hopes it will solve them hasn’t worked and probably never will.
