There's a difference between "siding with Russia" and siding with negotiated peace.
Many people seem to think that the US, and to a lesser extent the EU, should fund this war indefinitely. However, the US clearly does not benefit from a direct war with Russia, and while we may gain from a proxy war, choosing not to fund it does not equate to “siding with Russia.”
Negotiated peace was what Russia and Ukraine had before, and Russia unilaterally broke it.
That is why the focus now is on security guarantees, which the U.S. is refusing so far. Without those, anything negotiated is a gift to Russia, specifically the gift of time to regroup and re-arm for another attack later on.
Lasting peace is not created by concessions, it is created when instigators believe they have more to lose than to gain from further violence.
It is an absurd position that the US should be on the hook to indefinitely pay for any war anywhere in the world forever, and if they attempt to negotiate peace while pulling out of that war that they are siding with the opposition.
The problem is not that the U.S. is trying to negotiate for peace, the problem is that the administration is doing a hilariously bad job of it by giving up all leverage right off the bat.
We don't have any leverage against Russia. America has no appetite to fight them directly. If Ukraine were more effective at hurting Russia where it counts, then we might have leverage but the last few years have shown that they are not capable of that.
US should be on the hook to indefinitely pay for a particular war that resulted out of a diplomatic agreement (Budapest memorandum) that effectively prevented Ukraine from defending itself by making it surrender its nukes in exchange for nebulous security guarantees that weren't honored by US.
I think it's a fine rule of thumb but what does Putin have to gain from negotiating with Zelenskyy who he is seen as a Western puppet orchestrated as legacy of US intel agency involvement? (Which we admitted is true…)
People in this thread are completely incapable of seeing any legitimacy in any Russian concerns about Ukraine.
Whether someone's concerns are legitimate is in the eye of the beholder, but actions can be directly observed. Unilateral violent invasion must not become a legitimate tactic again. It was the norm for centuries, and excluding it resulted in the fastest rise in global living standards in history--including in the U.S. and Russia.
Putin could have kicked back and enjoyed his dacha like other less powerful dictators do all over the world, but no, he had to write a "scientific" treatise about Ruski Mir and how the Ukraine isn't actually a thing. He wants a legacy.
Well, he got it and whatever happens in the war, Russia is cooked. It's never coming back from this.
It will either fracture from the war going badly, or it will become a vassal state of China, and ironically, perhaps the US, the way things are going with the White House these days.
The other powerful “dictators” get dragged through the streets or hanged for daring to enjoy an economic system outside the US dollar. Putin knows this and so should you.
> That is why the focus now is on security guarantees, which the U.S. is refusing so far.
This seems obvious to me, but is apparently not obvious to many here.... America (no country really) can guarantee Ukrainian security without risking WWIII, and frankly there's no reason to. At the end of the day, from a non-Ukrainian standpoint, it doesn't really matter who administers the land that today is Ukraine.
When the “negotiated peace” is “Russia gets everything they want, you give us every dime and your treasury, and we don’t promise to actually help you when Russia attacks again after we let them re-arm for as long as they like”…. That isn’t a peace deal, it’s virtually unconditional surrender.
Under what circumtances is the US allowed to pull out of a war they didn't start, which does not directly involve any US interests, in which we have already invested $110bn? Never? Not until we spend another $500bn we don't have?
No one is arguing that the US isn't allowed to pull out.
But "negotiating" a treaty with the other side and then claiming that that treaty is the final word on the war is atrocious. That's what's crazy. Not ending US involvement, but trying to say that Ukraine must stop fighting.
Now, I also think the US should keep supporting Ukraine, but that's a totally different topic.
This isn’t pulling out. It’s embarassing an ally on the world stage while acting like the spoiled toddler and Putin asset that he is. This is not normal. This isn’t even bad. This is outside politics and just flat out treasonous.
The US has sided with Russia against European and Western civilisation. Don’t understate what we are witnessing. The betrayal of civilisation is almost complete.
Yes, there's a difference, and what Trump is doing is clearly siding with Russia. His "negotiated peace" is neither negotiated nor peace. It's a surrender.
You don't have to support Ukraine indefinitely; only until Russia stops. Your options are to support Ukraine until Russia stops, or to surrender until Russia stops.
No. Not at all. There will come a point when Russia will stop the war because either Russia is completely exhausted and on the verge of collapse, or Putin is dead or removed from power. And chances are those two will go together.
Depends on who does the removing. It could go a lot of different ways, but even if it's someone from his own government who is hostile to the west, they're still likely to use it as an excuse to end the war.
It's mind blowing to me to see the left being the war mongers now. That used to be the mantle of the right, but hey, here we are.
The arguments I see for the US staying involved are the same hand wavy ones used in Vietnam - "better to fight them over in Asia then in America". It was a weak argument then, and it's a weak argument now.
The people that helped fan the flames of this war don't give one crap about Ukraine. What they care about is the neocon policy of "do anything to keep America's rival weak". So funding a war that Ukraine pays the price for works just fine.
The truth is that the war is going to end eventually and it's not going to be Russia capitulating. So rather than a hundred thousand more dead might as well find a solution.
I do not think you can compare this conflict with Vietnam. US army went into Vietnam, while Ukraine is fighting a US rival with their own military, but they do use US provided equipment.
General public in Europe didn't see US as actively involved, or at least didn't see it until the new administration said it would end the conflict. This is when Trump administration started getting into "talks with Russia" and offering Ukraine "mineral deals". While US might have tried to do that even before, it was not discussed openly by presidents.
This war is going to flame out eventually. Lessons learned in this one will be used for the next one, which is going to hurt even more.
> There's a difference between "siding with Russia" and siding with negotiated peace.
There is absolutely no difference, when the US is negotiating that peace only with Russia, without Ukraine in the room.
With Trump administration officials not able to name a single compromise they’ve asked from Russia.
If the “negotiated peace” is “I asked the country that invaded you what they want, and you must do everything they asked for”, that’s not negotiation.
I will never understand how people can be so quick to abandon independence nations, and are so willing to bow to dictators. You would cheer Chamberlain submitting to Hitler as he launches an invasion as a momentous day for peace. You would be wrong then, and you are wrong now.
Exactly... so what's the purpose of continuing the fight and killing Russian and Ukrainian men for no reason? This forum used to be a strong supporter of men's rights, but apparently these disappear once we dehumanize them via international relations. There's literally no reason for any individual Russian or Ukrainian man to die right now, since we all agree that no territory is being gained or lost.
First, VCs don't get paid when "dogshit startups" get acquired, they get paid when they have true outlier successes. It's the only way to reliably make money in the VC business.
Second, want to give any examples of "shitty, hype-based compan[ies]" (I assume you mean companies with no real revenue traction) getting bought out for "a few billion".
Third, investment banks facilitate sales of assets, they don't buy them themselves.
Maybe sit out the conversation if you don't even know the basics of how VC, startups, or banking work?
Not my experience. I’ve tried (and am still trying) texts and not once I was able to have it just work. Constantly messages not showing up, accounts not loading, or something else missing. I’ve been submitting heaps of feedback to the Texts team.
It looks great but feels very alpha/beta to me, and I decided to not renew my subscription
I'm a pretty avid Texts user, and I both agree and don't… as much as I ~regularly run into hiccups of some kind, I feel they're pretty inevitable with this sort of thing, and the parts of Texts that _could_ be stable definitely are. The overall product feels polished and snappy IMO.
I've not had a day without issues. I don't know if this is something wrong with my account (instagram), but it's so unreliable that I can't trust that what I see in Texts is actually how the conversation looks like. Funnily enough, I ran Beeper in parallel as backup.
Weird things from a message missing in between other messages, new messages not showing up at all, messages I send not arriving, etc.
(The iOS app is on a completely different level with it not even refreshing my messages most of the time until I disable and enable certain accounts again. But it's in TestFlight so I'll treat it as a beta and not expect too much polish yet)
I've religiously submitted feedback constantly to them, together with console logs and error dumps, but now my trial expired and I just can't justify paying for it in the current state :/
"it clashes with deep values of the people who aren't shareholders, but are no doubt vested in the product the company produces, mainly the customers. It ignores their needs completely because they don't own stock."
Presumably companies generate value for shareholders by selling things to customers and generating profits, which makes customers the ultimate beneficiaries. What companies are you thinking of that ignores their customers' needs completely and are still quite successful and valuable for shareholders?
"quit or stfu", not being able to meaningfully bargain at place of employment or anywhere else, is not dignified. If you got better solution for this than unions, fine, just say.
That's not what I said nor was responding to. The GP asserted that companies have a fiduciary duty to avoid unionizing, and my counterargument is that such activity could be illegal which is actively detrimental to a company's fiduciary duty.
Unions almost never negotiate in the long-term interest of a business, they're collectively overly-short-term-focused cash/productivity drags on a business. If unions were truly long-term focused they'd be negotiating things like employee equity, but you almost never see that. Ceteris paribus non union shops are more long-term focused and trend towards better long-term outcomes.
> Ceteris paribus non union shops are more long-term focused and trend towards better long-term outcomes.
Do you have any source for this? It seems hard to believe but I haven't been able to find any studies yet. The best I've found so far says unionization has no impact on business survival: https://www.princeton.edu/~davidlee/wp/unionbf.pdf.
I'm also skeptical that you could really study this effectively, since non-unionized employees tend to benefit when unions are formed elsewhere in their industry. You'd need to compare a group of companies that unionized against a group of similar companies in the same time and place that didn't unionize and also were completely unaffected by the mass unionization of the first population.
That’s a lot of hand waving around an assertion conspicuously missing any supporting logic or data. Do you have any citations? Say, for example, a study comparing the actions of unions versus senior management over time? It’s not hard to find examples of unions accepting cuts to help the future of a business during a bad economic downturn, or executives focused on juicing the share price before they sell, so I think something rigorous would be better than trading vague generalities.
Also I'm not sure what "supporting logic" is, I presented my logic and you can disagree with it if you want (usually using different logic, which you haven't presented), but there's no such thing as "supporting logic".
That’s paywalled but the abstract is talking about stock market pricing, not the health of the company. Lower equity would make intuitive sense if workers have better compensation, but that doesn’t mean the business is less competitive or likely to survive.
> I don't think you understand what the price of a stock means ...
Well, the context here was your assertion that unions don’t act in the “long-term interest of a business”. Now, most people understand that share prices are bets on the future value, but also that it’s not a direct relationship because there’s an inherent tension between long-term and short-term interests. That plays out in questions about how much or whether to pay dividends (which has seen a big multigenerational shift in investor preferences), and whether a move which raises share prices is a long-term detriment.
We’ve seen a lot of the latter discussed here lately with tech companies doing broad layoffs to satisfy activist investors, despite research suggesting that companies making unforced layoffs tend to underperform over the long term.
What's the principle? I should get anything I want for free as long as I can get away with it? I shouldn't have to pay for anything if I don't want to?
Genuinely curious what the principled argument is here.
Many people seem to think that the US, and to a lesser extent the EU, should fund this war indefinitely. However, the US clearly does not benefit from a direct war with Russia, and while we may gain from a proxy war, choosing not to fund it does not equate to “siding with Russia.”