This makes sense to me, I was thinking of the situation where I’m from, where you don’t get much more than a pat on the back and the good feels of helping out when you donate blood.

It’s honestly kind of insane to me that there is a system in place to get desperate people to literally sell their blood for money… No one should ever be made that desperate :(

Ok, so systems for donating blood are different in different places, I get that. Where I’m from, the only benefit you get from donating blood is a thumbs up, pat on the back, and a popsicle or a coffee cup or some other small gift.

Some people just say to lie for every question.

People say this? I’ve never heard anyone donating blood say this, and I personally would say that all precautions taken by the professionals that collect blood donations should be taken very seriously. It’s not, at the end of the day, up to me to be the judge of what is or isn’t a condition serious enough that my blood shouldn’t be accepted. I’ll give the professionals as much information as possible, and then let them judge whether or not it is safe to give my blood to someone else.

I would never even dream of lying in order to donate blood, when that could end up actively harming someone, and I honestly cannot see the argument in favour of doing that. The whole point of donating blood is helping people.

Exactly! It’s choosing not to do so which makes some companies special!

Unclear to me at what stage the “self-guided” part kicks in here. I can imagine several cases where these can be extremely useful though: One is simply having a self-guidance mechanism that can be turned on at the final approach to when signal can fail due to proximity to the ground. Another case altogether could be to let a munition loiter, and then just activate a self guided attack once a target is found. Also, I could imagine that they could let a drone “taxi” itself to a loitering position before a pilot takes over.

Combine some of these, and suddenly a single pilot can effectively fly a dozen drones at the same time, only needing to check in on a loitering drone, and select targets before checking the next drone. If a drone is used to hit a target, three more can be en route to the location, and the pilot can just take over control as they arrive.

Seeing as one of the disadvantages of drones is that they’re relatively slow, this could massively multiply the amount of damage a single pilot can do!

In case you don’t follow Norwegian politics very closely: There are several parties that are pushing for us to give 10-100 times this (new) amount. We probably (unfortunately) won’t see that happen within the next couple weeks, but there seems to be political consensus that more is coming, but that the details need to be ironed out.

I mentioned in another comment that Norway could literally match US donations so far in the war dollar for dollar if the decision is made to really start tapping in to the wealth fund. I’ll be voting for a party that pushes for that.

Of course, that’s why I specified (in terms of dollars). I guess my line of thinking is that if Norway declared tomorrow that they had dumped 150 billion EUR into buying weapons, and would buy from whoever could deliver the fastest, we would probably see an increase in weapons manufacturing on European soil the likes of which we haven’t seen since WWII. That’s what we need right now.

The second element (which I honestly think is at least as important) is showing the rest of Europe how it’s done. By pushing ahead and doing something symbolic like immediately picking up the slack from the US (in dollars) we can hopefully shake other countries into recognising how high of a priority this should be. It may also help people shake off the “what are we going to do” feeling, by showing what we’re going to do: Prioritise this above all else.

While this is great, I’m still firmly in the camp that we are spending an embarrassingly low amount on both our own military, Ukraine, and up-arming ourselves and allies in general.

Norway has made an absurd amount of money on the increase in gas prices due to the war, and the rule regarding the wealth fund was put in place to ensure the benefit of future generations. I’m still young enough (< 30) that the latter to some extent applies to me. There is no better investment for future generations than ensuring that we, Ukraine, and our allies, are armed to the teeth asafp.

To be absolutely clear: A quick search tells me that the EU and member states have donated a total of 145 billion USD to Ukraine. Norway has the resources to on its own match that - dollar for dollar - and it would cost ≈ 7 % of our “wealth fund”. This makes the notion of giving donations measured in the single-digit billions absolutely embarrassing.

Norway has the ability to stand up now and show that we’re good for something. We can pick up the slack from the paused US support (in terms of dollars) tomorrow if our politicians choose to do so. If no one leads the way we are doomed to fail. I believe that Norway has the opportunity to show we mean business, and that failure to do so will go down in history as a massive mistake. My vote this autumn is going to whatever party that best understands this.

To follow that up: I think the only thing that has a chance of shaking the American people out of this craze is that the trump admin crashes and burns the US economy on a level that hasn’t been seen for 100 years. Something so bad people are forced to remember what happened that time they elected a populist dictator’s puppet for president.

The danger with that is what we’ve seen before (and which the people planning stuff like Project 2025 may be banking on): A broken economy breeds populism and fascism. In that sense, there’s the paradoxical danger that trump running everything to the ground may push even more people into the maga-camp.

To look at the positive side: Even if the US lifts all sanctions, the major gas exports from Russia were through pipelines going to Europe, and that won’t be affected. Also, if I remember correctly, the US is a net exporter of petroleum products, which means they likely won’t be importing that much from russia even if sanctions are lifted.

Finally, the EU has a bunch of sanctions in place that hit anyone trying to help russia circumvent EUA sanctions. If the US lifts sanctions, they might actually start getting hit by some of these secondary effects. The more severely trump fucks up the US, the harder the eventual backlash will hopefully be.

Not a guitar player, but I’ve done my fair share of climbing, which is quite punishing to the skin on your fingertips.

My immediate answer is a clear no. The skin on your fingertips adapts very quickly, and hardens within a week or two of being worn down regularly. If anything, you want to make sure that you keep your skin well cleaned (helps it heal faster). Some people have good experience using moisturiser, and say that helps their skin recover more quickly. I’ve also known people who will carefully sand down the skin on their fingertips if it starts getting too hard, or if they haven’t climbed for a while and it starts peeling (usually starts happening after 1-2 weeks of low/no exposure).

Regardless, the rawness of the fingertips is a quickly passing issue for people who have not worn down their fingertips sufficiently in recent time.

You can check out some of these skin products which are designed for climbers. Some are meant to improve skin healing time, and some are supposed to help harden your skin. If you want to use anything, I suggest something like that instead of glue.

This is what we need to see more of across all of Europe: Defence production contracts large enough that producers build out new production lines and hire more people. This only gets better once we’ve increased production capacity tenfold. I want to see Europe pumping out at least 2000 MBTs and 5 000 000 155mm a year until russia learns.

The EU is inwardly inclusive. It doesn’t give a shit about Africa for example.

I honestly don’t buy into this. With the amount of resources that are spent every year on anything from building schools to distributing clean water and vaccines, saying “we don’t give a shit” is a bit of a stretch.

Regardless: I don’t buy into the idea that the EU, because it consists of democracies that respect mutual international agreements and don’t invade each other, has some kind of “obligation” to treat other countries with any more decency than they treat us. Put simply, the EU has gotten its shit together the past 70 years, and pulled huge amounts of people out of poverty. There wasn’t a bunch of international aid (outside of that coming from the US) to help us. I don’t buy into the idea that the EU now has some “responsibility” to pull the rest of the world out of poverty as well.

By all means, we should do what we can to help people, because that’s the right thing to do, and gives mutual long-term benefits. But accusing the EU of somehow being “unfair” for doing more for its members than other countries, or for being more involved in a war on its border than one on another continent simply doesn’t hold up. The primary responsibility of the EU, and any country, is first and foremost to the security and wellbeing of its citizens.

Besides the whole “russia will collapse in a couple months” rhetoric that’s been floating around the past couple years, it remains a fact that there is a limit to how long russia can keep spending the way it is.

They are operating on a war-time economy, which more or less by definition is not sustainable in the long term. Also, with the way russia works, and the fact that putins victory plan seems to be “project the image that we can keep going forever in order to break Ukraine/support for Ukraine”, I think it’s likely that if the russian economy breaks, it’s going to break quite suddenly and quite hard.

With that said, I don’t know if Russia can keep going for six more months or six more years (of course, I hope for the former). Regardless, they will break sooner or later. Until that time comes, all of us in Europe need to keep ramping up military production, support for Ukraine, and sanctions against russia.

Which is a comparison that makes complete sense. When you say that someone is leading the way, you are clearly referring to them being at the forefront at the time when they were leading the way. Any system that was a trail blazer 100+ years ago should be outdated by now, unless progress stopped or went backwards in the meantime.