Mods, perhaps a weekly post like this would be beneficial? Lowering the bar to entry with some available support and helping to keep converts.
SineIraEtStudio
joined 8 months ago
3 Buyan-class Corvettes Cost (yr. 2016): 27B rubles. 65R:$1 US (2016). Each Corvette costs ~$138M US (2016).
Added context from OP article: "the fire had "disabled" the ship and that "its means of communication and automation were "completely destroyed."
OP Article Text:
The Russian missile ship Serpukhov, which was docked off the exclave of Kaliningrad on the Baltic Sea, was set on fire on April 8, Ukraine's military intelligence claimed.
In a post on Telegram, the agency said that the fire had "disabled" the ship and that "its means of communication and automation were "completely destroyed." The military intelligence also shared a video appearing to show a fire breaking out on the ship.
A source from Ukraine's military intelligence confirmed to the Kyiv Independent that its operatives were behind the fire. It was the first such attack on Russian naval assets in the Baltic Sea.
In recent months, Ukraine has intensified its attacks on Russia's Black Sea Fleet targets in occupied Crimea, successfully targeting several ships and forcing some Russian vessels to redeploy to safer waters.
Dmytro Pletenchuk, a spokesperson for Ukraine's navy, said on March 30 that the Russian Navy had withdrawn nearly all its major ships from ports in occupied Crimea as a result.
According to the website of the Russian Navy, the Serpukhov is a Buyan-M missile corvette, and is 74 meters long (242 feet), and contains a variety of different weapons systems.
Russian authorities announced earlier on April 8 that the Russian ice navigation vessel Katerina Velikaya caught fire while undergoing repairs at the shipyard Dalzavod in the far eastern city of Vladivostok.
One person was killed, and three others were injured, Russian authorities said, adding that the circumstances of the fire were under investigation.
The cost of one “Orlan-10” drone is estimated between $87,000 and $120,000, as reported by the UK's Royal United Services Institute for Defence and Security Studies.
The 7 listed aircraft are from the Yeysk air base only.
For the curious:
The Beriev Be-200 Altair is a jet-powered amphibious flying boat designed for fire fighting, search and rescue operations, and maritime patrol, as well as freight and passenger transportation.
Relevant Section, with example implementation:
With an annual budget of roughly $2 million, the program saves Eugene $14 million annually in ambulance trips and emergency room costs, plus an estimated $8.5 million in public safety costs—and has successfully diverted thousands from the criminal legal system. Of the estimated 17,700 calls CAHOOTS responded to in 2019, teams requested police backup only 311 times.
311/17700=~1.75%
Article Text Below:
What Happens When We Send Mental Health Providers Instead Of Police
For Daniel Prude, Patrick Warren Sr., and Ricardo Muñoz, 911 calls led to tragedy. They are three of at least 97 people killed just last year after police responded to reports of someone “behaving erratically or having a mental health crisis.”
Like Prude, Warren Sr., and Muñoz, nearly a quarter of the more than 6,000 people fatally shot by police since 2015 were experiencing a mental health crisis. Today, a person having a mental health crisis is more likely to encounter law enforcement than they are to get any medical support or treatment, making jails the largest behavioral health facilities in the country. Chicago’s Cook County Jail, the Los Angeles County Jail, and New York’s Rikers Island jail complex each hold more people with serious mental health conditions than any dedicated treatment facility in the country.
Numerous deadly encounters prove that police are ill-equipped to safely and effectively serve people experiencing mental health crises, yet police have been the default first responders for a range of social issues. And as with so many aspects of our broken criminal legal system, Black people become victims in disproportionate numbers. A study published in January 2021 found that police are more likely to shoot and kill Black men who exhibit mental health conditions than white men who display similar behaviors.
Advocates across the country have called for officials to develop services that curb police involvement in mental health crises, and community organizations have led the way. Approaches vary, but a growing number of cities are starting programs that rely on first responders who aren’t police, such as counselors or social workers, to respond to calls that involve mental health crises and substance use.
Eugene, Oregon, is home to one of the oldest such civilian response programs in the country, launched in 1989. The Crisis Assistance Helping Out on the Streets (CAHOOTS) program, operated by Eugene’s White Bird Clinic, pairs a medic with a crisis worker to respond to 911 and non-emergency calls involving mental health, homelessness, and substance use. The teams are trained to provide crisis intervention, counseling, basic emergency medical care, transportation, and referrals to services.
With an annual budget of roughly $2 million, the program saves Eugene $14 million annually in ambulance trips and emergency room costs, plus an estimated $8.5 million in public safety costs—and has successfully diverted thousands from the criminal legal system. Of the estimated 17,700 calls CAHOOTS responded to in 2019, teams requested police backup only 311 times.
The program has served as a model for places like Denver and Olympia, Washington, with many other cities looking to create their own programs. Of course, every community is different, so a one-size-fits-all approach will not work. Eugene, for example, is more than 80 percent white. White Bird Clinic Director of Consulting Tim Black recognizes that residents have a “healthy enough relationship” with police, so they may feel more comfortable calling 911 for crisis response incidents than people who live in communities that are overpoliced.
Denver’s Support Team Assisted Response (STAR) program, which launched as a pilot in June 2020, similarly sends health care workers to respond to incidents related to mental health, poverty, homelessness, and substance use. As of May 2021, STAR had successfully responded to 1,323 calls, none of which resulted in injury, arrest, or a request for police backup. Denver’s police chief has said the program “saves lives” and “prevents tragedies.”
But the program faces criticism from community members and advocates, who have said that responses have been “clinical” and that responders often can’t relate personally to the people they serve. STAR is staffed by social workers who are predominantly white, and advocates envision a community-driven program that includes “providers who share lived experiences and identities with Denver’s diverse population.”
Polling shows that Democrats, independents, and Republicans alike support programs that replace police with trained experts in situations involving behavioral or mental health crises. But residents, community organizations, behavioral health professionals, and others need to be involved in the creation and implementation of any crisis response program. And stakeholders need to ensure that these programs don’t perpetuate inequities based on who they serve, which calls get diverted, and how first responders work to resolve a situation.
With American Rescue Plan (ARP) funding, local governments have an opportunity to make real investments in health-first approaches. Denver has already committed to using ARP dollars to enable an expansion of STAR, and other cities—including Charlotte, Long Beach, Phoenix, and San Francisco—are funding similar programs through ARP. Cities need to create and implement programs that actually promote public safety—and save lives.
Interesting article. Relevant section below:
The HUR thinks it can disable the bridge soon. “We will do it in the first half of 2024,” one official told the Guardian, adding that Kyrylo Budanov, the head of the main directorate of intelligence, already had “most of the means to carry out this goal”. He was following a plan approved by Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, to “minimise” Russia’s naval presence in the Black Sea.
Over the past five months Ukraine has sunk seven landing boats and large ships belonging to Moscow’s Black Sea fleet. The latest, the Sergei Kotov, capsized in March after a night-time raid involving 10 Ukrainian Magura V5 amphibious drones packed with explosives as it was on patrol south of the Kerch bridge. HUR officials indicated this was a “shaping operation” prior to another attack on the crossing.
Another interesting piece of the article:
Pro-Kremlin Russian channels last month released an intercepted phone call in which high-ranking German military officials discussed the capabilities of Taurus. The experts estimated that 10 to 20 missiles would probably be enough to destroy the bridge.
Tldr: Advanced western equipment takes so long to reach Ukraine that Russia adapts to it's potential capabilities before it's deployed.
Relevant section:
Unnamed Ukrainian military officials said there is an unfortunate pattern of the West finally sending weapons when they are "no longer relevant" for the current battlefield dynamics, Politico reported on April 3, citing sources.
While Ukraine's Western allies have provided tens of billions of military aid and equipment, some of the more advanced systems pledged, such as the F-16 fighter jet, have been slow-walked and have yet to reach the battlefield. At the same time, Russia has been steadily adapting its defensive capabilities to counter new Western weapons as they arrive.
An international coalition to train Ukrainian pilots on F-16s was launched in the summer of 2023. Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark, and Norway have also pledged to supply Ukraine with dozens of U.S.-made fourth-generation jets.
Yet, the unnamed Ukrainian military officials told Politico that the "F-16s were needed in 2023; they won't be right for 2024."
The official explained that Russia has been testing its air defense posture and has likely deployed its radar and anti-air missiles in a manner that would render much of the F-16s' offensive capabilities ineffective.
Tldr: Germany took over control of the bank from Russia, so US removed it from the sanctions list.
Relevant section:
Germany-based Ost-West Handelsbank has been removed from the list, according to the information on the Treasury's website. The positions with names under which the bank used to operate earlier – VTB Bank Deutschland and VTB Bank Europe – were also struck down.
The U.S. announced extensive anti-Russian sanctions that also targeted VTB Bank at the offset of Moscow's full-scale invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022.
In the wake of the sanctions, German authorities wrested control of the Frankfurt-based subsidiary from its Russian parent in April 2022 and appointed a special representative to help run it.
VTB Europe officially changed its name to Ost-West Handelsbank in November 2023.
Tldr: "while discussing science on social media has many professional and societal benefits (and has been a lot of fun), increasing the citation rate of a scientist’s papers is likely not among them."
Abstract:
Multiple studies across a variety of scientific disciplines have shown that the number of times that a paper is shared on Twitter (now called X) is correlated with the number of citations that paper receives. However, these studies were not designed to answer whether tweeting about scientific papers causes an increase in citations, or whether they were simply highlighting that some papers have higher relevance, importance or quality and are therefore both tweeted about more and cited more. The authors of this study are leading science communicators on Twitter from several life science disciplines, with substantially higher follower counts than the average scientist, making us uniquely placed to address this question. We conducted a three-year-long controlled experiment, randomly selecting five articles published in the same month and journal, and randomly tweeting one while retaining the others as controls. This process was repeated for 10 articles from each of 11 journals, recording Altmetric scores, number of tweets, and citation counts before and after tweeting. Randomization tests revealed that tweeted articles were downloaded 2.6–3.9 times more often than controls immediately after tweeting, and retained significantly higher Altmetric scores (+81%) and number of tweets (+105%) three years after tweeting. However, while some tweeted papers were cited more than their respective control papers published in the same journal and month, the overall increase in citation counts after three years (+7% for Web of Science and +12% for Google Scholar) was not statistically significant (p > 0.15). Therefore while discussing science on social media has many professional and societal benefits (and has been a lot of fun), increasing the citation rate of a scientist’s papers is likely not among them.
Relevant part of the article:
in an investor call following the announcement of Saber's departure, Embracer CEO Lars Wingefors implied the KOTOR remake may still be a long way away. The game has undergone a long limbo, having been announced in 2021 after three years of development at Aspyr, paused indefinitely due to lack of progress, and revived again at Saber Interactive. There have been minimal official updates since.
From the article:
Voters who chose "uninstructed delegation" in Wisconsin's presidential primary Tuesday more than doubled the 20,000 votes President Joe Biden won the state by in 2020, sending warning signs for his reelection chances in the battleground state.
Voters displeased with Biden's handling of the Israel-Hamas war organized into a "Listen to Wisconsin" campaign that mirrored other states like Michigan and Minnesota, where a similar "uncommitted" option took about 13% and 19% of the vote in the Democratic primary, respectively.
In Wisconsin, "uninstructed delegation" represented 9% of the vote on the Democratic side as of 10:15 p.m., taking about 42,269 votes. Around 408,610 voters have selected Biden as their choice, or 88%. About 3% voted for Minnesota congressman Dean Phillips, who has ended his campaign and endorsed Biden.
After the arrival of Europeans, native American dogs almost completely disappeared, leaving a minimal genetic legacy in modern dog populations.
Source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7116273/
I did not do a very deep dive but it looks like there were "domesticated" dogs in the Americans prior to Europeans, but they were almost completely replaced by their European counterparts. This leads me to believe the European versions were far superior for the intended usage. If the American version was indeed significantly inferior for their intended purposes, they may have been at or below the effectiveness/usefulness levels of semi-domesticated animals, like foxes.
Edit: The_Sasswagon brings up a good point about the effects of potential European diseases on American dogs.