We could get a lot more benefit if we spent that money on building infrastructure instead of blowing shit up, but I still agree. Doing the right thing and US interests aligning doesn’t seem to happen very often. I think we have to act when they do.
Most Ukraine funding is actually in the form of weapons, most of which have been sitting in warehouses in case of war with Russia. Now they get used before going obsolete and the US’s #1 rival is quickly becoming irrelevant without putting US soldiers at risk. We provide the weapons and Ukraine supplies the soldiers. I think we got the better side of that bargain.
This whole idea that the US is spending money abroad out of some kind of altruism or that we just let other countries take advantage is preposterous. It’s always money spent in furtherance of US interests. We are the wealthiest country in the world in large part because we exploit the labor and resources of the rest of the planet.
Down payment on a bribe.
Some people just want to watch the world burn.
Their interests aren’t generally all that aligned, so that helps. It’s pretty obvious that the garbage coming out of the cable news networks is at a minimum deeply sympathetic to American corporate interests, if not straight up misinformation.
From a US perspective, I see these tactics being used far more extensively by wealthy individuals and corporate interests than I do Chinese interests. Unfortunately, our government and especially our politicians are often directly involved in spreading misinformation and suppressing the truth. We need strategies that function outside of government to close the gaps between reality and public perception.
A few years ago when I was working from home and on the phone all day, I much preferred my landline. My cell service was decent, but the landline was better. No dropped calls, no static or garbled audio (from my side anyways), and no latency causing me to talk over other callers. I always hated getting on calls when I was remote from my home office.
That’s the only reason I’ve ever done much of anything in shell script. As a network administrator I’ve worked many network appliances running on some flavor of Unix and the one language I can count on to be always available is bash. It has been well worth knowing for just that reason.