I can't see any meaningful parallels between the current war and WWI. For one thing, people in Russia (as of today) aren't literally running out of bread.

No, forcing the existence of a new aggressively expansionist jewish state did that.

If the war ended tomorrow, and Russia withdrew from Ukraine, Putin would still be enjoying ~50% organic support among Russians.

Just like Trump has a ~35% approval floor of complete idiots standing behind him as he sends inflation and gas prices and cost of living through the roof...

Putin enjoys fairly wide actual support for generally developing the country over his tenure. Whether someone else would have done better is not the hypothetical people are engaging with.

Did this announcement come from the military side of things, or the MAGA side of things?

Objectively, you don't need a house with a lawn and a back yard to have children, and have them grow up healthy and successful.

If in 19 years as a SWE, you haven't saved up a lot of money, you are one or more of:

1. Incredibly unfortunate in the jobs you've been taking.

2. Have made some incredibly bad investments.

3. Are spending like a sailor, burning every dollar as it comes in.

4. Have gone through one or more absolute life catastrophes.

... Then yes, you are also likely to have financial problems if you're out of work for two years.

I don't mean to say that these are incredibly uncommon. They aren't, especially in people chasing the startup carrot and ending up with nothing but the brown, sticky bit.

But I think it's fair to say that a large number of people in the profession should have managed to avoid all four. (With #3 being the main 'avoidable' culprit, and with #4 being largely unavoidable.)

Consider that somehow, people making less than a quarter of our prevailing wages manage to live... Fairly comfortably.

You are, of course, the sole free-thinking, unpropagandized person in the world.

We don't see a lot of food shortages these days, but with climate change fucking with agriculture sufficiently, regular famines in the global south might make a comeback... Or might not, if population growth and degrowth projections solve that problem before crop yields are seriously impacted.

His OKR for IC contributions on top of his management responsibilities won't fill itself.

"The poor will always pay for it" is a thought-terminating cliche that is often trotted out in support of the status quo (or some mythical past status quo).

How do you know that past status quo isn't actually worse for them than the direction things are trending? Do you think we somehow stumbled upon some global maximum for them [1], and any deviation from that, in any direction is going to make things worse for them?

[1] In spite of, as you say, shit flowing downhill.

I've no doubt that the short-term gains during a bull market on all sorts of garbage are significant.

They all manage to get by without the leverage of 11 carrier fleet groups. You know, trade between equals, and not subjects.

WW2 was largely driven by the personalities involved. Roosevelt really, really, really hated fascism, and was doing everything in his power to stick it in their wheel spokes. Had the industrialist coup succeeded, or had Hoover or Landon won, it's quite likely that neither would have done much to oppose either Japan or Germany.

WW1 was also driven by principles, as opposed to pragmatism. Wilson found more alignment with the anglosphere than he did with the central powers - and after watching the most destructive war in history go on for four years, was keen on embarking on his League of Nations project. Practically, there was no reason for the US to not maintain neutrality in it.

Security-wise, two oceans, vassal neighbours and two thousand nuclear missiles have it covered.

It would mean that someone can't gank an account from under you while you're using it, but you could recover it after a week if you lose access to your email.