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For real. The majority of the price difference isn’t materials or workplace safety but privatized vs state enterprise. A sizeable chunk of the $5000 price difference is the cut that goes to the shareholders of General Dynamics. It’s the same reason the Chinese J20 costs so much less than the F35 and had dramatically less production issues.

Russia only had a privatized defense industry from the early 1990s until in 2007 they decided privatization of certain industries was a mistake. They undid the privatization of their aerospace, defense, high tech manufacturing, and key heavy industries. It’s taken almost a decade to repair the damage of privatization and rebuild capacity but we are now seeing the fruits of those efforts.

In Russia their 155mm artillery shells are currently manufactured by KBP Instrument Design Bureau, a wholey owned subsidiary of the Russia state owned Rostec holding corporation.

In the US all their 155mm artillery shells are manufactured at the US government owned Scranton Army Ammunition Plant, which is operated by the private sector defense contractor General Dynamics. That same facility used to be able to produce over a million 155mm field artillery shells per month back in the 1940s before modern factory automation and even today claims to have the ability to ramp back to that capacity (at a cost) with only a couple months notice. As part of the US propaganda blitz, BusinessInsider recently did a PR and tour video of the plant.

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Let’s not kid ourselves by calling it gimmicks or overly complicated. It is the same hardware and methods for the Russian military. It also isn’t security through obscurity. Everyone switched to software defined radios for their communication and radar for a reason.

There are methods to combat such jamming but Ukrainian forces don’t have the training or capability. NATO can’t just magicially make the Ukrainian military into one with the capabilities of military super powers like the US, China, or Russia. The US and Russia both have the capacity, infact the Russian military is extremely capable when it comes to the electronic warfare and countering electronic warfare because their military has to be on par capability wise with the US military.

Instead we have sad stories like what’s left of the Ukrainian air force powering down all the electronics in their aircraft as they approach the front line because they have no way to detect and counter Russian electronic capabilities.

The worst part is all the NATO countries are stripping the Active Protection System hardware out of Challenger, Lepord, and Abrams battle tanks before they are delivered to Ukraine. Everyone is paranoid about Russian electronic warfare learning how to jam the radar systems those NATO nations have installed in their tanks. Russian tanks currently on the front line have modern APS hardware while Ukraine is getting battle tanks that are intentionally crippled by NATO.

Another funny and fkd up thing is what will happen with the F16 fighters Ukraine is about to have. The US has stripped out the counter measure hardware that makes an old airframe like the F16 more survivable in an environment with modern anti air missiles being fired at it. Those F16s are going to get turned by Russia into wreckage just as fast as they did with all these NATO battle tanks.

blood for the blood god!

It’s too funny because the F16 doesn’t stand a chance against Russian air defenses. The US and NATO are giving Ukraine F16 fighters undoubtedly stripped down to the feature set reserved for buyers like Pakistan. They will lack any modern advanced electronics equipment to keep them from getting easily shot down. It’s an old fighter at this point and without the latest upgrade packages is going to be cannon fodder for Russian mobile anti air, which is actually quite advanced.

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This is too fkd up and the news article really avoided talking about who is doing this:

You will find no better expert. Your guide is an urban policy professional, card-carrying City Commissioner overseeing a municipal department with an annual budget over $500m, and cofounder of San Francisco’s largest neighborhood association.

It’s a PR stunt by a political action group to stoke even more of the reactionary policies that made SF into the dystopian libertarian shit-hole it currently is.

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It really depends on the quality of benefits package. For example my brother and father are white collar types working for organizations with extremely strong unions. Their compensation includes full medical/dental insurance (no out of pocket) for them and their dependents that their employer pays $6,500 a month for. Their employer contribution to the agreed upon pension plan is also thousands a month. They have showed me the itemized documentation and I’m always jealous since they get a $130K salary then their employer spends almost as much on their benefits while I’m stuck in a job where I have to pay for things like dental or major hospitalization out of pocket.

I’m not claiming you are cheaping out on your employee benefits as a business owner but if you are paying so little I have to assume you are making your employees pay half for things like medical insurance and it’s the type of medical insurance that doesn’t cover full dental. I also have to assume you aren’t providing your employees with a full pension but instead doing the 401K match scheme employers in the US pull to avoid actually providing a robust pension plan. Most employers in the US skimp out on dental coverage and for anything other than preventive care people are expected to pay tens of thousands out of pocket for basic things like braces for their children or dental surgeries.

Even that is giving too much credit to the US government narrative.

There literally are all the US mainstream news outlets like CBS News who actually had reporters there at the time: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/there-was-no-tiananmen-square-massacre/

Also from classified US communications with assets on the ground: https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/89BEIJING18828_a.html

Funniest thing is that “tank man” photo idiots spam on Reddit all the time. Most people in the west don’t realize there is video of it, that the guy didn’t get run over. Furthermore they assume he was blocking tanks heading towards the square, infact those tanks were at the time headed away from the square to avoid engaging with armed agitators (people with guns and grenades that had killed police) in a crowded environment. Dude was trying to make them go back.

The deaths that day were people who got gunned down by the “protestors” or the police who were killed when the “protestors” threw grenades (military ordnance) into police vehicles. People that were armed by the CIA as part of a color revolution operation, one that failed because it didn’t actually have any support and more importantly because the PLA commander on the scene ordered his units to leave the area rather than responding in kind. The only actual protestors that day were communists having labor protests happening nearby and not the dancing libertine youth acting as the face of the US color revolution operation involving armed groups trying unsuccessfully to provoke the PLA soliders into responding to deadly attacks with deadly force in a crowded urban environment.

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Class traitors are a valuable, often critical, part of any successful revolution.