Roman superiority!
(midwest.social)
European MemesWhat is this maymay from?
The Good Doctor, I think
It's just nicer here...
Pasta money > potato money
You spelled vodka wrong
vodka just old potato
Sure. Now adjusted for PPP
Compared to the first two 7 and 3 are an error margin, it's the same value, just proving the original point
i mean, if you want to compare “empire”ness, you should compare what the entire unit can funnel into a specific goal, right? that’d be nominal.
what i’m seeing is that italy can buy more mercenaries than russia can
Russia has domestic steel and material production so that's effectively free, and the ppp does matter for the things they make. But they didn't make a lot of high quality optics and precision things, which they import for military vehicles. So it's not just ppp or nominal.
No, in terms of war production, what matters is PPP not nominal. Most of your war material is made domestically for national security reasons. So what matters is how much production your economy can support. PPP measures that accurately, not nominal. For example, right now Russia's currency is depressed for reasons of international trade due to the sanctions put on it. But that doesn't affect domestic production.
And mercenaries? It's 2026, not 1626. Russia recruits some warm bodies from abroad, but the vast majority of folks fighting and dying for Russia are Russian citizens.
You can adjust any numbers to show anything. Russia isn't a country it's just a bunch of mafia petrodicks in a trench coat.
While that's true (speaking as a russian citizen), numbers are also true.
Unfortunately, those numbers don't convert to the happiness of ordinary Russians (and Ukrainians, ofc).
My state produces more than your country with 40x less land and 1/4 the people.
Sucks to suck, and your shit is a vacuum.
numbers are also true
that really depends on the number, ~~non-positive ones~~ some are evaluated as false 😂
Programmer joke flying overhead.
that’s not correct. anything that isn’t 0 is true. only 0 is false. what has the world come to
Casually spreading misinformation (for job security reasons)
ok, fair, that was inaccurate. i was primarily targeting the silly statement of "numbers being true" used as a manipulation to support the argument.
Viceversa’s point was that these numbers also have very great statistical meaning (and added zimself the significant caveat that the meaning in question is unrelated to the subject we’re discussing) and had seemingly nothing to do with Boolean logic. Viceversa’s point was that the numbers here aren’t being adjusted even though they show something different from the initial meme.
Yeah, a binary number that's all 0s is what it's looking for, which is 0 in every reasonable number format. Any other number has 1s in it, so is evaluated as 1.
Nominal GDP doesn't mean anything here. Russia and Italy are not buying their stuff from USA.
Sometimes I wonder if most people here are just illiterates.
Russia and Italy are not buying their stuff from USA
oh italy does, because they can afford it 😂 it is the gdp adjusted per ppp that doesn't mean anything here, because who cares how much russian potatoes can a russian person buy from another russian person.
because who cares how much russian potatoes can a russian person buy from another russian person.
The Russian army. That's who cares. Because how many potatoes Russia can produce directly reflects how many soldiers they can keep fed on the battlefield. Nominal is absolutely not the right measure here, PPP is. In a war, what matters is how much war material can be made in Russia, by Russians, to support the Russian army. You have it exactly backwards.
The Russian army. That’s who cares. Because how many potatoes Russia can produce directly reflects how many soldiers they can keep fed on the battlefield. Nominal is absolutely not the right measure here, PPP is. In a war, what matters is how much war material can be made in Russia, by Russians, to support the Russian army.
yes, this is partially true, but i was commenting on "is russia a superpower?" and to that, the question is resounding no. weren't it for ownership of nukes they would be deleted from the ukranian map in a day (or rather they would not even start).
they tried for decades to convince the world they are the strongest army in the world, it turned out they are not even the strongest army in ukraine.
the ability to sustain terrorist attacks against four times smaller neighbor is not what makes you superpower.
This is moving the goalposts. The original point was that Russia isn't a superpower, and the reason that justified this was that its GDP is supposedly lower than Italy. But again, that's a poor measurement based on nominal GDP not PPP.
And while I'll admit they probably don't count as a "superpower," (though how do you even define that?), your framing of Ukraine really isn't fair. Ukraine is fighting with absolutely everything they have. Their entire population is either in uniform or supporting the war effort. Russia hasn't even instituted a draft yet. Ukraine is fighting this like it's WW2. Russia is fighting this like it's the US fighting Vietnam (and even Vietnam had a draft.) An expensive and bloody conflict to be sure, but not a total war that you mobilize the entire productive capacity of a nation to fight. If Russia was fighting with the same effort and ferocity as Ukraine, Ukraine would be steamrolled. The only thing that's saved Ukraine is that mass conscription would be political and perhaps literal suicide for Putin. But when we're talking about a superpower, we're talking about the potential power of a nation, what kind of war effort it's capable of sustaining if it puts its back into it. The Ukraine war is not a reflection of the type of effort Russia could muster in a total war.
And the idea that Russia would be driven from Ukraine in a day? I can see where that kind of hubris made sense before the Iran conflict, but now that's a downright delusional take. That's tankie level of self-delusion. Russia has a population 2/3rds larger than Iran, controls vastly more territory and resources, and has a per-capita GDP PPP 2.5x that of Iran. And look at how much trouble the US has had with just Iran. Perhaps being a superpower just isn't what it used to be in terms of military dominance. And drone technology has leveled the playing field a lot. And we've seen now that the US defense industry is just as enshittified as any other industry, prioritizing the production of small numbers of high profit margin weapons over large numbers of cheaper ones. The US simply doesn't have the production capability to produce its weapons in the numbers it needs to sustain a large war. We optimized our production chain to fight jihadis hiding in caves, and we've been caught with our pants down when facing even a modestly competent foe.
I despise the absurdity of tankies. But take care when fighting monsters that you do not become one yourself. It's just as easy to become an anti-tankie as it is to become a tankie, easier if you think about it.
