Meta had the right idea of adding older RAM to their existing servers instead of just buying more. Shame how nobody really noticed. Reduce, REUSE, recycle is the correct order and what we should be doing.
95% come from China? Why ban importing the materials you desire, which are not going to magically be cheaper by banning them, instead of providing services to simply and easily recycle them?
Collection and recycling these safely at scale seems mind boggling difficult. Various batteries, electronics, resin encrusted elements, oils, plastics, and mouthy guckiness.
I would love to see how this process works. Banning them seems to be the most economic and safest solution.
You’re correct, it isn’t worthwhile in either case, imo. However, I’m more curious as to what the “solution” is so supposed to achieve.
If you took the lithium from every disposable vape imported into the US yearly and instead used the lithium for industrial scale batteries, you’d get like 100. That’s it. Or maybe 5k batteries for EVs. That’s about 0.005% of yearly EV sales.
As someone that just got done doing a legal dig in a national park (inholding from the 1800s owned by a mining company, preparing to trade that land to the park for another mineral patent elsewhere) before you think of recycling you should perhaps think of developing your own domestic supply to recycle in the first place.
And maybe introduce some technological improvements, too. Like portable millsites and leach pads so you don't fuck up the landscape with dead buildings and environmental waste. And maybe look into some chemical process improvements, like using DMSO instead of cyanide for leaching gold.
Oh, and look into using Z-pinching for mining so we don't need explosives, we just need capacitors and metal tubes and drills to make precision tunnels to grab ore and leave more of the land intact.
Because China has stated they will take Taiwan, they have been threatening Philippines sovereignty too. Japan and others are on edge too. China currently has been behaving very adversarial and has a huge fraction of the minerals under their control that this article is posting about. I think sovereignty is a good thing. Plan for the worst, hope for the best.
You're sort of right. What the US is doing in Canada right now is more comparable to what Russia was doing in Ukraine in the early 2010s[0]
The upcoming Alberta separatist referendum that is funded and boosted by foreign agitators isn't intended to succeed. It's intended to cause a festering wound in Canada to prevent it from growing in strength and independence from America.
As far as I'm concerned America has already lost the next impending major war. They've spent the past 25 years blowing trillions on purposefully unwinnable wars that serve to enrich American oligarchs. This has left the American military structurally weakened and mis-optimized to fight small groups of terrorists instead of fighting an enemy with comparable and perhaps superior ability.
We've also seen the decimation of the manufacturing base in America and with it the economic security that it provided the middle class and with it the power and skill set that comes from being able to design and build thing. Finally, the United States' recent choice to blow half their stockpile of numerous kinds of missiles all all at once while at the same time lacking the supply chain or even the manufacturing base to adequately restock their munitions as the nail in the coffin for the American empire.[2]
So what's going to happen in a world where America can't win a global conflict but is still protected from invasion by thousands of nuclear weapons? America is going to decline into a regional power that attacks its neighbours with impunity. You're already starting to see it and it won't be long until you see articles like this[1] about Alberta.
Well, to be fair, by “USA“ you mean one person who is frankly more ceremonial than an actual leader. Whereas I think China is doing much more to actually irreversibly change who has the real authority in Canada. Canada is also a uniquely bad case in governance. I don’t know if any western country has had so much decline in living standard so fast. That you could put Fidel Castro‘s bastard son in charge says a lot about who holds the cards there.
And yet all sorts of people are advocating for using Chinese LLMs because they are less expensive. It seems like a very risky move to save a few dollars.
While true, China's threat has been going on for a long time and they've been running repeated exercises on how to do it, how to take US warships out, etc.
Additionally, US support for taking Greenland is virtually zero. Chinese support for taking Taiwan is frighteningly high.
They're exactly as rational as any other group of humans.
They've repeatedly stated that they'll use force to take Taiwan if necessary.
They are building the military power to make the full frontal assault.
I don't get why there's so much "oh, China's different" talk on here or on other online forums. I often wonder how much of that is organic versus something their propaganda/agitation ministries puts on.
Rational or not, they're building warships and an invasion fleet, along with the ability to stifle any US attempt to stop them. This is not the action of someone hoping for a slow victory.
The person at the top of the chain was asking why everyone is preparing for war. This behavior from China is why. It predates any of the Greenland Trump idiocy, too.
There are undoubtedly elements within the state that advocate for war, just like the elements within our state that do the same. So far, chinas political leadership is shrewd enough to mollify them and still maintain power.
The downside of autocracy is ...autocracy. the upside is that you have a consistent hand at the helm, making predictions of behaviour simpler and more rational than the rotating cast of leadership we present.
China has consistently chosen soft power over military action. I suspect they will continue to do so.
But more generally, when the foundation of your country's morality is "all men are created equal" you really have given up the space to object to others doing what you do.
I don't think Trump is bluffing. However Americans in general are opposed to taking Greenland, and so if Trump does anything I expect Americans/Congress to raise up. Europe should be concerned because this will take months to play out.
That's misattribution of the the why. The real why is US can't do the sensible thing and cede regional hegemony to growing PRC. There's always the normal solution of watching PRC bomb PH schoolgirls while buying their rare earth and selling them semi, like the rest of the world when US bombs school girls. The why is US leadership pathologically can't not fight, including the fights most of their pop don't want to fight.
A war with large geographic scope has been independently modeled as having a high probability of occurring circa 2030 by major governments for a decade or more. As time has passed, reality has not diverged from those models, so confidence in the conclusions have grown. It is worth noting that this pre-dates current political dramas, Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022, etc. The underlying strategic geopolitics driving it is much deeper than those issues.
It has been accompanied by a large spike in military spending globally. The backlog of foreign military sales of US weapons just waiting for approval is ~$1T.
> A war with large geographic scope has been independently modeled as having a high probability of occurring circa 2030 by major governments for a decade or more
Do you have more information about this, or a source?
This has been discussed in strategic geopolitical circles for a long time. When surveying defense analysts and similar if they believe a "great powers conflict" will occur in the near future, the percentage that say yes has been rising rapidly (currently 40-50%). If you search for "probability of global war in $YEAR" you will find a lot of discussion of varying quality.
The major alignment is almost always assumed to be something like Russia/China vs Europe/US/Japan.
You can find circumstantial evidence for this in the change in military posture of many countries and rapid scaling of production capacity. Some random examples:
French General states that they are preparing for open war in "3-4 years" in 2025:
Up until a about a decade back, here in Australia/New Zealand, politicians behind door always talked about the tyranny of distance. Simply due to distance we were largely kept out of or behind larger global flows.
Nowadays it is seen as having the world largest moat.
When things like global conflict starts, it does impact us but it is more the flow on effects rather than direct impacts.
The last few minutes of this 2025 recap by 'Ordinary Things' did the best job or summarizing how the world is getting ready for war.
> Germany's defence minister is frank and plain-spoken, but also deliberate with his words and intention. When he talks about Russia, the future of the West and the possibility of another European war, the message however becomes stark: "Our experts say it can happen in 2029."
> In remarks published Wednesday, Generalleutnant Christian Freuding, the inspector of the German Army, said the 2029 date was not a figure pulled out of thin air by his government's national security establishment, but an actual consensus view among Western allies.
> NATO Chief Mark Rutte urged member countries to do more to prepare for the possibility of large-scale war, warning that Russia may be ready to attack the alliance within five years.
Russia may be ready to attack the alliance within five years.
Russia can't even take the country next door. How exactly are they going to attack NATO? With a bunch of rusty nukes that almost certainly no longer work, and that would get their (relatively few) major population centers vaporized by nukes that almost certainly work just fine?
> With a bunch of rusty nukes that almost certainly no longer work, and that would get their (relatively few) major population centers vaporized by nukes that almost certainly work just fine?
Even 1% of Russia's arsenal being functional would be a problem, and I can imagine someone taking a gamble on "will Germany/France/England want to take a nuke to the face over the Baltics?"
Nukes aren't relevant unless Russia uses nukes or tries to take Paris or London. No one is going to nuke Russia over a Polish-Russian border town, and maybe not even over Warsaw falling. Until Poland and the Baltics get their own nukes, of course.
Have you seen the state of the rest of their armaments? Countries that have to bum artillery and soldiers off of North Korea are not in any position to go up against NATO.
If you're a Russian officer in charge of nuclear stockpile maintenance, why in the world wouldn't you pencil-whip the paperwork and steal the funding? If you're ever caught, it will be under circumstances where nobody will be in a position to do anything about it.
There is a good chance of this. Nukes need ongoing yearly maintenance to be operational, without that they are basically just a flying tin can. The whole movie trope of stealing an old nuke and using it doesn't apply to the real world.
Also corruption is somewhat accepted in some countries as it allows those at the top to have legitimate means of disposing of traitors when needed without that hassle of drumming up fake charges.
I read that in the Cold War, the military expected some incredibly high failure rate (30%+) of the bombs due to technical failures. These are incredibly complicated machines.
There is a lot of nuance missing in public discourse about the US threats of leaving NATO, stopping direct arms support of Ukraine (except for intelligence), and generally scaring NATO members and Europe into funding their own defense.
Every USA president since the fall of the Berlin Wall has implored NATO members take control of their own defense. The US has long since abandoned the two theater war doctrine. The US is not going to fight Russia. Doing so would just be taking the bait to split their forces when China simultaneously decides to mobilize in the South China Sea. All of USA military planning has been in preparation for that theater.
Trump's belligerence has accomplished the US foreign policy goals of every administration for the last 40 years.
The point made by the parent comment should not be taken to mean that the Trump administration strategically accomplished the aforementioned goals, just that they were, in a vacuum, accomplished.
If you're saying that it seems to you that the tactical goal was accomplished at the expense of the broader historical strategy, I would respond that yes, it does seem that way.
I'm also personally a little skeptical that the current administration would actually go to war with China over, say, Taiwan or control of the South Sea or so on. Maybe they are keeping that in mind, maybe they're just isolationist in general?
Whether the admin would have done anything to Iran without being asked by Israel is a big open question for me here.
It is all starting to feel like a stalemate between the US and China, each hoping the other fails from their own internal issues before it comes to actual battle.
The logistics are already straining against Iran, can't see how the US could hold up around Taiwan. And China can now see for themselves how weak the US military machine has become.
They aren’t. Political will is faulting but the military is holding back on Iran. There is no follow on ground invasion or clear carpet bombing of the entire country. These strikes are all suppose to be strategic. If the US military was waging a true all out war, Iran would be piles of rubble and glass
I am not supportive of war with Iran by a long shot but to see the US military and be like “oh it’s strained” is just not talking from a place of knowing. The politics is straining the military and rightly so, but capability wise it’s as good as ever
The military loves to say how they are pulling their punches. Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan. When things get real, the US will totally be there and unstoppable.
>If the US military was waging a true all out war, Iran would be piles of rubble and glass
Then the Gulf oil infrastructure would be gone in retaliation and the impacts to the global economy would be severe. Trump's popularity and legacy would be utterly destroyed.
The USA wouldn't be able to invade and carpet bomb China and end the war before logistical strain started to show either.
There's no point talking about USA's theoretical capabilities to end a war quickly if they can't use those capabilities to end a war quickly. Yes, the USA is holding back on invasion, carpet bombing, total war and nukes. It doesn't matter to the Chinese assessment for the capability of sustained high intensity US military operations.
Oh it most definitely does matter, to think it doesn’t makes no sense. The Chinese may be building up their military capabilities but they still spend a fraction of what the US does every year.
They’re different leagues, and in a gloves off war being on the receiving end of the US military would be devastating.
I think if China makes a move it’s because they perceive US political will to defend Taiwan to be weak enough that there won’t be a real protracted fight or escalation.
Which I half wonder if that is why they aren’t more defensive about Iran. Bleed out the political will of the US populace on a war and it’s unlikely we’ll want to support another one anytime soon.
True but it also looks like a Hail Mary shot for them. If they make the move and it doesn't work, the internal pressures from the people could topple a lot of the power structure.
They probably won't move until they have a very decent chance of pulling it off but they are running out of runway to build that force.
This level of preparation does not strike me as "so hard". Seems to me that if we in America and Europe were really preparing for a war there are a lot of things we would want to do that we are not doing.
because the empire sees no other way but war to maintain dominance, scratch that, avoid dissolution. so folks all over the world prepare, and rightly so if u ask me.
spoiler alert: the cozy days of the colonial west are over. it will all be over soon, and one can hope but i don't guarantee surviving will be necessarily a lucky draw.
btw, this would explain fermi's paradox pretty well.
I have always figured the fermis paradox is that civilizations run out of resources before they can become large scale sustainable. Having wars over a shrinking world would accelerate this however.
I hope its less because of war and more because its better to not be so dependent on other countries, similar to how Europe is trying to rely less on the US for digital infrastructure.
I also feel like the boomers offshoring everything to China in the 70's is one of the reasons things are worse off nowadays, but I digress.
A lot of the answe are reddit-esque throwaway answers and political shill bots, but for a more nuanced answer. For a long timeant people were brought up on the "End of History" idea. That after the Cold war mankind would all get together and sign kimbaya, that war as we knew it was over, sure there would be atrocities and "policing actions" that would be needed to stop some bad guys but everything was good wars of the past were over and it was all good.
This started to unravel as things got more tense with the increasing militarization of China and centealzatuon of power in Xi as well as well as Putins more aggressive moves.
The Ukraine war kicked the whole structure over and dillusioned a lot of people. The problem is that if suddenly history isn't over and war is a possibility again you need to start preparing for it. If you choose not to play the great game you don't avoid it, you just get crushed, and so as a matter of national survival and security you need to start preparing to meet near peer adversaries, but they see you preparing and they up their defensive preperations and military spending because you did and if they don't they might be crushed, and you see this and have to up your spending, and suddenly a massive amount of wealth is going to preparing for conflict.
The whole situation is almost identical to how things were on the eve of the 20th century, with radical advances in technology overturning decades of military theory and strategy, everyone is tense with alliances constantly shifting and real politick dominating everything because the alternative is the fate of the Belgians who had their country shorn from them and their people massacred by Imperial German forces. At the same time we see growing social unrest within nations (stoked by foreign actors trying to disrupt social cohesion of their potential enemies) and everyone posturing with more and more bluster because to be precieved as weak is to invite death as no one wants to make friends with a weak link.
The one important lesson to be taken however is that WW1 didn't have to happen the Great War could've been prevented, a major part of the conflict was the certainty that there was going to be a war. If we can choose to instead try and be peacemakers and bring the overall temprature of discourse down we can avoid another human catastrophe.
China is dependent on world exports for its future and seems to be trying hard to keep that going, particularly under Xi. It's the US that seems hellbent on breaking globalization.
Also, technological changes in our times are slow compared to the end of 19th century. Nukes are 60 year old tech and cheap drones are not particularly sci-fi tech machines.
Unfortunately I think the actual reason is because they know (despite what they say in public) that climate change is a real and present danger, and the resource and migration wars are coming.
If you look at everything that seems strange through this lens (see for example: Trump talking about how the US needs to take Canada and Greenland) it looks a lot less strange. There's at least some sort of rational throughline, even if its awful and militaristic (and likely only revealed at all to the public at this point because Trump is an age-addled old fool that has a broken public-speaking filter).
Almost definitely this. It explains the build up of forces, signaling of land grabs, hardening of boarders and increase of surveillance. It is all about built a fortress.
There is a lot of dramatic stories in the climate change space but when you see the military's and actuaries around the world talking about the conditions of the coming decades in very matter of fact terms, that is why I worry. They are the level heads that are signaling to those in power, now is the time to harden defenses. Both external and internal.
There have been many Climate Risk Assessments by many countries that we only have little pieces of, but due to freedom of information requests and what bits we have are fairly grim.
Here in Australia there was a report that is still not public on this. But the more open politicians that have seen it said they had to change all their future plans and promises based on what the findings were. That we are moving towards a much more unstable and resource limited world.
As it has been termed by many militaries, Climate change is a threat multiplier.
I have said it for a long while now, in future we will welcome immigrants with open arms. Those arms being machine guns, rockets and drones. I really hope I am wrong but I can see many hermit kingdoms rising and they will loot others before they go hungry.
> Humans have had major wars throughout history, it's unrealistic to really think that will change.
Sure, but now all the major powers have society ending devices to deploy when they go to war.
And when you combine that with the fact that the US is currently actively proving it can't impose its will on even Iran despite having a much stronger conventional military, when the next war breaks out between major nuclear powers it is likely to accelerate to the worst possible outcome very quickly.
Meta had the right idea of adding older RAM to their existing servers instead of just buying more. Shame how nobody really noticed. Reduce, REUSE, recycle is the correct order and what we should be doing.
https://www.neowin.net/news/meta-is-reusing-old-ddr4-ram-in-...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48778956
If the government want to pay for my electronic scrap, great! I've got a box of 2nd-gen Intel CPUs, bidding starts at $3000.
Start by banning disposable vapes. The sheer waste of lithium from those fucking devices is insane in 2026. We need every scrap of it we can get!
Its market value is clearly not high enough or they wouldn't use it in disposable vapes.
I think the problem is more that non disposable vapes are illegal and unavailable to most people.
95% come from China? Why ban importing the materials you desire, which are not going to magically be cheaper by banning them, instead of providing services to simply and easily recycle them?
Collection and recycling these safely at scale seems mind boggling difficult. Various batteries, electronics, resin encrusted elements, oils, plastics, and mouthy guckiness.
I would love to see how this process works. Banning them seems to be the most economic and safest solution.
You’re correct, it isn’t worthwhile in either case, imo. However, I’m more curious as to what the “solution” is so supposed to achieve.
If you took the lithium from every disposable vape imported into the US yearly and instead used the lithium for industrial scale batteries, you’d get like 100. That’s it. Or maybe 5k batteries for EVs. That’s about 0.005% of yearly EV sales.
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In the office? Only if their office has a separate air supply.
They should be able to do what they want. They should not be able to affect me by what they want. Selfish people need to step aside.
Ok if they pay extra tax for the extra health costs they will incur.
TFW "near term potential" F35s will get their radars.
As someone that just got done doing a legal dig in a national park (inholding from the 1800s owned by a mining company, preparing to trade that land to the park for another mineral patent elsewhere) before you think of recycling you should perhaps think of developing your own domestic supply to recycle in the first place.
And maybe introduce some technological improvements, too. Like portable millsites and leach pads so you don't fuck up the landscape with dead buildings and environmental waste. And maybe look into some chemical process improvements, like using DMSO instead of cyanide for leaching gold.
Oh, and look into using Z-pinching for mining so we don't need explosives, we just need capacitors and metal tubes and drills to make precision tunnels to grab ore and leave more of the land intact.
Micron had to delay their New York memory fab by a year because there were some bats in trees. This stuff is DOA in most states.
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Why is everyone preparing for war so hard
Because China has stated they will take Taiwan, they have been threatening Philippines sovereignty too. Japan and others are on edge too. China currently has been behaving very adversarial and has a huge fraction of the minerals under their control that this article is posting about. I think sovereignty is a good thing. Plan for the worst, hope for the best.
The USA keeps threatening my country; Canada.
I can say with a reasonable amount of confidence that going "but china" isn't going to help the US much going forward.
I'm in canada. I don't think the two are even comparable.
You're sort of right. What the US is doing in Canada right now is more comparable to what Russia was doing in Ukraine in the early 2010s[0]
The upcoming Alberta separatist referendum that is funded and boosted by foreign agitators isn't intended to succeed. It's intended to cause a festering wound in Canada to prevent it from growing in strength and independence from America.
As far as I'm concerned America has already lost the next impending major war. They've spent the past 25 years blowing trillions on purposefully unwinnable wars that serve to enrich American oligarchs. This has left the American military structurally weakened and mis-optimized to fight small groups of terrorists instead of fighting an enemy with comparable and perhaps superior ability.
We've also seen the decimation of the manufacturing base in America and with it the economic security that it provided the middle class and with it the power and skill set that comes from being able to design and build thing. Finally, the United States' recent choice to blow half their stockpile of numerous kinds of missiles all all at once while at the same time lacking the supply chain or even the manufacturing base to adequately restock their munitions as the nail in the coffin for the American empire.[2]
So what's going to happen in a world where America can't win a global conflict but is still protected from invasion by thousands of nuclear weapons? America is going to decline into a regional power that attacks its neighbours with impunity. You're already starting to see it and it won't be long until you see articles like this[1] about Alberta.
I don't want it to be this way, but it is.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43487443
[1] https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-hit-with-demand-for-answ...
[2] https://www.csis.org/analysis/last-rounds-status-key-munitio...
The usa is also threatening my country. The orange dude wants to buy a part of Denmark that is not even ours to sell.
Well, to be fair, by “USA“ you mean one person who is frankly more ceremonial than an actual leader. Whereas I think China is doing much more to actually irreversibly change who has the real authority in Canada. Canada is also a uniquely bad case in governance. I don’t know if any western country has had so much decline in living standard so fast. That you could put Fidel Castro‘s bastard son in charge says a lot about who holds the cards there.
And yet all sorts of people are advocating for using Chinese LLMs because they are less expensive. It seems like a very risky move to save a few dollars.
It'd be interesting to know how much of that is truly organic support versus what the CCP pushes out across the internet as agitation/propaganda.
Are they cheaper? They are open-weight, so in theory, they are cheaper to run and do with them as you wish.
The problem is that they come from a place with a long and storied history of attacking digital assets in the US and the West in general.
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While true, China's threat has been going on for a long time and they've been running repeated exercises on how to do it, how to take US warships out, etc.
Additionally, US support for taking Greenland is virtually zero. Chinese support for taking Taiwan is frighteningly high.
China is not an irrational actor. They know that the most effective way to take Taiwan is slowly, through soft power and political subterfuge.
There is no need or advantage to a full frontal assault.
> There is no need or advantage to a full frontal assault.
Perhaps, but in the last year China did build these:
https://www.navalnews.com/naval-news/2025/03/stairway-to-tai...
Unless China has some very interesting new anti-drone tech, those look like nice big targets.
They're exactly as rational as any other group of humans.
They've repeatedly stated that they'll use force to take Taiwan if necessary.
They are building the military power to make the full frontal assault.
I don't get why there's so much "oh, China's different" talk on here or on other online forums. I often wonder how much of that is organic versus something their propaganda/agitation ministries puts on.
Rational or not, they're building warships and an invasion fleet, along with the ability to stifle any US attempt to stop them. This is not the action of someone hoping for a slow victory.
The person at the top of the chain was asking why everyone is preparing for war. This behavior from China is why. It predates any of the Greenland Trump idiocy, too.
There are undoubtedly elements within the state that advocate for war, just like the elements within our state that do the same. So far, chinas political leadership is shrewd enough to mollify them and still maintain power.
The downside of autocracy is ...autocracy. the upside is that you have a consistent hand at the helm, making predictions of behaviour simpler and more rational than the rotating cast of leadership we present.
China has consistently chosen soft power over military action. I suspect they will continue to do so.
The Europeans didn't think it was a bluff.
But more generally, when the foundation of your country's morality is "all men are created equal" you really have given up the space to object to others doing what you do.
If honour is a thing.
I don't think Trump is bluffing. However Americans in general are opposed to taking Greenland, and so if Trump does anything I expect Americans/Congress to raise up. Europe should be concerned because this will take months to play out.
Nobody said bluff but you, and honour is long gone.
That just leaves the facts. Which do you think is more credible and likely?
reflect on what? both things can be true at the same time.
When both are true at the same time, one might reflect on why "because China" is given as the pat answer.
When the subject is China, the reflection isn't "because China". What we are seeing here is "Because US", which is very different.
The subject of "Why is everyone preparing for war so hard" would seem to be "everyone", no?
The subject is critical minerals. China is therefore why here. Of course in the large picture everyone is preparing for war.
That's misattribution of the the why. The real why is US can't do the sensible thing and cede regional hegemony to growing PRC. There's always the normal solution of watching PRC bomb PH schoolgirls while buying their rare earth and selling them semi, like the rest of the world when US bombs school girls. The why is US leadership pathologically can't not fight, including the fights most of their pop don't want to fight.
A war with large geographic scope has been independently modeled as having a high probability of occurring circa 2030 by major governments for a decade or more. As time has passed, reality has not diverged from those models, so confidence in the conclusions have grown. It is worth noting that this pre-dates current political dramas, Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022, etc. The underlying strategic geopolitics driving it is much deeper than those issues.
It has been accompanied by a large spike in military spending globally. The backlog of foreign military sales of US weapons just waiting for approval is ~$1T.
> A war with large geographic scope has been independently modeled as having a high probability of occurring circa 2030 by major governments for a decade or more
Do you have more information about this, or a source?
This has been discussed in strategic geopolitical circles for a long time. When surveying defense analysts and similar if they believe a "great powers conflict" will occur in the near future, the percentage that say yes has been rising rapidly (currently 40-50%). If you search for "probability of global war in $YEAR" you will find a lot of discussion of varying quality.
The major alignment is almost always assumed to be something like Russia/China vs Europe/US/Japan.
You can find circumstantial evidence for this in the change in military posture of many countries and rapid scaling of production capacity. Some random examples:
French General states that they are preparing for open war in "3-4 years" in 2025:
https://www.politico.eu/article/french-top-general-expects-s...
Sweden increases defense spending by 40% starting in 2021:
https://www.defensenews.com/global/europe/2020/12/15/sweden-...
Up until a about a decade back, here in Australia/New Zealand, politicians behind door always talked about the tyranny of distance. Simply due to distance we were largely kept out of or behind larger global flows.
Nowadays it is seen as having the world largest moat.
When things like global conflict starts, it does impact us but it is more the flow on effects rather than direct impacts.
The last few minutes of this 2025 recap by 'Ordinary Things' did the best job or summarizing how the world is getting ready for war.
https://youtu.be/ZEobLPh82-w?si=hrUaw-vTx4mWU6T6&t=6627
I hope we avoid this but I fear we will not.
Australia at least is taking it very seriously and aggressively upgrading their capabilities.
If things go down in the Pacific no one will be safe.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/russia-nato-arms-germany-wa...
> Germany's defence minister is frank and plain-spoken, but also deliberate with his words and intention. When he talks about Russia, the future of the West and the possibility of another European war, the message however becomes stark: "Our experts say it can happen in 2029."
> In remarks published Wednesday, Generalleutnant Christian Freuding, the inspector of the German Army, said the 2029 date was not a figure pulled out of thin air by his government's national security establishment, but an actual consensus view among Western allies.
https://www.politico.eu/article/nato-mark-rutte-says-europe-...
> NATO Chief Mark Rutte urged member countries to do more to prepare for the possibility of large-scale war, warning that Russia may be ready to attack the alliance within five years.
> Russia may be ready to attack the alliance within five years.
With what, sharpened sticks? Russia will soon only be left with rattling its nuclear saber as its once mighty military is left in ruins.
> With what, sharpened sticks?
Deniable, asymmetrical attacks?
Look what Ukraine did to Russia's air bases with a couple truckloads of drones.
Russia may be ready to attack the alliance within five years.
Russia can't even take the country next door. How exactly are they going to attack NATO? With a bunch of rusty nukes that almost certainly no longer work, and that would get their (relatively few) major population centers vaporized by nukes that almost certainly work just fine?
> Russia can't even take the country next door.
Neither could the Weimar Republic.
> With a bunch of rusty nukes that almost certainly no longer work, and that would get their (relatively few) major population centers vaporized by nukes that almost certainly work just fine?
Even 1% of Russia's arsenal being functional would be a problem, and I can imagine someone taking a gamble on "will Germany/France/England want to take a nuke to the face over the Baltics?"
Pretty much this. If a single nuke detonates over say Leipzig, it would be the most deadly single attack on European soil in history.
Nukes aren't relevant unless Russia uses nukes or tries to take Paris or London. No one is going to nuke Russia over a Polish-Russian border town, and maybe not even over Warsaw falling. Until Poland and the Baltics get their own nukes, of course.
"Almost certainly no longer work"? I'd be interested in seeing your basis for your "almost certainly".
Have you seen the state of the rest of their armaments? Countries that have to bum artillery and soldiers off of North Korea are not in any position to go up against NATO.
If you're a Russian officer in charge of nuclear stockpile maintenance, why in the world wouldn't you pencil-whip the paperwork and steal the funding? If you're ever caught, it will be under circumstances where nobody will be in a position to do anything about it.
There is a good chance of this. Nukes need ongoing yearly maintenance to be operational, without that they are basically just a flying tin can. The whole movie trope of stealing an old nuke and using it doesn't apply to the real world.
Also corruption is somewhat accepted in some countries as it allows those at the top to have legitimate means of disposing of traitors when needed without that hassle of drumming up fake charges.
I read that in the Cold War, the military expected some incredibly high failure rate (30%+) of the bombs due to technical failures. These are incredibly complicated machines.
What ongoing yearly maintenance does a non-hydrogen nuke need?
The rockets need regular attention.
The Atlantic Council and RAND corporation both report on this.
https://www.rand.org/topics/taiwan.html
https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/content-series/atlantic-coun...
There is a lot of nuance missing in public discourse about the US threats of leaving NATO, stopping direct arms support of Ukraine (except for intelligence), and generally scaring NATO members and Europe into funding their own defense.
Every USA president since the fall of the Berlin Wall has implored NATO members take control of their own defense. The US has long since abandoned the two theater war doctrine. The US is not going to fight Russia. Doing so would just be taking the bait to split their forces when China simultaneously decides to mobilize in the South China Sea. All of USA military planning has been in preparation for that theater.
Trump's belligerence has accomplished the US foreign policy goals of every administration for the last 40 years.
How's the Iran thing figure in, then? That's a lot of the stockpile used up before China starts.
It's the same as Venezuela. These are strategic moves to control China's crude oil supply.
The point made by the parent comment should not be taken to mean that the Trump administration strategically accomplished the aforementioned goals, just that they were, in a vacuum, accomplished.
If you're saying that it seems to you that the tactical goal was accomplished at the expense of the broader historical strategy, I would respond that yes, it does seem that way.
I'm also personally a little skeptical that the current administration would actually go to war with China over, say, Taiwan or control of the South Sea or so on. Maybe they are keeping that in mind, maybe they're just isolationist in general?
Whether the admin would have done anything to Iran without being asked by Israel is a big open question for me here.
It is all starting to feel like a stalemate between the US and China, each hoping the other fails from their own internal issues before it comes to actual battle.
The logistics are already straining against Iran, can't see how the US could hold up around Taiwan. And China can now see for themselves how weak the US military machine has become.
Testosterone injections won't help there.
They aren’t. Political will is faulting but the military is holding back on Iran. There is no follow on ground invasion or clear carpet bombing of the entire country. These strikes are all suppose to be strategic. If the US military was waging a true all out war, Iran would be piles of rubble and glass
I am not supportive of war with Iran by a long shot but to see the US military and be like “oh it’s strained” is just not talking from a place of knowing. The politics is straining the military and rightly so, but capability wise it’s as good as ever
The military loves to say how they are pulling their punches. Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan. When things get real, the US will totally be there and unstoppable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China%27s_Final_Warning
>If the US military was waging a true all out war, Iran would be piles of rubble and glass
Then the Gulf oil infrastructure would be gone in retaliation and the impacts to the global economy would be severe. Trump's popularity and legacy would be utterly destroyed.
Doesn’t negate capability which is what is being mentioned.
The USA wouldn't be able to invade and carpet bomb China and end the war before logistical strain started to show either.
There's no point talking about USA's theoretical capabilities to end a war quickly if they can't use those capabilities to end a war quickly. Yes, the USA is holding back on invasion, carpet bombing, total war and nukes. It doesn't matter to the Chinese assessment for the capability of sustained high intensity US military operations.
Oh it most definitely does matter, to think it doesn’t makes no sense. The Chinese may be building up their military capabilities but they still spend a fraction of what the US does every year.
They’re different leagues, and in a gloves off war being on the receiving end of the US military would be devastating.
I think if China makes a move it’s because they perceive US political will to defend Taiwan to be weak enough that there won’t be a real protracted fight or escalation.
Which I half wonder if that is why they aren’t more defensive about Iran. Bleed out the political will of the US populace on a war and it’s unlikely we’ll want to support another one anytime soon.
How well is this military doing against Iran right now? I think a few months ago a civilization was destroyed one night, right?
Possibly the first strike in the war with China.
True about trump....but at a terrible (longtime) cost to the USA.
War with China has been on the roadmap for 10+ years.
Yeah, but not for 2030. IIRC, Xi has demanded that China's military be ready to take Taiwan in 2027.
True but it also looks like a Hail Mary shot for them. If they make the move and it doesn't work, the internal pressures from the people could topple a lot of the power structure.
They probably won't move until they have a very decent chance of pulling it off but they are running out of runway to build that force.
This level of preparation does not strike me as "so hard". Seems to me that if we in America and Europe were really preparing for a war there are a lot of things we would want to do that we are not doing.
because the empire sees no other way but war to maintain dominance, scratch that, avoid dissolution. so folks all over the world prepare, and rightly so if u ask me.
spoiler alert: the cozy days of the colonial west are over. it will all be over soon, and one can hope but i don't guarantee surviving will be necessarily a lucky draw.
btw, this would explain fermi's paradox pretty well.
I have always figured the fermis paradox is that civilizations run out of resources before they can become large scale sustainable. Having wars over a shrinking world would accelerate this however.
The military build-up in China is world war scale.
Because some idiot leaders threw diplomacy & international law out the window?
So.. back to how things were done in the old days.
The Juche is on the loose.
I hope its less because of war and more because its better to not be so dependent on other countries, similar to how Europe is trying to rely less on the US for digital infrastructure.
I also feel like the boomers offshoring everything to China in the 70's is one of the reasons things are worse off nowadays, but I digress.
In the 70s it was offshoring to Japan. China’s market opened to the west in the late 80s/90s.
When goods don't cross borders, armies do. Dependence is necessary for peace
Perhaps necessary, but definitely not sufficient, as demonstrated by Russia willing to gamble everything on Ukraine.
A lot of the answe are reddit-esque throwaway answers and political shill bots, but for a more nuanced answer. For a long timeant people were brought up on the "End of History" idea. That after the Cold war mankind would all get together and sign kimbaya, that war as we knew it was over, sure there would be atrocities and "policing actions" that would be needed to stop some bad guys but everything was good wars of the past were over and it was all good.
This started to unravel as things got more tense with the increasing militarization of China and centealzatuon of power in Xi as well as well as Putins more aggressive moves.
The Ukraine war kicked the whole structure over and dillusioned a lot of people. The problem is that if suddenly history isn't over and war is a possibility again you need to start preparing for it. If you choose not to play the great game you don't avoid it, you just get crushed, and so as a matter of national survival and security you need to start preparing to meet near peer adversaries, but they see you preparing and they up their defensive preperations and military spending because you did and if they don't they might be crushed, and you see this and have to up your spending, and suddenly a massive amount of wealth is going to preparing for conflict.
The whole situation is almost identical to how things were on the eve of the 20th century, with radical advances in technology overturning decades of military theory and strategy, everyone is tense with alliances constantly shifting and real politick dominating everything because the alternative is the fate of the Belgians who had their country shorn from them and their people massacred by Imperial German forces. At the same time we see growing social unrest within nations (stoked by foreign actors trying to disrupt social cohesion of their potential enemies) and everyone posturing with more and more bluster because to be precieved as weak is to invite death as no one wants to make friends with a weak link.
The one important lesson to be taken however is that WW1 didn't have to happen the Great War could've been prevented, a major part of the conflict was the certainty that there was going to be a war. If we can choose to instead try and be peacemakers and bring the overall temprature of discourse down we can avoid another human catastrophe.
China is dependent on world exports for its future and seems to be trying hard to keep that going, particularly under Xi. It's the US that seems hellbent on breaking globalization.
Also, technological changes in our times are slow compared to the end of 19th century. Nukes are 60 year old tech and cheap drones are not particularly sci-fi tech machines.
The Ukraine war was far from the start of things. Wars were still happening in other parts of the world long before that.
As a wise man once said, we didn't start the fire. It was always burning since the world's been turning.
> Why is everyone preparing for war so hard
Unfortunately I think the actual reason is because they know (despite what they say in public) that climate change is a real and present danger, and the resource and migration wars are coming.
If you look at everything that seems strange through this lens (see for example: Trump talking about how the US needs to take Canada and Greenland) it looks a lot less strange. There's at least some sort of rational throughline, even if its awful and militaristic (and likely only revealed at all to the public at this point because Trump is an age-addled old fool that has a broken public-speaking filter).
Almost definitely this. It explains the build up of forces, signaling of land grabs, hardening of boarders and increase of surveillance. It is all about built a fortress.
There is a lot of dramatic stories in the climate change space but when you see the military's and actuaries around the world talking about the conditions of the coming decades in very matter of fact terms, that is why I worry. They are the level heads that are signaling to those in power, now is the time to harden defenses. Both external and internal.
There have been many Climate Risk Assessments by many countries that we only have little pieces of, but due to freedom of information requests and what bits we have are fairly grim.
Here in Australia there was a report that is still not public on this. But the more open politicians that have seen it said they had to change all their future plans and promises based on what the findings were. That we are moving towards a much more unstable and resource limited world.
As it has been termed by many militaries, Climate change is a threat multiplier.
I have said it for a long while now, in future we will welcome immigrants with open arms. Those arms being machine guns, rockets and drones. I really hope I am wrong but I can see many hermit kingdoms rising and they will loot others before they go hungry.
Humans have had major wars throughout history, it's unrealistic to really think that will change. It's in our nature.
> Humans have had major wars throughout history, it's unrealistic to really think that will change.
Sure, but now all the major powers have society ending devices to deploy when they go to war.
And when you combine that with the fact that the US is currently actively proving it can't impose its will on even Iran despite having a much stronger conventional military, when the next war breaks out between major nuclear powers it is likely to accelerate to the worst possible outcome very quickly.
Yet we have wars for oil, not water.
Canada needs a nuclear deterrent.
Cuz they don’t believe in anything else anymore except violence
great distraction for the masses from the files
War is profitable and the people who profit run the US and Europe
that's one term of the equation. the other is that war is the tool of banking cartels.
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