Ukraine Turning To AI To Prioritize 700 Years of Landmine Removal (newscientist.com) 221
MattSparkes shares a report from NewScientist: The Russian invasion of Ukraine has seen so many landmines deployed across the country that clearing them would take 700 years, say researchers. To make the task more manageable, Ukrainian scientists are turning to artificial intelligence to identify which regions are a priority for de-mining, though they expect some may simply have to be left as a permanent "scar" on the country. The model considers vast amounts of data, including tax and property ownership records, agricultural maps, data on soil fertility, logs from the military and emergency services of where bombs and shells have landed, information gleaned from satellite images and interviews with local civilians and the military. Even climate change models and data on population density derived from mobile phone operators could be assessed. The AI then weighs factors such as civilian safety and potential economic benefits to determine the importance of a given piece of land and how urgent it is to make it safe. Ihor Bezkaravainyi, a deputy minister at Ukraine's Ministry of Economy, is leading the team, and he likens the task of de-mining during an ongoing war to designing and building a submarine entirely underwater, except that the water is on fire. "It's a big problem," he says.
A legacy of violence (Score:5, Insightful)
Europe is still de-mining and clearing unexploded munitions (UXBs) from WW1. Ukraine will have another century at least of finding dangerous explosives buried in the topsoil, no matter the outcome of this war. Russia will have another seventy years of taking care of war wounded and permanently disabled. Even the most conservative capitalist analysis will show us that war is a very expensive business, especially in terms of human cost.
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At least 20,000 Ukrainians have had amputations since the start of the war too. Gaza is probably even worse, but it's hard to get reliable data.
Re: A legacy of violence (Score:2)
https://www.businessinsider.co... [businessinsider.com]
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This article says that "Russia has lost 87% of troops it had prior to start of Ukraine war, according to US intelligence assessment". They may have recruited new ones but only after being decimated.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/12/12... [cnn.com]
Re: They didn't recruit new ones (Score:2)
Russian economy is actually growing faster than prior to the war, and it has little problems recruiting men into army because because they are signed as paid contractors. On the other hand, Ukraine just started recruiting prisoners. 87% of losses are actually not dead. Anyone who was wounded or decommissioned for any other reason is part of this 87%. Moreover, you need to remember that Russia invaded in 2022 with actually a relatively small force.
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Its to be expected that there are going to be *some* economic benefits to war. The manufacturing base required to support a total mechanized war machine the size of russias that is, none the less, constantly getting blown to pieces and requiring replacement is considerable. Thats jobs on the ground.
The problem is, its a closed circle, its not generating new food, new microwave ovens, new internet modems, its just producing guns and bullets. So while the economy might appear on some metrics to be doing well,
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Russia's economy has contracted due to sanctions. Even if it is growing faster now, which is doubtful, that's only because it's smaller.
Casualties which haven't died are harder for a nation to manage than those who have, because you either have to give them care, or you have them hanging around reminding people of how shit it is to be in the war.
Russia invaded with a relatively small force for russia, because they were already in a dire economic situation thanks to Putler's pals running off with all of the
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It is actually growing faster, for several reasons:
1) Enormous government spendings to fund the war
2) About a million of people have left the country, and tens of thousands are dead or crippled, so there is a labour shortage, resulting in higher wages
3) A shitload of companies have left russia, replaced in many cases by domestic manufacturers that can now demand much higher prices since there are no alternatives
This is obviously not sustainable in the long term (hence the ridiculously high key interest rate
Re:A legacy of violence (Score:5, Informative)
Decimation was the Roman practice of killing 10% of the soldiers in a unit that had as a unit displayed cowardice or other illoyal behavior. So a reduction by 10% not to 10%. A huge, inhumane punishment for sure, but not enough to ruin a unit's fighting capacity. With this definition, the regular Russian army that existed before the war turned hot in 2022 has been much more than merely decimated.
We use the word today to mean something much more serious, where a unit is depleted so much that it's not effective anymore and has to be reconstituted.
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Decimation was the Roman practice of killing 10% of the soldiers in a unit that had as a unit displayed cowardice or other illoyal behavior.
To be more exact decimation was the Roman practice of making 90% of the soldiers in a cohort kill the rest by beating them to death. Not quick executions by some outsider, soldiers being forced to kill their comrades at random. Romans really were sadistic bastards.
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Decimation was the Roman practice of killing 10% of the soldiers in a unit that had as a unit displayed cowardice or other illoyal behavior. So a reduction by 10% not to 10%.
Historical practice and current definitions are not the same thing. No person (other than a few language nazis) use decimation in an English context to mean a 10% reduction. You can find both definitions in the dictionary, but the 10% reduction one will be labelled either "historical" or "archaic" to indicate that you should neither use the words like that in a modern context, nor assume anyone else understands it to mean that.
For all intents and purposes decimation is the process of dividing by 10.
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if Donald Trump somehow pulls off of victory. Which given the Trump is a convicted felon is basically impossible
I wish I had your confidence there. Donald Trump once rather famously said he could shoot someone on 5th avenue and not lose voters. It looks like he was right. What's a felony or two when you're the second coming of Jesus? I mean isn't falsifying business records to cover up an affair while your pregnant wife is at home something everyone just wishes they could do?
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As a non american, this absolutely baffles me. What am I missing here about this guys popularity? He absolutely flubbed his first term, failed to act to contain covid early in the pandemic with catastrophic results, appeared to obviously lie in almost every sentence he spoke, and managed to completely obliterate whatever unity was left in american society to the point where con
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Another European here.
Neither Biden nor Hillary would be a better candidate than Trump. Now, if you had offered us Bernie Sanders.. then perhaps.
But in general I am curious as to why, in a nation of 300+ million, you managed to limit the choice to the current bunch of old men
US politics at the moment seem to be "it's more important that the other side lose, than who wins". It's amazing that you can be split into more or less two parties, and everything is about two issues: guns and abortions. With these tw
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>> Neither Biden nor Hillary would be a better candidate than Trump.
Not US citizen here, but I would choose "old guy with some common sense" any day over "orange painted deluded felon which lies worse than putin"
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Biden is clearly a better candidate.
That doesn't make him good, but good and bad are not binary. Biden is not good, and no I wouldn't want him, but Trump is worse and I wouldn't want him even more. I don't really see how you think that saying Biden is much better than Trump implies some kind of love for him.
They as both old, both look like they are no longer sharp. One us a convicted felon who has no respect for democracy and likes stirring up division, the other is a dull establishment candidate.
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As a non american, this absolutely baffles me. What am I missing here about this guys popularity?
As an American who's not taking a side in this, people are all but angry here. Every stroke of the government's pen is perceived to be another cut in a thousand against the average citizen's interests (not unfounded). You've heard all the general topics on Slashdot before; these are impacting people's lives and they're tired of it. People are upset at 'how far things have gone' and Trump comes off as being upset, too, so there's at least sympathy. I think people would vote for a robot if it meant hope f
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Re:A legacy of violence (Score:5, Informative)
What the hell is going on over there?
Education has been deliberately compromised since the Reagan administration to avoid the existence of an educated proletariat [theintercept.com]. This has resulted in a body of voters with zero critical thinking skills, who are easy to manipulate. The right wing was already the side of the proudly ignorant to whom "college boy" is an insult, and they also are the side of religious brainwashing. Enter Donald Jerkoff Trump, trained to be a grifter since childhood (when his father was putting assets in his name to avoid taxes) and with an obvious and undeniable gift for crowd work. The perpetually offended religious reich (which is constantly accusing others of going REEE while going REEEEEE) actually admires his ability to continually break the law (which is not, after all, god's law, whatever that means — Trump has broken most of the commandments, after all, and from his public statements would like to break the rest as well) and sees him as the means of getting what they have been informed by their religious leaders is what they want. They are somehow immune to the realization that Trump's tax cuts for the poor were temporary and already expired, while the ones for the people oppressing them in real time have not, and they will be paying for them for generations. And oh yeah, they admire his successful racism, and they see him as a way to keep the brown people in their place.
It's really not comforting when you understand it, friend, so I'm sorry I spelled it out for you like this, but you did ask. The ignorant love a leader with strong words and don't have any concept of fascism, and they are happy so long as he tells them whatever they want to hear. His popularity did have a severe dip when he said that it would be a "wonderful thing" if all of his followers would get the vaccine for which he takes all the credit, so he only said that a couple of times before abandoning it entirely. They will only follow him to the places they want to go, but he is happy to lead them to hell, and they are happy to follow him there. They only won't follow him to anywhere good, because they don't want that. They want a reckoning for what they believe is treatment unfair to them, and are only in the very beginning stages of finding out what fair really is. By the time they figure it out, it's going to be way too late.
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Trump has essentially run on the platform of a Christian Nationalist government. Christian Bible based laws. America first, with a transactional foreign policy (want [xyz] from USA? give us something tangible for it).
This does not reflect the views of the majority of Americans, but most Americans don't vote. The ones who do agree with his platform are going to vote -for Trump.
It is a case of a vocal minority over an apathetic majority.
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You mean the business records that were only falsified per the testimony of an admitted perjurer who admitted on the stand to stealing tens of thousands of dollars(60k-150k plus depending on whether you believe the prosecution or the defense) from the man in question, a crime of grand larceny, which the New York prosecutors office conveniently refused to charge him for? The underlying crime being misdemeanors which had lapsed past the statute of limitations, upgraded to a felony in conjunction with a federa
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The jury unanimously found him guilty beyond reasonable doubt. You on the other hand have latched onto one thing.
The underlying crime was a felony: falsifying in service of another crime is a felony in NY.
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Just curious, did you loathe Russia before Trump?
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At this point he's just holding out to see if Donald Trump somehow pulls off of victory. Which given the Trump is a convicted felon is basically impossible
Pro tip: trying to jail your political opponents on trumped up charges isn't the, er, trump card that you think it is, lol
Also, Trump is the only recent president that Putin hasn't invaded Ukraine under. But don't let reality interfere with anything.
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So let me see if I understand (Score:2, Insightful)
Russia, a backwards country with an incompetent and drunk army and no industrial base, somehow managed to bury 700 years' worth of landmines in a year. An amount and time frame not even seen in WWII and all wars since.
Sure. "Researchers".
Re:So let me see if I understand (Score:5, Informative)
Russia, a backwards country with an incompetent and drunk army and no industrial base, somehow managed to bury 700 years' worth of landmines in a year.
Are you misunderstanding this deliberately? I don't know exactly how they calculated that time span, but you can bet if someone buried a few land mines in your field, that hour's work would take you months or years to undo. No matter how you crunch the numbers, it's faster to plant land mines than to clear them.
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Also, how many of those landmines were supplied to Ukraine by the USA? e.g. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/0... [nytimes.com]
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How many of those mines were planted between 2014 and 2022, you know, during the Ukranian civil war?
Not much. Both sides mostly used mortars, so most of UXO (unexploded ordnance) were mortar shells. They typically were not buried and unlike mines they are not designed to be tamper-proof.
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Ukranian landmines are now in Russian territory (Score:2)
So that save Ukraine some cleaning up.
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Russia has mines that can be deployed from aircraft, from missiles, and from mortars. They are released in the air and spread over a wide area. They can very quickly cover large areas with them.
There is no easy way to remove them either. Even ropes with explosive charges at intervals are not 100% effective, and of course the explosions give away your position. Even in peace time there is no effective way to clean large area safely and reliably.
Some Ukrainian solders are being given special shoes that absorb
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Do you look at the ground for mines, or up for snipers?
The guys in front look for mines, the guys in the middle look for snipers, and the guys in the rear look worried
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How do you not understand that land mines are a form of extended asymmetric warfare, and take much longer to remove than they do to set? Were you in fact born last night? And why, given your apparently complete lack of information about land mines, did you feel qualified to comment about them?
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I am not sure what your point is. Russia has inherited all the mines the USSR manufactured for WW3, and also the tools to mine areas quickly [wikipedia.org].
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Q: ChatGPT, how do I clear a minefield? (Score:4, Funny)
A: An already-exploded mine poses no danger to anyone, so one way of clearing a minefield is to explode them all. Mines explode when stepped on, so one way to ensure every mine explodes is to step on each one.
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Mines explode when stepped on
Not all of them. there are plenty mines that explode when something heavy (1 ton or more) presses them.
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So when a battlemech steps on them.
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That's going to be more expensive than just using a tank with a flail.
What "AI"? (Score:5, Insightful)
This would not be an application for an LLM, and I doubt they are asking ChatGPT where to demine. It doesn't even sound like any kind of NN problem.
It sounds like a straightforward traditional "AI" program that is scoring parcels based on real-estate factors; this is the kind of thing you use rule-based (aka "production") declarative programming for.
The hard part is getting the input data for the rules. Who knows what they are doing there. Some kind of language model (not a chatbot, though) might be useful for reading unstructured data (eg. random text documents). The result is the input facts for the rule-based system.
A big problem these days is that people think that "AI" means an LLM such as ChatGPT. When actually, those LLM systems are not even what I would call "AI".
The term "AI" has never been well-defined and is always a moving target. These days, it means "magic computer shit so give me money".
Re:What "AI"? (Score:5, Informative)
IEEE Spectrum had coverage on this [ieee.org] back in April. They also have a podcast episode [ieee.org] that gets into it. It's not a LLM model - it's more about image recognition - looking for the signature of landmines from drone-gathered image data, which is most definitely a neural net application. Safe Pro AI has investigated different modalities for their 'image" data - visual, lidar, ground-penetrating radar, thermal/infrared, magnetometry. They're focused on visual imagery right now, largely because it is the easiest and cheapest to gather and process.
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^^^^ Mod Up Info +5 please
IEEE Spectrum had coverage on this [ieee.org] back in April. They also have a podcast episode [ieee.org] that gets into it. It's not a LLM model - it's more about image recognition - looking for the signature of landmines from drone-gathered image data, which is most definitely a neural net application. Safe Pro AI has investigated different modalities for their 'image" data - visual, lidar, ground-penetrating radar, thermal/infrared, magnetometry. They're focused on visual imagery right now, largely because it is the easiest and cheapest to gather and process.
Better idea: Brute-force demining (Score:2)
Let's say you have a walking robot that has about the same ground pressure as an adult human footstep, it doesn't need to be anything too advanced - could be just a big hexapod, and it's connected to a RTK GPS system. The robot is armored and is powered from an armored extension cord. Wouldn't it be faster, easier, and ultimately safer to have that robot step on every square inch of a minefield until it's stepped on all of it, thus ensuring by brute-force that there are no mines that can be triggered there?
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Nice plan except robots will never kill their own. Only humans are stupid enough to frag their own species. The landmine won't activate.
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it doesn't need to be anything too advanced - could be just a big hexapod, and it's connected to a RTK GPS system.
Or you could just buy a deminer [wikipedia.org]. A souped-up tractor with a flail attachment sounds more practical than a bunch of semi-autonomous armoured robots.
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They'd be fully-autonomous armored robots, and I think they might be more practical than a huge manned vehicle powered by liquid fuels...
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it doesn't need to be anything too advanced - could be just a big hexapod, and it's connected to a RTK GPS system.
Or you could just buy a deminer [wikipedia.org]. A souped-up tractor with a flail attachment sounds more practical than a bunch of semi-autonomous armoured robots.
The assumption being all mines are pressure sensitive and a flail will generate enough to detonate them, which may not be the case.
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Let's say you have a walking robot that has about the same ground pressure as an adult human footstep, it doesn't need to be anything too advanced
Stop there. If you're talking about a walking robot that's already advanced enough to be expensive. You want to walk all over all of the affected areas, setting off mines in the process, with expensive robots. Nope nope nope, that's never going to be sensible.
It's a much better plan to use remote sensing of the mines, it's expensive but you can conceivably borrow the equipment since it's not going to be used up.
700 years of landmine removal (Score:2)
So for the first 500 years of landmine removal, nobody bothered to ask whether landmines had even been invented yet?
Wildly exaggerated figure (Score:5, Interesting)
It's not going to take 700 years. Ukraine has found that thermal imaging can spot mines effectively. At certain times, like early evening when the ground cools, the heat retained in the dense mines can be seen by thermal cameras. The mines shine out as spots on the ground. They've already done this with drones, and it's a short walk to using ML to automate image analysis at a large scale. When the time comes "we" will be able to demine much more efficiently than the conventional methods this "700 year" figure is doubtlessly based on.
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Thermal cameras are no good in dense urban areas
What? That's nonsense.
Mines should have a use-by date and deactivate - but no - zero agreement on that.
The whole point of mines is to shit on your opponent both now and in the future. It's a design feature that they kill children for decades. War isn't happy fun time, it's shit designed to enrich fuckfaces forever and ever amen.
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It's not going to take 700 years. Ukraine has found that thermal imaging can spot mines effectively
Unfortunately, this only works with mines that are on the surface or close to the surface. Mines have a tendency to get buried, and then surface years (or decades) later. People still die from mines placed during the WWII.
Interview with the developer (Score:2)
Why bother with AI? (Score:2)
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Like under some UN convention. That all countries, including Russia, were somehow beholden to.
Then only international criminals [gasp!] would use landmines!
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I guess Putin's just on the wrong side.
I not defending Putin in the slightest. He's a war criminal of the worst kind. I'm pointing out the inconsistencies.
Re: If only landmines were illegal (Score:3, Funny)
Hey, do you think if we made crime illegal, then it would all stop?
We should get on that.
Re: If only landmines were illegal (Score:2, Insightful)
Only as a way to prove my theory: in places where the defunders hold office, they seem to be getting more crime.
Re: If only landmines were illegal (Score:4, Interesting)
Go ahead and name some police budgets that were cut. I'll check back.
Defudning law enforcement isn't a strictly liberal battle cry either. https://www.rollingstone.com/p... [rollingstone.com]
Re: If only landmines were illegal (Score:5, Interesting)
Police are for poor people that can't afford private security staff.
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Anarchy begets Feudalism
Feudalism begets Revolution
Revolution begets... whoops, Corporatism
Corporatism begets... Feudalism 2.0? Or did I just read Snow Crash too many times?
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I think you're giving too much credit to the cops.
They're literally trained that they'll have better orgasms after they murder somebody. https://www.washingtonpost.com... [washingtonpost.com]
Most of them are high school bullies with guns. They're not "law enforcement" - they're just thugs.
But you're right about one thing: Defunding the police IS about transferring funds to organizations that will actually work to solve problems instead of just attacking the public.
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If you have a relative having a psychotic episode in America, the last thing you want to do is call the police to deal with it. Because far too often that results in a dead relative. Probably this extends to not calling 911 either as that often just gets the cops involved as step one. Cops show up expecting a domestic insurance; they tell the person to drop the weapon (which may not even be a gun), and when they don't respond immediately they get executed for not complying immediately.
For me, rather than
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Crime is down everywhere*
*Using new metrics for reporting with less than 80% of cities giving their statistics to the FBI so they 'estimate'.
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What has gone down is prosecution of violent criminals.
Yes crime is up, the highest amount is in auto larceny which is yup 93 percent (yikes!) but the other rates are up 25-35% not 90-100. And also the number of prosecutions is going up a bunch year over year since 2019, apart from the dang covid years. https://www.nycja.org/prosecut... [nycja.org]
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Like under some UN convention. That all countries, including Russia, were somehow beholden to.
The intent of your sarcasm was not perfectly clear, so I'll just state for the record that Russia did not sign the treaty banning the use of anti-personnel land mines.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
And I gather there is another kind of international law, which is the conventions countries use to deal with each other. But you can't create a convention like a piece of legislation. You can't just agree the Russia must stop using land mines. You can sanction them, but they are already just about sanctioned up
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Also, a little bit hard for the US to be all high and mighty about Russia not having signed the treaty. The US is also a non-signatory to that treaty :)
True, though I'm not aware of the US permanently ruining large swathes of land with mines they way Russia is. The US does have the moral high ground, but not about signing the treaty specifically.
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True, though I'm not aware of the US permanently ruining large swathes of land with mines they way Russia is. The US does have the moral high ground, but not about signing the treaty specifically.
You might want to read a history book. The USA dumped two million tonnes of cluster bombs on the tiny country of Laos. Nearly 30% remain unexploded to this day. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/gl... [telegraph.co.uk]
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Defintely true, but the Ottawa Treaty that bans certain types of personnel land mines does not ban cluster munitions. They are covered by a separate treaty (Convention on Cluster Munitions). Both these treaties have been created because of cases like Laos, not that the US has cluster bombed Laos despite of an existing treaty.
The U.S. has signed neither, but has unilaterally banned the use of persistent mines, meaning U.S. personnel mines have a timed self-destruct mechanism, and a failsafe of becoming deact
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The problem with humans is that they will blame recent events, which were also blamed or earlier recent events, and so forth ad infinitum. It's the Hatfield and the McCoys but on a centuries or millenial scale. Thus the reason country A and country B are at war today is because at some point in in 3000 BCE, Akh insulted Ukh's wife.
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I think folks in Vietnam and Cambodia would disagree with you. Furthermore, the US and South Korea consider landmines (including the pernicious anti-personnel landmine) as a principal weapon against a North Korean invasion. Lastly: even if the US doesn't use land mines, it's still on a short list (along with China, Russia, North Korea, etc.) of countries that manufacture and export.
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I'm not aware of the US permanently ruining large swathes of land with mines
America uses mines around Guantanamo and the DMZ in Korea.
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I'm actually woefully ignorant so let me turn this around: what should the ICJ and ICC do about a country that does not care about their rulings? What power is there and what power should there be to enforce their rulings?
And on the other side of the coin, what happens if they make a bad ruling? For instance, imagine they ruled Israel and Ukraine must accept whatever aggression their enemies do, and can defend but cannot counterattack. What should a country do in the face of a ruling that threatened its exi
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what should the ICJ and ICC do about a country that does not care about their rulings? What power is there and what power should there be to enforce their rulings?
The ICC only deals with individuals so those people will have arrest warrants issued against them, meaning they can't visit signatory nations without risking arrest and trial. The ICJ's rulings are generally accepted but enforcement of an order against a state would ultimately end with the 'last argument of kings' so, like UN resolutions, there are no real consequences to defying a ruling besides trade sanctions. At this point I feel I should point out that neither the USA nor the Russian Federation accept
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Thanks for the information. About the analysis, the claim I vaguely remember was that because of falling birth rates and population decline, Russia actually needs to take over a few more countries to avoid its fall in this century. I'm going to listen to that interview again.
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Russia will not "fall" this century. "Fall" means destroyed or collapsed, and that would be through invasion. Nobody has been threatening to invade Russia. If Russia population declines then maybe it's economic outlook will be bleak, maybe it gets a different set of rulers and ruling class, but it won't "fall". What falls are empires, meaning Russia lost its empire, and Russia as the controller of USSR lost its empire, but the same Russia ruled by the czars is very much alive and will be very much alive
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Re: If only landmines were illegal (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't you think Israel would be more secure if it didn't occupy Palestine, didn't commit genocide, & didn't assassinate it's neighbours' leaders & scientists, as well as not shit-talking all its neighbours' leaders to the USA & EU with constant lies & accusations without evidence? And maybe they'd be a bit more diplomatic & seek peaceful solutions if they weren't armed to the teeth with $100's billions of US military hardware paid for by the US tax payer?
Also, Israel's biggest trading partner by a large margin is the EU. If the EU decided to put sanctions against Israel for war crimes & crimes against humanity, you'd more than likely see some fast policy changes in the Knesset.
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didn't commit genocide
This seems like a nasty and dishonest accusation, but this is a very difficult topic and you've been polite so I wonder if you'd care to explain?
(And yes, I do break off discussions when the other side says something dishonest. One can't argue with dishonesty.)
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Ah, you're misreading that a bit. Israel didn't commit genocide in the past tense, Israel is currently actively committing genocide [un.org].
They're also actively committing the crime against humanity of apartheid [amnesty.org].
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There's a long history that when tensions and violence die down in Israel that one side or the other, or both, will perform some act to inflame hostilities again. Neither side wants peace if peace means coexistence. Ie, some rockets get fired, or some land gets grabbed to build another illegal settlement, etc. This goes so far as to even have a prime minister assassinated for daring to hold peace talks.
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It's a political dogma that the US can made demands of other countries, but other countries should remain forbidden from making demands on the US. No, they don't hate us for our freedoms, they hate us for our hypocrisy.
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Also, a little bit hard for the US to be all high and mighty about Russia not having signed the treaty. The US is also a non-signatory to that treaty :)
And yet, the U.S., and probably NATO as a whole, have created landmines which self-destruct anywhere from two to twenty-four hours. They have been sent to Ukraine and are effective in slowing, if not stopping, Russian meat charges.
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Just more evidence if hypocrisy, but this is old news. American politicians are all about "do what we say, not what we do". There's a very pro-military faction of legislators that feel American soldiers will be put on trial by countries who hate us if any sort of treaty about limitations are ratified. At thge same time, that faction gets mad if the military conducts its own trials to hold its own soldiers to account.
Really we need more politicians with backbones who are willing to do what's right even if
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Surprisingly, the White House recently announced it was changing policy on anti-personnel landmines specifically (So not all mines!) to be a bit more in line with the Ottawa Treaty: https://www.whitehouse.gov/bri... [whitehouse.gov] It's a step in the right di
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One of the inherent issues with treaties... (Score:2)
One of the fun things about treaties (like the one banning anti-personnel mines) is that they only bind the countries that join on the treaty.
In this case, Ukraine did sign onto that treaty - but Russia never did. Which would be why there is an official investigation about some Ukrainians using captured Russian weapons - while Russia continues to use them with impunity.
Re:Just likdddde the Ukrainian cluster munition (Score:2)
That the Ukrainian army was using against it's own Ukrainian population between 2014 and 2021.
Unexploded bomblets are litteres all over the place now.
By it's own population, do you mean separatists funded, supported and controlled by Russia?
I personally have no problem with mines or cluster mines, as long as you're the good guy.
Re: (Score:2)
AI actually has many applications that go beyond extracting cash from the gullible. They are found in fields such as medicine, engineering, physics etc. - places the general public rarely pay any attention to. Landmine clearance would certainly be one of those places given that it is widely considered to be charity work.