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BoraTas

BoraTas

Major
Registered Member
siegecrossbow said:
Is your family safe?
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Thanks for asking. Yes. They barely noticed it. They live in Western Turkey.
ACuriousPLAFan said:
The current death toll of the two earthquakes in Turkey and Syria has surpassed 1600. This is a huge-scale natural disaster.
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Pretty much the entire city of Haram, Syria was leveled by the earthquake. Horrific...
https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1622511689508990976
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The combined death toll will likely go over 30,000 and there will be at least 150,000 injured. Southeast Turkey is relatively poor and most buildings are cheaply built 4-7 floor brick buildings. In rural, there are still mud brick buildings. Northern Syria is even worse. So even an earthquake of magnitude 5 is problematic there. Two earthquakes of magnitude 7.8 are horrific for those regions.
 
A

ACuriousPLAFan

Lieutenant General
Registered Member
BoraTas said:
Thanks for asking. Yes. They barely noticed it. They live in Western Turkey.


The combined death toll will likely go over 30,000 and there will be at least 150,000 injured. Southeast Turkey is relatively poor and most buildings are cheaply built 4-7 floor brick buildings. In rural, there are still mud brick buildings. Northern Syria is even worse. So even an earthquake of magnitude 5 is problematic there. Two earthquakes of magnitude 7.8 are horrific for those regions.
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There is also the factor of time.

The first earthquake happened in the wee hours of the morning, when most people are still asleep in their homes. It is not hard to guess that many people couldn't make it out in time and were crushed by the collapsed buildings. The second earthquake which came in the afternoon only made things worse.

Update: The latest death toll surpassed 1800.
 
FairAndUnbiased

FairAndUnbiased

Brigadier
Registered Member
BoraTas said:
I am maybe overanalyzing it but this balloon incident is evidence of the US being a sh*tshow on multiple levels.

1- Why they couldn't shut it down before it entered their airspace and was floating throughout the country? If it was an ISR platform, they spectacularly failed. If it was not, then they shot down a harmless civilian aircraft. The latter is likely the case.

2- The US military's reaction was absurd. How many sorties did they launch? We don't know. But we know they had 3 tankers in patrol most of the time. That is a lot of flight hours flown by a lot of aircraft. It feels like middle-ranking commanders are trying to get promoted by showing their merits. This shouldn't be the case. Using national resources to advance your career is corruption.

3- It feels like the Biden admin and Pentagon were against having talks with China. They needed a scapegoat to indefinitely postpone the meeting and look tough (looking tough is the holy grail of modern anglosphere politics). But thanks to Republicans being tougher and the hysteria of Americans it backfired. The leadership had to make a lot of statements and they had to shoot it down finally. Now they have even worse relations with China, likely lost votes, and made the US look like an idiot. This is just my opinion. You may disagree.

4- Politicians and some common people who are celebrating the shooting down of the balloon... They are funny. This whole event had to be a non-event. It blew out of proportion because the US media is a reality show and American politics are extremely polarized. Any rationality dies in minutes because of these. Also, politicians and media figures trying to get popular by glorifying the military feels very 3rd world. That usually happens in the third world. Republicans who are doing that are especially funny considering they hate the government otherwise.
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In the late Ming Dynasty, which is the only country I am talking about and in the hypothetical, you had the following situation:

1. crushing tax burden used to pay for a massive yet ineffective military
2. backwards looking ministers trying to recreate the 'good old days'
3. multiple secret police agencies monitoring each other (Jinyiwei, Eastern Depot, Western Depot)
4. rulers more interested in looking tough than in actual governance
5. caught in a bankrupting war against a foreign power (Japan) invading a vassal state (Korea). while Japan was eventually repelled, it was never punished and would try again later.
6. overprinting of money led to disconnect between reported revenue and purchasing power, then hyperinflation
7. nominally 0 corruption, reality huge corruption and low government efficiency
8. extreme arrogance and believed the outside world had nothing to offer

This is just history. Unrelated to modern day events at all. Yeah.
 
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