gnull

It's not guaranteed to be bit identical (the why of it is a can of worms), but it's identical enough for all practical purposes.

Good points, didn't know that.

Yeah, the C++ comments this gentleman posts ate rather repelling.

I agree that they hit civilian targets, the evidence is there. How do you know they targeted them? Missiles sometimes can miss or or be shot down by air defenses, then fall and explode.

It's been broken down many times with a lot of examples from history: harassing civilians only mobilizes them. So Russia must be not only cruels but also stupid if you want to argue that they're targeting civilians.

The death toll among civilians also does not look like they're being targeted, more like collateral damage. Typically when you see a headline like "another bloodthirsty attack of Russian orcs of Ukraine's civilians", you open the post to see that there's 4 dead + 15 injured. Like if they had a goal of killing civilians, they wouldn't do it by hundreds.

It's cheap to demonize and dismiss the side you don't like, picture them as cruel, stypid, evil. And from there, creatively explain everything they do with these qualities. It seldom helps you understand reality though.

So it could be that your case is special, you're not just being lazy and racist in building your worldview, but people you don't like are actually unreasonably cruel, evil and also stypid. Or maybe not, and your explanation is lazy and of poor quality. Guess which one is more likely.

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Even the big targets nowadays take hundreds of drones launched to destroy, because of air defense. Air defense seems like one of those thigs that's easier to concentrate around a select number of key sites. You won't put a Patriot next to each residential building, but you can put some next to a big power plant.

And the drones today are made with large targets in mind, carrying one bigger payload of explosive. I wonder how they can change if the goal would be to target stacks of fragile solar panelts with best cost efficiency. I've seen on the news yesterday that Russia started targeting bridges more because that have some new payload that's more destructive to them than just a big lump of explosive.

I don't know what's actually true here, just some ideas on what else need to be taken into account.

A hypothetical is not a position. They are a logical/rhetorical tool that let's you see what are the implications of X being true without saying that X is true. The point of a hypothetical is seeing where something leads without making that something your position.

One reason to do hypotheticals is to see if X being true leads to any valuable, surprising implications. So that after that you can go back to talking about whether X is true, this time knowing why you need to know it (or skip talking about it if it doesn't lead anywhere interesting).

Making two hypothetical that contradict each other is extremely useful and common way to use them. One typical example is case matching. If you show that some Y holds under the assumption that X is true, then you show that Y also holds under the assumption that X is not true; this allows you to conclude that Y is true, no matter whether X is true.

In don't know if Ukraine moving to decentralized will make attacks on its grid useless. In two differs branches here I consider what happens if it does and what happens if it doesn't. In response to whatever the other commenters seem to believe in. When someone states X as their position, sometimes I prefer to see what are the implications of it, and if any are interesting come back to talking about whether their position is true. If no implications are surprising, I won't even approach the costlier task of trying to understand if the commenters position is true.

You seemed to believe that decentralizing will make grid attacks not viable, and from there try to go to saying decentralization helps. My point to you was that there's a few variables (decentralization penalty, Russia's next best target after grid) that must be taken into account if you were to conduct an argument like that. I'm saying that without stating (or even having) a position on whether decentralization will stop grid attcks.

In the other thread the discussion was about whether grid attcks will stop. And my point was that I don't find it obvious that they won't.

Strictly speaking, none of this was stating my position. There's so much more to logic and rhetorics than stating positions and defending them.

Fair points.

> mitigate Russia's ability to inflict pain

The crux of the distinction I'm making is right there. Russia is not doing some ephemeral "inflict pain", it's pursuing a clear objective of draining Ukraine's budget.

The way I'd do it if I was in Kremlin is something close to make up a list of targets, rank them by (Ukraine's cost to maintain)/(Russia's cost of missiles), pick the top 3-5 and hit them. Also continuously update the cost estimates and reevaluate those 3-5 targets.

In this vocabulary, Ukraine moving to decentralized is a cost in itself, so if it does pay that cost to move "energy grid" item down Russia's list, Russia can celebrate it and move on to the next target. If this happens, Ukraine will have paid the cost of moving to decentralized, and will be continuously paying a penalty for it, while Russia's coat of incurring that on Ukraine goes to zero (since the new missiles are hitting different targets).

And critically, if we assume moving to decentralized will make it pointless for Russia to hit the grid, deciding how much will it help requires knowing what target they will aim those newly freed missiles at, and how much cost that is going to incur.

> you were claiming PV being outside was "much easier to hit" but now you are saying those systems probably won't be targeted.

These are all hypotheticals, I assumed we're on the same page about it. We don't really know here in this forum what's going to work. Considering two contradicting hypotheticals in different threads is alright.

My comments are not about what is true, what's going to actually happen on the ground. They're about how one should go about arguing whatever they're arguing for, what reservations they're missing, and what assumptions they made they're not aware of.

Fair!

I meant a diesel generator in a residential building. The refineries stay centralized somewhere safe (not a problem in Ukraine's case).

I meant greenwashing as pulling a reason to make something about renewables out of thin air. In this case article's choice to center it's argument on renewables is greenwashing. Maybe I need a different word, not sure.

The argument that decentralization (diesel or renewable) helps makes sense to me. What they do though is attribute the benefits of decentralized to renewables (ignoring how many buildings are powered by diesel in Ukraine today, those which did not receive that grant from Denmark to do solar), then completely skip potential downsides of renewables, and draw a conclusion from there.