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The conflict is not occurring in a vacuum. They can pretend that they are the only ones who can make that decision, but without the West sending ridiculous amounts of money in arms and support, they wouldn't be in a position to make any decision. As long as they're entirely dependent on others, they can't monopolize the decision making here.

the worth of the guns and tanks and other things we’ve been giving them that were just collecting dust over here?

Use of reserves motivates replacement. Just because you're giving them weapons that were produced in the past, and therefore whose (production) cost has already been incurred, doesn't mean that occurs in a vacuum. With stock running low, contemporary money goes in to replenishing that stock. In effect, there's no difference whether you send old or new equipment, because both incur costs in the present.

No actual money was involved and so didn’t really cost us anything.

It cost you exactly the amount it cost to produce them. Just because it was produced in the past, doesn't mean it was free. You paid for it X years ago, and are only now seeing it used. You paid for it. Moreover, you're now going to pay to replace it.

Tangentially related but I can't seem to find the answers and I have a couple questions that perhaps someone can answer:

1. Do stars actually generate muons directly? From what I understand the muons on Earth are a result of cosmic rays colliding wtih particles in the atmosphere.
2. If they do, how far do they travel before decaying? Even if they travel at relativistic speeds, they have a mean lifetime of 2.2 ns, so the math seems to say they don't travel very far at all on average.
3. Either way, are there any other sources of muons in the universe? I'm curious what the muon density distribution in the universe would look like.

You're not completely wrong but neither is the person you're replying to. While the raw materials of construction may have an established supply chain, NPPs are unique in at least two ways:

1. Each has a somewhat different engineering design to account for conditions of where it's built; and
2. Since the designs differ, the construction process necessarily differs and, due to uniqueness, is inherently more expensive and complicated than just building something off-the-shelf or standardized like a house or office building (or, relevant here, a wind farm).

Raw materials is only part of the supply chain: there's construction (as you mentioned), but also engineering and design.

The expense of NPPs, including going over-budget and having to adjust engineering designs for new regulations, is largely because NPPs are regulated to "internalize" their externalities. Whereas a coal plant is allowed to pollute in gathering the raw materials, is allowed to pollute in producing electricity, and is allowed to pollute in disposal, and has weak safety standards overall, NPPs must be mostly self-contained and over-engineered for safety. If coal plants had to control all of their pollution, be earthquake resistant, be airplane-hijacking resistant, etc they would also routinely be over-budget and have delays, and have unique designs for each plant. Now, there is something like a plateau here, where at some point we will have decided on a fixed set of regulations, and common design features can be identified and re-used more than they are now, and therefore NPPs could become less expensive. But we aren't there yet. Comparatively, we do have a practically fixed set of regulations and common design features for much of the renewable sources.

Currently, other renewables get to benefit from existing supply chains where NPPs can't really, but it doesn't have to remain that way, and there's reason to believe it will remain that way.

.io is a ccTLD though and is subject to the whims of the British Indian Ocean Territory. They can, for any reason, remove domains. See what recently happened with Mali and .ml.

Congratulations citizen! You have been awarded with a 600 FICO score for promulgating sinophobic nonsense. If you also prove that China is the Big Evil, you can get an additional 250 FICO score.

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I don't think you see the irony in using the dead trope of "Social Credits" when an actual credit score exists in FICO and can be used to deny you housing, loans (and therefore access to education), jobs, and more. And if you think it's just financial transactions, try looking at what companies like LexisNexis have on you that it coalesces into things like "RiskView", or how much of a profile skip tracing agencies have on everyone. Then you have the profiles built on you by several government domestic (and foreign) surveillance agencies. And you have the profiles built on you by several big tech companies. Just because there's not a single, unified, government-sponsored surveillance and consumer rating agency doesn't mean the tangible effects of such disparate systems aren't identical to what you claim happens in China (i.e., denial of services and access). It doesn't matter if it's 50 different entities controlling parts of the system if the end result is identical.

Gotcha, no problem, I did take it as criticism of my comment but that was a reflex.

Indeed. Funk can not only move, it can remove.

The person I replied to wasn't able to name the forces beyond gravity, so I think over-simplification and reduction to specific phenomena they would have heard of is appropriate.

I don't think you know what "fascist" means.

Moreover, people will happily complain that Chinese/Russian "propaganda" is allowed to exist, especially on the internet. They will demand that Chinese/Russian "propaganda" is removed from social spaces. And, then they somehow they have a problem with other countries (esp. China/Russia) wanting to do the exact same thing. The premise is that the propaganda being put out is misrepresenting the truth to influence public thought: when it comes from China/Russia, people want it blocked and removed; when it comes from the West, blocking and removing it is some sort of "free speech" issue (or, as you wrongly claim here, "fascism").

In this particular case, I don't personally know hardly anything about the movie, and I do strongly disagree with using "promoting homosexuality" as an excuse to ban something. But in general, countries wanting to put a damper on other countries' propaganda is near universal.

Read my edited footnote. I do not fully agree with the claim itself either.

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

I hate this saying. It's not explicit, and logical consequence isn't bidirectional, but it implies that those who do remember the past somehow won't repeat it. Which is blatantly false. Many people, even those who intimately know history, want to repeat it. Either because they think material conditions are just different enough to lead to a different result this time, or that the precise way the actions in the past was carried out was subpar and with tiny tweaks it would lead to a different result, etc. I do generally agree with the explicit statement[^1], but I strongly disagree with the implicit statement.

[^1]: And even on the explicit statement I still have reservations. Sometimes material conditions are different enough, or the precise manner in which actions are carried out are different enough that those who know nothing about the past aren't condemned to repeat it: what those who know nothing about the past do is only superficially similar to the past, and can have radically different outcomes.