China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Russia, Turkey, (EDIT: the UK, indirectly) and Egypt have each also supplied weapons into this conflict [1]. Presumably due to Sudan’s position on the Red Sea. (China and the UAE seem to be alone in supplying the RSF, though.)
The other complication is the surprising contributions of various African countries. Ethiopia had supported the RSF until 2024, and Kenya hosted an RSF conference in Feb 2025. Haftar in Libya supported RSF before the war, but may have changed positions as his Russian backers turned against the RSF in 2024. The RSF also has some ties to rebels in South Sudan as well as in Chad. Chad in particular gave shelter to the RSF at the behest of the UAE, but has also seized arms shipments that were intended for the RSF. Russia as noted was sympathetic to the RSF until mid-2024, when they switched sides.
When the war initially broke out, some articles in The Economist seemed somewhat agnostic between the two sides, noting that both had serious corruption issues and had committed many abuses. But as the war has progressed, the RSF seems to have revealed itself to be the far more vicious faction, and the red E along with the rest of the Western media now sees their advances as a tragedy. Unfortunately, the one constant here is the general failure of foresight among nearly all countries of the global North (whether aligned with the West or Russia) getting involved in Africa. If the brutality of the RSF had been better anticipated in 2023, the current situation might have been prevented.
It's also likely that the US is kept at bay by trading UAE acceptance of Israel in return for diplomatic cover and military passivity. The US destruction of Libya has been quite important for the UAE:s ability to supply the RSF as well, a lot of the weapon transports pass through there.
Actually, it is a very common belief on the left and the right of US politics that the Israeli lobby pushed the US to invade Iraq. You know, the whole if Israel/Jews didn't exist, US would be a peaceful nation, no sickness(money will go to the healthcare) and the world would be a heaven on earth.
The last time Janjaweed-style gangs engaged in similar acts of apartheid and genocide in Darfur the US opposed it and openly called it a genocide. This was in 2007.
I'm not sure when UAE ramped up funding and equipping of similar groups in the Sahel and Maghreb, but when Libya collapses in 2011 they decided to do it there and a few years later they rebrand Janjaweed-militias as RSF and expects them to professionalise because they are provided with resources and diplomatic cover.
Unsurprisingly these gangs in Libya, Mali, Sudan and elsewhere don't stop doing racist murder and rape because it is made easier for them to get away with. Also unsurprisingly, the UAE sees the US as the main risk that they'll be stopped and held accountable, because the ICC and ICJ just don't work as a decent person would expect them to.
The US got (justifiably) yelled at for the war in Iraq, and again (less justifiably) in Libya and Afghanistan, and took the leas that military interference is always wrong, despite the obvious counterexamples of Syria and Crimes.
This is complicated by a lot of the yelling coming from US peace activists, who took advantage of their complete vindication in Iraq (and Vietnam before that) to pretend that there's a through-line and preventing a dictator from bombing dissidents or a naked land-grab-war-of-aggression is identical to starting our own naked-land-grab-war-of-aggression.
Got evidence that they supplied weapons? GP’s Wikipedia article does not seem to say that they did (apart from an unclear reference to US military aid, which I don’t think refers to US military aid to Sudan specifically).
China never directly supplied weapons either. Yet its weapons have been found on both sides. The RSF got them through the UAE and the SAF got it through Iran.
If GGP is going to count China as a supplier it's only fair to count the US. Js. Fwiw, both China and the US place sanctions on the RSF and denounce it as a genocide. Neither directly does business with either side.
Russia is involved directly in the conflict however, literally sending in Wagner mercenaries. They used to back the RSF but in early 2024 switched sides and now fully back the SAF. The sad truth is that most major international players don't care about the Sudanese people. They just want to have the support of whichever side comes out on top so they can continue exploiting the gold reserves of the country like they did before the dictator Omar al-Bashir was overthrown by a popular revolution.
I think it’s possibly fair to say the U.S. doesn’t want this war to continue and probably doesn’t even want the UAE to supply weapons to it, but that was likely true of Israel’s bombing of Gaza as well and no one batted an eyelid when holding the U.S. responsible there.
I haven't found any articles implicating the US, which has export sanctions on Sudan. The only thing I could find was something about small arms from the UK.
That is like saying Russia is suppling Ukraine with weapons to kill Russians because Russia has exported weapons to X that then made it to Ukraine. That is just silly claiming Russia is a supplier of arms to Ukraine.
It's more like stating that Margaret Thatcher knew what her son was up to and could have stopped him had she wanted to.
It's exactly embracing the notion that five eyes track the volumes of their arms sales and are indiffeent to their arms being used to kill children, civilians, etc. as long as they're not being stockpiled for use against the originating nation in any significant volume.
I'd suggest that Russia is less adept here than the US or the UK if they're being harmed by thir own supply.
No, it is not. It is the exact same situation. Do YOU think it make sense to put a headline claiming Russia is supplying weapons to Ukraine? Is that an accurate description of reality?
It would be very strange if American weapons weren't used in a conflict this big, which is a very different question from "did the US government sell weapons into this war".
I've looked for articles and don't see anything about US weapons. It would be very strange, indeed, but supposition isn't proof and I can't find anything suggesting the US is involved in anyway. Colour me surprised, tbh.
I wasn't here to 'provide proof'. Just pointing out that any conflict beyond a certain size almost certainly has some weapon from every large arms producer deployed in the field. I can't image how many tons of small arms we left laying around in Iraq, Afghanistan and the rest that are now being recirculated around the worlds conflict zones. I remember after the Soviets pulled out of Afghanistan if you were in the right place and knew the right people you could get cases of NIB AKs for like $25 a rifle (no, I didn't). It's not politics...it's logistics.
Guess you are on the wrong side of things if you know your weapons are getting laundered through other countries to get to a conflict. And of course uk, us and china know this and always knew this.
> How come dubai hasn’t experienced any sanctions yet?
The UAE has crafted itself as a new Switzerland. (Qatar is trying to copy, but clumsily.)
They buy American weapons and financial assets, making them influential. They’ve also established themselves as a logistics hub in an important logistics channel to the West and Asia. (They also pitch their balancing effect on Saudi Arabia skillfully.)
The comment merely said UAE has become strategically influential in finance, transport (cargo shipping (#5 in world), world's busiest international passenger airport), tourism. Nothing about being fond.
5% GDP growth in non-oil. More diversified than Saudi. #2 globally for being "easy to do business in and with". Top-10 in Global Soft Power Index since 2023 [0], rose from #18 in 2020. Dubai has become a global influencer capital.
Looks like the US is backing UAE as Saudi wanes, and as a regional counterweight.
If we're talking about Switzerland, yes it's a federal republic with semi-direct democracy, but it also happily supplied mercenaries to mainland Europe for several centuries.
In the long term, Venezuela has more proven reserves (but much less production capacity). Or nuclear + renewable will overtake fossil fuel. In either scenario, Saudi's share of total global energy production will likely decline by late 21st century.
And in non-oil GDP growth, UAE is currently outpacing Saudi.
As to "everyone there was still as rich as ever due to the oil money", depends on who "everyone" is: 77% of the total workforce in Saudi is migrant workers, many of whom earn < US$5000/yr. They're not citizens.
> whenever someone is talking fondly about UAE that's all you need to know about that person
I’ve heard that line about Qatar, Uruguay, Singapore, Malta, Cyprus, the Maldives, and countless other small states.
I grew up in Switzerland. Folks like to compare themselves to us, mostly due to complete ignorance of our actual history and culture.
It’s true in part and misses the point in others. Geopolitically, however, the observation is sound. Small states need a powerful protector far away or to balance their position between nearby large states. The latter only works in mountainous hellholes and on peninsulas (provided your larger neighbor(s) can’t blockade you; if they can, you need a foreign guarantor with a blue-water navy, of which historically there have only been one or two at a time).
(You know Switzerland is a weapons exporter, right? To the U.S. But also to Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Hungary. One could almost say that folks who conclude intent from a place of ignorance communicate “all you need to know about” themselves.)
I think the connotation of 'being Switzerland' has less to do with the modern state of Switzerland and more to do with the ... Unsavory things Switzerland has historically been a part of.
Most of them are patently incorrect, and most of those don't even care to educate themselves since they keep repeating cheap stuff they heard from other bright people and that's it. How many heard about accepting refugees despite being literally surrounded by axis and facing starvation of their own people (how many nations would do that including yours), or not-so-secret massive collaboration with western allies while on surface acting as neutral ie Campione d'Italia, and so on and on).
They were neutral in WWII like ie Spain was, think a bit what does it actually means. Not participating in conflict in any way. So they accepted both jewish and nazi gold or art, and everybody's else. If you want to understand why some of that was kept around after the war maybe reading about numbered accounts would enlight you. If you actually care to understand history as it happened.
Hitler had plans to conquer Switzerland after dealing with Russia, he was aware that they were 'most free and most armed nation in the world', fiercely independent and taking them would cost him dearly not only due to terrain.
Literally nobody had come out of WWII with properly clean slate, you just need to dig (not even deep) to find abhorable stuff on everybody, to different volume of course. Swiss have no problem acknowledging their mistakes, much more than most other nations.
So why do they repeat the same mistakes by hosting Putins family, laundering his money, and denying Germany to deliver Swiss-made air defense ammunition to Ukraine?
Hamas was the de facto government in the Gaza strip, so it was in everyone's best interest to fund them enough to keep their civil branches running (pre-oct 7).
>Qatar does, the official allows, transfer $30 million each month to the Hamas administration in Gaza. But those payments are performed in consultation with Washington and Israel - and with their approval, he says.
>Each month, he says, construction materials worth tens of millions of dollars are also delivered from Egypt to Gaza via the Rafah border crossing. those supplies are then sold by Hamas. He says the organization uses the proceeds to pay its administrative staff. Israel, in turn, he explains, supplies $10 million worth of diesel fuel to the Gaza Strip each month, with Qatar providing another 10 million to needy families. They receive $100 each, "martyr families excluded," the government representative stresses.
Netanyahu having had people transfer cash was a big scandal in Israel.
Trying to murder the negotiating team in Doha was an effort to stop the US from pushing through 'a deal' as it's commonly been called. They've previously been successful at this and it likely annoyed the US that the israelis failed.
The thing is that "Hamas" is used as a synonym for words like "terrorist" and "palestinian" and "arab", and in some circles in the US and largely in Israel "Qatar" means the same thing. It's the un-chosen people that need to serve or die, basically. Hence the anger at Netanyahu, and an important reason why he clings to power, he doesn't want to step off until he's made history some other way that makes israelis forget his scandals.
The UAE is pretty good at playing both sides so they always come out ahead. They act as a key diplomatic intermediary and host a major US military base which is essential to projecting power in the region.
> You'd probably be shocked at just how much wilderness is in the UK.
You're right. I was shocked at just how little there is. If one's definition of large is more than a few square km, there's virtually none, for any sensible definition of wilderness, at least south of the Cairngorns.
Very cool and hopefully will help influence policy in the future. (Here’s [not] looking at you, insanely overbright LED shop window ads blasting well into the late night in my city)
This is so cool, but I did not see a key piece of info in the article: does the ongoing operation of this mission fall under NASA's science budget and therefore at risk of cuts and defunding under Trump [1]?
Sure, the launch will go through, but SpaceX doesn't see any recurring revenue from later operations, and I wouldn't put it past the current administration to cut NASA's budget such that continuing operations are affected.
I'm not sure how to make out of comments like this. Is SpaceX actually launching customer payloads under $50m or whatever? Because, unless they are, it won't be long before JAXA/MHI starts selling H3 at half the cost of H-IIA, which is already like 15t to LEO for $67m at 150 JPY/USD, which leaves F9 reusable barely competitive in price. I don't know what India or China charge for foreign customers, but is it really reasonable to expect worse deal than Mitsubishi from them? ...
Superheavy-Starship reusable launches at F9 price would completely destroy everything in space space, but so far the only things it had disrupted are itself and airline services under its flightpath. And even F9 is starting to show increasingly clear signs of repetitive "old space" scrubs as NASA gets more disrupted.
Is that really a meaningful statement that stands, or it that just hand wavy glance away one now?
I'm sorry no, you should spend some time actually understanding the industry.
JAXA builds a tiny amount of rockets, almost exclusively for their own use. They have never been a significant player and its very unlikely that will change anytime soon.
Its pure fantasy to suggest otherwise. And even if they could reliably hit these prices at commercial launch scale, Falcon 9 could easily lower their prices if real competitors actually existed.
If H3 was such a dynamic thread as you suggest, why did Amazon not buy 100s of launches from them. They bought launches from every SpaceX competitor, but not Japan.
> I don't know what India or China charge for foreign customers, but is it really reasonable to expect worse deal than Mitsubishi from them? ...
China isn't really relevant. Western stuff is just not going to fly from China.
India used to do more commercial stuff, but SpaceX Rideshare is far, far, far more popular.
The reality is, India large rockets, like Japan, is mostly build for their own program, they don't really have that much access capability.
> Is that really a meaningful statement that stands, or it that just hand wavy glance away one now?
The $67m figure is the same one I'm finding for Falcon 9 (and it can carry loads 40% heavier). That made me think they were matching each other on price to stay competitive in the market and that seems correct as the internal costs I'm seeing for SpaceX Falcon 9 launches are estimated around $15mil, meaning they have a large margin from which to come down from.
> it won't be long before JAXA/MHI starts selling H3 at half the cost of H-IIA
SpaceX doesn't stand still. It's weird to think that in several years SpaceX will be in the same place (relying on Falcon 9) yet JAXA, etc will have improved dramatically.
So are they launching F9 at $67m? Or do you merely expect SpaceX to eventually price match? Not that MHI is selling a lot of slots, but still. Quoted payload figures is also within ballparks.
They are actually doing launches as low as $62 million (as of 2024). They also have enormous margin to lower this cost because even the upper-bound estimate by industry analysts on the Falcon 9 launch cost for SpaceX is only $28 million.
Costs are largely meaningless when talking about global situation and other nations and their strategic interests. Europe will move fully to ESA for anything actually important, China and India have their own stuff too.
Private satellites, sure why not if companies are OK with risking of getting their payload removed at last minute because somebody again bruised musk's ego.
Business can't be done in an environment with zero trust, doesn't matter how much better the offer looks on paper. That trust with spacex is gone for good.
Costs are never meaningless when you're talking about technical projects that cost billions of dollars.
> trust with spacex is gone for good.
Sorry to pop your bubble, but they launched 134 rockets with payloads last year and they all made it to their orbits successfully except for one of their own starlink payloads. This is more than 90% of all launches that occurred last year.
Trump created the Space Force so he will presumably want some amount of funding for rockets and what not. If Space Force fails it would make him look bad after all.
Trump is the one who actually decided to go through with the creation of a distinct branch rather than having it as a command. I think it is fair to say he created it.
There are all sorts of politicians and military members who advocate for a distinct Cyber branch of the military instead of Cyber Command. If a politician ends up doing that, then he should get credit for creating it even though it has been a long time coming.
> distinct Cyber branch of the military instead of Cyber Command
It's not 'instead', it's adding a cyber branch to a different org chart. There are two major org charts in the US military:
The services, such as Army, Navy, Space Force, etc., which are generally defined by domain (land, sea, orbit) and whose role is to recruit, organize, train, and equip forces - to prepare them, but not to deploy or command them in operations.
The combatant commands, which are defined by geography - such as Africa Command, Indo-Pacific Command - and sometimes by geography-independent domains, such as as Space Command or Cyber Command. The combatant commands deploy the resources provided by the services in various combinations. Modern conflicts generally require resources from multiple services/domains working jointly.
It makes some sense - you want domain experts to train and equip them for their domain, then you must necessarily deploy them jointly. Who should organize, train, and equip sea-born forces? Probably you want the Navy to do that, not the Army. Who should organize, train, and equip electronic domain forces (I hate the term 'cyber')? Do you want your IT organization organized, trained, and equipped (think of the importance of each step) by the US Marine Corps, or maybe by some actual researchers, engineers, and experienced managers?
Yep, it looks like it will be cut and closed, which is truly unfortunate. It’s disappointing to see that science nor innovation are not a priority for this administration. And this doge cutting of funding or even shutting down important projects will have long-term consequences, impacting research, education, and technological advancements that benefit everyone.
> "We'll soon be releasing real-time and historical forecasts from GenCast, and previous models, which will enable anyone to integrate these weather inputs into their own models and research workflows."
They will give you the weights and code not the forecast - your quote is incomplete.
Its either a temporary gift to the community until its adopted then charge for it OR they know most orgs can integrate that into their products therefore requiring to buy google products IF it works as they say it does.
The key assumption is that T and H may not have the same probability, but each flip isn't correlated with past or future flips. Therefore, TH and HT have the same probability. So you can think of TH as "A" and HT as "B" then you repeatedly flip twice until you get one of those outcomes. So now your coin outputs A and B with equal probability.
I feel like I am missing something so obvious that I feel the need to correct wiki, but that likely means I am fundamentally missing the point.
"The Von Neumann extractor can be shown to produce a uniform output even if the distribution of input bits is not uniform so long as each bit has the same probability of being "one"->[first] and there is no correlation between successive bits.[7]"
As long as the person doesn't favor which of the two bits they chose is "first", then it should appear as random.
But that is self-defeating, as if the person had the capability to unbiased-ly choose between two binaries, they wouldn't need the coin.
But since the only way to determine the variation from expectation is repeatedly increasing sample size, I don't see how doing it twice, and just taking encoding of the bits, then...
Is the magic in the XOR step? To eliminate the most obvious bias (1v5 coin), until all that could had been left was incidental? Then, always taking the first bit, to avoid the prior/a priori requisite of not having a fair coin/choosing between two options?
and it clicked. Rubber duck debugging, chain of thought, etc.
Maybe I don't understand why or what you don't understand but...
Say you have a biased coin. It lands heads 55% of the time (but you don't know that.) Then the probabilities are:
HH = (0.55 * 0.55) = 0.3025
TT = (0.45 * 0.45) = 0.2025
HT = (0.55 * 0.45) = 0.2475
TH = (0.45 * 0.55) = 0.2475
If you disregard the HH and TT results then the equal probabilities of HT and TH result in a perfect binary decider using a biased coin. You assign HT to one result and TH to the other.
Coins and dice and datums (solid objects with detectable outcomes) may, or may not have bias, it depends on how they were made and on manufacturing defects that resulted. But, at a minimum, such bias can oftentimes be side-stepped or bypassed.
Consider this argument from Johnny Von Neuman.
Suppose you have a single biased coin with these outcome probabilities:
A) Heads (1) 60% (Call this probability p.)
B) Tails (0) 40% (The probability of this outcome is q=(1-p), by definition.)
Now let us apply this algorithm to sequential tosses for this coin:
1) Toss the coin twice.
2) If you get heads followed by tails, return 1. (Say this outcome occurs with probability p’.)
3) If you get tails followed by heads, return 0. (The probability of this outcome is q’=(1-p’), by definition.)
4) Otherwise, ignore the outcome and go to step 1.
The bit stream that results is devoid of bias. Here’s why. The probabilities of obtaining (0 and 1) or (1 and 0) after two tosses of the coin are the same, namely p(1-p). On the other hand, if (1 and 1) or (0 and 0) are thrown, those outcomes are ignored and the algorithm loops around with probability 1 – 2p(1-p). So, the probability (p’) of getting a 1 using this algorithm after any sequential two tosses of the coin is p’ = p(1-p) + p’(1-2p(1-p)). The solution of which is p’=1/2, and since q’=(1-p’), then q’=1/2. A fair unbiased toss!
In fact, the example bias numbers given above don’t matter for the argument to hold (note that after solving for p’ it is independent of p). The outcome of the algorithm is a fair toss (in terms of the (0 and 1)-bit stream that results), regardless of the actual bias in the coin for a single toss. All the bias does is have an effect on the efficiency with which the bit stream is created, because each time we toss heads-heads or tails-tails we loop around and those two tosses are thrown away (lost). For an unbiased coin the algorithm is 50% efficient, but now has the guarantee of being unbiased. For a biased coin (or simply unknown bias) the algorithm is less than 50% efficient, but now has the guarantee of being unbiased.
This algorithm is trivial to implement for the Satoshi9000.
But many analyses actually find that the emissions reductions from switching to electric vehicles are quite minor.
Paul Hawken, for example, doesn’t put electric cars in his top 10 climate solutions. In fact, it’s number 24 on his list, with almost ten times less impact than reducing food waste, nearly six times less impact than eliminating the use of refrigerants which are powerful greenhouse gases, and behind solutions like tropical rainforest restoration (about 5 times as effective at reducing emissions as is switching to EVs) and peatland protection (more than twice as effective).
Producing a single electric car releases a lot of greenhouse gas emissions—about 9 tons on average. This is rising, as the size of electric cars is going up substantially. That means that even if operating electric cars reduces emissions overall, it’s not going to reduce them much. One calculation estimates reductions of 6 percent in the United States. That’s not enough to make much of a dent in warming.
> almost ten times less impact than reducing food waste, nearly six times less impact than eliminating the use of refrigerants
I love this: it implies we should eliminate refrigerants and we should eliminate food waste...
Like a child wanting two incompatible things.
And I was answering "it looks like their arguments are presented entirely in terms of tradeoffs". Which to me contains the same locura - trying to face reality but failing to.
Plus the other reply which is black and white: "unambiguous moral purity opposing these projects that we can have a trade-off. Without them, nothing that goes against the unambiguous selfish interests"
And I've just noticed the original comment is flagged... Another form of denying and erasing the reality of others.
That list is only scale (e.g. 40 Gigatons saved by onshore wind or utility solar by 2050) and even on that measure EVs do pretty well at 10 Gigatons.
But they do even better if you consider cost since the TCO of many electric vehicle classes is lower than the alternative, so you save money and carbon.
These tradeoffs are displayed on a marginal abatement cost curve:
> Technologies: Many measures in the power and transportation sectors are cost-effective right now, including several electric vehicle classes, electric efficiency, high-quality solar PV and onshore wind resources, and nuclear relicensing. The use of heat pumps in buildings is also available.
> Emissions: Together, the measures in this range represent more than 1 gigaton of potential annual emission reductions by 2050 or 22% of way toward net-zero carbon emissions by 2050.
Frankly, these articles are obviously written from a very left-wing perspective with essentially no relevance on the American political stage.
None of the opinions stated in the protect* article are close to majority.
> > Benson’s argument is that “mining critical metals is a necessity for a greener future.” But I would ask—a necessity for whom? For example, do child slaves laboring in Congolese cobalt mines call this necessary? Cobalt is an essential ingredient in mobile phones and electric vehicle batteries, but those kids aren’t driving Tesla’s and listening to podcasts all day. They need liberation, not consumer toys.
“Liberation” is not the solution to extreme poverty in the Congo/DRC. You either need to convince wealthier societies to do vast wealth transfers or find a way to bootstrap a stronger economy, which very well might involve lithium mining.
The leftism exemplified by this blog post resembles actual leftism. Unfortunately, it only really exists in the confinement zone of social media, and isn't allowed anywhere near the political stage.
What Americans consider "leftist" in their politics is just "socially progressive but center right." Hillary Clinton gets called a Communist, Barack Obama a Marxist. Americans wouldn't know an actual leftist if one threw a Molotov cocktail through their window.
Sure, the people winning elections aren't part of the capital-L Left but that doesn't mean the capital-L Left isn't an important political force even in America.
> The term “manifold” comes from Riemann’s Mannigfaltigkeit, which is German for “variety” or “multiplicity.”