This Stepan Banderas stuff gets so tiresome.

Your country doesn't have any historical figures it honors for certain things despite an ugly background? Mine has plenty, just because history itself is pretty ugly and extremely messy.

If that were true, then Ukrainian airpower would be obliterating the Russian army with good old dumb bombs, while Russias fighters were kept at bay by Ukrainian SAMs and the drone threat to their airfields.

Not sure why you're so desperate for this to be true, there's nothing wrong with acknowledging that more work needs to be done. Declaring success prematurely is unnecessary.

Don't underestimate their air defense, it's not dead yet. I'm sure they're conserving interceptors so they don't actually fully run out, and can still deny airspace to more expensive platforms Ukraine would like to use along the frontline.

Their problem has always been too much area to protect, and drones being hard to deal with in general for modern air defense. Not that their air defense is actually useless or anything like that. There's still a lot of degrading that needs to be done to it.

I'll just leave this little bluesey tune here:

https://youtu.be/c0OA3khCZiU

Smokejumper by Jason A. Ramos and Julian Smith

I don't know about the Spanish wildfires, but I know in America there's a whole slew of challenges associated.

The first is the unpredictability of wildfires. You don't want to over-evacuate, that causes unnecessary disruption. But conditions can change rapidly, and a plan that looked good 6 hours ago can quickly become bunk.

Another is speed. Wildfires can travel much, much faster than people's intuition leads them to think. So, it can go from "over there" to "oh shit" quick enough to be life threatening. Wildfires counter-intuitively go uphill faster than downhill, winds can pick up, blowing embers can cause it to jump, etc.

A third is that some people try to protect their property. This is actually possible if you've taken proper precautions of removing burnables from your property and have a garden hose that you are 100% certain will keep running. This is not recommended, but some people will try and that is their right. It's a calculated risk they have to decide for themselves to take or not.

Fourth might be various other failures to evacuate. Evacuation order didn't arrive in time, elderly resident didn't hear in time/can't move fast enough, someone got stuck in evacuation traffic, mental illness, stubborn conspiracy nut thinks tin foil hats protect against wildfire, who knows, it'll vary case-to-case.

Fifth could be firefighter deaths. It's a highly dangerous job with a significant fatality rate, and our wildlands firefighters (colloquially called "hotshots") are basically like the special forces of firefighting. They airdrop into wilderness areas with whatever gear they can carry, with instructions to change the course of an oncoming force of nature. They have the tools (chainsaws and shovels mostly) and training to do this, but it's still exactly as dangerous as it sounds.

Wildlands firefighting is really fascinating stuff. I got an audiobook ages ago written by a retired one that talked a lot about the process. Was like 100 pages or something and super interesting, highly recommend.

It's just fun. Thinking back to my childhood, I think this phase probably comes in around about the time the word "poop" stops becoming the world's foremost source of hilarity.

Kyiv Post tends to be a little less bombastic with their reporting:

https://www.kyivpost.com/post/79532

They word it differently, saying the US warned that Russia was "considering" an attack. This is probably true, and has probably been true every year for the past several decades. Simply because a nation's military planners "consider" pretty much everything they can think of.

Yeah, that's ... unfortunate. Can always just ask one of them if it's cool.

Employees go through the canisters and pick out the obviously moldy ones. They're trying to work fast, though, so they can miss some that aren't obvious. The decay can also get much, much worse just in the time the product sits on the shelves, depending on how good the refrigeration in that exact spot is.

Anyway, open them up and examine before purchase. The employees will not mind, it's what they'd do too.

edit: Assuming there's no sticker. If they're sealed with a sticker then I wouldn't break it.

Rosen is such a gem for the chess community, he has such a smooth, mellow vibe to him that pairs great with chess. He's just a natural teacher, even if his chess isn't the strongest in the world.

Yeah, they interviewed someone who talked about this on NPR the other day. Neat little tidbit.