I love that Magawa's wikipedia article is structured just like a human: Early Life, Career, Retirement and Death.
A few weeks ago when "Croatia declared free of landmines after 31 years" was posted here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47189535), I rabbit holed wikipedia about landmine-sniffing animals. It's such a fascinating topic.
Ah, RatKablooey. Yeah, that’s the nickname they gave the old bomb-sniffing rat. Guy was a legend… or at least, that’s what the reports said. His “bomb count” was so high, even the military started double-checking the math when his stats became too explosive for the spreadsheet. Rumor has it that half the “bombs he found” were just suspiciously shaped cheese wrappers. Retired with a medal, a tiny cape, and a lifetime supply of peanuts. Still shows up at reunions, mostly to argue about the “official count,” and reminisce with his old field commander, Agent Cody Banks.
You can teach a kid to change a tire without saying a word. It’s the same thing. Rats are very smart and very social. Rats that were good at teaching Rathood to their little ones had more that survived.
Put food in a maze and I’m sure rats would teach other rats how to get it. I expect this is similar.
Rats are intelligent social mammals. They teach by actions. Imagine training a dog. You have two dogs, one trained and one not. You say "sit" and the trained dog sits and you give it a treat. The non-trained dog will quickly pick up on that.
I too have no expertise here, but I've known quite a few rodents. So... my amateur take:
I do not think that the area would necessarily need to be cleared of debris first. Rats can get places people would never imagine they could quite easily.
What I did find to be consistent with rodents is the difficulty in getting them to use set search patterns and such. Rodents go where and how rodents go, and I've never found it possible to teach them set routes. They get a whiff and tend to go right at whatever they smelled in contrast to dogs who can be taught to take set routes/patterns.
The "distance from the nose" wouldn't matter. Rodents can often smell stuff that's around a mile away... a few inches of dirt (most landmines are under fewer than 25cm of dirt, anti-tank mines under fewer than 30cm) wouldn't be sufficient to deter them.
Reliably signaling humans depends upon the particular rodent. Rodents have personalities, and they will often make very particular signals to their people in response to particular things. Reliably enough to bet a life on it? Not sure, but I don't think they'd be terrible in that regard.
"1) Rats have short legs and can only be used in a smooth, obstruction free area.
2) Rats cannot be trained to move in a search pattern.
3) Rats have the capacity to detect explosive residue and can apparently be encouraged to do so with food rewards...
4) ...but there is no evidence that rats can respond to explosive residue in a hazardous area reliably.
5) There is no evidence that the method of deployment results in a thorough search of the area.
6) The speed of search sometimes claimed would make thorough search (tiny nose within 10 cms of target) physically impossible.
7) The cost of preparing the area where they are used, then dragging the rat back and forth over it has to be added to training and housing the rats.
8) While a rat may indicate on a hazard, it cannot expose and clear it. The cost of manually excavating and clearing any explosive hazard that the rat signals on must also be added to the total cost of clearance.
9) The ground has to be scalped for them to be dragged across it in a straight line, then safe-lanes for the handlers manually searched and cleared – so the total cost of using the rats includes the cost of an armoured vegetation cutter and a fully equipped demining team to prepare the area in which the rat will search.
10) There is absolutely no evidence that the cost is less than the cost of demining the area using the same assets but without rats.
11) Because the rat cannot be trained to search and indicate in a set way (which a dog can be reliably trained to do) there is no way for a Quality Assurance observer to know whether the rat is paying attention, so no way of knowing whether the rat has done anything of any value at all.
"
Ok, I only skimmed the article, but it sounded a bit forced. And already point 1 in the summary makes me sceptic, because rats can climb pretty well as far as I know. (Otherwise I am no expert, either)
"5. There is no evidence that the method of deployment results in a thorough search of the area."
This is the most technical post, and it will go almost unnoticed.
A cool story about a rat or a dog draws more attention than mines which were missed and maimed people years after searching the field.
Anyways, the author of that piece is a little mad, but in the sense that it is worth serious consideration. TLDR: the rats aren't cost effective and, worst of all, haven't scientifically proved to be effective.
Stark reminder of how precious and meaningful a life can be - of any creature, no matter how small. We should be nice to all creatures not just humans.
I agree. However, you get insane push back the second you start to mention veganism. And yes, that is a luxury and there large parts of the world where that's not an option, but if you're reading this comment you probably could survive without eating meat.
Yep. Another great example of this is any discussion where datacenter resource usage gets brought up. Mention how much water someone's ChatGPT queries takes and people will generally agree it's a problem. Mention how much water their burger takes and at best you'll get people hemming and hawing about protein or indigenous cultures or their cousin's friend who went vegan and got really sick.
Also, I personally think framing it as a binary or quasi religious decision is counterproductive.
I was vegetarian for some years, before ultimately deciding I just run better on an omnivore diet. But for environmental and ethical reasons I decided to make meat more of a side dish vs the center of the meal, and to mostly eat chicken vs more high environmental impact animal proteins like beef.
I think a lot of people that would never go full vegan can do well on this sort of less meat middle road.
Hot take: people get angry about veganism because they suspect, deep down, that vegans are right and feel guilty about eating meat. (Not taking the moral high ground here - I have put approximately zero effort into reducing meat intake at all.)
Vegas are objectively right. I eat mostly vegan but still eat other stuff from time to time. I look at those times as me being selfish. I am an imperfect person and the vegans are right.
So long as they're humanely harvested? Some argue that cows are mistreated when kept producing milk as much as they are, but I haven't looked into it because I'm selfish too.
Cows are mammals. They produce milk for their young for a period after giving birth then stop, just like a human woman. Which means that for us to take their milk we have to keep them constantly pregnant.
Ask a woman (or think about it if you are one) how they would like being forcefully impregnated then having their tits constantly milked, year after year. As a bonus, the born kids are separated into girls to be milked in the same cycle and boys to be killed and eaten.
Agree if the animals are treated well; but I have a very high bar for that. I would also accept eating animals which died of old age if it could be done safely. It's easier to just round this to "vegan."
The real problem with veganism is that you are a social outcast around normies. That was the biggest problem that I had. Also, veganism is essentially a "fundamentalist" way of thinking -- all or nothing. Now, I advocate for people to experiment with eating less meat and animal products, not zero. Even if people cut the amount of meat they ate by 20%, it would have a huge environmental impact. Also, the type of meat you eat also has a large environmental impact: Consider beef vs chicken.
Agree. Everything else is easy: taste, nutrition, cheap shopping... but if you decide to exclude animal products, prepare to face ostracism and you'll need to learn to cope with that. A simple and effective way is to ignore the blames and regards, let them flow to the ground without catching them.
Some people will get angry at you because you tried to do something good to much:
- not trying: that's ok, everybody is free to keep his life as-is
- trying 0-90%: that's ok, everybody is free to try doing some good
- trying 90-100%: you're a fundamentalist, you can't change the world
My advice: don't argue:
- "that's extremist" / "that's not natural" / [...] => That's an opinion, you won't change it. Smile and route to another subject.
- "why are you [an extremist/unnatural/priest/...]?" => Question. Don't try to rant the full manifesto, you won't change their opinion neither. But if you feel confortable you may clarify a few inches of incomprehension :
- Have you heard of vegansociety's definition[0]? I don't consider myself as an extremist.
- I find Tofu very tasty!
- I won't try to change your habits, just doing thinks the way I like them better.
Golden rule: don't get upset. You're always free to not being confortable discussing your choices.
Hard disagree. People care about animals because they have faces that trigger their empathy. Plant life is still life. The destruction of plants to feed people is no more moral than the slaughter of an animal. The cutting of a redwood to make a desk is not moral. Many people also lack any kind of principle and make stuff up as they go. They get angry at killing a butterfly, but they don't care at all about killing a wasp. Likewise, people get upset about a pig, but they don't care about carrots. The carrots lack a face, and the wasp lacks pretty wings.
There’s no point to be sad: even trees get remembered and honoured. Human’s humanity have no such "compassion contingent”: loving a new child doesn’t take the love out of the precedents.
Some antispeciesist (and others) argue that giving more compassion to animals is a step to develop one’s compassion to others being, hence being nicer to others humans. On the opposite: accepting an horrendous practices toward non-humans animals makes ones more prone to accept horrendous practice toward humans.
I was recently at a wet lands were there were hundreds of thousands of snow geese making the lake white and blackening the sky, crazy to see and yeah we are blessed with the ability to change the entire Earth, the other guys are just along for the ride
Beaver dams change ecosystems. The Earth has oxygen due to cyanobacteria. Pedantically, all living beings change the Earth. But it certainly seems like we're the ones making the biggest changes at the moment.
RIP Magawa. Animals are wonderful. My grandmother had seizures for the latter part of her life and her doctors were unable to determine the root cause. A Great Dane mix her and my grandfather rescued was able to sense when one a fit was coming on and would lean on her until she was lying down and safe.
Magawa cleared 1,517,711 sq.ft of land. He could work at a pace of 2,808 sq.ft (a doubles tennis court) every 20 minutes. If he maintained that pace, he worked 180.2 hours. Let's assume, with hazardous terrain, he worked 25% that speed on average. If that's the case he worked ~720 hours during a 5-6 year career. A different rat, Ronin, that found more stuff found a total of 124 explosive devices. So Magawa found no more than 1 explosive for every 5 hours and 45 minutes of searching. Or approximately one device every 17.25 tennis courts of searching.
I don’t like this site’s obsession with reducing everything to market opportunities, but… it’s extremely well documented that land mines, white truffles, cancer, diabetes, chemical weapons, etc can all be ‘sniffed’ by animals and it’s a mechanism that is almost always ‘better’ (cheaper, quicker, more deployable in the field) than human-engineered solutions. Surely there’s some vebture capital opportunity here for better sensors that would unarguably improve our lot more than AI, at least per dollar invested?
Before focusing on rats, who are too light to set off mines and live long pampered lives, I would focus on the 73 million pigs and 87 million cows in factory farms [0].
There is a concrete numbers of dollars needed to functionally demine Cambodia, and it's in the low billions of dollars. They have highly effective teams, and you can directly contribute by visiting museum. https://www.cambodialandminemuseum.org/
I just can't help but imagine those long lived rats escaping and taking over our cities. We already struggle with the rat population and they only live 3 years, imagine if they lived 15.
Also I love rats and totally agree they're tough pets because they don't live long enough. We had many of them growing up and spent a fortune removing tumors.
I thought rats would make great pets but the idea that you get attached to a guy who would die in a couple years is quite discouraging. You updated my knowledge.
My grandmother had an African grey parrot she had inherited from someone.
Hey there, sorry to confuse you but that was a bit of a joke, real rats max lifespan is 7, but we have those other rats that will live to 80 or even 90... But yes, the parrot issue is real, people will get those without thinking for even a second about how old they can get. We have one in our family that has outlived three owners.
Finally, some excellent news that honors the contributions of a (once) living creature that made the world a better place (presumably without conflicting ulterior motives).
Nobody likes experimenting on animals, but it is use mice or orphans in third world countries. In silico and computational models are just not a good enough analogue for the human body.
Well it's good to be honest, and so I commend you on that.
So the hierarchy is
- our kids
- "third-world orphans"
- other species
For what it's worth, I'm not denying the benefit we obtain by testing on animals, nor am I suggesting that we live surrounded by rodents that we know to be vectors for multiple diseases that would affect us.
The comment above was merely an observation on the value of life and how little attention we pay to it.
We subject sentient beings to untold amounts of horror every day, and we are completely destroying the balance of life on earth with a system that is entirely devoted to serving humans--individual humans, not humanity.
The statue is not the point. The point is what this little creature did and how we might learn to show mercy and respect to our fellow sentient beings.
Correct. These are the creatures that will ruin your home/barn if infested with them.
Source: recently finished getting rid of a rat infestation in my barn. they also reproduce at a crazy rate. Some poison + getting two barn cats = problem solved.
Sadly demand for such heros may increase in the future. Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Ukraine and Finland withdrew from the Ottawa Treaty banning personnel mines. And probably more countries will follow.
Whatever the reason, this will increase the likelihood of landmine casualties in the future. And not necessarily (only) in this area, but it weakens the treaty in general.
Part of these kinds of treaties is to accept some additional difficulty or expenses in defence for a more widespread benefit. I'm living in Finland and I would have accepted these.
161 countries are still in the Ottawa Treaty, including all European countries except the ones who withdrew. I have hard time seeing how this treaty would have much effect on wartime alliances.
But if that's the case, what are "all the force multipliers"? Chemical weapons? Biological weapons? What share of the GDP for defence?
It's nice that so many countries are signatories, but the countries which are currently involved in significant conflicts, have been, or are likely to be, are all non-signatories, have withdrawn, or are not abiding by their commitment. I'm not sure how much it matters that many non-warring countries are signatories to the convention, unless you think the Ottawa Treaty has actually prevented one or more conflicts (which I doubt).
I find some of the signatories laughable, as both sides in the Russia-Ukraine conflict have used them (with Ukraine being a signatory), while countries like Palestine and Eritrea have committed egregious human rights violations (since assenting), so I don't trust any commitment of theirs.
With respect to chemical and biological weapons, I think the reason they're not widely used is that they're relatively ineffective, and inconvenient, so I don't think they're a force-multiplier at all. Russia & Syria's (likely) uses of chemical weapons seem like more of a (mostly ineffective) desperate gamble than a brilliant move, though they demonstrate the non-existent consequences to such violations of treaty obligations.
The main effect of the treaty is that personnel mine production and trade has dramatically decreased, thus making it harder for (small) non-signatories to deploy too.
International treaties tend to be always somewhat aspirational and are often violated and sparsely enforced. This does not mean they don't have any effect.
That's a bit difficult argument to exhaustively address.
Personnel mines has been a topic of considerable public, political and military discussion about personnel mines in Finland for a long time and has been analyzed in depth. Even now, after a significant political mood change at around 2024, the official line (e.g. in the government proposal[1] that led to the withdrawal) is that personnel mines have mostly an auxiliary role in the defence strategy.
Indeed, but without them Ukraine would have been overrun by now. They are 'auxiliary' but very important. Ukraine is pretty clever about them too: most of these expire after a few days or weeks.
Well, there is a bit of a problem. Ukraine has shown the reality of dealing with Russia and unfortunately landmines are back on the menu. Yes, it would be much better if we didn't need to defend from aggressors. But if you tie your own army one hand behind their backs then they will lose for sure. This about war, not Oxford boxing rules, and if one side commits one human rights violation after the other it would be great if you could keep the high ground but there are practical limits to that.
Note the incredible restraint of Ukrainians troops in dealing with Russian civilians and captured Russian military. But that does not translate into 'let's handicap our own forces'.
The warmongers are on the other side of the border. Europe is just reacting to this and the states that have rescinded the landmine ban are all directly in the line of fire.
In the interest of figuring out whether you are trolling or not, can you please describe which problems these are and what diplomatic solutions you believe exist?
I'm not trolling - its pretty evident that diplomacy was not effective and that the decision was made to go to war, whatever the cost - because thats what happened.
The diplomatic effort to save over a million men from needless massacre on the battlefield was not considered worthwhile by the ruling elites running Ukraine for the past two decades, in face of the immense profits to be made - by an elite few - in war profits.
In the interest of figuring out whether you profit from war or not, why don't you tell us the extent of your own investment in the military industrial complex which currently profits from propagating the "ma' Russia" trope ..
Ukraine did not decide to go to war. I really don't know where you got the idea that they had any agency in preventing this short of giving Russia all of their territory and fleeing West. Since you're an immigrant into Europe maybe study the lay of the land a bit before having such outspoken opinions. You are effectively a mouthpiece for Russian propaganda which I have now idea where you picked it up (you're from Australia originally iirc and you are currently in Austria so you have access to information just like everybody else).
> I really don't know where you got the idea that they had any agency in preventing this short of giving Russia all of their territory and fleeing West.
This is at best a conjecture. It's arguable what terms are acceptable and to whom, but Russia has offered and is offering substantially milder terms than taking all of Ukraine. They probably wouldn't even want western Ukraine if offered.
No, they would definitely want western Ukraine and they would take it too. From the beginning of the war it was pretty clear that they were going for all of it. Remember the assault on Kyiv, as well as the leaked map that showed all of Ukraine and Moldova as the target of the 'special operation'.
Ukraine decided war with Russia was worth the cost that would otherwise have been imposed on it by Russia, during negotiations. Both nations chose war, because their cultures require it.
>Immigrant to Europe
To me, this reads as a banal attempt at doxxing, since you have assumed yourself the position of arbiter of moral authority, which is being challenged by my assertions - but since you choose to frame things in this context, I can say with positive certainty that my cosmopolitan, multi-national, multi-language lifestyle, carried on over 4 decades, has well and truly led me to what I consider to be an elevated position: that all cultures are arbitrary and choose war instead of peace overtly, and often blindly.
The narrative that "all Russians are bad" or that "Russia can never be trusted" is as banal as the narrative - although equally 'true' - that "all Americans are bad" and that "America cannot be trusted", also. The simple fact of the matter is, I know plenty of great Russians. And Americans. And Iraqis', and Afghani's, and Kurds and Israeli's and Iranians and Egyptians and a few great Brits, a very hilarious Yemeni family (also immigrants), and a handfull of other wonderful people, on the other side of the _label_.
Russia and Ukraine are in the mess they are in because their arbitrary cultures are perpetuating the hatred, like you, instead of postulating peace and prosperity, like me.
The simple fact is, our current set of nations, equally human, is currently too incompetent to attain the wishes of the greater human entity, which exists well and truly beyond the sphere of those claiming that "mouthpieces of Russian propaganda" are something to be worrying about.
And the reason for that incompetence is, in my well-travelled and -spoken opinion, due to one factor only: the laziness of those who would use "those of another culture, over there", to manifest their own self-hatred. Because, as an American, you must surely, surely understand that there is a growing stack of reasons for the rest of the world to hate America right now - and yet, here we are, having a civil discussion about the state of things.
It is my learned opinion that there are no greater or lesser, more inferior or superior cultures - that all humans have the same constraints hefted upon them in greater or lesser magnitude, and those of us who have the freedom of expression and travel to maintain a multi-cultural, cosmopolitan lifestyle, must never submit to those incapable of escaping the propaganda and hubris of their own mono-culture.
All culture is a lie, which only persists in the re-telling. "Russians are evil" and "Americans are evil" are lies, persisted by those who re-tell them, designed to keep Russians and Americans from doing great things, together.
And if you think this isn't applicable, in every single human case tested so far, then you need to travel more. And not as a tourist: as a local.
It's the only way to be sure you know what you're talking about with regards to world affairs...
> Ukraine decided war with Russia was worth the cost that would otherwise have been imposed on it by Russia, during negotiations. Both nations chose war, because their cultures require it.
Ukraine certainly could have chosen to accept Russia's demands, but the demand was essentially the extinguishment of soverign Ukraine, and the extinguishment of Ukrainian identity. At least, those were the demands I saw.
Not a lot of diplomatic room. Also, Ukraine had engaged diplomatically with Russia in the past, but it turns out there's no mechanism for Ukraine to enforce treaties that Russia signed.
In which documents, please? I would like to see for myself where Russia demands the extinguishment of sovereign Ukraine, that's bound to be interesting language.
> “I have said many times that I consider the Russian and Ukrainian people to be one nation. In this sense, all of Ukraine is ours,” Putin said, according to Sky News.
Russia's intentions for Ukraine were not limited to only destruction of statehood and identity, but included the physical extermination of Ukrainians too; at least to such extent that Ukrainians would not be able to self-govern anymore: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Russia_Should_Do_with_Ukr...
This closely mirrors the actions of Russians in the 1940s against a number of countries in Eastern Europe. Exterminate doctors-lawyers-merchants to destroy natural leaders, and then exploit the working class people as slaves to the immigrant class of Russian masters. This is the blueprint of how Russia has grown from a small city-state to span 11 timezones. The parent poster mentioned banality several times. It's utterly banal to believe that you can smooth talk your way out of this.
As much as the poster criticizes Western attitudes, they end up reproducing one of the most characteristic ones: the belief that every conflict can be managed through negotiation and that there is always some mutually acceptable deal to be made. This reflects the Anglo-American bubble and bias toward materialism, which leads to serious misjudgements when applied to situations where motivations other than economic.
If you are using Wikipedia as a source to determine "what Russia wants", instead of Russian sources, then whose propaganda are you truly propagating?
Which is to say, your "What Russia Should Do with Ukraine" is just a projection of the, indeed very materialist, "Project for a New American Century" - so shall we castigate all Americans for callously allowing such totalitarian schemes to have been committed, in their names?
Your agitation against Russia is the kind of smooth talking that gets people into conflict, not out.
Regardless, let us not ignore the statistics for "# of states considered inferior by ones own states' ruling elite and thus qualified for destruction and then actually destroyed", per-state, shall we .. the OP is right to point out the sheer magnitude of crimes when comparing Russia vs. Western-5-eyes states...
Perhaps you use Wikipedia as a source for your information, but there are still a lot of people alive, like myself, from all the countries that are or have been neighbors of Russia, who know from first-hand experience how the Russians have treated all the territories that they have invaded, by killing the natives, deporting them to Siberia (where those deported were chosen for having "dangerous" professions, like school teacher or any other "intelectual"), installing Russian colonists in their former houses, stealing everything from the leftovers and then attempting to brainwash their children by teaching them that everything useful in the world has been invented by Russians and that the Russians are their "liberators", to whom they must be eternally grateful.
I would like to see which would be your opinion about Russians if you had the luck to live in a place close to them, so you would have seen your family kidnapped and sent to forced work in Siberia and everything they owned stolen from you.
This is something that the Russians have done everywhere around them, whenever they could, and it was always done unprovoked, before any of those neighbors had done anything against them. When those attacked by Russia during WWII have fought back, after Russia was among the victors, with the help of USA and UK Russia has extracted huge "war reparations" from those who have fought against the Russian aggression, besides transforming all the Eastern European countries into vassal states.
The traditional joke about Russia was: "Who are the neighbors of Russia? ... Whoever Russia wants."
So there is no wonder that anyone whose memories are intact will do anything to prevent the Russians from repeating such actions.
> If you are using Wikipedia as a source to determine "what Russia wants", instead of Russian sources, then whose propaganda are you truly propagating?
Wikipedia says:
> What Russia Should Do with Ukraine" (Russian: Что Россия должна сделать с Украиной, romanized: Chto Rossiya dolzhna sdelat s Ukrainoy),[a][1] is an article written by Timofey Sergeytsev and published by the Russian state-owned news agency RIA Novosti.[2] The article calls for the full destruction of Ukraine as a state, as well as the full destruction of the Ukrainian national identity in accordance with Russia's aim to accomplish the "denazification" of the latter.
Sounds like Wikipedia describing an Russian source. I can't read Russian, can you? Is the description of the source inacurate? Is the summary inacurate?
You extensively comment on your history on HN when it suits you, and then you balk when that history is quoted and claim this is 'doxxing'? Sorry, but that's not how this works. Either you keep your history off HN or you can expect it to be quoted back at you when inconvenient.
> I can say with positive certainty that my cosmopolitan, multi-national, multi-language lifestyle, carried on over 4 decades, has well and truly led me to what I consider to be an elevated position: that all cultures are arbitrary and choose war instead of peace overtly, and often blindly.
Having lived in a few countries and always leaving those countries with a negative attitude (as you are doing now with Europe) sketches a very shallow level of engagement. You don't have an elevated position, you just believe you do and your comments here are testimony to how far off the mark you are.
> The simple fact is, our current set of nations, equally human, is currently too incompetent to attain the wishes of the greater human entity, which exists well and truly beyond the sphere of those claiming that "mouthpieces of Russian propaganda" are something to be worrying about.
They are something to worry about: they serve in Putin's army of useful idiots, and you are currently behaving like one of those.
> And the reason for that incompetence is, in my well-travelled and -spoken opinion
You can travel a lot and speak well but still spout nonsense.
> Because, as an American
Oh, this is hilarious.
> It is my learned opinion
You are coming across as someone who knows it all but fails to see the most basic stuff, that detracts from all of your other points.
> "Russians are evil" and "Americans are evil" are lies
Obviously they are, but I wasn't making any arguments along those lines. I know some fine Russians and I have more friends in the US than in Europe. I too have traveled a bit and spent some time abroad. It doesn't make me feel like I found the stone of wisdom and it certainly did not make me feel like I was qualified to start pissing on the cultures and leadership of the places that I've lived.
> And if you think this isn't applicable, in every single human case tested so far, then you need to travel more.
Because I haven't traveled enough? Or because we disagree and you think that by putting up some arbitrary bar you can pretend that you have the moral high ground?
> And not as a tourist: as a local.
Well, you are not a tourist: you are now a local. So we get to hold you to a higher standard than some random commenter.
> It's the only way to be sure you know what you're talking about with regards to world affairs...
Unbelievable. Anyway, I've yet to see such a pompous pile of junk on HN, you are dangerously misinformed and on top of that you come across as if you have achieved some level of enlightenment that gives you the right to pontificate to the lesser folks you interact with. I would suggest a more humble stance, one where you stop assuming that you know it all and start with actually listening a bit more.
I'm a pacifist at heart, but I also understand that if your country is attacked that you will defend it, and it is very clear who the aggressor is here and that there was no diplomatic solution other than to end up with Ukraine as a sovereign nation utterly destroyed. Russia (note: Russia, not Russians) has proven to be an utterly untrustworthy party to deal with at the diplomatic level. Their betrayal of Ukraine is horrific, mass murder, rape, daily attacks on civilians and civilian infrastructure. Many, many people dead, wounded and mentally destroyed for life. And here you are from your safe house in Vienna telling them that they should have engaged in more diplomacy? Unbelievable.
You like to travel? Good, I challenge you to go visit Ukraine and to spend some time there and befriend people, talk to them and get some actual perspective on this conflict. Then afterwards, you can go to Russia and do the same there. You will certainly come away with a slightly different point of view than what you have right now and since you feel the need to tell me to travel more (which is hilarious) I think it is fair for me to do the same to you.
Yes, and I also believe that the Western mindset is stuck in a collective dialectic which disallows honest discussion on the subject, because in fact Europe has a lot to answer for on the topic of war, recently, and there is a lot of profit being made by those very European institutions responsible for collectivizing and propagating war-monger groupthink. Europe does not have altruistic arms dealers - it has war-mongering profiteers who have historical ties to the subject dating back hundreds of years.
Russia is not even the worlds #1 source of war-mongering, by a long shot. (The UK and the USA are, having murdered millions of innocent human beings since 2003 in multiple different theatres - countries and cultures deemed inferior by Western, fundamentalist, racist, ruling elites...)
I am not Russian, and can thus do nothing effective about Russia. I am a subject of the criminal 5-eyes western alliance which has murdered millions of innocent human beings since 2003, however, and I no longer believe in Western moral authority which gives us the imperative to 'do something about their war criminals' without "first taking care of our own war criminals", because we have far, far more heinously evil individuals still running the show with bloodied hands and with massive war crimes and crimes against humanity to answer for - yet we do nothing while bleating about Putin.
> which has murdered millions of innocent human beings since 2003, however, and I no longer believe in Western moral authority which gives us the imperative to 'do something about their war criminals' without "first taking care of our own war criminals"
That goes back MUCH further than 2003.
> because we have far, far more heinously evil individuals still running the show with bloodied hands and with massive war crimes and crimes against humanity to answer for -
On this we agree, so what are you doing about it?
> yet we do nothing while bleating about Putin.
Yes, because Putin is currently waging a war of aggression against a much smaller nation which also matters.
The fact that there is more than one thing wrong with the world does not give you leeway to only see the one and ignore the other. Western leadership has often been found on the wrong side of many conflicts and the same goes for the current Russian leadership. But since you've chosen to throw your lot in with us Westerners we still sort of expect you to show some solidarity rather than to start carrying water for at least one enemy. Just so we can hold things together long enough to address all of those wrongs.
Europe has problems, there is no doubt about it. But it also has learned a lot of every expensive lessons and has the scars to prove that. You have yet to integrate or understand those lessons and yet you lecture us as though you've been invited to educate us poor backwards denizens with your superior insight. But all you've done is show the limits of your own understanding, of the history of the content, of how things go to where they are and how we are collectively trying very hard to improve things, which is hard and slow work.
A relatively small fraction of West-Europeans has visited the countries east of the line Berlin-vienna-Rome. In that sense Europe is more like two continents than one. In a nutshell, your viewpoint appears to be 'not my problem'. And I don't doubt it isn't your problem, you have no roots here and can pack up any day with your Australian passport to find a new home. But we actually live here and even though some of us have traveled as much (or maybe even more as you did) as you have and/or have lived in many different countries (which on HN isn't nearly as exceptional as you seem to think).
When you immigrate you accept that the country you immigrate to isn't perfect. But you do make a statement of loyalty, the country that accepts you accepts you with all your flaws and that's a two way street. You don't get to pretend you're some kind of alien from outerspace that expects the people around you to start living according to your ridiculously high and impractical standards. Because theory is fine, of course. The problem is that we don't live in your theoretical world where all conflict can be solved diplomatically so that nobody's holy houses and material gains get upset. Sometimes you really do get invaded, and sometimes you have to fight.
The country that I'm from has a long, long history of abuse that made us fabulously wealthy. This is not something to be proud of. At the same time it got invaded many times and somehow we managed to ultimately fight off the invaders or outsiders fought them off for us. I have no illusions about our leadership, but at the same time, when looking at the various alternatives it could be a lot worse. The last thing I would think of as an immigrant is to lecture the locals on how they should run their affairs. I would be the outsider and it would be up to me to learn, not lecture.
I recently visited the facility near Angor Wat Cambodia. Its a facility with a lot of promotional matetial and have greatbway of presentong themselves. I had a demo presentation with a rat doing demining so some observations:
The rats are big. The idea is that they smell mines and are more useful than dogs since they are less than 5kg which detonates the mines. They are also better than human since they can smell old mines that are under soil or plants after so many decades. Unfortunate that is very labor intensive since there are two people escorting each rat and handle it with tethers.
For those reasons their effectiveness is limited.
A few km up the same road is the Cambodian Landmine Museum that has a couple of demo gardens where one can spectacularly fail find Lamdimes Found like 10 amd they were like one hundred, 2 right next to me…. Unfortunately that place which is run by a person called Aki Ra although having done a lot more work gets less financing.
Wonder how hard it would be to train for diabetes? My under 10yo was just diagnosed with T1DM, a pocket rat sounds like fun and cheaper than a dog which is priced at unobtainium prices for us.
Animals are awesome, land mines are not. I hope we can avoid ever bringing that to our shores. Sadly, I know we now have air-mines (drones) so guess someone has to come up with drone sniffing pidgins or something (though obviously a parked drone probably doesn’t persist as long as a buried stationary mine and a flying drone less so).
What a hero. Rats are so smart. I previously asked what I think was an official account on Instagram and was relieved that the rats are apparently too light to set off the mines.
I think instead of cloning on a static meaningless statue, much better if we clone Magawa in term of functionality and cabability, and name the landmine detection machine device Magawa.
Japanese researchers have already successful in detecting sub-surface bamboo shoots for culinary, because young bamboo shoot underneath the ground taste better than apparent overground ones.
Let's invent a landmines detection robotic device namely MAGAWA for Mines Apparatus Ground Assessment Waveform Analysis.
Donations to APOPO can be made at apopo.org. I was at the APOPO Visitors Center in Cambodia last year when the Trump administration eliminated all USAID funding for APOPO. The bombs being removed by APOPO in S.E. Asia were dropped by the U.S. during the Nixon and Johnson presidencies.
And others have statues of a mad clown king. To each their own.
We here have a few old statues mostly from people who won in
"glorious wars". While the statues look ok (though, aged),
at one point in time I wondered why we glorify these folks.
I then concluded that statues showing humans is a rather outdated
concept, IMO. Some of this is history though, but it is still
outdated.
For all of the recipients. Tearing up a bit reading stories of courage that will never get the same recognition just because they weren't born a human.
> Magawa retired from bomb sniffing in June 2021 owing to his old age, as is standard for APOPO's HeroRATs.
> He spent a number of weeks mentoring 20 newly-recruited rats before ultimately retiring to a life of "snacking on bananas and peanuts".
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magawa
End to life worthy of being envied.
I love that Magawa's wikipedia article is structured just like a human: Early Life, Career, Retirement and Death.
A few weeks ago when "Croatia declared free of landmines after 31 years" was posted here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47189535), I rabbit holed wikipedia about landmine-sniffing animals. It's such a fascinating topic.
Just missing the "controversies" and "personal life" sections!
"Alleged embezzlement of soft fruit"
Ah, RatKablooey. Yeah, that’s the nickname they gave the old bomb-sniffing rat. Guy was a legend… or at least, that’s what the reports said. His “bomb count” was so high, even the military started double-checking the math when his stats became too explosive for the spreadsheet. Rumor has it that half the “bombs he found” were just suspiciously shaped cheese wrappers. Retired with a medal, a tiny cape, and a lifetime supply of peanuts. Still shows up at reunions, mostly to argue about the “official count,” and reminisce with his old field commander, Agent Cody Banks.
8 years is an extraordinarily long lifespan for a rat, isn’t it? And he got a lot done!!
Apparently it's about as expected for a southern giant pouched rat. But he was indeed a particularly good one!
They are not the same species than rats and mice longers
How does one rat mentor another?
You can teach a kid to change a tire without saying a word. It’s the same thing. Rats are very smart and very social. Rats that were good at teaching Rathood to their little ones had more that survived.
Put food in a maze and I’m sure rats would teach other rats how to get it. I expect this is similar.
Our dog learned to find tennis balls by smell off a dog that was good at it. This was after me one walk with this dog.
Every trip to the park got us a few.
Then he ate one and have himself a bowel obstruction and me a great enthusiasm for pet insurance.
Rats are intelligent social mammals. They teach by actions. Imagine training a dog. You have two dogs, one trained and one not. You say "sit" and the trained dog sits and you give it a treat. The non-trained dog will quickly pick up on that.
My guess, first they send them links to confluence wiki.
All deprecated pages with outdated info of course. But the comments have links to Slack threads about the incorrect info.
“Feel free to update the wiki to correct anything you find that’s outdated”
When I was young I saw a rat mentor 4 turtles!
Human in the loop reinforcement learning
More specifically, fruit in the loop reinforcement learning.
imitation learning is widespread among animals including many nonhuman species
RatGPT
One demining expert claims that the rats are actually no good, but the charity persists with them anyway: https://nolandmines.com/APOPO%20rats.html
I have no expertise. His arguments sound very plausible though.
I too have no expertise here, but I've known quite a few rodents. So... my amateur take:
I do not think that the area would necessarily need to be cleared of debris first. Rats can get places people would never imagine they could quite easily.
What I did find to be consistent with rodents is the difficulty in getting them to use set search patterns and such. Rodents go where and how rodents go, and I've never found it possible to teach them set routes. They get a whiff and tend to go right at whatever they smelled in contrast to dogs who can be taught to take set routes/patterns.
The "distance from the nose" wouldn't matter. Rodents can often smell stuff that's around a mile away... a few inches of dirt (most landmines are under fewer than 25cm of dirt, anti-tank mines under fewer than 30cm) wouldn't be sufficient to deter them.
Reliably signaling humans depends upon the particular rodent. Rodents have personalities, and they will often make very particular signals to their people in response to particular things. Reliably enough to bet a life on it? Not sure, but I don't think they'd be terrible in that regard.
> in contrast to dogs who can be taught to take set routes/patterns
A rat taught to do a Westminster-style agility course including slalom cones:
https://imgur.com/gallery/smart-pet-rat-tofu-doing-fun-agili...
A rat driving a car. Not evidence of anything... just fun
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s0GWux2kz24
"1) Rats have short legs and can only be used in a smooth, obstruction free area.
2) Rats cannot be trained to move in a search pattern.
3) Rats have the capacity to detect explosive residue and can apparently be encouraged to do so with food rewards...
4) ...but there is no evidence that rats can respond to explosive residue in a hazardous area reliably.
5) There is no evidence that the method of deployment results in a thorough search of the area.
6) The speed of search sometimes claimed would make thorough search (tiny nose within 10 cms of target) physically impossible.
7) The cost of preparing the area where they are used, then dragging the rat back and forth over it has to be added to training and housing the rats.
8) While a rat may indicate on a hazard, it cannot expose and clear it. The cost of manually excavating and clearing any explosive hazard that the rat signals on must also be added to the total cost of clearance.
9) The ground has to be scalped for them to be dragged across it in a straight line, then safe-lanes for the handlers manually searched and cleared – so the total cost of using the rats includes the cost of an armoured vegetation cutter and a fully equipped demining team to prepare the area in which the rat will search.
10) There is absolutely no evidence that the cost is less than the cost of demining the area using the same assets but without rats.
11) Because the rat cannot be trained to search and indicate in a set way (which a dog can be reliably trained to do) there is no way for a Quality Assurance observer to know whether the rat is paying attention, so no way of knowing whether the rat has done anything of any value at all.
"
Ok, I only skimmed the article, but it sounded a bit forced. And already point 1 in the summary makes me sceptic, because rats can climb pretty well as far as I know. (Otherwise I am no expert, either)
"5. There is no evidence that the method of deployment results in a thorough search of the area."
This would be my main question here.
This is the most technical post, and it will go almost unnoticed.
A cool story about a rat or a dog draws more attention than mines which were missed and maimed people years after searching the field.
Anyways, the author of that piece is a little mad, but in the sense that it is worth serious consideration. TLDR: the rats aren't cost effective and, worst of all, haven't scientifically proved to be effective.
It sounds weird there is a pro-rat constituency.
[dead]
Stark reminder of how precious and meaningful a life can be - of any creature, no matter how small. We should be nice to all creatures not just humans.
From "Loving-Kindness (Metta) Sutta" of the Buddhist Pali Canon:
In gladness and in safety,
May all beings be at ease.
Whatever living beings there may be;
Whether they are weak or strong, omitting none,
The great or the mighty, medium, short or small,
The seen and the unseen,
Those living near and far away,
Those born and to-be-born —
May all beings be at ease!
I agree. However, you get insane push back the second you start to mention veganism. And yes, that is a luxury and there large parts of the world where that's not an option, but if you're reading this comment you probably could survive without eating meat.
Yep. Another great example of this is any discussion where datacenter resource usage gets brought up. Mention how much water someone's ChatGPT queries takes and people will generally agree it's a problem. Mention how much water their burger takes and at best you'll get people hemming and hawing about protein or indigenous cultures or their cousin's friend who went vegan and got really sick.
Also, I personally think framing it as a binary or quasi religious decision is counterproductive.
I was vegetarian for some years, before ultimately deciding I just run better on an omnivore diet. But for environmental and ethical reasons I decided to make meat more of a side dish vs the center of the meal, and to mostly eat chicken vs more high environmental impact animal proteins like beef.
I think a lot of people that would never go full vegan can do well on this sort of less meat middle road.
Hot take: people get angry about veganism because they suspect, deep down, that vegans are right and feel guilty about eating meat. (Not taking the moral high ground here - I have put approximately zero effort into reducing meat intake at all.)
Vegas are objectively right. I eat mostly vegan but still eat other stuff from time to time. I look at those times as me being selfish. I am an imperfect person and the vegans are right.
I kinda feel like vegetarians are right but consuming animal derived products is fine.
So long as they're humanely harvested? Some argue that cows are mistreated when kept producing milk as much as they are, but I haven't looked into it because I'm selfish too.
Cows are mammals. They produce milk for their young for a period after giving birth then stop, just like a human woman. Which means that for us to take their milk we have to keep them constantly pregnant.
Ask a woman (or think about it if you are one) how they would like being forcefully impregnated then having their tits constantly milked, year after year. As a bonus, the born kids are separated into girls to be milked in the same cycle and boys to be killed and eaten.
Agree if the animals are treated well; but I have a very high bar for that. I would also accept eating animals which died of old age if it could be done safely. It's easier to just round this to "vegan."
You might enjoy this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ExEHuNrC8yU
The real problem with veganism is that you are a social outcast around normies. That was the biggest problem that I had. Also, veganism is essentially a "fundamentalist" way of thinking -- all or nothing. Now, I advocate for people to experiment with eating less meat and animal products, not zero. Even if people cut the amount of meat they ate by 20%, it would have a huge environmental impact. Also, the type of meat you eat also has a large environmental impact: Consider beef vs chicken.
Agree. Everything else is easy: taste, nutrition, cheap shopping... but if you decide to exclude animal products, prepare to face ostracism and you'll need to learn to cope with that. A simple and effective way is to ignore the blames and regards, let them flow to the ground without catching them.
Some people will get angry at you because you tried to do something good to much:
My advice: don't argue: Golden rule: don't get upset. You're always free to not being confortable discussing your choices.0: https://www.vegansociety.com/go-vegan/definition-veganism
Hard disagree. People care about animals because they have faces that trigger their empathy. Plant life is still life. The destruction of plants to feed people is no more moral than the slaughter of an animal. The cutting of a redwood to make a desk is not moral. Many people also lack any kind of principle and make stuff up as they go. They get angry at killing a butterfly, but they don't care at all about killing a wasp. Likewise, people get upset about a pig, but they don't care about carrots. The carrots lack a face, and the wasp lacks pretty wings.
The carrot lacks a brain that can experience pain, fear and depression, that's why nobody cares about carrots.
I am not an expert in plant neurobiology, but:
https://nautil.us/plants-feel-pain-and-might-even-see-238257
It's a really nice sentiment, but it makes me sad. We're barely even nice to humans, mostly
It's downright miraculous when we respect a non-human life enough to honor it like this
This rat will be remembered for longer than I will, that's for sure
There’s no point to be sad: even trees get remembered and honoured. Human’s humanity have no such "compassion contingent”: loving a new child doesn’t take the love out of the precedents.
Some antispeciesist (and others) argue that giving more compassion to animals is a step to develop one’s compassion to others being, hence being nicer to others humans. On the opposite: accepting an horrendous practices toward non-humans animals makes ones more prone to accept horrendous practice toward humans.
I was recently at a wet lands were there were hundreds of thousands of snow geese making the lake white and blackening the sky, crazy to see and yeah we are blessed with the ability to change the entire Earth, the other guys are just along for the ride
Beaver dams change ecosystems. The Earth has oxygen due to cyanobacteria. Pedantically, all living beings change the Earth. But it certainly seems like we're the ones making the biggest changes at the moment.
If you visit Siem Reap, you can visit the APOPO visitor centre, and see the rats (and a demonstration!) for yourself. Highly recommended.
- http://apopo.org/support-us/apopo-visitor-center/
RIP Magawa. Animals are wonderful. My grandmother had seizures for the latter part of her life and her doctors were unable to determine the root cause. A Great Dane mix her and my grandfather rescued was able to sense when one a fit was coming on and would lean on her until she was lying down and safe.
Magawa cleared 1,517,711 sq.ft of land. He could work at a pace of 2,808 sq.ft (a doubles tennis court) every 20 minutes. If he maintained that pace, he worked 180.2 hours. Let's assume, with hazardous terrain, he worked 25% that speed on average. If that's the case he worked ~720 hours during a 5-6 year career. A different rat, Ronin, that found more stuff found a total of 124 explosive devices. So Magawa found no more than 1 explosive for every 5 hours and 45 minutes of searching. Or approximately one device every 17.25 tennis courts of searching.
Real needle in a haystack stuff, wow
Another comment pointed out that a at least one de-mining expert is skeptical:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47680882
I don’t like this site’s obsession with reducing everything to market opportunities, but… it’s extremely well documented that land mines, white truffles, cancer, diabetes, chemical weapons, etc can all be ‘sniffed’ by animals and it’s a mechanism that is almost always ‘better’ (cheaper, quicker, more deployable in the field) than human-engineered solutions. Surely there’s some vebture capital opportunity here for better sensors that would unarguably improve our lot more than AI, at least per dollar invested?
There has certainly been work on it, but not sure what the status is. Of course, it could be very useful.
From Google, 2019,
https://research.google/blog/learning-to-smell-using-deep-le...
Sounds like the obsession of reinventing trains and trees. Surely training a rat is cheaper than a portable real-time NMR device, right?
Rats are sentient beings. If we have a choice, it’s not ethical to risk their lives to meet our own goals.
Before focusing on rats, who are too light to set off mines and live long pampered lives, I would focus on the 73 million pigs and 87 million cows in factory farms [0].
[0]: https://www.sentienceinstitute.org/us-factory-farming-estima...
There is a concrete numbers of dollars needed to functionally demine Cambodia, and it's in the low billions of dollars. They have highly effective teams, and you can directly contribute by visiting museum. https://www.cambodialandminemuseum.org/
I spent the last minute observing in silence, in memory of this remarkable creature. HN sheep, I command thee all, to do the same.
I did. Also, I think i needed this bit of news today.
If you're into rats, here is a playlist with 6+ hours of rats doing tricks: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLGThSDBAdLEKFkcKeHc0D...
Rats are so awesome, we just need to GMO them to live longer.
I just can't help but imagine those long lived rats escaping and taking over our cities. We already struggle with the rat population and they only live 3 years, imagine if they lived 15.
Also I love rats and totally agree they're tough pets because they don't live long enough. We had many of them growing up and spent a fortune removing tumors.
Some of the rats live to 80, sometimes 90 years old.
I had no idea.
I thought rats would make great pets but the idea that you get attached to a guy who would die in a couple years is quite discouraging. You updated my knowledge.
My grandmother had an African grey parrot she had inherited from someone.
Hey there, sorry to confuse you but that was a bit of a joke, real rats max lifespan is 7, but we have those other rats that will live to 80 or even 90... But yes, the parrot issue is real, people will get those without thinking for even a second about how old they can get. We have one in our family that has outlived three owners.
Ah! Thanks for clarifying.
Finally, some excellent news that honors the contributions of a (once) living creature that made the world a better place (presumably without conflicting ulterior motives).
These are the creatures we kill with poison and carry experiments on.
Those mice have a sculpture as well[0].
Nobody likes experimenting on animals, but it is use mice or orphans in third world countries. In silico and computational models are just not a good enough analogue for the human body.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monument_to_the_laboratory_mou...
Well it's good to be honest, and so I commend you on that.
So the hierarchy is
- our kids
- "third-world orphans"
- other species
For what it's worth, I'm not denying the benefit we obtain by testing on animals, nor am I suggesting that we live surrounded by rodents that we know to be vectors for multiple diseases that would affect us.
The comment above was merely an observation on the value of life and how little attention we pay to it.
We subject sentient beings to untold amounts of horror every day, and we are completely destroying the balance of life on earth with a system that is entirely devoted to serving humans--individual humans, not humanity.
The statue is not the point. The point is what this little creature did and how we might learn to show mercy and respect to our fellow sentient beings.
Correct. These are the creatures that will ruin your home/barn if infested with them.
Source: recently finished getting rid of a rat infestation in my barn. they also reproduce at a crazy rate. Some poison + getting two barn cats = problem solved.
Sadly demand for such heros may increase in the future. Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Ukraine and Finland withdrew from the Ottawa Treaty banning personnel mines. And probably more countries will follow.
Is that their fault or is there maybe a giant reason nearby why they are doing this?
Whatever the reason, this will increase the likelihood of landmine casualties in the future. And not necessarily (only) in this area, but it weakens the treaty in general.
Part of these kinds of treaties is to accept some additional difficulty or expenses in defence for a more widespread benefit. I'm living in Finland and I would have accepted these.
Would you expect other countries to come to Finland’s aid if the country had declined to employ all the ‘force-multipliers’ that were available to it?
I would not expect other countries to come to Finland’s aid if Finland had made such decisions.
161 countries are still in the Ottawa Treaty, including all European countries except the ones who withdrew. I have hard time seeing how this treaty would have much effect on wartime alliances.
But if that's the case, what are "all the force multipliers"? Chemical weapons? Biological weapons? What share of the GDP for defence?
It's nice that so many countries are signatories, but the countries which are currently involved in significant conflicts, have been, or are likely to be, are all non-signatories, have withdrawn, or are not abiding by their commitment. I'm not sure how much it matters that many non-warring countries are signatories to the convention, unless you think the Ottawa Treaty has actually prevented one or more conflicts (which I doubt).
I find some of the signatories laughable, as both sides in the Russia-Ukraine conflict have used them (with Ukraine being a signatory), while countries like Palestine and Eritrea have committed egregious human rights violations (since assenting), so I don't trust any commitment of theirs.
With respect to chemical and biological weapons, I think the reason they're not widely used is that they're relatively ineffective, and inconvenient, so I don't think they're a force-multiplier at all. Russia & Syria's (likely) uses of chemical weapons seem like more of a (mostly ineffective) desperate gamble than a brilliant move, though they demonstrate the non-existent consequences to such violations of treaty obligations.
The main effect of the treaty is that personnel mine production and trade has dramatically decreased, thus making it harder for (small) non-signatories to deploy too.
International treaties tend to be always somewhat aspirational and are often violated and sparsely enforced. This does not mean they don't have any effect.
The main problem with biological and chemical weapons isn't their effectiveness (or lack thereof), but the impossibility of controlling them.
With an expansive Russia next door it's hard to forego effective defense measures.
I'm in Finland and I would have forgone this measure. It is not a critical, or even an important, part of the defence strategy.
You couldn't be more wrong about that.
That's a bit difficult argument to exhaustively address.
Personnel mines has been a topic of considerable public, political and military discussion about personnel mines in Finland for a long time and has been analyzed in depth. Even now, after a significant political mood change at around 2024, the official line (e.g. in the government proposal[1] that led to the withdrawal) is that personnel mines have mostly an auxiliary role in the defence strategy.
[1] https://www.finlex.fi/fi/hallituksen-esitykset/2025/56
Indeed, but without them Ukraine would have been overrun by now. They are 'auxiliary' but very important. Ukraine is pretty clever about them too: most of these expire after a few days or weeks.
Better a diplomat than a warmonger. Lets hope there are saner heads in Finland as such methods become more and more relevant.
Well, there is a bit of a problem. Ukraine has shown the reality of dealing with Russia and unfortunately landmines are back on the menu. Yes, it would be much better if we didn't need to defend from aggressors. But if you tie your own army one hand behind their backs then they will lose for sure. This about war, not Oxford boxing rules, and if one side commits one human rights violation after the other it would be great if you could keep the high ground but there are practical limits to that.
Note the incredible restraint of Ukrainians troops in dealing with Russian civilians and captured Russian military. But that does not translate into 'let's handicap our own forces'.
The warmongers are on the other side of the border. Europe is just reacting to this and the states that have rescinded the landmine ban are all directly in the line of fire.
Ukraine also showed the world how to utterly fail at finding diplomatic solutions to ones problems.
In the interest of figuring out whether you are trolling or not, can you please describe which problems these are and what diplomatic solutions you believe exist?
I'm not trolling - its pretty evident that diplomacy was not effective and that the decision was made to go to war, whatever the cost - because thats what happened.
The diplomatic effort to save over a million men from needless massacre on the battlefield was not considered worthwhile by the ruling elites running Ukraine for the past two decades, in face of the immense profits to be made - by an elite few - in war profits.
In the interest of figuring out whether you profit from war or not, why don't you tell us the extent of your own investment in the military industrial complex which currently profits from propagating the "ma' Russia" trope ..
Ukraine did not decide to go to war. I really don't know where you got the idea that they had any agency in preventing this short of giving Russia all of their territory and fleeing West. Since you're an immigrant into Europe maybe study the lay of the land a bit before having such outspoken opinions. You are effectively a mouthpiece for Russian propaganda which I have now idea where you picked it up (you're from Australia originally iirc and you are currently in Austria so you have access to information just like everybody else).
> I really don't know where you got the idea that they had any agency in preventing this short of giving Russia all of their territory and fleeing West.
This is at best a conjecture. It's arguable what terms are acceptable and to whom, but Russia has offered and is offering substantially milder terms than taking all of Ukraine. They probably wouldn't even want western Ukraine if offered.
No, they would definitely want western Ukraine and they would take it too. From the beginning of the war it was pretty clear that they were going for all of it. Remember the assault on Kyiv, as well as the leaked map that showed all of Ukraine and Moldova as the target of the 'special operation'.
Ukraine decided war with Russia was worth the cost that would otherwise have been imposed on it by Russia, during negotiations. Both nations chose war, because their cultures require it.
>Immigrant to Europe
To me, this reads as a banal attempt at doxxing, since you have assumed yourself the position of arbiter of moral authority, which is being challenged by my assertions - but since you choose to frame things in this context, I can say with positive certainty that my cosmopolitan, multi-national, multi-language lifestyle, carried on over 4 decades, has well and truly led me to what I consider to be an elevated position: that all cultures are arbitrary and choose war instead of peace overtly, and often blindly.
The narrative that "all Russians are bad" or that "Russia can never be trusted" is as banal as the narrative - although equally 'true' - that "all Americans are bad" and that "America cannot be trusted", also. The simple fact of the matter is, I know plenty of great Russians. And Americans. And Iraqis', and Afghani's, and Kurds and Israeli's and Iranians and Egyptians and a few great Brits, a very hilarious Yemeni family (also immigrants), and a handfull of other wonderful people, on the other side of the _label_.
Russia and Ukraine are in the mess they are in because their arbitrary cultures are perpetuating the hatred, like you, instead of postulating peace and prosperity, like me.
The simple fact is, our current set of nations, equally human, is currently too incompetent to attain the wishes of the greater human entity, which exists well and truly beyond the sphere of those claiming that "mouthpieces of Russian propaganda" are something to be worrying about.
And the reason for that incompetence is, in my well-travelled and -spoken opinion, due to one factor only: the laziness of those who would use "those of another culture, over there", to manifest their own self-hatred. Because, as an American, you must surely, surely understand that there is a growing stack of reasons for the rest of the world to hate America right now - and yet, here we are, having a civil discussion about the state of things.
It is my learned opinion that there are no greater or lesser, more inferior or superior cultures - that all humans have the same constraints hefted upon them in greater or lesser magnitude, and those of us who have the freedom of expression and travel to maintain a multi-cultural, cosmopolitan lifestyle, must never submit to those incapable of escaping the propaganda and hubris of their own mono-culture.
All culture is a lie, which only persists in the re-telling. "Russians are evil" and "Americans are evil" are lies, persisted by those who re-tell them, designed to keep Russians and Americans from doing great things, together.
And if you think this isn't applicable, in every single human case tested so far, then you need to travel more. And not as a tourist: as a local.
It's the only way to be sure you know what you're talking about with regards to world affairs...
> Ukraine decided war with Russia was worth the cost that would otherwise have been imposed on it by Russia, during negotiations. Both nations chose war, because their cultures require it.
Ukraine certainly could have chosen to accept Russia's demands, but the demand was essentially the extinguishment of soverign Ukraine, and the extinguishment of Ukrainian identity. At least, those were the demands I saw.
Not a lot of diplomatic room. Also, Ukraine had engaged diplomatically with Russia in the past, but it turns out there's no mechanism for Ukraine to enforce treaties that Russia signed.
>At least, those were the demands I saw.
In which documents, please? I would like to see for myself where Russia demands the extinguishment of sovereign Ukraine, that's bound to be interesting language.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/putin-ukrain...
> “I have said many times that I consider the Russian and Ukrainian people to be one nation. In this sense, all of Ukraine is ours,” Putin said, according to Sky News.
Russia's intentions for Ukraine were not limited to only destruction of statehood and identity, but included the physical extermination of Ukrainians too; at least to such extent that Ukrainians would not be able to self-govern anymore: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Russia_Should_Do_with_Ukr...
This closely mirrors the actions of Russians in the 1940s against a number of countries in Eastern Europe. Exterminate doctors-lawyers-merchants to destroy natural leaders, and then exploit the working class people as slaves to the immigrant class of Russian masters. This is the blueprint of how Russia has grown from a small city-state to span 11 timezones. The parent poster mentioned banality several times. It's utterly banal to believe that you can smooth talk your way out of this.
As much as the poster criticizes Western attitudes, they end up reproducing one of the most characteristic ones: the belief that every conflict can be managed through negotiation and that there is always some mutually acceptable deal to be made. This reflects the Anglo-American bubble and bias toward materialism, which leads to serious misjudgements when applied to situations where motivations other than economic.
If you are using Wikipedia as a source to determine "what Russia wants", instead of Russian sources, then whose propaganda are you truly propagating?
Which is to say, your "What Russia Should Do with Ukraine" is just a projection of the, indeed very materialist, "Project for a New American Century" - so shall we castigate all Americans for callously allowing such totalitarian schemes to have been committed, in their names?
Your agitation against Russia is the kind of smooth talking that gets people into conflict, not out.
Regardless, let us not ignore the statistics for "# of states considered inferior by ones own states' ruling elite and thus qualified for destruction and then actually destroyed", per-state, shall we .. the OP is right to point out the sheer magnitude of crimes when comparing Russia vs. Western-5-eyes states...
Perhaps you use Wikipedia as a source for your information, but there are still a lot of people alive, like myself, from all the countries that are or have been neighbors of Russia, who know from first-hand experience how the Russians have treated all the territories that they have invaded, by killing the natives, deporting them to Siberia (where those deported were chosen for having "dangerous" professions, like school teacher or any other "intelectual"), installing Russian colonists in their former houses, stealing everything from the leftovers and then attempting to brainwash their children by teaching them that everything useful in the world has been invented by Russians and that the Russians are their "liberators", to whom they must be eternally grateful.
I would like to see which would be your opinion about Russians if you had the luck to live in a place close to them, so you would have seen your family kidnapped and sent to forced work in Siberia and everything they owned stolen from you.
This is something that the Russians have done everywhere around them, whenever they could, and it was always done unprovoked, before any of those neighbors had done anything against them. When those attacked by Russia during WWII have fought back, after Russia was among the victors, with the help of USA and UK Russia has extracted huge "war reparations" from those who have fought against the Russian aggression, besides transforming all the Eastern European countries into vassal states.
The traditional joke about Russia was: "Who are the neighbors of Russia? ... Whoever Russia wants."
So there is no wonder that anyone whose memories are intact will do anything to prevent the Russians from repeating such actions.
> If you are using Wikipedia as a source to determine "what Russia wants", instead of Russian sources, then whose propaganda are you truly propagating?
Wikipedia says:
> What Russia Should Do with Ukraine" (Russian: Что Россия должна сделать с Украиной, romanized: Chto Rossiya dolzhna sdelat s Ukrainoy),[a][1] is an article written by Timofey Sergeytsev and published by the Russian state-owned news agency RIA Novosti.[2] The article calls for the full destruction of Ukraine as a state, as well as the full destruction of the Ukrainian national identity in accordance with Russia's aim to accomplish the "denazification" of the latter.
Sounds like Wikipedia describing an Russian source. I can't read Russian, can you? Is the description of the source inacurate? Is the summary inacurate?
The Wikipedia article summarizes a notable piece published in Russian state media.
Wow. What a load of drivel.
> To me, this reads as a banal attempt at doxxing
You extensively comment on your history on HN when it suits you, and then you balk when that history is quoted and claim this is 'doxxing'? Sorry, but that's not how this works. Either you keep your history off HN or you can expect it to be quoted back at you when inconvenient.
> I can say with positive certainty that my cosmopolitan, multi-national, multi-language lifestyle, carried on over 4 decades, has well and truly led me to what I consider to be an elevated position: that all cultures are arbitrary and choose war instead of peace overtly, and often blindly.
Having lived in a few countries and always leaving those countries with a negative attitude (as you are doing now with Europe) sketches a very shallow level of engagement. You don't have an elevated position, you just believe you do and your comments here are testimony to how far off the mark you are.
> The simple fact is, our current set of nations, equally human, is currently too incompetent to attain the wishes of the greater human entity, which exists well and truly beyond the sphere of those claiming that "mouthpieces of Russian propaganda" are something to be worrying about.
They are something to worry about: they serve in Putin's army of useful idiots, and you are currently behaving like one of those.
> And the reason for that incompetence is, in my well-travelled and -spoken opinion
You can travel a lot and speak well but still spout nonsense.
> Because, as an American
Oh, this is hilarious.
> It is my learned opinion
You are coming across as someone who knows it all but fails to see the most basic stuff, that detracts from all of your other points.
> "Russians are evil" and "Americans are evil" are lies
Obviously they are, but I wasn't making any arguments along those lines. I know some fine Russians and I have more friends in the US than in Europe. I too have traveled a bit and spent some time abroad. It doesn't make me feel like I found the stone of wisdom and it certainly did not make me feel like I was qualified to start pissing on the cultures and leadership of the places that I've lived.
> And if you think this isn't applicable, in every single human case tested so far, then you need to travel more.
Because I haven't traveled enough? Or because we disagree and you think that by putting up some arbitrary bar you can pretend that you have the moral high ground?
> And not as a tourist: as a local.
Well, you are not a tourist: you are now a local. So we get to hold you to a higher standard than some random commenter.
> It's the only way to be sure you know what you're talking about with regards to world affairs...
Unbelievable. Anyway, I've yet to see such a pompous pile of junk on HN, you are dangerously misinformed and on top of that you come across as if you have achieved some level of enlightenment that gives you the right to pontificate to the lesser folks you interact with. I would suggest a more humble stance, one where you stop assuming that you know it all and start with actually listening a bit more.
I'm a pacifist at heart, but I also understand that if your country is attacked that you will defend it, and it is very clear who the aggressor is here and that there was no diplomatic solution other than to end up with Ukraine as a sovereign nation utterly destroyed. Russia (note: Russia, not Russians) has proven to be an utterly untrustworthy party to deal with at the diplomatic level. Their betrayal of Ukraine is horrific, mass murder, rape, daily attacks on civilians and civilian infrastructure. Many, many people dead, wounded and mentally destroyed for life. And here you are from your safe house in Vienna telling them that they should have engaged in more diplomacy? Unbelievable.
You like to travel? Good, I challenge you to go visit Ukraine and to spend some time there and befriend people, talk to them and get some actual perspective on this conflict. Then afterwards, you can go to Russia and do the same there. You will certainly come away with a slightly different point of view than what you have right now and since you feel the need to tell me to travel more (which is hilarious) I think it is fair for me to do the same to you.
> Better a diplomat than a warmonger.
I am genuinely curious what you mean by this exactly? Do you see Finland as being led by warmongers?
I believe that Europe is currently led by warmongers, and yes, that Finland is currently caught in the throes of war profiteering.
Wow. Do you believe that Russia is currently led my warmongers?
Yes, and I also believe that the Western mindset is stuck in a collective dialectic which disallows honest discussion on the subject, because in fact Europe has a lot to answer for on the topic of war, recently, and there is a lot of profit being made by those very European institutions responsible for collectivizing and propagating war-monger groupthink. Europe does not have altruistic arms dealers - it has war-mongering profiteers who have historical ties to the subject dating back hundreds of years.
Russia is not even the worlds #1 source of war-mongering, by a long shot. (The UK and the USA are, having murdered millions of innocent human beings since 2003 in multiple different theatres - countries and cultures deemed inferior by Western, fundamentalist, racist, ruling elites...)
I am not Russian, and can thus do nothing effective about Russia. I am a subject of the criminal 5-eyes western alliance which has murdered millions of innocent human beings since 2003, however, and I no longer believe in Western moral authority which gives us the imperative to 'do something about their war criminals' without "first taking care of our own war criminals", because we have far, far more heinously evil individuals still running the show with bloodied hands and with massive war crimes and crimes against humanity to answer for - yet we do nothing while bleating about Putin.
> which has murdered millions of innocent human beings since 2003, however, and I no longer believe in Western moral authority which gives us the imperative to 'do something about their war criminals' without "first taking care of our own war criminals"
That goes back MUCH further than 2003.
> because we have far, far more heinously evil individuals still running the show with bloodied hands and with massive war crimes and crimes against humanity to answer for -
On this we agree, so what are you doing about it?
> yet we do nothing while bleating about Putin.
Yes, because Putin is currently waging a war of aggression against a much smaller nation which also matters.
The fact that there is more than one thing wrong with the world does not give you leeway to only see the one and ignore the other. Western leadership has often been found on the wrong side of many conflicts and the same goes for the current Russian leadership. But since you've chosen to throw your lot in with us Westerners we still sort of expect you to show some solidarity rather than to start carrying water for at least one enemy. Just so we can hold things together long enough to address all of those wrongs.
Europe has problems, there is no doubt about it. But it also has learned a lot of every expensive lessons and has the scars to prove that. You have yet to integrate or understand those lessons and yet you lecture us as though you've been invited to educate us poor backwards denizens with your superior insight. But all you've done is show the limits of your own understanding, of the history of the content, of how things go to where they are and how we are collectively trying very hard to improve things, which is hard and slow work.
A relatively small fraction of West-Europeans has visited the countries east of the line Berlin-vienna-Rome. In that sense Europe is more like two continents than one. In a nutshell, your viewpoint appears to be 'not my problem'. And I don't doubt it isn't your problem, you have no roots here and can pack up any day with your Australian passport to find a new home. But we actually live here and even though some of us have traveled as much (or maybe even more as you did) as you have and/or have lived in many different countries (which on HN isn't nearly as exceptional as you seem to think).
When you immigrate you accept that the country you immigrate to isn't perfect. But you do make a statement of loyalty, the country that accepts you accepts you with all your flaws and that's a two way street. You don't get to pretend you're some kind of alien from outerspace that expects the people around you to start living according to your ridiculously high and impractical standards. Because theory is fine, of course. The problem is that we don't live in your theoretical world where all conflict can be solved diplomatically so that nobody's holy houses and material gains get upset. Sometimes you really do get invaded, and sometimes you have to fight.
The country that I'm from has a long, long history of abuse that made us fabulously wealthy. This is not something to be proud of. At the same time it got invaded many times and somehow we managed to ultimately fight off the invaders or outsiders fought them off for us. I have no illusions about our leadership, but at the same time, when looking at the various alternatives it could be a lot worse. The last thing I would think of as an immigrant is to lecture the locals on how they should run their affairs. I would be the outsider and it would be up to me to learn, not lecture.
I recently visited the facility near Angor Wat Cambodia. Its a facility with a lot of promotional matetial and have greatbway of presentong themselves. I had a demo presentation with a rat doing demining so some observations: The rats are big. The idea is that they smell mines and are more useful than dogs since they are less than 5kg which detonates the mines. They are also better than human since they can smell old mines that are under soil or plants after so many decades. Unfortunate that is very labor intensive since there are two people escorting each rat and handle it with tethers.
For those reasons their effectiveness is limited.
A few km up the same road is the Cambodian Landmine Museum that has a couple of demo gardens where one can spectacularly fail find Lamdimes Found like 10 amd they were like one hundred, 2 right next to me…. Unfortunately that place which is run by a person called Aki Ra although having done a lot more work gets less financing.
Wonder how hard it would be to train for diabetes? My under 10yo was just diagnosed with T1DM, a pocket rat sounds like fun and cheaper than a dog which is priced at unobtainium prices for us.
Animals are awesome, land mines are not. I hope we can avoid ever bringing that to our shores. Sadly, I know we now have air-mines (drones) so guess someone has to come up with drone sniffing pidgins or something (though obviously a parked drone probably doesn’t persist as long as a buried stationary mine and a flying drone less so).
War sucks.
From what I've read from rat owners, the worst thing about owning a rat is their short lifespans.
Rats are incredible animals, and this is a well deserved honor.
If you visit Siem Reap there is a museum and interactive demos of this whole process. You can even hold one of the rats. It was pretty fascinating!
What a hero. Rats are so smart. I previously asked what I think was an official account on Instagram and was relieved that the rats are apparently too light to set off the mines.
Awesome! As soon as I saw "landmine-sniffing rat" I knew it must be Magawa!! He even has a book! https://www.albertwhitman.com/book/herorat/
I think instead of cloning on a static meaningless statue, much better if we clone Magawa in term of functionality and cabability, and name the landmine detection machine device Magawa.
Japanese researchers have already successful in detecting sub-surface bamboo shoots for culinary, because young bamboo shoot underneath the ground taste better than apparent overground ones.
Let's invent a landmines detection robotic device namely MAGAWA for Mines Apparatus Ground Assessment Waveform Analysis.
Fever dream interview question: 100 landmines are cleared per hero rat. How many rats needed to restore peace in Eurasia?
We have drones now which are cheap and recyclable.
But it takes humans to decide how much work we're going to make for ourselves.
No one likes those shitty kids that keep making messes because they are entitled or angry.
What?
Land-mines, particularly anti-personnel land minds are just horrible weapons. They should be banned.
They've been banned since 1997, though Lithuania has withdrawn and Estonia, Latvia, Poland and Finland plan to.
Funny how all countries are adjacent to Russia...
Ukraine has withdrawn as well.
Wait. How did Cambodia end up with so many mines and explosives in the first place?
War with Vietnam in the 70s.
So Vietnam put those ordnances there, those bastards.
No, all sides in that war (it kicked off the Cambodian civil war, so there were a lot of sides) used landmines.
Donations to APOPO can be made at apopo.org. I was at the APOPO Visitors Center in Cambodia last year when the Trump administration eliminated all USAID funding for APOPO. The bombs being removed by APOPO in S.E. Asia were dropped by the U.S. during the Nixon and Johnson presidencies.
RIP Magawa
Some have statues of rats.
Others have statues of cats.
And others have statues of a mad clown king. To each their own.
We here have a few old statues mostly from people who won in "glorious wars". While the statues look ok (though, aged), at one point in time I wondered why we glorify these folks. I then concluded that statues showing humans is a rather outdated concept, IMO. Some of this is history though, but it is still outdated.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDSA_Gold_Medal
For all of the recipients. Tearing up a bit reading stories of courage that will never get the same recognition just because they weren't born a human.
i assure you if we have enough resources, rats will have rights.
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