quiet_NaN
1mo ago
If I had to hide an electronically ignited bomb in a battery, I would try to set it up so that a short ignites a primer which will ignite the explosive. Fill an electrical fuse with a primer which is volatile enough that the molten wire sets it off, perhaps?
The alternatives being that you have three leads on your battery (e.g. +, -, boom, where connecting boom with + will cause the explosion.), which is much more noticeable, or having another component which serves as a primer on the PCB near that battery. Of course, 'shorten the battery when receiving a particular message' is not a standard feature of most pagers, so you have to modify or swap the PCB anyhow, and putting the electronic ignition in there might be easier.
I concede that just because a battery is not rigged to explode on short it might still explode in other conditions.
Agreed that most of the fun 'send real time GPS coordinates every ten seconds' options are off the table.
OTOH, with a capacitor, the pager could still send out a short, triangulate-able burst when it receives a certain message.
I was kind of assuming the pagers were coming with their own lithium batteries, which would be a pain to replace. Someone here claimed the devices were in use for months before exploding. I would think that most of the devices would no longer be running with their original (rechargeable, presumably) battery at that point.
Edit: The Guardian says (or implies) that it was an Apollo AR924 pager powered by a 90g Li battery. This is roughly similar to the ~115g battery found in Nokia phones from ca. 2000 and should easily be powerful enough to do the odd transmission.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
I still think that overall, mentioning the cat eating thing was a mistake by Trump, because it allowed the Democrats to reframe the debate in a way which is very advantageous for them.
The best argument I can find for it being a good move on Trumps part is not that he expects that some evidence will be found, but that he knows that 'Trump lies' is already common knowledge. The median Trump voter will not say "What? He lied on national TV? Now I can't vote for him". They know that he lies about everything from the size of his inauguration crowd to his affairs to random stuff he picked up on twitter or Fox News to (possibly) his golf scores. They vote for him regardless. Him being a liar is already priced in. Fighting Trump with fact checks is like trying to attack Lenin for not being very Christian.
So an easily disproved falsehood is him throwing a stick for the media to play fetch with, distracting them in a way unlikely to damage him.
Of course, the other side is also mostly post fact. Who cares if he is factually correct about the US having paid for gender transition surgery for some aliens, images of the Alien (1979) monsters in high heels are trending all over imgur not because Trump is wrong but because his point if found ridiculous.
I think the media on both sides is mostly preaching to the choir. While mobilizing the people firmly on your side is sound strategy, I think both sides fail to put themselves into the mind of a voter who is still uncertain which of the options is the lesser evil. That voter is likely not so strongly anti-trans that he would get enraged by the US paying for some transition surgery more than he would be by the US generally paying for health care. He also would not care that Trump is lying on TV.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
If it was true, then of course we have never denied it and you are racist for not respecting their cultural traditions. (OTOH, woke people really prefer dogs to pigs to some unreasonable degree, so perhaps it goes 'we have never denied it and anyway it is just a few isolated incidents and does not matter, why would you even talk about that anyhow')
That being said, I think it is very likely that it is either a complete fabrication or that it will never be proven beyond reasonable doubt. I just don't think that Trump operates the way that he would only make such an outrageous claim if he had ironclad proof, instead, he likely read the claim on twitter somewhere and that is close enough to the truth for him.
I think that the culture war playbook of the left here is solid. By focusing on one outrageous claim from Trump, they can reframe the whole discussion about what the benefits and downsides of suddenly having 20k refugees from the third world in your town, which is not an argument where the left is likely to win, into an argument if Haitians eat cats, which they can be reasonably certain to win.
You have to continually move up the housing ladder so that you can live only near people who can afford to do the same thing; this is the only way to ensure you live near pro-social people.
I think one of the key selling points of woke ideology over traditional left-wing ideologies is that it goes so well with economic inequality. A Marxist paying ten times the rent a member of the working class makes might have to face the cognitive dissonance of himself qualifying as an enemy of the working class.
In the woke mindset, economic disadvantage is an effect, not a cause. You are poor because you are black or female in a bigoted society, not because your parents were poor. (I guess if you are a poor white male, you are probably poor because you are either lazy or terrible racist and sexist.) This frees you to discriminate against poor people in a way which a traditional leftist would fine shameful. If you manage to keep the poor out of your neighborhood, you are basically all set, that black lawyer or immigrant doctor who can afford to live in your suburb are very unlikely to be involved in violent crime, hence any claims that a culture celebrating crime festers in any minorities are just racist libel.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
Here is an article about dog torture in West Africa.
The first sentence of that article literally reads:
Countless Countries Worldwide that are involved in the Dog and Cat Meat Trade are also heavily involved in the Barbaric Demonic Voodoo Animal Sacrifices, where they are using various methods of torture such as Beating Hanging, Setting Fire to Animals whilst they are still alive, Mutilation, Stabbing ,Tearing Animals apart with their Bare Hands and Eating them while they are still Alive.
I would give you 20% odds that this is a parody site, with The random Capitalization Thing going On.
While I am hardly the expert, Haitian Vodou and West African Vudun have diverged a few 100 years ago. So even if the most common sacrifice in contemporary Vudun are in fact dogs (which I concede by no means), concluding from that fact that Haitian Vodou also sacrifices dogs is a bit like observing that contemporary Roman Catholic priests have a tendency to fuck altar boys at higher than base rate and conclude from that that that Calvinist pastor is the prime suspect in your child rape case. Or indeed concluding that your Haitian is, because Catholicism is also a key ingredient of Vodou.
From my understanding, the animals most likely to being sacrificed in Vodou are exactly the same animals which Americans put on their barbecue, and Wikipedia claims the same:
Species used for sacrifice include chickens, goats, and bulls, with pigs often favored for Petwo lwa.
I am not saying that Haitian Vodou does not have its problems, it certainly does not seem to be as capable of fostering the creation of a functional state as various branches of Christianity are, but blaming it for missing cats in a country where you can simply buy a more traditional sacrifice like a chicken for a few bucks seems implausible.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
This would mean that either, they decided not to act on the info they had before because: (1) They found the allegations not credible and were doubtful that they could make anything stick (2) They found them credible, but were uninterested in enforcing sex crime laws against a high profile target
Now, (2) would be in contradiction to how I would expect a blue tribe, political DA to act. Securing a criminal conviction in a high profile #MeToo case seems like the best strategy for reelection.
(1) might be credible if we were talking about Trump. The narrative 'since 2021, the blue tribe is panicking about Trump and brings any half-baked allegations to court' has at least some merits to it. But Combs is very much not Trump, and putting a few millions (??) in twitter is not Trump-running-for-president level of evil in the mind of the progressives.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
FWIW, I think that this definitely qualifies as MeToo. Powerful man, coercion, promise of advancement, all there. Much more severe than most such cases, imo.
Of course, the ASA (besides being a lex Trump) reads like a prime example of an ex post facto law, which Article one, sections 9 and 10 of the US constitution would prohibit.
But of course I am reading that all wrong. You see, the framers intent of these sections was clearly to only prohibit ex post facto laws concerning criminal cases resulting in criminal punishment, which is defined as narrowly as humanly thinkable. Having to register as a sex offender, being banned from owning firearms or even being locked up indefinitely are clearly not punishments, and having to pay money to some other party never is.
This goes hand in hand with the triple jeopardy for the same act practiced by the US. First we try you in state court. If you get acquitted in state court, we can still try you in federal court. If you also get acquitted there, we will still allow civil cases which might bankrupt you but will at least not send you to prison (unless you do not comply with the definitely-not-a-punishment regulatory prohibition to own firearms, for example).
In Germany, from my understanding, most criminal allegations go to court once only (not counting either side contesting the verdict). Generally, if you want to get damages from the defendant, you would become a joint plaintiff (Nebenklaeger). A civil court will generally be very reluctant to make a finding of fact that one party committed a criminal act in contradiction to the finding of fact of an earlier criminal trial. I also think the statue of limitations for claiming damages is the same as for the criminal act on which they are based, 'we convicted the arsonist but you can't have him pay for your house because the civil statue of limitations expired' would be silly.
--
However, here, the charges made against Combs are clearly criminal charges. I don't know how the law is in NY, so it could be that without the ASA, none of the women who alleged sex crimes would have seen a single penny from Combs, so their motivation would have been limited to sending a sex offender to jail, which is of course not as good a motivation for the painful act of going on the stand and detailing degrading sex acts as the prospect of earning a few millions in damages is.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
I think it is a cultural thing. Almost all of the members of all the political tribes (myself certainly included) are at most armchair activists who mostly post on social media. The people who are willing to use gun violence to further their political aims are always a tiny minority, but the size of that minority differs very much dependent on the tribe.
In a bizzaro world where Trump dropped out of the race and Adolf Hitler became the replacement candidate, the blue tribe would certainly feel that Hitler needs shooting. But the average coastal city-dweller who puts their pronouns on twitter is certainly not going to snipe Hitler. On the other hand, if parts of the red tribe feel that Hitler needs shooting (which they would), a small fraction of these actually have the capabilities to carry out a serious assassination attempt.
So if say 10% of the blue tribe think that the US would be better off if someone killed Trump, and if 1% (Lizardman constant and all that) of the red tribe also thought that, I would expect most serious attempts to come from from the people at least vaguely associated with the red tribe.
This is not universal, but specific to the US. Gun culture, 2nd amendment (violently resisting tyrants) and all that are very much red tribe coded. In post-war Germany, the highest profile assassinations (such as the RAF killing an AG) were carried out by left wing terrorists, who picked up gun handling skills over a few years in the underground.
There is certainly the possibility that some fringe left people decided to get really good at long distance shooting in 2020 for the specific purpose of murdering anyone who would in their eyes turn America into a fascist dictatorship. But that is a very lonely path, you would have to tell all your blue tribe friends "I practice rifle shooting because it is fun" which would be received about as well as "my hobby is tuning my diesel engine so that it emits as much smoke as possible". From the state's point of view, keeping tabs on a few blue tribe activists who own long arms is much easier than figuring out who among the zillions of rifle-owning red tribe activists is actually likely to climb on some roof and shoot a candidate and who is only cosplaying with their tactical vests.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
Come on. Short the battery, see if the effect is just as bad as a normal battery. Use sympathetic detonation to test if it is explosive. Use mass spectroscopy to test the chemical composition.
Other than that, a pretty ballsy power move by Mossad, betting on Hezbollah being to stupid to check for explosives in other electronics after learning that explosives were hidden in some of them.
Then again, any senior commander who personally handles electronics within 24h after learning that some of them had a tendency to explode is simply to trusting to live.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
I agree, the impact is mostly morale. Getting maimed by your pager is certainly not the most glorious kind of martyrdom.
Of course, I would also not oversell the psychological impact. The more senior commanders will simply keep some expendable kid nearby to handle their pager.
That is a very good point.
Mossad could certainly replace the circuit board with one which has an additional UMTS modem and a GPS tracker on it, but this would be rather trivial to detect once you open the device and compare it to the manufacturers PCB.
If you assume that Hezbollah is smart enough to do the that, but not smart/paranoid enough to short circuit one of the lithium batteries to verify that it will not cause a bigger fire or explosion than normal.
Of course, if I knew Mossad was after me, I would at least disassemble the PCB layer by layer, looking for any chips hidden within it, then open up any chips, compare the silicon to the original under a microscope, then worry about how programmable they are, then consider the possibility that Mossad would build custom chips which look identical to specs on the top layer and finally decide to find myself a job compatible with the continued existence of Israel so that I don't have to live a life full of well-justified paranoia. Thus I would make a terrible jihadist.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
Originally, you used the term
fait accompli
with reference to Mariupol.
From my understanding, that term can be phrased as "done deal" and generally refers to a party accomplishing their objective before their opponent has time to react. A central case would be Crimea: from my understanding, it was occupied before Ukraine was even aware that it was under attack and could deploy military units. Rather than reinforcing their battling troops, they would have had to mount a completely new counterattack.
A city under siege is the opposite of a done deal. Attacking besiegers to break the siege goes all the way back to the dawn of warfare. If you besiege a NATO city for a few months, NATO will be under a lot more pressure to act than if you manage to take it overnight and cease hostilities.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
Agreed. Even if they hide the explosive in the battery, using a sympathetic detonation one would still be able to find out if that battery was explosive.
Of course, next time, Mossad might not modify all of the pagers, but just 5%, so just testing a few is not enough to prove that the bunch is safe. So they either have to destroy 90% of the pagers they buy or live in fear that their pagers might explode in their face, perhaps not even granting you a martyr's death, but just maiming you for life.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
Of course, the Guardian is not happy with this:
Reports continue to come in but, with at least nine dead and about 3,000 wounded in dozens, if not hundreds, of coordinated explosions the episode demonstrates a ruthless and indiscriminate desire to target Hezbollah.
I think it 'indiscriminate' is a curious word here. Per Wikipedia, "From the inception of Hezbollah to the present, the elimination of the State of Israel has been one of Hezbollah's primary goals." Of course, the tactics employed by Hezbollah have included suicide bombings and indiscriminate rocket attacks on Israel.
I think that if you manage to kill your mortal enemies without turning their neighborhood into rubble, that is commendable. Of course a few civilians will also die in such attacks, but certainly a lower number than would in any conventional form of warfare.
Given that the pagers were meant as an alternative to a trackable cell phone which could attract Israeli missile strikes, it seems reasonable that the persons using them were mostly people who thought that they might become a target of such strikes otherwise, that is military personnel and especially leadership.
My main beef with Mossad would be purely operational -- nine killed, (one of whom seems to be a ten years old girl who was unlikely to belong to the higher echelons of Hezbollah leadership) with 3k wounded seems pretty inefficient. Of course, without knowing how these are counted (are most of them pager owners who survived, or is everyone who had ringing ears after hearing the blast counting as injured here), it is hard to say for certain. And I get that there were operational constraints -- if the pagers suddenly weighted as much as a 1995 phone, the terrorists would have become suspicious. But even if we are generous and say that the eight killed were all military commanders, and that another sixteen were permanently injured in a way which prevents them from continuing to destroy Israel, I don't think that the outcome is very impressive.
Of course, this is just an armchair analysis. Perhaps using the compromised pagers to keep tabs on Hezbollah would not have been worthwhile because they were scheduled to be swapped for fresh, uncompromised ones in a week. Perhaps using something deadlier than mere explosives was not politically feasible.
While I think Hamas and Hezbollah are quite similar in a lot of ways, I think I still have more understanding for the Hamas grunt than for the Hezbollah grunt. The former has been raised on Hamas propaganda in fucking Gaza, which is not known for its economic growth and upwards mobility. The latter is much more likely to have heard the opinion that destroying Israel is perhaps not the most important thing in life, and has a Lebanese passport which offers economic alternatives to 'become a jihadist, Iran pays well' of which Gazans could only dream.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
and makes it fait accompli - just like with Mariupol in Donetsk Oblast
Per Wikipedia, Mariupol was conquered by Russia in May 2022, months after the Putins special operation had been begun.
For NATO to be effective, it does not have to be 100% committed to starting WW3 over a few square miles. Instead, following the method EY outlines in planecrash, it would be sufficient to escalate with a probability which is high enough to make the expected value of the defection of your opponent negative. Even a low but finite probability of responding in a way which will eventually lead to nuclear escalation will be enough to outweigh the gain of a bit of territory.
I think that NATO reactions to an invocation of Article 5 would be quite different from Western reactions to the invasion of Ukraine for game theory reasons.
If a slice of Poland gets invaded, and the rest of NATO is like 'well, they have already ceded so much territory to Russia in '45, surely they can spare another 50 square kilometers', then NATO as a defensive pact is dead. There can be some discussion if present day Russia is a credible threat in the same way that the USSR at the height of the cold war was, but if it was, then the options would be simple. Either your soldiers now fight Russia in your neighbors territory, or they fight them in a year in your own country, or they end up fighting someone else for Russia in two years. So the least-bad option would be to support your allies in a conventional war.
Of course, there have been precious few large-scale conflicts between nuclear powers, so the likelihood of such conflicts staying conventional for long is unknown. But both sides would have an interest to cause attrition to their enemies nuclear capabilities, and at some point someone might decide that faced with the choice between losing the retaliatory capabilities of a missile sub or silo or escalating to a nuclear conflict, it is not in their interest to defer nuclear escalation any longer.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
principal / agent problems where middle management pursues empire building instead of efficiency
I think that this is a huge part of the problem. In management, the number of people working under you is kinda your dick size.
Of course, you could have a system where the managers of different teams are internally bidding for firm employees. "I will pay you a bonus of 500$ a month for the project". "I will pay you 400$/month extra, and also you will not have to work with either SAP or Carl on my team".
Then the employee who spends their day on TikTok and only knows how to copy/paste from stack overflow would be readily identified by a lack of enthusiastic bids, once everyone has worked with them for a project.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
Still, a product which can be developed in offices in Seattle can also be developed in offices in Romania or India. Granted, there are coordination problems, and teams have to talk to each others, which is more difficult when they live in different time zones, but the option to outsource some team is always on the table.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
I think that there exist abortion rules which 80% of the country would find acceptable, but as it is a partisan topic, there is a lot of signaling value in either side making extreme demands. "abortion should always be illegal, no exceptions" to "abortion should be legal until the separation of the naval cord after birth".
A six weeks ban means that women has about two weeks after missing her period (per Wikipedia) to get an abortion. Now, a woman with regular periods and high executive function will notice that something is amiss within a week, and then can conveniently schedule her abortion.
But not every woman, and especially not every woman likely to have unwanted pregnancies will make it in that time frame. Perhaps her periods sometimes are a week late due to stress or whatever, and then it only takes a few more days of distraction to miss her window. (I don't have a very high executive function myself ('is it my week to deal with the garbage cans again?', 'I should really schedule a dentist appointment soon', etc), so I am sympathetic.)
Ethically, I am a Singerian who does not find anything fundamentally wrong with baby-killing, but politically that is not a hill I would be willing to die on. In practice, I would be fine with banning abortions without medical indication after a few months of gestation -- give the woman a bit of time to notice 'well, I did have sex and my period stopped, perhaps I should buy a pregnancy test'.
Now, there will be people who think that ensoulment happens at conception (I am not clear how this works with monocygotic twins, do they each have half a soul or is one of them soulless?) and people who have or perform abortions should always go to prison for murder. But I am somewhat hopeful that these are a fringe minority. On the other hand, the number of people who believe that killing what might already be a viable baby is wrong is likely much higher.
In a way, this is a late fallout of Roe v Wade. If the SC had not legislated that abortions are always legal, there might have been room for a sane compromise federal law before the issue became hopelessly soaked with partisan politics to the point where half the raison d'etre of the Republican party was to elect a president who would appoint justices who would overturn Roe.
Of course, opinion articles on both sides will try to dig up the most extreme cases imaginable. 'Woman living in a state with harsh abortion laws lost her life in a way related to her attempt to abort. This is why abortion should always be legal until your kids are of legal age.' or 'look at this poor baby being born alive in a botched abortion in the third trimester. This is why we must ban any abortions everywhere (and perhaps let's ban contraceptives too)!'
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
donated five figures to a candidate
The election budget is 14G$. There are ~161M voters. This means that 86$ are spent per voter.
Of course, the effectiveness of campaign spending is debatable. It could well be that the money required to mobilize the marginal voter is 1000$, but donors keep spending because they have trillions riding on the outcome of the election. But your claim that you need 100,000$ to flip a single vote seems unlikely.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
To be fair, this assumes that you have a horse in the race. If you are legitimately indifferent between Trump and Harris and not enthusiastic about third party candidates either (this is technically known as a Giant Douche vs Turd Sandwich dilemma), then skipping a vote with a write-in of 'None of the above' and staying home instead does not seem like a defection against the other people dissatisfied with the options.
Also, if you have reason to believe that you are less informed with regard to the polled issue than the average voter, it might be fair to say 'I don't have a few hours to research the key arguments, and I don't want to vote based on whose name is funnier, so I will skip that item'.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
Voting often feels pretty stupid when I look at the results: my decision to vote has never had any consequence.
Besides deciding who wins the state, votes may also have more subtle influences. Kang winning by 48% or by 80% of the popular vote might not change which drooling alien gets to sit in the White House, but it will drastically change how the Kodos party reacts to the defeat. In the former case, they might decide that they need to mobilize their people in key battleground states more, in the other case they might decide to completely reinvent themselves, perhaps become more like the Kang party.
Of course, in countries with proportional representation, you can signal more than a single bit.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
Tangential rant: why the fuck is the most powerful country on the planet apparently incapable of deploying world-class secured online voting?
To expand a bit on @netstack's comment, I believe that it is not enough that the voting process is fair, it also should be recognizable as fair to the average citizen.
With paper ballots, anyone can observe how many people cast their vote at your polling station, the fact that they are not in the position to prove to anyone how they voted and thus could not be bribed or coerced, and compare how many votes are counted after that, and that they are counted correctly. Passing elementary school basically gives you the ability to verify that.
As soon as the vote count is kept digital, that ability goes out of the window in a heartbeat. You could have a PhD in computer security and still would be highly unlikely that the hardware says what the specification says or that the software which is running on the machine you cast your vote is actually compiled from the unadulterated github sources, and that the formal verification tool which guarantees the vote integrity is itself sound.
In practice, people in IT security tend to be the voices most opposed to computerized voting, because they are the least likely to trust computer systems.
Of course, if you allow people to vote online from their own devices, it is not enough that the server infrastructure is sound (which will be completely impossible to verify, and even the people who build it would likely not bet their lives on it), you also have to trust the endpoint.
Most Americans are woefully unprepared to compute the crypto primitives used by TLS in their head, so they would have to trust the device in front of them. That device likely runs an operating system for which the vendor has stopped shipping security fixes five years ago, with the user having installed "free_legit_photoshop.exe" or the like. Even if you could solve the problem of identifying the user in front of the screen, a compromised device can just intercept your vote for Kang, change it to a vote for Kodos and change the confirmation message to read 'Vote for Kang confirmed'.
There is a reason why any serious bank has their customers use TAN generators, which are separate and very simple devices with a much reduced attack surface have a small shitty display which will show the user the numbers of the transaction they are making, so they can double-check in case their online banking device is compromised and was requesting a TAN for sending all of their balance to Nigeria instead. You could roll out similar devices for voting, which will display KANG before generating the transaction number, but even then you will have the problem that the integrity of the vote is likely not assured by the process and certainly can't be checked by the median voter.
Here in Germany, voting generally happens on Sundays, where most employees are not allowed to work. Within towns, polling sites are often within 500m, and the average time I had to wait in line to cast my paper ballot is perhaps five minutes. Yes, it takes a while for the votes to be counted, but typically we have the tally by Monday morning, which is good enough for me.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
he likes living in super heavy blue tribe areas
Well, he lives in Silicon Valley, which probably has the highest relative density of grey tribe (10%, perhaps?).
SV is also heavily urbanized and thus is overall very blue. But a high population density is kinda required if you want to meet people of your minority. Even if the fraction of people belonging to the grey tribe in rural Texas was equally high, meetups would involve much longer drives.
I agree that from what I know about his cultural upbringing, Scott is likely closer to the blue tribe than the red one. If he spent his youth fixing his car on his farm, he talks very little about it.
Of course, one could also discuss how much Trump himself fits into the red tribe. From my understanding, he was born elite and spent an awful lot of time in NYC. I don't think he ever shot his dog because it was going after the neighbors chickens. Definitely not a redneck/borderer type. On the other hand, he passes (imo) successfully as a working class man who comes to own a big fortune (even though he is nothing of that sort). Where other elites are into refinement, and perhaps subtly understate their wealth, Trump is the opposite, going for straightforward opulence.
Understatement: Jeff Bezos could have named his company Bezos. He did not. Trump likes to put his name on anything he is involved with. While I don't know the truth about that rumor, of all the people who might be able to afford a toilet bowl made out of gold, Trump feels like the person who would be most likely to signal his wealth that way.
Refinement: Other elites might marry sophisticated people with an advanced degree in fine arts. Trump goes straight for hot models. Where other elites would dine on food with fancy French names unknown to ordinary Americans, Trump likes his fast food.
Meaning you don't really respond to him emotionally too much.
I concede that. My reaction is more like 'urgh, please let us not have four more years of that clown', not 'he is a fascist and he will destroy democracy in America (this time!)'.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
maybe concede Crimea
Crimea has been under Russian occupation since 2014. I doubt that Putin has been losing sleep over the possibility of a counter-invasion by Ukraine which would not be contrary to international law, but would be so after Ukraine formally conceded Crimea.
Putin may be an autocrat, but I think it is very possible that his position of power is strong enough that he can de facto surrender in Ukraine without losing his job and possibly his head. That might have an option after his Blitzkrieg had failed in 2022, but to tell the mothers of dead Russian soldiers that their sons have died so that Russia can keep Crimea seems like political suicide.
(And who knows how plebiscites in the oblasts might turn out, once the people who fled Russian occupation are allowed back. Both sides have incentives to engage in ballot-stuffing by sending their citizens to stay there long enough to vote, and the records of who was living there in 2013 could have been tampered with by either side.
independence and neutrality guaranteed by the EU and Russia
Guarantees are not the deterrence you think they are, historically. Also, they are just a precommitment to start a war in certain cases.
Say you are Estonia. If someone invades Poland, that means that under Article 5 you are obliged to go to war (along the US and most of the West) to defend your fellow NATO member.
This might seem like a bad deal for Estonia, and indeed it is not clear how many NATO countries would honor the obligation. But with NATO membership, they get something in return: If they are invaded, Poland is also obliged to come to their aid.
The EU guaranteeing Ukraine would leave Estonia in the same position of having to fight if Ukraine gets invaded, but without (a) any reverse obligation to Ukraine (b) support from the US or the UK, who happen to have the largest nuclear stockpiles in NATO.
Now, I like Ukrainian independence, and support sending them weapons for as long as they care to fight and die for it, but absent mutual obligations (e.g. NATO), I am opposed to starting WW3 lite (between EU and Russia, without US/UK) over it.
--
So, neither the EU (which would have to vote unanimously) nor Putin would agree to your plan. A more realistic peace proposal would concede most of the occupied territory to Russia and see Ukraine (which will then not be in an active conflict) join NATO so Putin can't come for the next slice in a few years. Of course, neither Ukraine nor Russia would likely agree to that.
Or perhaps start with a ceasefire, where both sides can dig in, making future conquests more costly. (Obviously swap the occupied part of Kursk for a piece of occupied Ukraine.) Then again, a frozen conflict a la Korea might be hard to accomplish because both belligerents are very unevenly matched here.
I think one key fact is that the central example of a human-extincted species is some bug living only on one type of tree in the rain forest, and the central type of domesticated species is perhaps the goat, whose precursor today lives in a region from the south of Turkey to Pakistan. Or take the genus Oryza from which rice was derived is found in Africa, Asia, South America, Australia.
Classical targets for domestication are generalists who thrive under a wide variety of conditions. Of course, for luxury food we might domesticate less resilient plants such as cocoa (which was doing ok in South America but can not really claim being native on multiple continents) or spices or drugs.
The other thing is that we don't have a long memory. I am sure that there are some wild species which the Romans found so tasty that they ate them to extinction, but 2000 years on, hardly anyone ever complains about not being able to eat them. As you say, capitalism goes on, and if I can't buy the tastiest bananas any more, I sure want the next tastiest.
In general, I would say that there is a big difference accidentally between extincting a domestic species through monoculture+infection and the typical 'depraved-heart' extinction of a wild species through loss of habitat. I am sure that the former can happen to specific cultivars, but are unlikely to affect the important staples where we have some diversity. I place the odds of a virus which wipes out all domestic rice plants at even lower odds than a virus which wipes out all the humans.
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