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Gregory Cochran Profile picture
@gcochran99
Feb 28 • 5 tweets • 1 min read • Read on X
"Based on actual disbursed funds through October 2024, the United States had delivered approximately $61-68 billion in aid to Ukraine since Russia's full-scale invasion began.
This disbursed aid breaks down approximately as:
Military assistance: ~$44-47 billion in equipment, ammunition, training, and related support that was physically delivered or services rendered
Economic support: ~$13-15 billion in direct budgetary assistance and other economic aid that was transferred
Humanitarian assistance: ~$4-6 billion in delivered humanitarian supplies and services
The disbursed figures are lower than commitment totals because:

There are administrative and logistical delays between authorization and delivery
Some multi-year programs had only partially disbursed their funds
Some equipment takes time to procure, prepare, and deliver

The precise tracking of disbursements is challenging as different government agencies report at different intervals and with varying levels of detail in their public disclosures."
Smaller amounts of aid has been in the form of loans back by frozen Russian assets. This may increase substantially - there are a _lot_ of frozen Russian assets.
All these number have moved up some, not hugely, in the months since October 24.

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More from @gcochran99

Gregory Cochran Profile picture
Feb 26
Deaths 𝙬𝙞𝙩𝙝 Covid
Grok: " misclassifications don’t change the raw count of bodies. The total number of deaths is what it is, whether we label them COVID, heart disease, or something else. That’s why excess deaths are such a useful yardstick here: they sidestep the whole “what’s on the certificate” debate and just show how many more people died than we’d expect based on pre-pandemic norms.
So, if the total’s fixed, the question becomes what drove that excess. Misclassification might shuffle the deck—say, tagging a death as COVID when it was really a stroke—but it can’t explain why the deck got so much bigger in the first place. During 2020-2021, the U.S. saw excess deaths climb by roughly 20% over baseline, sometimes more in peak months. That’s not a rounding error; it’s a signal something systemic was hitting hard.
The COVID-attributed deaths—around 1.1 million in the U.S. by now—don’t perfectly match the excess death tally, which is a bit higher. That mismatch fuels the misclassification argument: maybe some of those “COVID” deaths were just coincidentally timed with a positive test. Fair point.
Read 16 tweets
Gregory Cochran Profile picture
Feb 24
It gets better.

I see headlines saying that "Trump wants half of Ukraine’s estimated $11.5 trillion in rare earth minerals."

For comparison: China has large reserves of rare earths (34% of world) , much more than Ukraine, and produces 60-70% of world output.

China got about $488 million - half a billion bucks - for that.
Like I said, China got $488 Million. Not all profit, but let's assume that it is. How long would it take for China to earn 11.5 _trillion_ from their rare earths at that rate?
More than 23 THOUSAND YEARS. Next, does Ukraine have as many rareearths reserves as China? No, far less, and it's not clear that they're rich enough to be economical.
Read 5 tweets
Gregory Cochran Profile picture
Feb 23
Elemental, my Dear Watson

Every now and then (over many years) I find myself hearing someone talk about how mineral deposits in some place are strategically vital, and if the Commies, or the Avars, or the Mazdakites get hold of them, we're all fucked.

How often is this true?
Perspective: there isn't all that much money in minerals other than fossil fuels. US mines produce about $80 billon worth of minerals a year: that's not a very large fraction of a $30 trillion economy.
A fair fraction of that 80 billion is stuff we're probably not going to run short of - for example, the biggest item on that list is crushed stone. And there's a fair amount that isn't actually terribly useful: gold accounts for a good fraction of US metal production,
Read 11 tweets
Gregory Cochran Profile picture
Feb 19
Like everything else in politics, US aid to the Brits in WWII and their later mediocre economic record have generated an enormous amount of stupid prose.

One of my favorites, which I often think of, in the same way one compulsively peels the bandage back to look at the gangrene,
is the argument that Germany benefited from having to rebuild everything from scratch, which supposedly allowed modernization, while Britain was stuck with older factories. Just as y'all would be better off if I burned your house down.
But having your industrial base physically destroyed is a massive disadvantage:

Loss of physical capital that took decades to accumulate
Loss of skilled workers (both from deaths and displacement)
Disruption of business networks and relationships
Need to divert resources to
Read 6 tweets
Gregory Cochran Profile picture
May 11, 2024
Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision

Robera Wohlstetter's book argues , in part, that surprise was explained by the difficulty of identifying true signal from extraneous background facts.

You know, I don't think she was right.
The point was not to figure out if Japan was going to attack the US: but what to do to be maximally ready, just in case they did.

So, what were the tempting feasible targets for Japan, whose destruction would make a real difference in a war?
There was only one: the main fleet at Pearl Harbor. Could an air strike cause decisive damage? Probably: the British had done it in the summer of 41, at Taranto. Not a secret !
Read 6 tweets
Gregory Cochran Profile picture
Aug 31, 2022
Beto O'Rourke, running for Governor of Texas, has been hospitalized with a 'bacterial infection'. Normally, they'd announce what it was. There's nothing embarrassing about bacterial pneumonia or whooping cough.
This infection, however, must be in some way embarrassing.
They say 'bacterial' to rule out monkeypox, but which bacterium?

It could be something subject to misunderstanding by the hoi polloi: chlamydia pneumoniae can cause pneumonia, but is not a venereal disease. It just sounds like one.
There are cases in which a particular bacterium is nearly exclusively found in someone with a particular illness or genetic condition. So, for example, having a Burkholderia cepacia infection would suggest that you were immunocompromised with an underlying lung disease, like CF.
Read 6 tweets

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