Not exactly, but I'm an American citizen who has lived in Estonia for the past ~5 years (and often read Estonian language media).
One of the more unfortunate political outcomes I've noticed from the Bush era is a tendency for people to take the tragedies of US foreign policy in the Middle East and project them onto every conflict involving the US since then (this is not targeted at you).
So you end up with well-intentioned individuals who strive for peace and opposed the Iraq War (or eg Vietnam), who find themselves siding with the autocracy invading its sovereign neighbors, for the simple fact that it positions itself as a force against American hegemony and must therefore inherently be "the good guys".
Either way, I sympathize with your point more generally, and also wouldn't like to see my tax dollars spent on drone striking weddings.
I agree completely. Most of the complaints I read about Kubernetes being "overkill" for homelabbing seem to stem from either wildly overestimating the resource requirements, or underestimating just how many common infrastructure concerns it handles for you out of the box (things that would otherwise still need to be implemented by the administrator in various ways, but with a less unified config syntax).
Surely you're speaking about your own country of residence here?
In Estonia for example (which tangentially has one of the highest press freedom rankings in the world), ERR ("Estonian Public Broadcasting") is widely considered to be one of the most trustworthy news platforms in the country. The reason for this is simple: there is no incentive to pump out journalistic sludge for clicks, or to prey on the public's collective anxieties for larger quarterly profits.
I suppose you could argue that it indirectly supports the "war machine" in Ukraine, but I don't really consider it unethical to fund wars of self-defense, especially given the national security implications at home.
I think the terminology is a bit muddied here because AMD has historically referred to physical cores as "modules" and logical cores as "cores" (although their current spec sheet [1] seems to use "cores" and "threads" in the way that most understand them).
So in a dual-socket setup, 2 x EPYC 9754 would indeed yield 512 threads (logical cores), which are backed by 256 physical cores.
Thankfully you've provided an example further down the thread, so my comparatively weak intellect doesn't need to do very much inference:
>As an example, it is within the realm of possibility that Israel or the United States use nukes on Iran, and there would be pretty strong logical/rational justifications for doing so.
Iran has promoted hostile rhetoric against Israel since the latter's inception as a state (with a brief thawing of relations during the Shah's time in power). You could reasonably say that its anti-Israeli stance is one of the two fundamental foreign policy positions of Iran, alongside containing the expansion of Saudi influence in the region.
Despite this (and despite having nearly 10x the population), Iran's ability to project power anywhere beyond its immediate borders has been limited to funding Islamic fundamentalist proxy groups. They have no functional nuclear weapons, and no capability to target Israel with a conventional land or sea attack. A real threat to Israel's sovereignty is neither credible nor imminent enough to warrant an Israeli preemptive nuclear strike (assuming such a justification can exist, as you're suggesting).
It's undeniable that the Soviet Union perceived the US to be an existential threat to its sovereignty. For some reason though, I find it unlikely that you would describe a preemptive Soviet nuclear strike on the US as "rational and reasonable" from their perspective, despite fulfilling many of the same criteria as your example: a hostile power outside of reach of a conventional attack, whose foreign policy is molded around precipitating your failure as a state (with the added qualification that such a power could actually deliver on this goal in a tangible way).
With an "imagination" like that, we can do nothing more than hope you're far from the reins of power.