Zoraptor

Pete Hegseth is just showing the administration's commitment to open government and freedom of information. Well done sir! (Would have been funnier if it had been Telegram rather than Signal though)

Sounds like a pretty ideal situation from a DOGEesque perspective though. The ideal there is that a lot of people don't turn up and get cut off so they make yuuuge savings on federal cash that they can crow about- while also assuming everyone who didn't turn up was a fraudster rather than bedridden/ sick/ uninformed about the requirement/ got annoyed at the process/ were unable to turn up etc. And yeah, using that as evidence they can then say that there was massive fraud under Biden and Obama. The only negative is that you don't really want to annoy old people since they vote, though you can at least be fairly confident that the people who vote will mostly be the ones to turn up for verification even if it is a bit onerous.

One of the methods for dealing with hardened underground facilities is a nuclear version of the bunker buster (B61m11). It's extremely likely Israel has an equivalent. Funny thing is, of course, that there was a mechanism for stopping Iran getting a nuclear bomb without the supreme irony of using nukes to do it: the JCPOA. Donald Trump should seriously consider drone striking whoever decided to renege on that deal for causing so much unnecessary threat to the world and to Israel.

Did they hit energy infrastructure anyway, only place reporting a blackout was Slaviansk which is only 15km behind the lines now. That's a far cry from previous attacks where blackouts were extensive. The art of the deal, folks.

Pretty similar- identical maybe, since neither is high on the details- to the proposal that got derailed by the Kursk incursion and then brought back by Zelensky 2 weeks ago. Far less than the US/ Ukraine proposal of a week ago though. Gotta lol at the one peculiar (not really) difference in the two readouts from white house and kremlin.

Ukraine was still getting intelligence from everyone except the US, and still had recon drones and the like. The intelligence they got from the US would also not instantaneously have become outdated, there would have been a decent lag. Further, Ukraine launched some relatively successful local counterattacks elsewhere (eg Toretsk and Pokrovsk) over the same time frame. If lack of US intelligence was immediately crucial you'd expect those to have failed and Russia to have made large gains elsewhere as well. End of the day they were in a narrow salient supplied by a single road, and that's perhaps the classic set up for failure- it was also precisely the situation the US has warned Ukraine about getting into and staying in repeatedly under the Biden admin; and which had resulted in sudden chaotic retreats multiple times previous. Default is that it happened again, without convincing evidence against. The main thing that seems to have changed on the battlefield was the number of fiberoptic drones deployed by Russia and their resistance to jamming. The Ukrainian attempt to fix that issue happened roughly 6 weeks ago, well before the Trump Zelensky meeting or intelligence freeze. It didn't succeed. (Overall, it's a classic compounding attrition scenario. You need to send in, say, 50 vehicles with supplies and replacements. Losing a few percent is fine, but if you start losing 10% it's not. Each vehicle lost has to be replaced, but so does its supplies, so you end up sending 55 vehicles in while using 110% of the previous supplies and needing 5 extra vehicles. You lose 10% of the vehicles on the way back too, so that's actually 10 per day needing replacement. But, each vehicle lost on the road makes your other vehicles more vulnerable as they have to slow or even stop because of their debris; and good luck stopping to try to recover vehicles. But if you cannot maintain that 50 vehicles your ability to resist constantly drops, and eventually everything falls apart. Numbers illustrative, obviously)

Sounds like prime cope. The pattern in Kursk was the same as in every other localised cauldron/ salient the Ukrainians have had in the war. Lose ground slowly, but steadily, then it all goes in a rush. See Avdiivka and Vuhledar over the past ~year. This is just highly prominent because Kursk had been hyped up by the press and Ukraine.

Eh, not sure you'd even get the thoughts and prayers from many of them I'm afraid. Last Trump presidency the one thing every liberal commentator and tv channel loved him doing was bombing Syria. What's the Brian Williams quote? "Today he truly became our President"? Never underestimate the ability of someone to see their groups actions as uniquely justified or to shrug their shoulders because it's all a bit too hard for them. "A liberal opposes every war, except the current one".

I am not at all surprised to hear that, he does rather seem the type. (I did wonder if he was old enough yet to get Shingles, which was a bit dumb given I knew who his father was)

He's probably just an idiot. ie Chicken Pox/ varicella infection fairly famously doesn't give you lifetime immunity- hence Shingles. Would it be ironic if Mr Kennedy got a highly painful (but non fatal) condition due to not taking the vaccine that would prevent it? Yes, and not in the rain on my wedding day sense.

That claim from Ukraine is a load of bollocks* so they don't really need to 'sell' it at all. Otherwise, same way Blair and Bush 'sell' Iraq or any other leader tries to sell something. Really though, Putin doesn't really need to sell much as western leaders have done an absolutely superb job of selling its necessity for him. Leaders always forget that much as you can use Putin's rhetoric to prove themselves right he can use theirs to prove his right. *Always a bit of a laugh that the side that has had 31k (meh, 41k) casualties out of 1.2 mn military personnel is also the one that has had 14 rounds of the draft and is actively kidnapping people off streets plus is constantly complaining about manpower issues while the one that has a billion casualties hasn't had a single round of the draft (ok, excluding the annual National Service type draft if we want to get technical) and apparently a large numerical advantage despite the 5:1 casualty ratio against them.

Says something about how far Intel's fab arm has fallen that in house production is seen as 'risky' when they really ought to be producing everything there, and would have been even 5 years ago. There's good talk about their 18A process though and nVidia is rumoured to have been doing test chips on it. Still a decent way off, a year for 3rd party and a bit less for Intel.

They very likely have the baseline m30/1 rockets and certainly claim to still be using them to nearly this day- yesterday's footage of the strikes on the troops coming out of the pipeline had them being used. While that footage definitely has issues there has been some other footage recently, and about as much as typical once they got jammed effectively (ie not much, but some). ATACMS... can't remember the last time there was footage or claims of them being used. Probably out, or saving in case of a high value target.

Nope, 100% no mention of murdered civilians. Indeed, that quote makes it sound like they got caught up in fighting or similar, not systematically slaughtered in their homes. SOHR* was more than enough attribution wise previous, when they were reporting on atrocities perpetrated by people the AP doesn't like- but now suddenly cannot be verified and the people are neutrally 'killed'. Who by? It's a mystery. Better get Scooby and pals on to it so they can unmask al Jolani as being notorious wanted terrorist al Jolani, something no one could have predicted. Or it could just remain a mystery, to the AP. Biggest one day civilian death toll of the war, might warrant a little bit of investigation though? A very little bit. The head choppers being head choppers they proudly posting their handiwork all over twitter and telegram... so it's pretty clearly the AP was deliberately not looking in order to write a misleading article. Not quite as passive voice as their Israeli coverage to be sure. *since it's all a bit hard for the AP reporters, some quotes/ articles from Rami, no charge for the research guys "Despite announcement about accomplishing security campaign in Syrian coastline groups of gunmen continue crimes and violations against residents" "Genocide in Syrian coastline and Latakia mountains 72 hours on | Military and security forces commit nearly 40 massacres, killing 973 civilians"

What a garbage article. Particularly: Oh, OK Ah, so it isn't really ending then, is it? Good thing we have APNews's crack journalist squad to immediately leap onto the obvious contradiction, eh? Also, no mention of all the murdered civilians and makes it sound like everything was started by the alawites. Reminder: they sent a unit bad enough to be sanctioned by the US for ethnic cleansing based head chopping, and then purported to be surprised at them doing the same thing again from the government. Crap journalists taking a bung from Turkey and defending genocide, awful editorial control from APnew... well no, par for the course for their coverage of Palestine actually and very obviously part of their editorial direction, which was equally full of selective facts and acritical use of often mutually contradictory quotes. As always, genocide is aok, since if its at someone we don't like it's just sparkling mass murder. Eh Bruce.

Biden rolled back almost all the constraints himself. Plenty of pictures of US kit getting destroyed or captured in Kursk, and they've been firing ATACMS at Russia proper for well over six months. Though whether the Ukrainians can independently enter the targeting info has always been an open question.

In the sense that they can cut off supply it is easy to make demands, sure. Not easy to get them fulfilled though. Radeon wouldn't even be close to 1% of ASUS/ GB/ MSI/ (ASRock)'s overall business. We saw how much sway AMD had back in the Geforce Partnership Program days, ie none. They'd just stop making the cards outright. Even the AMD specific brands generally have a sibling company making nVidia and other products. AMD can't really even make their own cards to sell- AMD branded reference cards were actually made by Sapphire, not AMD (same as their CPU coolers were made by a third party). Overall, a bit like Musk threatening to cut off Starlink to people; except this 'Starlink' is a lot smaller, less important and there's an alternative. MSRP is fundamentally designed around having a cheap reference card design. Otherwise you end up with, say, Pulse and Nitro+ cards both being MSRP despite one obviously being more expensive to make. It is equally fundamentally the Manufacturer Suggested Retail Price. The current problems aren't controllable by a company as large in the video card space as nVidia, so they certainly aren't by AMD. AMD did what they could when they sold their own cards- at MSRP, and with as good a scalper prevention set up as you could manage.

I'm quite partial to this gem from Julian Röpcke, personally. (For anyone wondering, Russians used a gas pipeline to infiltrate Ukrainian positions in Kursk. This is the 3rd time they've done something similar. The thought of some little green men toodling hundreds of km along Nordstream into Germany though is... every so very slightly implausible. Particularly ironic because there was a lot of 'effort' put into trying to make it look like a disaster rather than a 'coup' by the pro Ukrainian side- though a video with dozens of jump cuts and thermal imaging during the day isn't very convincing unless you want it to be. Coincidentally, despite 80% casualties and the rest suffocating a bunch of Ukrainian positions in the vicinity collapsed at the same time --how did I manage to spell his name wrong when it's right there?)

Further evidence of the NWO agenda: Hulk Hogan being a prominent Trump supporter. Trump and Hogan both in the WWE Hall of Fame. Linda McMahon is Education Secretary. Turning Heel against Volodymr Zelensky in the White House. They even got to John Cena. Pretty conclusive stuff. Positives? Voodoo Child is a far better themesong than the Star Spangled Banner.

In news that should surprise literally nobody- except, maybe, the CIA/ MI6 etc- the western backed moderate head choppers have done exactly what would be expected of them and massacred 745 alawite civilians on the Syrian coast in revenge attacks. Note that kind and reformed Al Qaeda sent in the Hamza Division* which is western trained . You'd think that France training Interahamwe might have given them second thoughts on training genocidal nutbars, if not the School of the Americas, but guess not. *to be fair, they are currently sanctioned by the US. For, uh, genociding Kurds on Turkey's behalf in occupied Syria. So not exactly a positive for the new Al Qaeda led government's 'moderation', sending a unit sanctioned for a bit of light genocide against a different minority to control another. Indeed, they've behaved exactly as any reasonable person might have predicted; and utterly without doubt as their fellow moderate head choppers would have expected. Whatever their claims might be.

The supply issues are largely not fixable, at least by AMD. That's a fab space issue, and fundamentally a problem with TSMC not really having any competitors. You cannot step up production on the fly because there's no excess capacity and you have to plan the allocations out many months- up to a year- ahead of time and hope you get things right. The real illustration of that is how many 9800x3d sales AMD are leaving on the table with their constant lack of availability, and that is far higher margin than mid range consumer GPUs and thus far higher priority. nVidia has the same problem consumer side. Perhaps even worse, since AMD has a wider range of products to be flexible with and a better relationship with TSMC. Only a limited amount AMD can do about the prices too. When they were selling their own branded reference cards from their website they were MSRP even when retail was higher, but they certainly cannot force 3rd party vendors or card partners to adhere to even MSRP long term (practically, outside of the launch window). They're the #2 maker by a wide margin, they simply don't have the leverage.

As said in the nVidia thread they are supposed to have decent availability due to being delayed for two months- and the bad press about the nV5000s does seem to have penetrated the bubble rather more than usual. Both of those ought to be positives for AMD. And consumers really. Still, no top end card is a major minus and AMD will have exactly the same 'problem' that nVidia has, ie that consumer graphics are the least profitable use* of their expensive and limited fab space so there isn't really that much motivation to push market share and aggressive pricing vs pushing the same for AI/ pro graphics/ CPUs etc. *except the MSony console chips in absolute terms, but those largely fund the consumer graphics' development so have a different plus

May depend a lot on availability too, can't buy a nVidia card if there aren't any for sale. Obviously all rumours, but 9070 is meant to have decent supply due to it originally being slated for a January launch while nVidia's launch numbers are not meant to be great, again. The negative talk about the 5000 series also seems to have resonated rather more than some of nVidia's other prior issues.

Old World is good. And that's from someone who doesn't like one unit per tile much at all. I'm a bit behind on the dlc though. Bruce and Elon wouldn't like it due to the DEI influences.

US pauses military aid to Ukraine. (not 100% confirmed at this point but enough for reuters to run it)