Zoraptor

Might as well prepare to take back Kosovo now that splitting bits off other countries by force is illegal again. Comparing Ukraine to Hamas, seems a little... counterproductive, Bruce.

Sheesh, it's pretty simple. Don't barrack your soldiers in amongst civilians. That's what Ukraine did. And yes, it wasn't just the Russians saying it, which was the point of quoting the BBC article. Going to say that they're the equivalent of RT? Going to say that the locals were lying and the picture faked? No? Then just accept the fact that that is what Ukraine did. In this case there was actual proof of that happening, which may be uncomfortable if you're of the opinion that Ukraine can do no wrong, but there's a reason you're not supposed to do it under the Geneva Conventions and why it constitutes a potential war crime- so you get as few dead 9 year olds as possible.

I'm not sure I'd be laughing much. 'Iranian' drones (well, officially Houthi drones) have been ludicrously cost effective against Saudi Arabia and embarrassed a whole lot of western tech. And not always western tech operated by ludicrously incompetent Saudi welfare cases either.

That's still likely to be before AMD, I'd reckon. If it is an overstock issue rather than a design or manufacturing one then they can still release a 4090/Ti/ Titan before any AMD release, and probably would. Especially so if they suspect AMD actually is faster. AMD has also over ordered 5nm as well, so they're partly in the same boat. They've got the CPU side to mitigate things though, and less stock on hand. That's one 'advantage' of them being supply constrained on 7nm for so long, even at boom prices GPUs were the least profitable option (excluding consoles, but those are contractual obligations). They can probably just accelerate 5nm releases and do some stuff they weren't initially planning like AM4 compatible 5nm CPUs. ARC looks pretty dead this gen, just taken far too long. Releasing into a glut market in bad economic conditions with two big improvements imminent from its competitors is just about perfect storm for them.

They're also supposed to have a massive over order of 5nm wafers, which TSMC won't let them reduce because everyone else has over ordered. Glut of stock, lots of 2nd hand ex mining equipment depressing prices and paying for manufacturing capacity you aren't using is not a great combination.

A southern offensive has been ongoing for about 3 months now, with the 'real push' about to be launched every single week since then. Kherson has been a day away from liberation almost that long. In the twitterverse. So, and I'll be charitable, you're saying the guy they rescued there was one of the rescuers? If so, you're most definitely incorrect "Some eyewitnesses said that some of the bodies had been wearing military uniforms. But most of those living here were civilians." You shouldn't be barracking soldiers in civilian infrastructure, because it means it's no longer civilian infrastructure. At worst that is itself a warcrime, but it pretty definitively means that it was a legitimate military target, not "another terrorist attack". Uh yeah, RFE/RL is literally literally US government propaganda. Indeed, their report cuts precisely when the guy from the still is lifted onto the stretcher so you cannot see that he's wearing fatigues. Precisely, so you cannot see he's wearing fatigues.

Gazumped by a mod, this is what tyranny feels like. I'll never get that two minutes back Anyway, bit of lazy propaganda from Ukraine today... Supplied image includes... https://twitter.com/Pavlo_Kyrylenko/status/1546003496687865856/photo/3 Which clearly shows a guy in military fatigues being rescued, from the civilian building...

More 737 MAX shenanigans from Boeing. They may have to cancel the next MAX if they don't get regulatory approval real quick! I particularly like this quote from the PR guy: "Safety remains the driving factor in this effort". Nothing says safety like... wanting to rush through certification so you don't have to comply with updated standards (and can on-the-cheap pilot training by using the same layout). Clearly Boeing has learnt the lessons of their previous success at finagling certification, not installing alert systems and not requiring significant pilot retraining. Whether they've also left critical information out of the flight manual and plan to blame dead pilots for not reading something that didn't exist again, who knows. Even if they don't care about the people they killed the proximal reason Boeing is in a hole currently is how badly those decisions effected their company. And if anyone is wondering exactly when the FAA warned them they were unlikely to meet requirements it was June 2021 so over a year ago now. Boeing is such a great example of beancountering a company into disaster- why on earth do you take over a ~failed company with a highly successful one, then bring in all the practices that lead to the failure of that failing company? Guess it all looked great on a balance sheet for 20 years as you coasted on prior successes and padded your share portfolios before, uh, running it into the ground in spectacular fashion. The response shows that they haven't actually learnt a thing- and you can tell how very annoyed the board is by this because they, er, increased the retirement age for CEOs so their current one can stay on. Best thing which can happen is them being told to asterisk off so they can stop trying to hammer the square peg of a plane designed 60 fricking years ago into the round hole of what is actually needed. And if they haven't got everyone with a scintilla of design talent working on an actual 737 replacement at this point... maybe their highly successful new space rocket could do with some live crew and the board could volunteer?

Looks like Elon Musk isn't buying Twitter any more. Not exactly surprising, it has to be the most overvalued entity on the planet. Though ironically Tesla would be one of its main rivals for that position.

Yes, but what I think was meant to address it was..

Orville 3.6 Good episode that, with one complaint. Though it was just good, not great. I think they addressed that spoiler comment...

SNW ep 10 At this point I can't help but feel that they're running through a checklist of episode types. Last week was a 'Monster of the Week' episode, before that was the 'holodeck malfunction' one (sans actual holodeck) this week it's 'knowledge of future --> unintended consequences'. Might be a bit of a worry for the future, but pales into insignificance compared to the worries I had 3 months ago. Overall, best first season of Trek I've seen. Which is nearly the definition of damning with faint praise considering how badly most Trek S1's were received (and disclaimer, I've only ever seen TOS out of order and long ago, so I don't even know which episodes are S1 so it is excluded). Very far from perfect, not exactly the redemption arc for nuTrek that people hoped for but no one expected but a combination of decent Trek and decent TV. The negative is no real classics not anything really approaching one, the positive is only one genuinely bad episode- and even the best seasons of Trek had at least one of those.

There's getting stuck on a zipline too, let's not forget that.

Euro farming is horrendously inefficient though, mostly due to subsidies. It's arguably unsustainable even without climate change/ pollution considerations- and would be the main reason why Ukraine will not get into the EU any time soon; their agricultural sector would come close to literally bankrupting the CAP as it stands. Haber process (~making ammonia for fertilisers) is one of the least known but most important chemical reactions in the world, but it's a gross energy user, and the alternatives for fertiliser aren't great- see Nauru getting shafted by Australia as its islands were reduced to a moonscape. Overuse of fertiliser is incredibly wasteful, as a lot of it just washes straight away into waterways and the like, ruining them (--> algal blooms, suffocated lakes, choked streams etc). Really though, the whole EU agricultural policy needs to be revised if they're at all interested in actually tackling climate change instead of just talking about it and it has to be done even with the knowledge that it will mean the end for a lot of farmers. Instead we get them constantly yelling about methane which isn't even an accumulator, just because that measure ignores everything else that contributes which EU agriculture is inefficient at. Funniest thing a few years ago was the spate of studies done in euroland to try and make New Zealand and Australian imports look bad which ended up showing the reverse- we were a lot better environmentally. That's what happens when a lot of your winter feed is grown on ex rainforest land in Brazil and has to be shipped in for a decent part of the year; that massively outweighs a one off trip even if that trip is longer and the cargo is frozen.

Boris did do pretty well pretending to be a clown for years, though. Kind of funny that the last straw for all those principled tories- is this the most oxymoronic oxymoron, I think it may be- is a whip appointment, something that directly effected them. No accident that it's all the people with leadership ambitions going now though of course, they've just obviously decided that Johnson is Done and they want to set up for a leadership bid- or for the sensible ones, given the mess Johnson has made and the economic situation, try and get a rival to go for the leadership. I have to admit I'm hoping for PM Michael Gove or Jacob Rees-Mogg for the lolz, especially the latter.

There are some photos of captured gear. The problem with judging anything from the Russian side is that their actual army is... kind of a social media black hole. It's the LPR (and DPR, though not so relevant here) and Chechens who post everything, plus there's some tv footage. This is also one of those situations where both can be telling the truth. Ukraine almost certainly didn't lose much in Lisichansk proper as it doesn't seem to have been directly contested much at all on the ground. One of the advantages to defending in cities is how hard it is to hit tanks and like which are inside them as all the pesky buildings get in the way for both direct and indirect fire. OTOH, they almost certainly lost a fair bit on the Donetsk's east bank due to the bridges being down. Not too hard to get the men out, but you're probably not going to be able to get many vehicles back. The big question is how much they lost during the retreat from Lisichansk etc, and there's no answer to that beyond the weak evidence of there being a fair number of videos of Ukrainian troops walking themselves out; because it was Russian regulars taking that area so no pictures. They also had ~6 weeks of having to supply those 15k troops along a salient that was less than 20km wide at the start and only got narrower, along one decent road (two at the start) for most of the time that was within easy artillery range and was probably anything but decent at the end. It's likely that the Russian are now going past a lot of destroyed equipment hit while resupplying and dumped off the side of the road as unrepairable. Open question is how much was hit during the retreat itself, and how much Ukraine had in the first place. Unlikely that there were 700 tanks or a/ifvs and artillery (exc mortars, but most mortars aren't really 'heavy') there total, but if you include trucks etc 700 could be accurate; and Ukraine could have lost relatively few of them recently. That's extremely unlikely. If there was one consistent complaint from the Ukraine side apart from supply issues it was that Russia had a massive advantage in artillery, and artillery is what causes most casualties. It could be a 5:1 ratio in terms of direct small arms confrontation, but from Ukrainian sources the problem was always that they'd fight the Russian infantry off, then get hit with a massive artillery barrage which often made them wish they hadn't (I particularly remember the guy interviewed for the WP who disliked Ukrainian tanks being nearby for that reason; when normally you'd expect them to be very keen on having heavy weapons support). There are also signs that Ukraine is really starting to feel a manpower crunch with the ban on draft age men* leaving their home cities without permission. *about which there seems to be a fair amount of... variable interpretation, but we do have it being specifically addressed by Zelensky so the order itself must be real.

Stalker 2 is up for preorder at GOG. Apart from the obviously placeholder release date of Dec31 2023 it means it's gone from being a DRM infested NFT delivery system to not having DRM at all in... 6 months?

At least he still has Dorries and Truss.

And Orville ep5- one of the better [currentyear] [currentissue] episodes I've seen, certainly handled better than the previous one did its issue..

Strange New Worlds ep9. Get the feeling there were a few similarities to another scifi franchise here, though they're pretty subtle so I'm not sure which one or how many people will notice. Only one episode to go and there's only been one turkey so far. I never thought that would have been the case when I started.

Bit of an open question whether there's many defenders left in Lisichansk now anyway, though they had a lot of troops (allegedly 4 brigades plus independents, from a pro Ukraine source) in the area and not many options on retreat routes.

Bit over 300 tanks are meant to have been delivered (about 250 Polish, 80 Czech). Certainly nowhere near 600 though. Could be including AFVs, could be future plans... Biden also does have a bit of a tendency to misspeak, eg welcoming Switzerland to the NATO alliance yesterday. Saying the wrong number is a bit less likely to be corrected immediately than getting a nation's name wrong.

You can see the type of missile used from one of the security cams and it was an anti ship system they have a lot of in storage which uses inertial guidance- not a precision system. They hit an industrial building about 100m away from the mall at the same time which was presumably the intended target for both missiles.

I'm not sure I've ever seen a Russian media commentator who didn't appear angry. Demands made and granted (from a Turkish source, so mileage may vary, though the official NATO release does show it's accurate as to what has been granted at least, and they match up with the sort of demands Turkey made publicly, eg) 1) Sweden and Finland lift arms embargo. 2) They will support Turkey against the PKK* and FETO (-->'Gulenists'). 2a) No support for YPG/ PYD* 3) Both will amend their laws on terrorism. 4) Both will share intelligence with Turkey. 5) They will extradite terror suspects. The one that didn't get granted was extradition of a particular politician (Kakabaveh, iirc, and there's a fairly obvious reason for refusing that given she holds the balance of power in the Swedish Parliament. For a few months). And while that demand was made by a government official it was never clear how serious it was. Asterisk marks the biggest point of contention/ interpretation. Turkey has a... rather broad interpretation of what constitutes 'PKK'; any Kurd who opposes Turkey, basically, much as the internal opposition are all Gulenists. So while YPG/ PYD are explicitly mentioned as just not getting support Turkey also explicitly considers both to be PKK. Has to be said, everyone also knows what Turkey's position is, attempts to differentiate those groups reek of arse covering for when they inevitably get attacked. Further to that the tacit point (6) is NATO approving another operation into northern Syria from Turkey, which Erdogan hasn't exactly been shy about saying he wants to do over the last couple of months.

I was certainly wrong on the leverage part (though they still haven't joined/ been annexed by Russia, so right on that). And on balance of evidence didn't think the Russians would invade, which was also wrong. It was explicitly on balance of evidence though, not stated as an absolute (eg 'unlikely' 'probably' and 'at this time', not 'will not'). Plenty of examples of me saying explicitly that they would not invade earlier though when they only had 100k troops, the shift was due to them having roughly the number I thought they needed for an invasion. Closest I got to an explicit will not later was when they didn't on the 16th. Last clause is definitely a bit lol though- let's be honest, I'd probably done a better job of setting out why Russia did have reasons to invade than Russia herself in the lead up; even if I didn't think they'd do it.