Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov says Western arms shipments to Ukraine mean Nato is "in essence engaged in war with Russia" and there is "considerable" risk of the conflict going nuclear
This is now a settled theme from Russia,.
Tbh I'm amazed they haven't said this from the outset, and it's part of the reason why I think we've being really disingenuous about the No Fly Zone. We have drawn our own line by saying that it's fine to supply tons of military equipment, intelligence and, even, special 'advisors' (SAS) to Ukraine but it's not fine to install a NFZ. 95% of people on here have gone along with this, often vociferously. They've told themselves that the one will help Ukraine but won't escalate it but the other would lead to WWIII and Armageddon.
But it's cant and hypocrisy basically, isn't it? If we're going to support Ukraine, bloody well support Ukraine. We should have backed Zelensky's request and stood up to Putin.
Just my opinion. Don't flame me.
Not going to flame you, but consider this: all but the most psychopathic criminals retain a demented sense of justice, a point quite neatly illustrated by monty python's piranha brothers who nail someone's head to the floor "because he had transgressed the unwritten code." Putin's unwritten code includes no nfz.
Or of course, he is bluffing and we only think it does. But don't fall into the narrative of Stand up to the bully, give Ivan a bloody nose and he will always cave in to true British grit. That is a school story and there's no nukes in schools.
It's amazing how many people think this is fucking Michael Bay film and that Russia will back down if, in some as yet to be defined manner, Ukraine wins.
There is going to have to be a deal sooner or later and the pressure should be on Ukraine and Russia to make it sooner.
What 'pressure to do a deal' can we put on a Russia that is doing, and saying, what it is?
And what makes you think they'll stick with the deal for a microsecond longer than it takes to get what they want?
Again, even nutters have a sense of justice. You adhere to the unwritten code, you don't get your head nailed to the coffee table. Russia's sabre rattling is consistently if...then, else..., not, we are going to nuke you just for shits n giggles and because we can
But OK you think a deal can't be done, so whats your alternative? Give Ivan a dam' good thrashing because then he'll back down, like bullies always do?
The government and people of Russia believe, with 100% confidence, that they will come out of the other end of a nuclear exchange in far better shape than NATO. This is a recurrent theme on Russian TV.
It's a vast and sparsely populated country with shit infrastructure and people who are used to roughing it anyway.
Oh I'm sure that Putin, his cronies and oligarchs with their luxurious palaces and yachts are completely used to roughing it (!)
I don't think they want to spend the rest of their lives living underground.
Russia may be sparsely populated but much of the population is concentrated in a small number of areas. Nearly 10% of the population lives in Moscow, and another 14% lives in the next fourteen cities. It would not take many warheads to destroy those population centres.
I think this is a case where standing up to a bully is actually a lot safer than giving way to him.
If we would do it. Would we? Does Vlad think we would? Do his people?
Moscow was abandoned and burned to the ground in 1812, Leningrad had a 900 day siege, Stalingrad happened at Stalingrad. Having its cities pulverised to fuck and coming back from it, is just part of the myth.
Somehow, I don't think that either Russia's leaders or masses have a huge desire to commit national suicide.
Well, fuck it, look at the actual evidence, why not? You might as well say that nobody has ever gone to war because, yes, I know what it says in the history books, but would people really commit themselves to years of large scale slaughter and misery for no clear gain, time after time? There is a whole heap of commentators out there, and any number of clips of state TV on twitter, saying quite explicitly that Russia thinks it can win an all out nuclear war. Now if the Russians are saying that and the Western commentators are saying believe them, I don't see what weight is to be attached to your "somehow" gut feeling on the subject.
If Russia was going to turn to nuclear weapons in reaction to defeat them why isn't Kyiv a smoking nuclear wasteland?
Russia has accepted military defeat in Ukraine once already. It will do so a second time.
I know there has been the odd rumbling over culture at SpaceX and Tesla, but realistically the people employed there could literally work for anybody in the world, they have skills in Machine Learning and Engineering that everybody would pay crazy money for. They ain't zero hour contractors working at Sports Direct warehouse to try to keep food on the table.
If people felt Musk was such a Hitler figure they could decamp to any other company in no time....which is what has happened to Meta AI research team, mass exodus of top talent over the past few months.
Hope you are keeping well @MaxPB, have you moved yet?
Happily we're inching closer to not going 🥳
My wife won't say it yet but she doesn't want to go, I think the thought of living within the vicinity of her mum has finally been realised.
How has life been treating you?
We'd be very lucky to keep you in London my friend.
Very good thanks, had our first cricket match last night, even though I got out LBW second ball it was good fine. My first shot was a lovely pull for four.
I am now off the anti-depressants and feeling good.
Thanks, fingers crossed.
Good to hear about the anti-depressants, real progress there!
I've given up on cricket this summer, preparing for the baby to arrive, which is making me very nervous.
Mental health wise definitely in the best position I've been in, in many years. So thrilled about that.
I bet you're excited about the baby, many congratulations to you both again.
Hope you are keeping well @MaxPB, have you moved yet?
Happily we're inching closer to not going 🥳
My wife won't say it yet but she doesn't want to go, I think the thought of living within the vicinity of her mum has finally been realised.
How has life been treating you?
We'd be very lucky to keep you in London my friend.
Very good thanks, had our first cricket match last night, even though I got out LBW second ball it was good fine. My first shot was a lovely pull for four.
I am now off the anti-depressants and feeling good.
Thanks, fingers crossed.
Good to hear about the anti-depressants, real progress there!
I've given up on cricket this summer, preparing for the baby to arrive, which is making me very nervous.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov says Western arms shipments to Ukraine mean Nato is "in essence engaged in war with Russia" and there is "considerable" risk of the conflict going nuclear
This is now a settled theme from Russia,.
Tbh I'm amazed they haven't said this from the outset, and it's part of the reason why I think we've being really disingenuous about the No Fly Zone. We have drawn our own line by saying that it's fine to supply tons of military equipment, intelligence and, even, special 'advisors' (SAS) to Ukraine but it's not fine to install a NFZ. 95% of people on here have gone along with this, often vociferously. They've told themselves that the one will help Ukraine but won't escalate it but the other would lead to WWIII and Armageddon.
But it's cant and hypocrisy basically, isn't it? If we're going to support Ukraine, bloody well support Ukraine. We should have backed Zelensky's request and stood up to Putin.
Just my opinion. Don't flame me.
Not going to flame you, but consider this: all but the most psychopathic criminals retain a demented sense of justice, a point quite neatly illustrated by monty python's piranha brothers who nail someone's head to the floor "because he had transgressed the unwritten code." Putin's unwritten code includes no nfz.
Or of course, he is bluffing and we only think it does. But don't fall into the narrative of Stand up to the bully, give Ivan a bloody nose and he will always cave in to true British grit. That is a school story and there's no nukes in schools.
It's amazing how many people think this is fucking Michael Bay film and that Russia will back down if, in some as yet to be defined manner, Ukraine wins.
There is going to have to be a deal sooner or later and the pressure should be on Ukraine and Russia to make it sooner.
What 'pressure to do a deal' can we put on a Russia that is doing, and saying, what it is?
And what makes you think they'll stick with the deal for a microsecond longer than it takes to get what they want?
Again, even nutters have a sense of justice. You adhere to the unwritten code, you don't get your head nailed to the coffee table. Russia's sabre rattling is consistently if...then, else..., not, we are going to nuke you just for shits n giggles and because we can
But OK you think a deal can't be done, so whats your alternative? Give Ivan a dam' good thrashing because then he'll back down, like bullies always do?
The government and people of Russia believe, with 100% confidence, that they will come out of the other end of a nuclear exchange in far better shape than NATO. This is a recurrent theme on Russian TV.
It's a vast and sparsely populated country with shit infrastructure and people who are used to roughing it anyway.
Oh I'm sure that Putin, his cronies and oligarchs with their luxurious palaces and yachts are completely used to roughing it (!)
I don't think they want to spend the rest of their lives living underground.
Russia may be sparsely populated but much of the population is concentrated in a small number of areas. Nearly 10% of the population lives in Moscow, and another 14% lives in the next fourteen cities. It would not take many warheads to destroy those population centres.
I think this is a case where standing up to a bully is actually a lot safer than giving way to him.
If we would do it. Would we? Does Vlad think we would? Do his people?
Moscow was abandoned and burned to the ground in 1812, Leningrad had a 900 day siege, Stalingrad happened at Stalingrad. Having its cities pulverised to fuck and coming back from it, is just part of the myth.
Somehow, I don't think that either Russia's leaders or masses have a huge desire to commit national suicide.
Well, fuck it, look at the actual evidence, why not? You might as well say that nobody has ever gone to war because, yes, I know what it says in the history books, but would people really commit themselves to years of large scale slaughter and misery for no clear gain, time after time? There is a whole heap of commentators out there, and any number of clips of state TV on twitter, saying quite explicitly that Russia thinks it can win an all out nuclear war. Now if the Russians are saying that and the Western commentators are saying believe them, I don't see what weight is to be attached to your "somehow" gut feeling on the subject.
Russia had very little choice but to fight an enemy in 1941 that was bent on enslaving or exterminating the population. In such a situation, they had little choice but to endure hell.
Hope you are keeping well @MaxPB, have you moved yet?
Happily we're inching closer to not going 🥳
My wife won't say it yet but she doesn't want to go, I think the thought of living within the vicinity of her mum has finally been realised.
How has life been treating you?
We'd be very lucky to keep you in London my friend.
Very good thanks, had our first cricket match last night, even though I got out LBW second ball it was good fine. My first shot was a lovely pull for four.
I am now off the anti-depressants and feeling good.
I find it a bit bizarre how Elon is such a hate figure.
The funniest is all the people who have spent the last few years praising cancel culture, saying that Twitter is a private company who can do whatever they want without justification, now going completely mad that there’s new management in place that they don’t like.
Robert Reich, former Secretary of Labor is one....couple of years ago saying well its a private company they can do what they want, past 2 days, total meltdown of billionaires having unprecedented control to set terms of debate etc, calling Musk an oligarch, saying its not fair twitter is a platform monopoly....
Amnesty International posted a bizarre post about it too as did the ACLU
He seems to have triggered plenty of people and groups.
How much approx would it cost to fill up a car’s petrol tank in 1951?
It’s late in the UK but perhaps some older insomniacs can remember…the online stuff I’ve read suggest it was hideously expensive and I’m having trouble believing it…
According to online data (yes, I know), it was apparently 4s 6d per gallon in 1950.
Comparing prices over time is complicated, because inflation-adjusted prices go down over time (in comparison to average earnings and GDP, which have been historically growing faster than inflation - essentially, a constant £10 "real" price was a bigger impact the further back you go.
Via measuringworth.com:
[RPI adjusted]: real price is £8.20/gallon [As a fraction of average wage]: labour value is £22.42/gallon [As a fraction of average income]: income value of that commodity is £30.73/gallon [As a fraction of GDP]: economic share of that commodity is £40.93/gallon
@Gardenwalker , it would be interesting to see any conclusions you reach.
I started driving in 1992, and I remember unleaded tipping above 50p a litre shortly thereafter. My gut feeling is that petrol prices then to now are roughly inflation, though much of that was in the last four months! cf the price of beer, which tipped to above £1 a pint more often than not about 1991 and has, I'd say, increased by a factor of roughly 3.5 - 4.5.
I remember serving petrol as a sixth former in 1978, the price of 4 star was 74p per gallon. My earnings were 85p per hour. There was a tanker drivers dispute on, but the tanker driver said to us he still had half of last weeks pay left and it was payday as well again.
When I started driving (1968) I could put 3 gallons of petrol in my mother's Austin Cambridge for a quid. So 6/8d a gallon.... a gallon's about 4.5 litres, 6/8d is about 33p, so petrol was less than 7.5p/litre. Blimey.
We simply need for the government to do less and for wealthy older people to pay a much larger share of their ongoing costs.
That's not an election winning platform.
Dave and George won on a fiscal responsibility platform in 2010 and 2015. No need to outline the specifics.
Even if gets a party through an election, they are still going to have to make the cuts.
And the magnitude of cuts you're after aren't going to come from waste, diversity officers and foreign aid. And public sector pay is getting to the point where you can't get anybody, let alone anybody good.
So what concrete things should the government stop doing? Because if the answer is "welfare for richer pensioners" or "expensive care that prolongs end-of-life", you may have a point, but good luck sneaking that past the electorate.
(And no, I don't have a better answer. Except maybe to get the band to play "Near my God to thee". Before firing the band as an unaffordable luxury.)
It will take a government with real cojones to do what it takes to axe the size of the state to avoid a high tax low growth future. Neither party seems up to it.
Not just to axe the size of the state but also to axe the cost of housing.
We need a house price crash and a return to 3-4x multiples so that people can afford their own home in the same way as the generations before them could but again that would take real cojones and no party is up to it.
Instead what we may need to rely upon for both is the market ensuring that TINA applies and both are to happen against the wishes of the parties.
Trouble is, somehow we need to engineer a house price crash without leaving half the country in negative equity. That's going to be challenging, to put it mildly.
We also need to do something about putting in infrastructure to match the additional housing - my town is growing by about 20% in five years. It was a pleasant place without major traffic problems. It seems fairly clear that its going to be a traffic nightmare by the time the builders have finished, and the local council has zero intention of doing anything about it. We've no obvious plans for more schools, doctors etc, and even attempts to get a new supermarket through planning get repeatedly scuppered.
That's already part of the standard planning process.
Have a look at all the docs associated with any local Planning App for a medium-sized housing estate.
But local objectors always try and use it as ammunition. Like the sudden interest that always develops in foxes and bats.
As discussed on here a few days ago, there are currently new reports coming in for nitrate balance in some places.
In theory it's part of the planning process. In practice, what is currently being built is going to dump a lot of traffic into the pinch points of a local road system that is already on the limit of its sensible capability at peak times, with no plans to build any more roads to relieve this (there is a logical and fairly easy bit of road to build that would get a lot of the through traffic out of the town centre, but the council appears totally disinterested, despite plans having existed since the 70s). I categorically don't want to see house building blocked, but I genuinely think it's going to cause serious problems without infrastructure being put in place to deal with the additional demand.
I know there has been the odd rumbling over culture at SpaceX and Tesla, but realistically the people employed there could literally work for anybody in the world, they have skills in Machine Learning and Engineering that everybody would pay crazy money for. They ain't zero hour contractors working at Sports Direct warehouse to try to keep food on the table.
If people felt Musk was such a Hitler figure they could decamp to any other company in no time....which is what has happened to Meta AI research team, mass exodus of top talent over the past few months.
Who do you think Tesla employs most of? Well-paid, brilliant engineers designing cutting-edge solutions (*), or low-paid, disposable grunts on production lines?
That's where Tesla's main workplace problems have been AIUI.
The same could be said for SpaceX: down in Texas they employ lots of people who are *not* rocket scientists, but just good blue-collar metal workers.
(*) Leaving aside batteries and their laughable 'autopilot'.
I know there has been the odd rumbling over culture at SpaceX and Tesla, but realistically the people employed there could literally work for anybody in the world, they have skills in Machine Learning and Engineering that everybody would pay crazy money for. They ain't zero hour contractors working at Sports Direct warehouse to try to keep food on the table.
If people felt Musk was such a Hitler figure they could decamp to any other company in no time....which is what has happened to Meta AI research team, mass exodus of top talent over the past few months.
there's a manufacturing plant. it's not all ML geeks.
Comments
Russia has accepted military defeat in Ukraine once already. It will do so a second time.
If people felt Musk was such a Hitler figure they could decamp to any other company in no time....which is what has happened to Meta AI research team, mass exodus of top talent over the past few months.
I bet you're excited about the baby, many congratulations to you both again.
Now, they do have a choice.
And congratulations MaxPB.
I have to go, been an interesting discussion over lunchtime. Bye everyone.
I'm sure you'll make a splendid father.
Editd extra bit: Mr. Battery, glad to hear that.
He seems to have triggered plenty of people and groups.
https://twitter.com/reuters/status/1518712403411808257?s=21&t=XMXZCtBbencca281GGtxRQ
In practice, what is currently being built is going to dump a lot of traffic into the pinch points of a local road system that is already on the limit of its sensible capability at peak times, with no plans to build any more roads to relieve this (there is a logical and fairly easy bit of road to build that would get a lot of the through traffic out of the town centre, but the council appears totally disinterested, despite plans having existed since the 70s).
I categorically don't want to see house building blocked, but I genuinely think it's going to cause serious problems without infrastructure being put in place to deal with the additional demand.
Treasury rakes in record amount of tax after Rishi Sunak's stealth raids @Telegraph
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/tax/news/treasury-rakes-record-amount-tax-rishi-sunaks-stealth-raids/
DJ Tim Westwood is facing multiple allegations of sexual misconduct by women who say he abused his position in the music industry to exploit them.
The 64-year-old is accused of predatory and unwanted sexual behaviour and touching, in incidents between 1992 and 2017.
Also, love how the Beeb describes him as a “White DJ”.
That's where Tesla's main workplace problems have been AIUI.
The same could be said for SpaceX: down in Texas they employ lots of people who are *not* rocket scientists, but just good blue-collar metal workers.
(*) Leaving aside batteries and their laughable 'autopilot'.