Posts by Jellied Eel

Florida Man and associates indicted for conspiracy to steal data, software

Re: The smell of desperation

It's terrible for the state of US democracy that the 2 presumed candidates would potentially be 82 and 79 if taking office in 2026, with a term running until they would be 86 and 83.

But this is democracy. The US system has term limits, but doesn't have age limits. Thanks to the miracles of medical science, people live longer. So in theory, you could end up with leaders who've gained decades of political experience running the country. Which could be a GoodThing(tm). Alternatively, you end up with people that aren't physically or mentally fit to hold office, although they can perhaps follow an autocue. But they won the vote, so get the job. There is a process, sort of by which they can be declared unfit to hold office, but there may be challenges invoking that process. The Dems tried it against Trump and failed, and are shielding Biden from that process knowing that if it succeeded, they'd end up with Harris.

Re: This is the most problematic indictment for him, by far

I hope so, but I would prefer a few more problems. Convicted criminals are still eligible to run for president (Eugene Debs) and could be president while in prison - until he works out how to use presidential authority to get out.

Simplest way would probably be to declare the Whitehouse as a prison, and have an Epstein-like work-release program as part of his sentence. The Whitehouse is arguably more secure than most prisons, although like many prisons, it does appear to have problems with drugs being smuggled inside it. The prisoners are also usually well guarded while inside, or out, although this may require some bureaucratic hoop jumping to allow the Secret Service to officially act as prison guards.

Re: This is the most problematic indictment for him, by far

It isn't that problematic for Trump, but it might be problematic for democracy. The charges seem to be based mostly on this call-

https://edition.cnn.com/2021/01/03/politics/trump-brad-raffensperger-phone-call-transcript/index.html

Between team Trump and Georgia officials, where Trump lays out claims regarding potential voting irregularities. It includes stuff like this-

Trump: When are you going to do signature counts, when are you going to do signature verification on Fulton County, which you said you were going to do, and now all of a sudden you’re not doing it. When are you doing that?

Germany: We are going to do that. We’ve announced —

Hilbert: To get to this issue of the personal information and privacy issue, is it possible that the secretary of state could deputize the lawyers for the president so that we could access that information and private information without you having any kind of violation?

Trump: Well, I don’t want to know who it is. You guys can do it very confidentially. You can sign a confidentiality agreement. That’s OK. I don’t need to know names. But we go the information on this stuff that we’re talking about. We got all that information from the secretary of state.

And maybe all the counts of conspiring to access personal information, IT systems etc vanish, because Trump (and Team Trump) say a couple of times that they don't want that information, just to verify that votes were valid. Then maybe Team Trump files a SLAPP lawsuit against Georgia for conspiring to prevent him running in an election.. Which is kind of a big bitch-SLAPP given the flurry of litigation is to prevent the leading Republican candidate from publicly participating in an election.

But ahead of all that is the prospect of discovery and disclosure, including all exculpatory evidence to Trump's defence team. And because Georgia's decided to invoke RICO, his co-defendent's legal teams as well. So an opportunity for Team Trump to re-litigate the claims made regarding voting irregularities in Georgia. And perhaps that will show that there were irregularities, and Georgia did not investigate those claims thoroughly. Which then I guess could get constitutionally interesting if it ends up that Trump might have won Georgia.

But such is politics. This sort of thing has happened before, eg-

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bush_v._Gore

Where Gore was convinced he won in Florida's 2000 election and was robbed of his victory by a bunch of hanging chads. Gore took that all the way to the Supreme Court in strong echoes of Georgia. Democrats generally overlook that election dispute. Or the way Clinton's been whining for years that Trump stole the election from her.

So I expect a bunch of downvotes from people who confuse supporting a free & fair election system and democracy with support for Trump. Having an election system voters can rely on is, after all one of those fundamentals that you really need in any representative democracy.

Tesla is looking for people to build '1st of its kind Data Centers'

Re: "adhering to Tesla's core principles"

Space for bedrolls and slop buckets? A couple of gruel dispensers?

Judge denies HP's plea to throw out all-in-one printer lockdown lawsuit

Re: What comes around….

The laugh back then was that the postscript printer was typically running a Motorola 68xxxx configuration that was more powerful than the typical x86 PC of the time and commonly found in Unix workstations…

The other laugh was realising that those postcript was also a language. So could send 'print' jobs that would take a strangely long time to 'print' and then produce a single results page. Which kinda upset the ops folks at the Uni's computer centre once they twigged to what we were doing. Wasn't our fault their printer had more compute than our workstations.

Re: I ditched HP printers

Granted, I've never fathomed a use case where I would ever need to do that, but hey... HP think there's one...

Back in the day, fax spamming was a thing. HP presumably think it could be a thing again, and you'd welcome coming home to find a print tray filled with exciting offers from HP's selected partners, topped with a note that you're out of ink, and you should order more.

Hacktivists attack Japanese government over Fukushima wastewater release

Re: Hmm

One of the reasons for the delay of the new US nuclear power station was that an environmental group sued them for not doing a study to evaluate the impact of tsunami on the power plant. Its 50 miles inland and in an area not known for tsunamis.

The new one in Georgia? For some reason, that's not been very well publicised, even though it's 3GW(?) and enough to power far more homes than massive wind or solar farms ever could. And it'll let peope charge their EVs using low carbon energy!

But one of the saddest elements around the Fukishima disaster is it's become considered a 'nuclear disaster', rather than the vast majority of damage and loss of life coming from the tsunami and quake literally knocking a large island sideways. Personally I think it's a testament to nuclear's safety given the lack of damage to the plants. Plus the simple safety improvements to raise the generators, which would prevent any future repeats. Somehow, I doubt offshore wind would have survived, and suspect massive onshore windmills would struggle to deal with large quakes.

Re: Natural tritium

You can buy bottled water in many places in the world from all natural springs with more tritium in the water than what will be released here.

Funnily enough, one of the places you used to be able to buy bottled water from was Fukushima. It has natural radium springs and used to sell radium water for when there were perceived health benefits. There are some pictures of those bottles somewhere on the Interwebz, but can't find them any more thanks to the 'improvements' made to search engines. Those springs are still there, and I think still more radioactive than the water they're proposing to release. Plus they'll be draining into the Pacific anyway.

It's one of nature's marvels, but probably won't get you a licence to sell Cornish Spring natural mineral water.

Homeopathy, again

However safe the water seems to be, the EUTNAIOA quotes nuclear engineer Hiroaki Koide and points out that "diluting simply means spreading pollution over a large area" – putting sea life, and those who consume it, in danger.

OhNoes!. Usual problems apply. Big scarey numbers in 'millions of gallons' of contaminated water. Proposal involves pouring those gallons into the 710,000,000 km3 Pacific Ocean. 1km3=26,417,2052,358.15 US gallons. People on the US West coast, make sure you're well stocked up on iodine tablets, or other patent remedies sold by anti-nuclear shills.

Meanwhile, the 165m km3 Pacific is busily being bombarded with cosmic and solar rays, not to mention RADIOACTIVE SUBSTANCES in the sea bed, or belching out of volcanic fissures. Not that consuming carbon-14 puts anyone in any real danger anyway given the abundance of it already in the environment. What they're not telling you is the potential tipping point. Carbon-14 will decay into nitrogen, and we know from the Netherlands that nitrogen is almost as bad as CO2. Beta decay means emitting an electron and an electron antineutrino, so can potentially lead to a large increase in antimatter, and the Pacific Ocean exploding. The results would be devasting given the mass of the ocean and antimatter having a yield of around 40kt/g

(insert missing /sarc tags to taste)

We need to be first on the Moon, uh, again, says NASA

Re: Just one question

Doesn't matter. It'll feel exactly same as here on Earth. Somewhat less, actually, as the shooter's mass will increase by the weight of the spacesuit.

Being pedantic, I think you mean 'mass of the spacesuit'..

Cartoon physics should stay in cartoons, ESPECIALLY when engaging in a thought problem.

True, yet I gave an example of a real-world observation regarding effective (or not) recoil management. Why would one shooter end up with a rear-sight impression in their forehead, and another just a small muzzle flip? Or, why does the muzzle flip at all given most of the recoil force should do the equal and opposite thing relative to the direction the bullet is going?

Ok, so that's a function of the firearm's action, grip design, grip angle, shooter's grip, hand, wrist and arm position etc etc. But like I said, modelling it accurately gets complicated. Again given mass, not weight, recoil force would be applied in some angle relative to the shooter's centre of mass. Because they don't have any gravity assist to hold them in position, this will make bracing harder.

...my money's on .22 LR being the round of choice for Space Cadets everywhere.

I'd suspect the 5.7mm or 4.6mm, because terminal ballistics would be much the same on the Moon as on the Earth. As you're obviously a very experienced and expert shooter though, I'm curious why you'd suggest .22LR given the well known problems with bullet lubrication here on Earth, and how that might translate in a vacuum environment?

Oh, and how is it that the gasses from a few grains of powder can blow dust and small rocks around, leaving very obvious sign? It'd be a relatively short impulse, but would still create recoil energy given it's effectively making the muzzle act like a small rocket nozzle. Again on complexity, thrust would vary depending on brake/compensator, or if a suppressor were fitted to slow gas expansion and velocity before the gas left the barrel.. But then space cowboys would probably have to field questions about why they're using 'silencers' in a vacuum.

(Bonus question. There's a shootout in a small room. Everyone's blazing with automatic weapons. How many rounds could it take before the gas generated overpressured the environment and blew out the windows?)

Re: Just one question

You know you can't resist that moment of power and satisfaction

Hur hur! You said 'moment' in a conservation of energy thread. But the whole thing starts with one of those fundamentals, ie for every action, there's an equal and opposite reaction, which is the basis of recoil. I found a discussion on the subject here-

https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/173477/is-it-possible-to-shoot-bullets-in-space-or-would-the-recoil-of-the-gun-be-too-s

Which got some replies digging into the physics a little.. which in reality would also mean digging into a whole bunch of vector math to track the forces acting on the shooter. From musing about this in the past, most focus on the mass and recoil velocity of the firearm, projectile and shooter.. But I'm still curious what the effect of the propellant gasses would be, and suspecting those would end up being more significant than simple recoil.

Thinking is based on simple observations. Anyone who's fired any reasonable calibre firearm knows there's a fair amount of force generated by the gas leaving the muzzle. Then various ways to tame or redirect that using muzzle brakes or compensators. Kentucky Ballistics has a YT channel where he shoots a lot of large calibre firearms, often in slow motion and you can see the recoil effects. And he's a big guy, but also being assisted by gravity. The issue with doing that in zero or microgravtiy is you lose that assistance, and given most firearms are fired offline with your centre of mass, would result in more movement. Think classic small (or untrained) person firing a large pistol like a deagle, and the pistol kicking up. In space, would that result in a backflip?

So question for the physicists or proper engineers.. How could you model this? I'm guessing finite element analysis could do it, and now to hunt around for any free/open source tools to mess around with. I'm also guessing that adding the propellant gases to the problem would make it a lot more complex to solve.

Re: Just one question

Recoil is proportional to the impulse of the shot, which means that mass and velocity matter but "little g" does not.

Except little g helps keep you planted. Both 5.56 and 7.62 give 6-7ft-lbs of free recoil and around the same in fps velocity. Could lead to some interesting designs for compensators and muzzle brakes. Plus astronaut's directional gas jets I'm pretty sure emitt less gas, less violently than the gasses venting from a typical firearm.

Re: Just one question

If NASA really want to get there in a reasonable time at reasonable cost, the only option is His Muskness.

Err.. bollocks. Musk mantra is to move fast and break stuff, which is kind of antithetical to manned space exploration.

Especially when other genius ideas have involved flinging people at high speeds in vacuum tubes (It's like an air hockey table!) or landing Starships on the Moon. But that's the easier part. Getting them and the passengers off the Moon again is a problem a long way from being solved. Or if it's really solveable with the current design. There just.. a few challenges with getting crew to the surface and back again that make me think a more traditional lander design makes a lot more sense.

Re: Just one question

Yes, but sadly judging by the rest of human history, how long will it be before astronauts and taikonauts are throwing moon rocks at each other* or clonking each other with whatever tool comes to hand in lieu of pointy sticks?? What's the odds future moon missions to have a small locked box with firearms inside 'in case of emergencies'??

A staple of SF going waaay back. Keep an eye out for contracts to develop recoiless, or recoil-compensated pistols, rifles and GPMGs. Or envirosuits for sharks. I keep thinking that space is one of those things that might be better done under the auspices of the UN. But I've also read and watched the Expanse. In theory, it would be a better use of resources though to pool ours in an attempt to get off this rock instead of having a few nations doing parallel development in attempt to claim the best future beach front property.

Ukraine's Victor Zhora: Russia's cyber 'war crimes' will continue after ground invasion ends

Re: It couldl all have been so very different

How about all the nazi symbols in russia? Ignoring those?

Citation needed. I'm sure they're some, but I'm more interested in views regarding flags prominently displayed in Ukraine, which are then ignored by our very own 'vatniks'-

..which is used to disparage someone as a blindly patriotic and unintelligent jingoist who pushes the conventional views presented in British/Ukrainian government media as well as those of web brigades..

Again mine is a simple question. Do you agree with the ideology represented by the OUN's flag, or not? It shouldn't be a difficult question to answer.

Re: It couldl all have been so very different

Yes Yes Jeel.. I have seen you waving the russian flag for over a year...

I notice you've avoided answering the question. People have been waving the Russian flag for years though. There was Clinton and Russia's election inteference making her lose an election. There was Russia planting the 'fake' Biden laptop. I'm sure though the Bbc has thoroughly investigated all this and presumably is just fine with the OUN's ideology.

I hope that you are at least getting paid for it...

Sadly, I'm not in the Biden's class..

Re: It couldl all have been so very different

I have completely lost any tolerance for Putler apologists.

So a simple question for you. What do you make of this?

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-66450520

It repeats numerous clichés from Kremlin propaganda, portraying Ukraine as an aggressive state run by nationalist extremists and manipulated by the West,

and

https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2023/08/8/7414763/

Ukraine's Ground Forces Commander visits Kupiansk front

More specifically, the two flags in the backrground. One is Ukraine's national flag, the other.. isn't-

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organisation_of_Ukrainian_Nationalists#Ideology

The OUN flag has become increasingly common in Ukraine, from being waved during the Maidan protests to being worn by Zelensky. Do you agree with the OUN's ideology, or think it's a view compatible with traditional British, American or EU social values?

Re: cyber "war crimes"

While I tend to agree with your broad point about mis-use of language, there are quite specific definitions of war crimes, which I believe include deliberate targeting of civilian infrastructure.

But there aren't, which is the problem. It's also a problem when war crimes aren't prosecuted, or are inconsistently prosecuted. Then there's an issue of venue, ie the ICC was set up as a 'neutral' venue to pursue these sorts of charges, but some nations ignore it, and it might be politically biased. But the Rome Statute of 2002 attempted to 'clarify' the issue, eg-

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_crime#International_Criminal_Court_2002

Slight snag. The US didn't sign, Ukraine hasn't ratified and Russia withdrew. It's also not necessarily a war crime to target civilian infrastructure, especially if it's dual-use. We intentionaly targeted the electricity systems in Sarajevo and Baghdad. Telephone exchanges were also targeted. Bridges get targeted because they're essential for military transport and logistics. If troops are occupying, or just proximate to cviilian buildings, they can be legitimate targets, as can hospitals and casualty collection points treating wounded combatants. It's one of those lawful but awful things.

So it's all a bit murky. Putin is currently charged by the ICC with kidnapping children. But there's also a duty to minimise civilian casualties. So is it lawful to evacuate civilians? Is it enough to simply tell civilians to evacuate? Could you forcibly evacuate civilians who are unwilling or unable to leave? If you don't conduct a lawful evacuation, might you then face charges of using human shields? Or there's the issue of GBAD. If you're using that to protect towns, cities or military stuff in those towns, is the placement of that kit creating an unneccessary danger to civilians near by? Plus intercepts fail, and interceptors or disrupted attacking missiles may end up hitting civilian buildings. If an S-300 AD missile misses, and hits an apartment building, who's liable? The defender, because it's their missile, or the attacker, because they launched the missile? If all civilian buildings are sacrosanct, but the conflict is about territory, where are you supposed to put your troops and defences when you're trying to protect towns?

Verizon to 'sunset' Blue Jeans vidconf platform

Re: Streaming is a commodity.

WebRTC is an open standard supported by every modern browser. Which means that anyone can spin up their own P2P chat service in a few hours, with the only costs being a dirt cheap ICE + relay + node.js server.

Sure, and that can be ok-ish for ad-hoc video calls. Proper video conferencing might involve setting up dedicated video conferencing suites, effectively studios with decent lighting, sound, desk positioning, document camera.. And if it was a Cisco Telepresence solution, the approved Bob Ross paint schemes. Those were not cheap, and product placements in shows like 24 may have contributed to it's cost. I think the main challenge though was traditional teleco thinking and trying to offer it as a 'service'. So a bundle of charges and tarriffs for per-call and per-minute video conferencing, which then increased overheads for billing and BSS.

Cisco used to pitch it this way as another revenue stream, even though they didn't really have the BSS stuff a telco and it's customers need and expect. It was also eye wateringly expensive for what it was, which was essentially some PCs, cameras and screens. Especially with all the support and maintenance charges loaded on top. Once properly set up, the results were very good. Problem is competitors realised that a telco's core business is pushing bits from A-B, per-application or service billing is generally a ball-ache, and in the end, video conferencing is just data. So started offering alternatives that just involved setting a CoS/QoS profile to prioritise conferencing and rent the tin with some support and consultancy. So it pretty much went the same way as being able to rent call bridges as a service. It's one of those apps that was hard to do in a good'ol switched voice/video world, but a whole lot easier to do in an IP world. Especially when there's a multitude of 'free' basic conferencing tools bundled into OSs or available as apps.

So there's a slew of 'free' stuff which is good enough for most purposes, and cheaper alternatives available from other telcos or service providers. I'm just suprised it took so long for Verizon to kill it off. Over a decade ago I had to do the Cisco certified telepresence thing and there were some designers from Verizon and other telcos there. They seemed a little shocked when I said we weren't charging, and had no intention of charging per-stream.

Scientists strangely unable to follow recipe for holy grail room-temp superconductor

Re: And that, my friends, is how you do science

That's France's privilege, it's built into their language. La petite mort.

I like that expression. But the US may be mayflies given the Mayflower and all that, and they're still a bit puritan. But more to do with the way Hollywood explains the birds and the bees. Get frisky with the babysitter, in the car, or on a camping trip and the next thing you know, it's axes, power tools and screaming. I think this explains why the US sex hormones move much slower.. they're just terrified.

That came out of FIVE BILLION dollars worth of supercomputer data mining

Take it from one who knows. You were close with the Yttrium-Oxygen-Garnet, but you still need to assemble sulphur monoxide, a couple of thalliums and another oxide before you reach enlightenment. Which may or may not involve tentacles. Much of the research in this field was tragically lost in a fire in Dr Whateley's Dunwich laboratory disaster.

Re: And that, my friends, is how you do science

Oh.. thumbs must be from US EWIS people.. Some day, you'll learn how the world really works.

Re: And that, my friends, is how you do science

...this meant that setting up diffusion gradients of sex pheromones took mere hours in Europe and ten times as long in the USA.

Ah, science. The need to demonstrate something experimentally that could be achieved by simple observation in bars and clubs in both Europe and the USA. My theory involves Hollywood and the way many Americans are brought up to learn that sex=death.

But I digress. Seems to me a case of premature publication and a weakness in the peer-review process, at least outside the Journal of Irreproducable Results. Given the commercial considerations, I can understand the researchers being a bit coy about the recipe, but the reviewers should have been shown how to reproduce it to validate the results and pass for publication.

Deutsche Bahn stands to lose €400M if it has to do Huawei with Chinese kit

Does the kit have to be extensively investigated every time there is a firmware/software update, or do users just have to suck up no updates or patches?

It depends, and can also get very expensive. There is some formal specification, eg-

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evaluation_Assurance_Level

and the rest can depend on any requirements by regulators, official bodies or how much you can squeeze out of the board for your ITSec budget. But previously when I did officially secure networks, the design had to be signed off and that was generally the same as for EAL approvals. So certification would be based on the specific design and implementation, including hardware, firmware and software revisions. So not updating anything meant you didn't break your security certification. For vendors, every update or revision should mean resubmitting their stuff for EAL validation, which is a slow and expensive process. One of Checkpoint's engineers told me it cost around $5m each time.

So it can be FUN! designing those types of networks. It also gets harder as vendors move to SaaS and expect holes poked through the security perimited to permit access for licensing, telemetry and ad serving. Especially when you think you've got a locked-down system and then the next update decides to re-enable features, like trying to find Xboxs or 'YouPhone' on your secure network. Then again, finding Xboxs or TheirPhone on your network when they shouldn't be there is also part of the security design. It gets ever more challenging to design secure networks as IT 'evolves' to make bloatware ever more 'feature rich' and insecure. Oh for the old days where you could run IOS10.2 on a locked down, locked away router, guarded by a pack of hungry leopards.

The challenges are also why there's so little high-level EAL kit, eg-

Practical application of EAL7 is currently limited to TOEs with tightly focused security functionality that is amenable to extensive formal analysis. The Tenix Interactive Link Data Diode Device and the Fox-IT Fox Data Diode (one-way data communications device) claimed to have been evaluated at EAL7 augmented (EAL7+)

which could be a V.24 connector with either pin 2 or 3 removed and the shell filled with epoxy. This works, kind of but only if there's a secure control/data plane seperation along with a physical craft/console port that can be secured. Then finding a current laptop or mobile terminal that still has a trusty serial port on it..

Or Microsoft, Cisco, Intel, AMD..

At least some risks can be mitigated, if you have dual-suppliers, but that's expensive and non-trivial. So maybe there are core, critical risks in processors or microcontrollers that affect Intel, AMD or ARM. Or their microcode, or OS. Oops, please apply this critical patch now.

I think one of the biggest risks actually comes from serialised components and DRM. Back in the good'ol days, if you anticipated supply shortages, you could stockpile spares in warehouses and swap stuff out at will. That de-risks events like Covid or shipping disruption delaying spares availability. But it that gets a whole lot harder if interface modules need to be paired with authorised devices, then registered on some licence/authentication server, somewhere that may be unreachable.

Biggest risk with a supplier like Huawei was that China just slapped on an export ban. Sorry, no more tin for you. Sneakier risks were potentially less risky, ie if you've designed a secure network with no public access to the control plane, you can limit the risks. If Huawei wants a 100Gbps link to their NOC as part of the support contract, you.. perhaps question why they need all that capacity? In the good'ol days, those types of access for suppliers might have been via out-band connections that had to be physically connected before vendors could get at your console/craft ports. Now, it's 'make sure all these virtual ports are enabled so you can connect to our licence servers across the Internet, or it'll stop working'.

Governments attempt to prevent this by creating security standards, but that doesn't always help when vendors are unwilling to offer kit that's actually secure.

Aspiration to deploy new UK nuclear reactor every year a 'wish', not a plan

Re: Technical marvel, but it's the economics, stu

Rubbish. How does adding renewables to the network increase dependency on gas. Without renewables you are burning more gas to make up the lack of renewables, all of the time.

You.. really don't understand any of this, do you? Again it's pretty simple. Wind is intermittent and unreliable. Electricity needs to be extremely reliable, and stable. This again shows the problem-

https://gridwatch.co.uk/Wind

Wind minimum: 0.189 GW maximum: 13.247 GW average: 6.266 GW

CCGT minimum: 2.253 GW maximum: 15.146 GW average: 8.289 GW

Nuclear minimum: 2.292 GW maximum: 5.31 GW average: 4.186 GW

Although the graph illustrates the point better for nuclear. Build 1GW nuclear, get 1GWh 24x7x365. When there's no wind, we need to burn gas. If we just burned gas, we could have a gas powerstation that of 1GW that produced 720GWh a month. The costs of building and running that plant are easier to model because it can be run at peak efficiency. Instead, demands on CCGT are at the mercy of the weather, so costs have to be spread across an unknown number of operating (ie saleable) hours. If you can generate & sell 720GWh a month, you can spread those costs, if you're only allowed to sell 20GWh, the cost of that electricity is obviously going to be a lot higher.

This was (or should have been) an obvious problem when DECC published their first levelised cost model. Gas cost (from memory) £60/MWh, Wind cost £120/MWh. That should have raised the obvious question that if gas (and even nuclear) was so much cheaper than wind, why TF are we wasting money building windmills? Answer of course is the mythical warming properties of CO2.

Coal is dead and not coming back. Get over it.

Tell that to Germany, Poland, India, China etc etc. Especially Germany given they're desperately building new coal stations to burn dirty/less efficient brown coal, when the UK is still sitting on massive piles of the good stuff. Germany's slowly waking up to the impacts of it's energewiend 'strategy' as it rapidly de-industrialises and it's economy slides into recession due to high energy costs. Other countries are of course committing to new nuclear because it's by far and away the most efficient zero-carbon power source. There are also other effects of lobbying and regulatory capture. The objective in the Climate Change Act was to reduce carbon emissions by 30%. Modern coal power stations can do this because they're more efficient than the ones we built in the '50s and '60s.

Of course the Greens say 'no', because the believe the best solution is going back to pre-Industrial technology and ignoring all the problems we already know came from the 'Age of Sail'.

Wind IS cheaper at wholesale no matter how many times you try and deny this, and there is ample evidence of it.

Again you're confusing beliefs with facts. This belief was promoted when the likes of Vattenfall pitched a wind farm at a low-ball price of (from memory) £39/MWh. Now, they're saying they can't deliver at that price and need even more subsidies. Again the lie should be obvious to anyone outside the 'renewables' industry that the more we've added wind & solar capacity to the network, the more our bills have increased. If this crap really was cheap, then if your're right, our bills should have been falling.

ps.. You mentioned Dieter Helm. This is especially amusing given you ovbviously haven't met him, nor have you read one of his first books on this subject-

In his book The Carbon Crunch (2012) and in print media, Dieter Helm criticised efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions through current regulation and government intervention, and the deployment of renewable energy, particularly wind power.

I recommend you actually read it, along with Net Zero. He's written widely about the problems and costs with relying on 'renewables'.

Re: Technical marvel, but it's the economics, stupid

Panorama just did a story about that, but it took some reading to get to the things they didn't cover when wasting their time trying to chase somebody and ask them questions they weren't going to answer.

I'm guessing that was about the Thurrock (et al) fiasco? There have been a lot of issues like that, eg Nottingham and 'Robin Hood Energy'. Or just councils and landowners being left to deal with the mess when some wind & solar farms are abandoned and they're left with the remediation costs. That's also been a problem for investment funds like pensions because the way these projects are structured, the revenues/subsidy streams are often spun out into an SPV the developers can flog off to the gullible. It's the usual PFI routine where profits are privatised, costs are socialised.

Steady rates are more important that rates that are tracking the market. When there is excess 'profits', they should go into savings to balance the times when costs are higher. There also needs to be more investment in the grid as well. People keep breeding and better ways to manage power keep coming out. At the most basic level, the grid needs to keep up with the population. It also has to keep up with where that population shifts and be able to service industry so it's possible for new firms to come to the country.

Yep, that's a massive general problem. Population increase, that places more demand on services, service capacity isn't increased and service quality takes a sharp nosedive. Personally, I think natural monopolies should be public because otherwise there's zero incentive to keep costs down. That's been demonstrated in situations like Macquarrie asset-stripping Thames Water then abandoning it, to our insane energy market. Companies like National Grid love 'renewables' because it means we have to make massive 'investments' in grid upgrades, which they manage and profit from. It's a classic example of regulatory capture that we're all paying for now.

Policy decisions really don't help either. Sure, everyone will be forced to go all-electric to hit self-imposed 'Net Zero' targets. Ok, so that means upgrading the supply to every home so they can run heatpumps, electric coookers and charge their cars. Which means thousands of substations and cabling will need upgrading, which is a collosal civils job.. Especially when I'm guessing most of the substations don't have the physical space to install more kit, especially in parallel prior to a cutover.

Re: Technical marvel, but it's the economics, stu

Lengthy diatribe from one who has already decided the answer and won’t listen. I shall keep the explanation simple as you’re clearly one of these types that lives off trying to discredit one’s opponents with cock and bull. You should be a politician!

So.. let me get this right. You made a bunch of posts simply stating I was wrong. Then you somehow found a very ancient response to a proposed change to the balancing mechanims, which is just one element of the UK's energy market. You then claimed this was 'proof' that gas sets the UK electricity cost, even though it doesn't, and to make matters even more amusing, the proposal you cited was rejected.

So why did you cherry pick that one? Was there actually some point you were trying to make? As for the rest of your 'argument'-

Bills skyrocketed? Gas price.

Reliance on imports (net importer since 2008).

Really sums it up. Electricty bills were skyrocketing before the SMO. This has been driven by the high cost of 'renewables'. Because 'renewables' are intermittent, unreliable and very expensive, we increased our dependency on gas.

Because gas and coal are bad, even though we can produce them ourselves, we reduced investment and actually created disincentives to invest in domestic gas production. Having massively increased our dependency on gas, we then decided to ban oil & gas imports when the SMO started. We never really bought much Russian gas, but because of the 'market', gas prices shot up. Then, because of the way our energy market is rigged, gas became more expensive than 'renewables', and 'renewables' generated massive profits. Ok, and so did our gas sector because we have LNG terminals and the EU doesn't.

This temporary situation allowed the 'renewables' PR scumbags, like the Bbc to claim 'wind is 7x cheaper than gas!', but only because of those unique market conditions. Now, the price of gas has fallen back to around pre-SMO levels, as has the wholesale price of electricity.. Yet for some reason, the retail price has not. And even though the energy 'crisis' has been one entirely caused by 'renewables' policy, the idiots in charge seem determined to make the situation even worse by pissing even more of our money into the wind.

Nuclear or modern coal would provide baseload capacity, gas could smooth out demand spikes, and our energy would be a whole lot cheaper and more secure. Oh, and watch this-

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hsCwZu3nvoM

which explains how the whole crumbling edifice is based on faked data..

Re: not actually a requirement

Open fuel cycle is a perfectly sensible nuclear strategy. Adopted by e.g.Sweden.

Yeh, but Closed is more fun because it involves both recycling, and alchemy. But it's back to requirements. Sure once-through fuel rods are cheap and convenient, other than storing and disposing of those fuel rods. Which could be re-processed into new fuel rods. This is recyling, which is Green, and therefore good. There's also more scope for recycling with designs that can use old nuclear 'waste', which is again much Greener than burying it in landfill.

Ok, not landfill but deep holes in the ground, but then that's a fun subject in itself because Greens seem to think this is hard. Medical and food industry waste will be radioactive for thousands of years! OhNoes! Who will guard pots of poop from patients who've been fed 'deadly' radiation as part of their routine diagnostic procedures? So they create elaborate schemes to 'secure' sites when a person with a paintbrush to repaint the "Keep Out!" signs would be cheaper and easier. I guess they could sit on the safety advisory committee if there's ever another Great Vowel Shift and the signs have to be re-written.

But I digress. Another challenge is, of course keeping us supplied with all the radioisotopes used in medicine and industry. Easily created via nuclear alchemy and letting various elements bask in the neutron flux of a warm reactor. Expensive, or impossible to create with a windmill or solar panel.

Re: Technical marvel, but it's the economics, stupid

The rules are neatly summarised right here.

https://assets.elexon.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/28171453/p135att1.pdf

Though with your mind already made up it matters little for anyone else to try and explain them.

Err.. wow. You found a thing! Somehow! Curious what your search term was that threw up a change proposal from 2003 for one small, but significant aspect of the energy market. Especially when-

This paper has been prepared by the Transmission Company to support BSC Modification Proposals “Marginal Definition of the ‘main’ energy imbalance price” and “Marginal SBP during periods of Demand Reduction”

and-

https://www.elexon.co.uk/mod-proposal/p135-marginal-system-buy-price-during-periods-of-demand-reduction/

Progression

The BSC Panel recommended that the Proposed Modification should not be made. The Authority rejected the Proposed Modification on 26 September 2003.

and the decision letter explaining the reasoning is here-

https://assets.elexon.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/28171453/decisionletterfinal.pdf

Imbalance settlement ensures that any electricity not covered by contracts is paid for at, or charged at, a cost reflective price to target the costs that NGC has incurred in undertaking actions to match generation and demand (“Electricity Balancing”) onto those Parties who are in imbalance, i.e. those Parties on whose behalf the SO has taken Electricity Balancing actions.

and is again one of those market rigging mechanisms. 'Renewables' scumbags, being providers of variable and intermittent electricity are more likely to find themselves out of balance due to the vagueries of the weather. It's also why there's so much pressure to waste money on batteries because they make millions from providing balancing services when there's a supply/demand imbalance. But the letter also contains some fun predictions-

In any Settlement Period during which demand control occurs, the SO will have accepted all feasible Offers, which potentially may be at very high prices, before a period of demand control is instructed. The majority of the PSMG considered that a marginal SBP in the region of £99,999 could be feasible.

Again why battery farmers are so keen to exploit marginal SBPs because as we've added more 'renewables', system stability has decreased, as have requirements for demand controls. It predicted that buyers left short could go bankrupt, and they have.. Although most of those have been bailed out by other energy customers, eg Bulb's bankruptcy. There are also other scams, like when wind output exceeds demand, wind farmers get paid millions in constraint payments to not supply electricity and unbalance the grid. Normally where you have supply, and no demand, the product has no value. But 'renewables' economics are special like that. Then there's preferrential or priority market access, which means wind sets the price and as everyone's seen, their electricty bills keep rising.

But I have an open mind, unlike you.. And I also question, or dare I say it 'fact check' the explanations given because often, they are utter BS as you've so clearly demonstrated. Now, would you like to try again and explain why, despite 'renewables' costs allegedly plummetting, our bills have been rocketting?

This isn't just a UK problem, and if politicians globally had any balls COP or related conferences might have been able to actually push appropriate action.

Politicians know that COP is all about lobbyists convincing gullible politicians to hand over $100bn+ a year to the UN to hand over to their mates. Most of it was dreamt up by a chap by the name of Maurice Strong, who got caught taking a rather large personal cheque during his time with the UN's previous slush fund, administering the 'oil for bribes.. I mean food' program.

I'm not sure I want to be around when the next generation or two asks us why the fuck did we get into this mess

They're more likely to be asking their parents why they can't afford to turn their heating on because it's freezing. But you don't have to wait a couple of generations, energy poverty is fast increasing in our supposedly 'developed' economies thanks to going back to trying to use pre-Industrial power tech that our ancestors previously abandoned.

Those that ignore history can get well paid jobs working for the 'renewables' lobby I guess.

Re: Technical marvel, but it's the economics, stupid

Why would I, as a consumer, be interested in costs? It costs ~£10 to make a pair of jeans

Because you, as a supposedly sophisticated consumer, should know that there's a fundamental relationship between cost, and price.

But - renewables and green tariffs are not about price, they are about CO2. We're going to have to pay what it costs

Well, not really. If the objective is to reduce CO2 emissions, then we could achieve that ambition by building nuclear. Or even replacing our vintage coal power stations with modern ones that can reduce emissions by the required 30% (or more) simply by being better designs. Kingsnorth tried that, so Greenpeace flew in a climate 'scientist' to object, and that replacement was scrapped. We don't have to pay the costs demanded by the 'renewables' lobby when cheaper and more reliable alternatives are available.

As for CO2, that's really for believers in homeopathy. So some simple "science"-

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keeling_Curve

The measurements collected at Mauna Loa Observatory show a steady increase in mean atmospheric CO2 concentration from 313 parts per million by volume (ppmv) in March 1958 to 406 ppmv in November 2018, with a current increase of 2.48 ± 0.26 (mean ± 2 std dev) ppmv CO2 per year

Dogma 101. What is the precise relationship between CO2, and temperature?

So picking from various wiki pages, because they're well known to be the most accurate and reliable sources for climate info.. Humans account for around 50 Gt CO2 per year. Each part per million of CO2 in the atmosphere represents approximately 2.13 gigatonnes of carbon, or 7.82 gigatonnes of CO2.

UK produces around 347.84Mt, or 0.347Gt, or 0.044ppm CO2.

Then assume a climate change of 1.5C based on the good'ol post-Industrial revolution increase in CO2 from around 275ppmv to 440ppmv. You get 0.009C per ppm. Ok, it's a little more complicated than that because the relationship is theoretically non-linear. But achieving 'Net Zero' would reduce global temperatures by around.. precisely fsck all. At a cost of a few trillion. Small price for someone else to pay to save the planet though?

You can also test this scientifically by building a greenhouse, raising the CO2 level by 1ppmv at the time and observing the thermal runaway. Well, in reality you'd need to be there a very long time with very sensitive instruments to note any significant change. Or you just cheat, as climate 'scientists' do and use tubes with a few thousand ppmv and show candles dimming or something. Just one of the many presentation 'tricks' utilised by climate charlatans.

Re: Technical marvel, but it's the economics, stupid

Pick a time, any time, and draw incorrect conclusions. How very climate change.. Your link's broken, but from the press release-

Professor Michael Grubb (UCL Institute for Sustainable Resources), who is leading the research, said: “Fossil fuels used to be cheaper than renewable energy sources, but that has turned on its head as gas prices shot up and the cost to produce renewables such as wind and solar power has plummeted.

So thanks to the self-inflicted 'energy crisis' and bans on Russian oil and gas, yes, gas prices did shoot up. But now they've fallen again, unlike our energy prices. Again it doesn't explain why our electricity bills have shot up as we've "invested" £200bn in 'renewables'. Surely if the cost of wind and solar has plummeted then our bills should also be plummeting?

Ok, so the situation is more complex. Given wind & solar are occasional generators-

https://gridwatch.co.uk/Wind

minimum: 0.189 GW maximum: 13.247 GW average: 6.266 GW

Something else has to pick up the slack. That's been gas, which has meant that our 'renewables' policy increased our dependency on gas and made the 'energy crisis' that much worse. Plus by relegating gas generation to stand-by capacity, costs have to be spread across their limited operating hours, again artificially inflating the cost/price of gas generated electricity.

Oh, and also from the press release-

The two papers are the first outputs of a programme of research led by UCL supported by the Aldersgate Group and the Institute for New Economic Thinking

So your basic sponsored research to greenwash for lobbying groups-

https://www.aldersgategroup.org.uk/aims/

The Group is focused on ensuring that the UK’s climate and environmental targets translate into measures that are environmentally effective and that grow affordable investment in low carbon infrastructure, products and services.

https://www.aldersgategroup.org.uk/membership/organisations/

The 'renewables' blob is, of course well represented.. Well, maybe not. I did wonder what Theresa May had been up to since she left politics.

Re: John Bull presents Little Englander Nuclear

Don't we get most of our uranium from Kazakhstan?

Hmm.. I don't know! Something to do some digging around. That country has had a bit of help with it's politics recently, but there are many alternative suppliers.

They supply something like 45% of total world production, and I think they are the closest source to us.

I don't think distance really matters so much given the potential energy density of uranium. Originally it was thought to be pretty scarce, but once geologists started looking, it turned up all over the place. The usual mineral rules seem to apply, ie concentration and cost to extract it. Shipping isn't really a problem given raw uranium (ie yellowcake) is pretty safe.. At least safer than shipping say, car transporters carrying EVs by sea.

Again the trick seems to be picking the right nuclear process and fuel cycle. If we went with 1950's style thorium, there's thousands of tonnes of that laying around in mine spoil heaps because at the time, thorium had no real economic value. With current designs, fuel has been relatively cheap, so fuel rods only get used once. Or there's limited recycling so depleted uranium can be disposed of in other people's countries. Some new reactor designs have the advantage of being able to recycle the nuclear 'waste' that so terrifies neo-Luddites.

Re: Technical marvel, but it's the economics, stupid

Generation prices follow marginal rates, and as gas is the marginal fuel, windmills and nukes charge at the same rate as gas - because they can.

But we have all given up explaining this to you because you never listen.

Ah, that royal 'we' again. I'm sure if you are correct, then you can provide me with a link or three that shows gas being the benchmark. Sure, for a few months the bans on cheap gas did allow wind farmers to sell at gas rates, but wind and solar as still the most expensive forms of generation by far.

Again this should be obvious to even the dumbest politician, or voter. The more we've 'invested' in 'renewables', the more expensive our electricity has become. At the same time, the 'renewables' lobby tries to convince people that their product is the cheapest and we should be throwing billions more into their pockets. It's understandable why people are confused when morons like this-

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-66359093

The truth about heat pumps and the power needed to run them

...And there is another issue.

Unit for unit, electricity typically costs three times as much as gas.

After glossing over the issues of needing to spend a lot of money on a heat pump, new radiatiors, and you'll need something else to make hot water. And they won't work very efficiently, if at all if outside air temperatures fall much below freezing. Like they have this strange and annoying habit of doing every winter. But then of course comes the big lie-

So, to get to net zero in time, the government has set an ambitious target - decarbonise the entire electricity supply by 2035.

The UK has been making great progress with offshore wind, but building wind turbines at sea is expensive.

The cheapest renewable power is from onshore wind and solar.

Many experts say the UK will need thousands of much cheaper wind turbines on land.

I'm sure whenever Rowlett isn't being jetted off to Alicante to inform viewers that Spain is hot in summer, he lives in some luxurious house in London and can afford to 'invest' in Green crap thanks to his generous Bbc salary and side-gigs. Vattenfall announced they can't deliver at their agreed contractual strike price, which highlights one of the lies about wind and solar being the cheapest. They're whining that their costs have been increasing not decreasing, even though their contracts are indexed.

Then there's the small point that the 2035 target is entirely optional, and any government can change the date. Same as the 2050 target. Or it could repeal the Climate Change Act. Or there's the bigges obvious lie.

Rowlett and his fellow travellers keep telling us we're facing 'extreme' weather, and it's here now! If so, why does he think it's a great idea to waste so much money on stuff that's entirely dependent on prevailing weather conditions? Sure climate predictions give various contradictory outcomes, like more storms, or less wind, more cloud or less cloud. Either of which affect wind and solar output and can even destroy wind and solar farms.

But the biggest lie is that it'll make any difference. Even if the UK ends up 'zero carbon', it will make no (ok, an statistically insignificant) to either UK or 'global' temperatures.

Re: Technical marvel, but it's the economics, stupid

If you want to look at the wholesale cost per source you'd need to look at what's called the 'Levelized cost of electricity' (LCOE). Then you'll typically see, from cheapest to more expensive, something along the lines of Large-scale solar -> offshore wind -> onshore wind -> combined cycle gas turbine (CCGT) -> geothermal -> nuclear -> small scale solar * -> coal (hard) -> coal (soft) -> more obscure sources such as old fashioned gas plants, oil, etc.

Except of course that's a steaming pile of BS dreamt up by the 'renewables' lobby to try and make their product appear affordable.

Problem is LCOE intentionally excludes a wide range of costs and is pretty much irrelevant to actual market requirements. The market wants cheap, reliable electricty because that's what powers our economy. So the cost per MWh available 24x7x365.

Solar can't do this because, well, night. Wind can't do this because windspeeds are highly variable. So LCOE deliberately excludes the cost of providing stand-by generation for night time, or when the wind isn't blowing, or blowing too fast. Then there's the costs to connect wind and solar to the grid, which can be massive, especially for off-shore eg-

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-suffolk-66023678

Two windfarms off the Suffolk coast were approved by the government last year - East Anglia One North (EA1N) and East Anglia Two (EA2).

The total connection cost for those two subsidy farms will be around £7bn, which isn't paid by the wind farm developers and just gets added to our bills instead. Same with the costs of garbage like battery farms to try and overcome 'renewables' inadequacies.

Of course if the true costs were known, there would be no justification to build this junk instead of more nuclear, or more modern coal power stations. Especially when new nuclear tends to be reactors where there were existing ones already, eg Sizewell, so much of the infrastructure is already in place. Alternatively, the CfD market could be reformed to firm prices based on good delivery. So that way if someone bids for 500MW of capacity, it has to deliver 500MW 24x7x365. That could also be done as a MWh model, and it would be the suppliers problem (and cost) to make good.

Of course that would also mean no more 'renewables', because they have never, and will never make economic sense in an energy market that has alternative cheaper and more reliable ways to deliver the the energy we need.

Re: Technical marvel, but it's the economics, stupid

In the UK the price of renewable electricity is linked to the price of electricity generated by gas.

Wrong. But of course this is what the 'renewables' parasites would want you to believe. If this were true, when gas prices were low, our electricity costs would have been much, much lower. The real reason electricity prices are high is because CfDs are based on marginal prices, ie to support the most expensive operator.. namely 'renewables'. So when gas prices rose due to governments banning Russian oil & gas, gas became the benchmark, and 'renewables' profitted massively because gas isn't one of their input costs.

And of course any sucker with a fake '100% renewable' tariff didn't see any benefit, even though their energy is allegedly the greenest, cheapest and non-reliant on imported gas service..

Re: Drive me mad

No no - the licenses are to allow private companies to profit from natural resources, nothing to do with the UK gas market.

There is no chance of harvesting enough gas to affect global prices, so there will be no change to the cost in the uk.

The oil industry in the UK is already heavily taxed, and being government, it could always decide to apply export taxes or duties to subsidise UK domestic consumption. This of course will duel-fuel the ire of both the US and the EU. One because they want us buying their gas, and the other because we'd benefit from selling to them. Plus producing locally is much greener than importing gas & oil from thousands of miles away.

Re: John Bull presents Little Englander Nuclear

Yeah, because when you resurrect the corpse of BNFL, the most important thing is for the name to have the post-Brexit Tories' favoured form of puffed-up linguistic Union Jackery shoved rather obviously in there.

Wasn't it one G.Brown Esq, who buried BNFL and most of the UK's nuclear industry? Possibly on the advice of his brother, who just happened to be working for EDF at the time?

One of the tricks with a sensible nuclear policy is to be able to manage the entire fuel cyle, which we were trying to do with reprocessing. Also may become more important given Niger's political situation, and that country providing France with much of it's uranium. Luckily, other sources are available, like Australia, which made the recent sub & nuclear deal even more annoying to the French.

Chinese companies evade sanctions, fuel Moscow’s war on Ukraine, says report

While I've often agreed with your criticism of wind mills and other energy strategy madness by governments, the sickening pro-Kermlin fuckwittery you've regurgitated above has earned you the nuclear option on downvotes.

It's fine. Although people who criticise Western policy in this conflict are being jailed for exercising free speech, the UK hasn't gone quite that far. Yet. But what I find sickening is the determination of our leaders to fight Russia to the last Ukrainian, and the hypocrisy. Russia is doing nothing more than we've done to many small defenceless countries that wouldn't do what they were told. Next up will be Niger, which looks like it's heading for a "nuclear" war after it's coup, and banning uranium exports.

For the current conflict, you really need to look at Ukraine's history, it's red & black flag, and where that has flown before with the OUN. It's been a strange conflict with the media from warning about the rise of the far-right in Ukraine (and Russia) to now denying this and praising it. Plus there's been some other strange symbology as well as the WW2 stuff. A recent video had an SUV with the mark of Khorne proudly painted on it's door. Blood for the Blood God and all that. The general 'Chaos emblem is also rather popular. This risks invoking a serious escalation if Games Workshop's lawyers get involved.

But instead of our leaders calling for peace, they're continually calling for more weapons and more blood. Not their own of course, but other peoples. In their desperate attempt to defeat Russia, they seem perfectly happy to drag everybody down with it and destroy our economies. The consequences of sanctions on oil & gas prices were inevitable, but also suit our idiotic leader's NZ ambitions in 'reducing demand' by making it too expensive for people in the West to heat our homes. And our leaders also seem to be determined to expand the conflict and draw in China, because why not?

Good of you to move to a country that invades its neighbours and sen missiles into civilianhouses.

I don't need to move for that to happen. We've done it repeatedly in Iraq, Syria, Libya, Afghanistan, Yugoslavia and France might be poised to start doing it in Niger. They've just had a coup, the ousted leader's asked for France to intervene. I wonder what would have happened if Russia had been asked to intervene in the same way after Ukraine's coup? Ok, apparently they were asked, but said 'No'.

Meanwhile, Ukraine's just attacked an office building in Moscow City, again. So rather suggests the target is a deliberate choice. The Bbc words the justification rather coyly-

A drone hit a skyscraper in Russia's capital Moscow, which houses government ministries, for the second time in two days

Of course it doesn't mention which government ministries, but it seems that as Zelensky says "this is an inevitable, natural, and absolutely fair process.", then it will also be fair for Russia to respond in kind. It's already warned a few times that attacks like this would result in more attacks against Ukraine's decision making centres, and has done so, eg the recent destruction of the SBU building.

Nice to see an putin defender going all out. Why not move to russia?

My Russian is rather rusty. But perhaps some day. Places like Moscow or St Petersberg are cleaner and safer than places like LA, SF, London, Paris etc. Cost of living is also lower. Of course this may change as Ukraine continues emulating it's heroes. The SBU's just released a cartoon showing it's V-Weapons, complete with imagery ripped off from Venom ready to rain terror on the citizens of Russia. That's been spun as 'bringing the war to the Russian population', ie a blatant terror campaign. Slight snag is previous attacks on Russia have just lead to calls from the population to escalate and finish Ukraine.

At the moment, it suits Russia because the SMO has always been a war of attrition, not territory. Ukraine's been helping with that by throwing it's forces against Russian defences, and it simply can't afford to keep doing that. It's currently busily attacking Artemovsk, which it previously said was strategically unimportant. The location is/was an important logistics hub, but if you look at a map the NYT showed months ago, Russia's defence lines are far behind the city. Which is much the same along the line. Ukraine may almost have captured or bypassed Robotyne, or placed itself in another cauldron, but it's still a good few kilometers away from Russia's first line of defence.

And back to logistics.. The media's been spinning about Ukraine gaining artillery superiority, but only because it's concentrating it's remaining artillery in a few points. Which is back to the logistics and supply chain challenges. There's a shortage of ammunition in NATO, and a shortage of artillery. Perhaps chopping up old field guns and converting the barrels into bombs wasn't a good idea. Russia, China and N.Korea can churn out new field guns and ammunition far faster than we can. China still produces a lot of components we need to produce weapons, and perhaps it'll respond to our sanctions by banning more stuff to the West? What would happen if China banned the sale of DJIs?

I'm sure you're backing these conspiracy claims with good references in your next post.

https://thehill.com/policy/international/3790699-zelensky-agrees-to-ukraine-rebuild-investment-with-blackrock-ceo/

Zelensky’s office made the announcement on Wednesday. It came after Ukraine’s economic ministry signed a memorandum of understanding in November for BlackRock to provide advisory support for designing an investment framework.

10% for the little guy? And won't someone think of the fees? I mean children.. Then again, it'll be interesting to see how Ukraine complies with BlackRocks' ESG policies, and when Zelensky will start appointing LGBT+ people into organisations like the SBU.. Ukraine is not exactly progressive in that respect.

By negotiation, not by force.

Yep, funny how that works. There's a supposed peace conference kicking off in Saudi Arabia next week, but it's based on Zelensky's 'peace' plan. Which is essentially for Russia to surrender Crimea and all the territory it's gained, and then Zelensky will negotiate. Unsuprisingly Russia is unimpressed with this proposal. Especially given the way previous peace deals like Minsk worked out. Again it's one of the reasons why nations are drifting away from the West's sphere of influence because we've proven to be very untrustworthy.

Russia was supposed to have over 2,000 T-14 Armata tanks before the war. They only have a handful because all money was embezzled by Putin's cronies.

Nope, simpler reason. The early production models had a few snags. Plus they didn't want T-14's being captured. Ukraine's less concerned by this so has been busily littering the battlefields with the NATO gear they've been given. This also happened during the civil war with stuff like US counter-battery radars being abandoned in their transport cases for Russia to analyse. Given the number of conflicts the West has been involved in over the last few decades, Russian intelligence has had plenty of time to study equipment and tactics. We rely on air power, so Russia develops anti-air. We rely on cruise missiles, so Russia develops systems to shoot those down, and hypersonic missiles that are much harder to counter.

But Russia's also churning out older model MBTs by the hundreds. The UK can produce precisely zero new MBTs and has a very small number of serviceable Challenger 2s, with many of those being earmarked for upgrading to Challenger 3s. So a total of less than 200, or less than Ukraine's lost so far in it's much hyped counter offensive. It's much the same with other basics, like artillery, ammunition, missiles etc etc. And the same story across Europe. Germany's been planning a new MBT, but it'll be years before they enter service. If ever.

If nothing else this has been a rather rude wake-up call for the West and NATO. If Ukraine has been following NATO doctrine, then clearly it's not working, so a rethink is needed. What that will be is anyone's guess, but at a minimum it seems to suggest a need to massively boost production capacity for consumables like ammunition. It's also been the first drone war, so how to counter that threat, and whether that will cause a re-think of AFV design. And a cynic might suggest this is one of the reasons why this conflict has been allowed to continue. It's clearly demonstrated strategic weaknesses in NATO, and provided support for massive increases in defence spending.. But then wars have always been good for business, if you're part of the defence industry.

Instead, as their army was deemed second best in the world early last year, it was actually just second best in Ukraine and for awhile it was second best even in Russia when Wagner rebelled and met only puny resistance.

Uh huh. Meanwhile, the red & black flag of Ukraine flies victorious over Ukraine's battlefield, as BlackRock's asset realisation team starts offering deals to scrap merchants. Wagner's coup was defeated in <24hrs, Ukraine's has taken a little longer. But Russia's using around 10-15% of it's military to demonstrate the impotence of the NATO collective. Zelensky, meanwhile still can't find a decent suit. He can irritate Russia by flying a few drones into random buildings in Moscow, and Russia will no doubt retaliate using the missiles it ran out of 18 months ago.

But back to the story. Once upon a time Kharkiv's tank works churned out a lot of the Soviet Union's armor. Ukraine also used to make Antonov aircraft, and engines for rockets. After independence of course, it didn't have a market for it's industry, well, other than Russia. But 2014 changed that, along with EU ambitions. But Ukraine doesn't manufacture NATO kit, and wouldn't have been allowed to compete with the established brands. Plus most of it's heavy industry was in the territorys it lost early on when those regions objected to the Kiev regime and it's de-Russification.

But if the conflict can be frozen long enough for the 'Arsenals of Democracy' to rebuild their steel industries, heavy engineering and basic weapon production, some of Ukraine may remain. It's still entirely at the mercy of the West though and will never be independent again. The mighty NATO, defeated by convicts with shovels. If only Russia had de-industrialised like the West has, it wouldn't have been able to produce as many shovels, and Zelensky would have his Crimean penthouse back.

And you wonder why "Russia could look like the agressor" when you are admitting in the next paragraph that they are intervening and invading.

Yes, well, there was the small matter of the civil war and ethnic cleansing that started in 2014. Then the buildup of Ukrainian forces poised to start the ethnic cleansing of the DPR and LPR. Again, we destroyed Yugoslavia to prevent ethnic cleansing there, so why shouldn't Russia to the same to preven ethnic cleansing in Ukraine?

When did this site go from snark to out right hate for the US? There is a war in Europe, Russia is the aggressor..

If you ignore everything that happened from say, 2012 when the US influence campaign kicked into high gear, which lead to Ukraine's 2014 coup, civil war and the deaths of thousands.. Then yes, I guess Russia could look like the agressor. Alternatively if you read the justification used for the SMO, it's almost word for word identical to the justification we used to destroy Yugoslavia. Then there were the same regime change stunts pulled in Libya, Syria and many other countries. Minsk was exposed as a sham, Ukraine was poised to attack the DPR, LPR and Crimea, and now this war must be fought to the last Ukrainian.

Most Americans are blissfully ignorant of the history, and thus the hypocrisy. It's not hate for the US because the US is simply acting in it's own interests, as nations should. If it's OK for the US and West to intervene and invade sovereign nations, why the suprise when other countries do the same thing?

AWS: IPv4 addresses cost too much, so you’re going to pay

The entire class E range is only 16 /8s, that would also not even be a year of allocations.

For ARIN, maybe, but they've always been very generous. Alternatively it's over 1m new /24s that the RIRs could fight over. There are some other smaller chunks that were reserved for experimental purposes and never really used that could also be released. Then again, it would also mean a load of new routes and route objects scattered across the various big cloud providers and further router bloats. But releasing the E-space has been discussed many times in the past, and Amazon/Google/MS's solution is, of course for them to be given the new /8s to (mis)manage.

There isn't that much unused address space out there. It's not worth the effort.

Not true. There's the entire 'Class E' range that's sitting unused*. That's 240.x.x.x right up to the end of the 'net, so 268,435,456 IPv4 addresses being completely wasted. There have been suggestions over the years to release this range, along with some other reserved/experimental space, but the usual answer is "No, Use IPv6". Please..

But I wonder how loudly Amazon would scream if it's peers started charging a mere 0.005c an hour for every IP address it routes? Filtering that mess has always been a bit of an overhead.

*Or is it? Routers often wouldn't let you configure addresses in the 240. space, but you could use something like GateD and use it instead. It's a relatively simple config change to release that space.. but what might be exposed, if that happened? I did come across one client who was using it on a VPN in a semi-risky security by obscurity kinda way given that space can't currently be routed on the public Internet.

Florida man accused of hoarding America's secrets faces fresh charges

Re: You sure are preoccupied by Trump and Musk!

Show the proof that Biden retained them deliberately. Reportedly they were a couple decades out of date, so unlikely to be of much value in 2022.

With strict liability offences, it doesn't (or shouldn't) matter if they were accidently retained, or deliberately. It's much the same as with CP. Possession without any lawful authority is the offence. Mere mortals get prosecuted, others appear to be above the law. That isn't justice.

Then there's the IT angle (ish). There have been many cases of politicians mishandling classifed documents or just secrets and they've generally escaped punishment. That isn't great for national or general security if they don't take document and information security seriously. You also misremember what happened, ie the documents were 'found', then lawyers, then the FBI were invited to inspect/collect, but also restricted to where they could look. The age of the documents is also irrelevant. They remain classified until they're de-classified. Sometimes that may be after 50 or 100yrs, sometimes never. It wasn't up to Biden to decide, at least not until he became President and then gained the power to declassify.

Record retention also extends beyond Presidential documents, ie Clinton's retention of State Department records, or just having those on a private rather than an official server. Prior to becoming President, Biden may have had no lawful authority to retain any of the documents found. The dates of those records may also tie with investigations into the Biden's family business dealings and whether those were used to gain inside info on those deals.

Trump's stuff is heading to court, and the court will decide if anything illegal occurred, not the media.. Despite the best efforts of the Dems to spin and convict Trump without due process.

Re: You sure are preoccupied by Trump and Musk!

In both cases, the papers were asked to be returned. Biden returned all documents, Trump lied and said he returned them.

Err.. no. For Biden, the papers were first 'found', and then some, or all may have been returned. No FBI raids, no TV cameras, no proper evidence collection, just a bunch of lawyers deciding what to give back. Because the process wasn't managed properly, there's no way of knowing if anything particularly embarrassing (or sensitive) was destroyed or moved elsewhere. But the same crimes may have been committed. That's usually simple possession of classfied information without authorisation, or failing to secure classified documents. Anyone who's handled this stuff knows that documents marked "Secret" shouldn't be left in boxes in your garage, or in a cupboard in a "think tank" bankrolled by the Chinese. They're also usually strict liability offences, ie possession means you're guilty.

It's a bit like being expected to be let off for robbing a bank because I gave the money back as the police closed in.

Trump's case hasn't got to court yet, so the details are mostly via leaks to the media and the Democrat lawyer's prosecution filings. Presidents do have some ability to declassify and retain stuff from their time in office. Documents were apparently stored in secure locations, so if Trump was authorised to possess those documents, and they were stored in accordance with the rules.. Has any offence been committed?

And why the selective prosecution? Senior Democrats have mishandled classified material, and escaped prosecution. Why does it seem that different rules apply depending on party affiliation, or rank? Aren't laws supposed to be applied equally in a well-functioning democracy?

Re: You sure are preoccupied by Trump and Musk!

Thanks mate, typical answer LOL

Likewise. Dems demand the 25th Amendment be invoked on Trump, but they're fine with their own geriatrics. Dems impeach Trump because he asked for more info on what the Bidens were doing in Ukraine. Dems have spent the last decade ignoring that question, even though there's ample questions that need answers. Biden kept classified documents in his family's 'think tank' and garage, and this is fine. Trump kept some documents in his pool house, and must be prevented from participating in the democratic process at all costs.

Again, it's fine, if you think this is the image the leader(s) of the free world and champions of democracy, decency and famility values should present to the world.

BTW, what is the Dbc? Did you mean BBC (as opposed to the also incorrect Bbc)?

The Democrats broadcasting corporation. It's long been trying to break into the US market and escape being an obscure cable channel that very few subscribe to. The Bbc is just a bit of fun because the world's greatest and most trusted broadcaster can't get names like NATO or NASA correct.