Where's that Ukrainian 'greatest counter-offensive' we've been hearing about? Last week it was bad weather. This week it's something about new gear and saving Bakhmut or some such. 'Excuses are like assholes', so they say.
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Yes, no Ukrainian offensive is planned, do not worry. Just keep on throwing the official "truth" here and keep on attacking Bakhmut - it is very important for the RF to conquer another flattened town that is in the middle of nowhere and in artillery range from the other side of the river. You do not have to worry about the nearly state of the art nearly 100 main battle tanks coming from US and Europe and those few hundred IMFV. That is just for defence, so no offensive planned in the next few weeks. Sleep well, read the Pravda, listen to Radio Moscow and keep drinking Stolichnaya. A few days ago, Russia attacked a fuel storage facility in Novomoskovsk, Dnepropetrovsk region. All Geraniums, of course, were intercepted by Ukrainian air defense, but they burned for two days until they burned to the ground - despite all attempts to put out the fire. They say that $15 million worth of fuel was burned, prepared for the counteroffensive. Therefore, you are right, you can safely continue to drink vodka, Leopards will not go anywhere with empty tanks.  |
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Meanwhile, Putin visited the liberated Mariupol today on an unannounced visit (and yesterday he was in Sevastopol at the celebration of the 9th anniversary of the reunification of Crimea with Russia), watched how the city was being restored, and paid special attention to the Mariupol Philharmonic. The building has been completely restored and soon there will be a public trial of the Nazis of Azov, who were taken prisoner during the assault on Azov Steel in May last year.
This pathetic cowardly kidnapper of children, came to Ukrainian Mariupol? Yes, he was on Poklonnaya Hill, laying flowers, so before that, within a radius of 3 km, all sewer manholes were welded, people were forbidden to open and look out the windows, every 10 meters there was a FSO officer, carbines and even branded bayonet-knives were taken away from the guard of honor , and a group of "people" who created the appearance, were held back by two hundred guards in a dense ring. And this cowardly criminal, in your opinion, came to Ukrainian Mariupol?!  ))) By the way, according to the first part - a video of the cleansing of the city, under the visit of an international criminal, a kidnapper, where he laid flowers - is available on the Internet. According to the second part, a video recording is now being deleted from all sources, where allegedly Putin, allegedly in Mariupol, allegedly drives through the streets of the city, and in one house from a window, with a characteristic, central Russian accent, a woman shouts "this is all staged, don't believe it!", then the sound suddenly stops... You already write in North Korean: the great leader of roshisi, who gave light to the solar system, yesterday visited the sun at the speed of light, opened a kiosk selling ice cream there, walked on the surface of the sun, to the applause of the inhabitants of the sun. After that, the great leader, the leader of all leaders, and the father of all fathers, dug the tunnel of the new metro station with his own hands: Sun-Moscow! Well, it will sound more realistic than nonsense about how this cowardly, unfortunate, vile body went to Ukrainian Mariupol, kidnapping children, having previously killed their parents I understand that it is difficult for you to accept that the cowardly "bunker grandfather" was at a distance of a shot from Himars, and Ukraine missed this favorable opportunity. |
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Meanwhile, First Republic Bank (FRC) seems to be dead too. The fall of its shares is close to catastrophic today.
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For at least the following reasons: - Most of the aid from the US is gratuitousHowever, also without payment, some of the weapons are transferred to us by other countries, and these are not front sights on trunks - The supply of weapons to Ukraine is not a cause, but a consequence of an attempt by a terrorist country, Russia, led by a war criminal, to destroy Ukraine - Of course, there is a positive economic effect for countries producing weapons - communism has not been built, so production is not free But they are financed by the "donor" state, which provides assistance - Moreover, since 2016, the Ukrainian military industry has also begun to develop - these are jobs, taxes, support for the army. So if we talk about "benefit", then not in terms of profit, but in terms of normal economic relations, in such a difficult time for Ukraine. Do you yourself believe in it? The USSR paid off its lend-lease debts in 2006, 61 years after the end of World War II. I think it will take Ukraine 150 years to pay off its debts for the supply of weapons, this is according to optimistic forecasts. |
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Meanwhile, the Russian Investigative Committee issued an arrest warrant for the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court and for the judges who signed the warrant for Putin's arrest. Lol |
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As said, China can cut the lifeline at any moment. I would certainly use that to my advantage and Mr Xi has made a whole life-career of doing exactly that.
While you are cultivating ridiculous Russophobic fantasies here, Mr. Xi has flown to Moscow on a three-day friendly visit, his first high-level retreat since his recent re-election. I am absolutely amazed to how low is your level of trolling this time. How can this be in any manner interpreted as "Russophobia"? Really, you need to broaden your lectures, if you only listen to the official propaganda you will become a dumb zombie. Unless you get paid for it, in which case you will become a paid dumb zombie. No, if Xi needs a retreat he will go to the coast of China and have a private beach and party, not to frosty Moscow. A chief of state visit is never casual. He is there to put forward his demands an put plenty of pressure in Putin's little gonads. China does not like war, they just like buying the world one dollar at a time (perhaps Taiwan might be an exception in the future). Anyway, a wild guess, US stops increasing the military presence near Taiwan, China turns a blind eye on it, Biden stops spending money to get re-elected and appear a man of peace and Putin may get some territory and his own life. China as usual, does business with all happily. Sound like a deal. Zelensky would need to concede, but Ukraine will survive and, in the future, arm itself with NATO weaponry to avoid further adventures. I think we got a deal. After the offensive of course. Ukraine can and will take back plenty of land. There is no trolling, I am surprised by the one-sidedness of your statement of the question. For some reason, you are sure that Russia owes a lot to China, while China is one of the main beneficiaries of the conflict in Ukraine. I think at the talks between Putin and Xi the question will be put in a different formulation, for example, "What else can China do for Russia so that the conflict in Ukraine continues for at least another year or two?" Think about it at your leisure. |
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As said, China can cut the lifeline at any moment. I would certainly use that to my advantage and Mr Xi has made a whole life-career of doing exactly that.
While you are cultivating ridiculous Russophobic fantasies here, Mr. Xi has flown to Moscow on a three-day friendly visit, his first high-level retreat since his recent re-election. |
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You seem just as confident now as you were almost exactly 1 year ago when you were defending the fact that the special military operation was still going on weeks later not because Russia was facing any setbacks, they just wanted to minimize civilian casualties is all...and don't worry, there will be a Parade in Kiev come May...
When it comes to the future, you always have to deal with probabilities, because, unlike the present, the future is not yet a fait accompli. The probabilistic nature of the future does not allow making predictions with 100% accuracy. When making my prediction regarding the victory parade in Kyiv, I proceeded from the assumption that Ukraine will soberly assess its capabilities in confrontation with Russia and will act in accordance with prudence and its own benefit. However, I was wrong in this assumption - Ukraine chose to get involved in a suicidal adventure, completely neglecting the instinct of self-preservation and acting to its own detriment. In all respects, it would have been wiser and more profitable for Ukraine to unconditionally capitulate a year ago. |
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I've never heard anyone in a real leadership position in Russia make much mention of the use of nuclear weapons at all,
I'm somewhat surprised that neither Russian State media or any of your conspiracy youtubers have discussed the nuclear threats Medvedev has made. He does it all the time. Nobody here in Russia takes Medvedev seriously. It seems that after the death of Zhirinovsky, he occupied the niche of an outrageous freak in the political arena. In short, an ordinary clown like Zelensky. Oh, the mythical counteroffensive... sure, keep your eyes on Bahkmut, no need to notice the 40 thousand motorised troops being massed in the Zaporilla area. Do not look there, nothing is going to happen in the next 3 weeks. Nothing at all. An the explosions in Sebastopol were again, RF soldiers smoking by the gas barrels. There is no resistance and no partisans in the zone. Nothing happening.
Of course, there will be an attempt at a counteroffensive from Ukraine, otherwise why these deliveries of tanks and training courses for soldiers of the Armed Forces of Ukraine in the West. I called it mythical because the chances of success are close to zero. |
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Meanwhile, Putin visited the liberated Mariupol today on an unannounced visit (and yesterday he was in Sevastopol at the celebration of the 9th anniversary of the reunification of Crimea with Russia), watched how the city was being restored, and paid special attention to the Mariupol Philharmonic. The building has been completely restored and soon there will be a public trial of the Nazis of Azov, who were taken prisoner during the assault on Azov Steel in May last year.
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What I am particularly interested in is whether a bank will appear in the EU that will be in trouble, because Switzerland is in Europe, but is not part of the EU or the eurozone.
Potentially problematic banks in the Eurozone - Deutsche Bank, Societe Generale, Credit Lyonnais. At the same time, one must understand that there is no bank in the world that is able to withstand a massive influx of depositors who want to cash out their deposits here and now. It's just that the existing architecture of the banking system does not imply full provision of depositors' funds with the bank's own capital. Therefore, the stability of the financial system in the Eurozone largely depends on the ability of the ECB to extinguish the panic with verbal interventions and prompt provision of additional liquidity to banks. Of course, in this case, many previous efforts to combat inflation will be crossed out. |
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~snip~
I read something about it, but I must admit that I was not fully aware of the extent of the damage suffered by the bank due to their decision to freeze Russian money. Obviously, this "neutrality" has its limits, and while for some such a move is logical, for them, from a strictly business perspective, it was a bad decision. I am not aware of whether CS is the only one that has this "problem" when it comes to Russian money, or whether some other banks in Switzerland have similar problems that have not surfaced yet. According to the FT, the outflow of funds from Credit Suisse reached $10.8 billion a day. The allocated credit line will not be enough for a month, the fate of the bank with 167 years of history will be decided tomorrow (and it will probably be voluntarily-compulsorily sold to UBS under a state bank guarantee with a total reorganization and dismissal of tens of thousands of employees). |
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I am always against ChatGPT and OpenAI because of the disadvantages they expose humans to, but this is new, if ChatGPT can find bugs and threats in the system then it is a very wonderful tool, I will change my mind about ChatGPT if this is very true.
The reason why I am against this technology is because of how this will make some people useless, unable to work, cheat and do some bad things using the tools, I got to fight for my people too, imagine you are from a home of a university teacher, both mother, and father.
Try to think about it in this aspect. A few years ago, cryptocurrencies made an impressive breakthrough in the democratization of investment. Now we are seeing an equally impressive breakthrough in the democratization of content creation from the side of neural networks. For example, on my home computer, among other things, there is a local instance of the Stable Diffusion neural network. I haven't created an Avatar-type movie with it yet, but hypothetically it's not technically impossible. There is quite a lot of work and calculations to be done, but in principle it seems that I can do it alone, without a team of hundreds of people and without a budget of hundreds of millions of dollars. A talented programmer no longer needs an expensive team and effort to coordinate it when he has access to ChatGPT. And so on. There is a social and ethical side to the problem, because hundreds of thousands of mediocre programmers have already lost their jobs. But this is not a reason to try to stop progress, in the end, the positive role of the state may manifest itself here, of course, if it chooses to save people, not banks, during the next crisis. |
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GPT was invented by people; does anyone think that AI will one day be able to win over the mind of a person? If someone has created a smart GPT chat, then there is sure to be another who can be smarter. And it will be a person. Machines should serve people, not the other way around. It is a mistake to think that one day people will be able to entrust everything to machines. There are already two different opinions about the usefulness of GPT. And besides his unique abilities, there are a bunch of bugs that he can't get around.
ChatGPT is a tool, very powerful and quite universal. Like any other tool, he has his own restrictions, in the sense that this is not a magic wand, not a panacea, and not even a silver bullet. Separate admiration is deserved by researchers who are looking for these restrictions, as well as ways of their possible bypass. However, now it is an extremely powerful working tool that can be found a lot of useful practical applications. Damn it, this thing easily passes the Turing test! In the sense that you cannot reliably determine whether you are reading the text written by a person, or an generated machine. And this is only the very beginning of the fascinating path. Recently, the dumps of the neural network Facebook Llam, which can be launched locally on an ordinary home computer (if he has enough RAM) appeared. It seems that this language model can even be used independently, for example, create a virtual character named after himself on his basis, feed him sparse messages from this forum from his profile - and now he will learn to generate messages in your own style, supporting the dialogs and adhering to the given topic. Of course, he will not have my personal charisma, beard and sparkling subtle humor, but is it not delightful? |
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Indian refineries have published details on the landing cost of crude oil from Russia. In January 2023, average cost per barrel was $80, and this may include $20 to $30 per barrel for freight and insurance. The landing cost was not much different from the Indian basket ($81 per barrel), since under pressure Iraq was forced to reduce the price of crude oil it sells to India. So India is benefitting in both ways. In one hand, it gets cheap oil from Russia and on the other, it can demand other exporters to reduce their rates.
What are you talking about, but what about the oil price ceiling? Bloomberg is indignant, along with Mr. beer alcoholic, who tells everyone here about huge discounts. Okay, India, it recently turned out based on an analysis of financial statistics reports that the average price of Ural oil, which Japan buys from Russia (which is outrageous in itself, of course), was $68 per barrel in January 2023 - and this is without insurance and transportation. This is no good, as an evil tyrant cannot be defeated by the progressive global LGBT+ community. |
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China is the only country that matters and is currently maintaining a significant commercial relationship with the Russian Federation. Without the huge exports and imports from China and to China, Putin and his Psychos would not be able to pay for a prolonger war. If anyone thinks that the China Communist Party is doing this for friendship and love should really give it a second thought.
What is the price? Transfering the latest tech? Intelligence data? Support for the future invasion of Taiwan? 50% discount in oil for 10 years? ... Xi Yinping could be now in Moscow asking for pretty much anything he wants - he is got Putin by his little balls.
China makes no sacrifices by cooperating with Russia, this strategic alliance is mutually beneficial. Therefore, I do not understand the question in your formulation, why should Russia pay China anything else, besides what it already pays under the existing agreements. |
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50% seems about right considering these banks don't hold enough cash to insure depositors in the event the economy crashes and there's a need for liquidity. The narrative of failing banks dates back to the economic crisis of 2008. And even further back to the banking industry becoming increasingly deregulated.
There could be whatever regulation on SVB in retrospect and the bank would still fail unless the regulation were to be applied to the federal reserve themselves. It was them that created trillions of dollars of cash flowing into the economy in 2020-2021 and seemingly tech stocks is where a lot of that money was funneled to. The bubble popped and so did SVB. The treasury bonds they were holding onto only added to the complications. SVB can't control the inflation rate. The drama of the SVB is that in terms of banking, he did everything right. In the sense that it was not the gamble of managers who were too carried away by high-risk investments that led to its collapse, and there were no high-profile corruption scandals with the loss of the bank's reputation. Just the conservative rate on the "risk-free" asset in the form of US Treasury bonds did not work, in conditions uncontrolled surge in inflation. And who did it? Of course, Putin. |
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Well, yes, another ridiculous attempt to make Russia a pariah country by outlawing its president. It is especially hypocritical that this legally insignificant PR action was carried out against the backdrop of the 20th anniversary of the illegal US invasion of Iraq. The International Criminal Court knows full well that it has no authority to try the (with diplomatic immunity) president of a country that has not ratified the Rome Statute. This is another empty informational occasion, not worth much attention, in a politically biased topic that has nothing to do with the economy.
Yes, Russia has not ratified the Rome Statute and will not do so under the Putin regime, and therefore does not recognize the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court. Putin and his current entourage also do not recognize the established international norms of law, the rules and customs of the war that they unleashed in Ukraine, and generally spit on any public opinion, and also demonstrate that no rules of human behavior apply to them. But still, they will be prosecuted and will suffer a well-deserved punishment. After the issuance of an ICC warrant for Putin's arrest, despite the fact that Russia does not recognize the jurisdiction of this court, any state from 123 countries that acceded to its jurisdiction is obliged to arrest Putin and bring him to the prison of this court in The Hague if he is on their territories.But this is only the beginning. Now Ukraine has initiated the creation of a separate international tribunal. It is created by general agreement. An agreement on the creation has already been written, there is a preliminary agreement of about eleven countries that they are ready to join, including very serious states. This special tribunal will begin to consider whether the highest political leadership is guilty of war crimes and aggression against Ukraine, and the recognition of its jurisdiction by Putin or other suspects, as well as by Russia as a whole, will not matter, just as the norms of human civilization do not matter now for these criminals. If proven guilty, they will receive from 30 years in prison to life imprisonment simply for starting a war. https://www.currenttime.tv/a/mnenie-rossii-uzhe-absolyutno-ne-vazhno-v-gaage-sozdayut-spetsialnyy-tribunal-dlya-suda-nad-putinym-za-prestuplenie-agressii-protiv- ukrainy-/32076126.html We will be able to see the full scale of the authority of the International Criminal Court already in August this year, it seems that Putin plans to personally attend the BRICS summit in South Africa, and South Africa has ratified its participation in the Rome Statute. And I'll tell you what will happen - nothing. Because the ICC is a cheap horror story for self-proclaimed black dictators from African banana republics. The US didn't give a damn about the authority of the ICC, there is even a law that prohibits the extradition of Americans at the request of the ICC (which was adopted after attempts to prosecute several US citizens for war crimes in Iraq). If the United States considers itself above the jurisdiction of the ICC, then this court is not so international. Well, Russia also holds a similar opinion on this matter, constitutionally affirming the priority of its own right over any international one. |
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They have been telling that sanctions will crumble Russia but it's not true anymore, after a year of this conflict, the sanctions are not affecting them.
That's the same mistake some people make about Europe. Just because there was an initial propaganda about an unrealistically terrible result (Russia crumbling like Europe freezing over) that didn't happen, it doesn't mean there wasn't any negative effects at all. The reality is that both Russia and NATO are severely affected by this war that has been going on between them for the past year. Both sides have been able to replace part of what they've lost (Europe replacing a small part of its energy supply, Russia replacing part of its energy customers) but it hasn't been enough to negate all the effects. Examples of these negative effects are in Europe with massive deindustrialization and in Russia with budget deficit. The problems with the budget deficit in Russia, about which only the lazy one did not speak about a month ago, are approximately 80% due to the introduction of a single tax bill in Russia from 2023. In this regard, in the first month of the year there were some technical difficulties with the display of revenues to the budget revenues on the balance sheet. Already in February, the system was debugged and started to work normally, and talk about an abnormally large budget deficit in Russia somehow subsided by itself. Because there was no budget deficit, it was a software failure in the work of the tax service, which, by the way, is one of the most progressive in the world. I still maintain that for Russia, Western sanctions are not an evil, but a blessing. If they didn't exist, they would have to be invented. And Polish farmers can continue to feed pigs with their apples. |
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Well, yes, another ridiculous attempt to make Russia a pariah country by outlawing its president. It is especially hypocritical that this legally insignificant PR action was carried out against the backdrop of the 20th anniversary of the illegal US invasion of Iraq. The International Criminal Court knows full well that it has no authority to try the (with diplomatic immunity) president of a country that has not ratified the Rome Statute. This is another empty informational occasion, not worth much attention, in a politically biased topic that has nothing to do with the economy.
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