Posts by I ain't Spartacus

Re: At least they were caught?

It would be good to see something explaining sanctions are supposed to work when they're announced - whether it's actively or passively enforced. I'm genuinely curious

I ain't no expert. But there's all sorts of different sanctions regimes - and different levels of effectiveness.

Take sanctions on Iran's nuclear program. They were always UN led. Approved by the Security Council. But of limited effectiveness. Because Iran's neighbours mostly carried on trading with them. You don't need the whole world onside to make sanctions really effective - but if you can get the country's neighbours on board as well - it's a lot easier. As most trade (at least usually) is between countries that are close together. Even then though, it's bloody easy to smuggle across long land borders. Also there's often no penalty for breaking UN sanctions. Even if you're Russia and voted on the Security Council to sanction North Korea - when you're desperate for artillery ammo in Ukraine what are you gonna do?

However - still most of the oil industry is Western dominated. That means lots of the equipment and the spare parts comes from countries that do tend to, at least try, to enforce UN sanctions. So although Iran's trade didn't suffer as much, their oil industry did get hit hard - and of course that generates lots of their trade and government revenues. Oil sanctions have also had an impact on Russia for similar reasons. They still have a large oil industry, but they struggle to replace equipment and get the yields from their oil fields that they should do.

The the US Treasury Department started looking at more effective sanctions about 20 years ago. They worked out that almost all of the world's financial institutions operate in dollars at least some of the time. And if you want to trade in, or borrow, dollars - you're going to need to talk to big banks. And so this gave the US the power to have very effective secondary sanctions. Even if the UN, or their allies in Europe wouldn't agree - they could still put out quite effective sanctions. If you trade with certain Iranian banks, then we won't allow our banks and financial institutions to trade with you. Thus you have a choice, trade in the US fiancial markets or trade with Iran. As a bank that's a no-brainer. You're making far more cash in New York, than doing a couple of deals for clients in Iran - so you simply drop all that trade. So when Trump pulled out of the Iran nuclear deal, the EU were in a right old mess because they wanted to keep it going, but were too rubbish to organise a way for European financial institutions to carry on trade with Iran without suffereing secondary sanctions from the US. Well the UK and EU did -they created a clearing exchange to effectively make barter possible for Iranian trading - no money so no banks - but it didn't really take off. The German state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern did also create a charitable organisation as a front for work on the Nordstream pipeline to get round US secondary sanctions. As otherwise they couldn't get a company to certify they pipe, as they couldn't pay them, and the state premier bet that Trump wouldn't directly sanction the German government, which he didn't. Plus she got some nice extra Russian government money to spend on local projects as part of it - so easier re-election too.

The same has been true on sanctions for Russia, though even more effective as the EU, UK, Japan, Korea, Taiwan and Australia and Canada joined in. So the G7 and the EU is a big old chunk of the world economy - and an even bigger chunk of the global financial services market.

However, there are limits. Trade with China is so important to some countries that it would be a serious dilemma as to whether to comply with US financial sanctions or to find ways to get round them. But if China invades Taiwan, I think there's a good chance that the Ukraine coalition might get back together, so the EU, G7, Australia and South Korea.

Finally it's relatively easy to stop big arms exports. But dual-use stuff is harder. Though Russia's T90 tanks are equipped with French night vision systems - a bunch of which it turns out were shipped after the EU arms embargo in 2014. Germany apparently also shipped a few hundred million of weapons to Russia that the excuse is was ordered before the embargo when they first invaded Ukraine. But mainly that's easy. Communications gear can be military or civilian. As can many other things.

RUSI did a report into a Russian Kalibr cruise missile that crashed in Ukraine. I think they found 50-odd electronic components sourced from countries with arms embargoes since 2014. Things like accelerometers on a chip and other miniaturised stuff for the guidance system. But they only make six a month, so how hard is it to buy these kind of components in lots of a few hundred for a "drone project" or something?

Much easier to embargo spares for their Airbus and Boeing commercial jets, oil industry or big stuff like that with highly regulated supply chains.

Re: Let's get on with

Nuclear weapons provide no benefit? Erm?

What is the monetary value of WWIII not having happened? And if that happy circumstance was brought about by the existence of nuclear weapons, what therefore is the value of those weapons?

Even if you think the Cold War could have been navigate without them, you still have cases like Putin's invasion of Ukraine. Where it is clear and obvious that Russia would be in an even worse position if they didn't posess nukes. German politicians have been absolutely clear that their fear or Russian nuclear power has stopped them at various points handing over weapons, or even allowing other countries to ship weapons they own - but Germany has veto power over. In the early war Germany even stopped the Baltic States from shipping artillery pieces that were left-over stock from the East German army - but because Germany were the origin of the end-user certificates - they still used their power to stop them being shipped on.

You don't have to like nuclear weapons to acknowledge that they have a use. Even if that use is merely a threat.

Re: Stability

DS999,

That's quite a complicated calculation. Nuclear weapons only "work" because other countries know you've got them and might use them. Given how awful they are, in most cases the best use of your nuke is not to use it. If you're forced to use them, it's going to be in dire emergency - which you'd rather avoid.

So you need to have a strategy to communicate that you have them and that you're able to use them effectively.

Equally, uncertainty seems to be a major component of nuclear strategy. It's even scarier to get into a potentially nuclear confrontation if you can't calculate the odds or the potential costs. Or at least that seems to be a major component of NATO nuclear strategy whenever I've had the misfortune to read about it. Presumably on the grounds that some dictator might think, "well the cost of this action is only two regional cities, and I've got loads of those..."

Also, by submitting to inspection yourself, you get to know roughly what the enemy have got.

Of course the other problem is that arms control was at least partly about saving money. Nuclear arms-races are expensive, so towards the end of Cold War it made sense to both get together and save some cash - and that made verification a sensible compromise. China is currently changing its nuclear posture, and that's causing the US to seriously worrry about its past decisions. Reducing tactical nuke stocks, and withdrawing whole types of theatre level systems made good sense in Europe at the end of the Cold War. But Putin's been in breach of that with the nuclear Iskander missiles for at least a decade. Plus China are building a range of such weapons. Hence Trump temporarily withdrawing from the Intermediate Nuclear Forces treaty - and Putin not being interested in going back to it. Trump's argument was that Putin was in breach anyway and that China was developing medium range nuclear missiles - so the US needed to have them. The idea being if they kill your carrier group with a nuke, can you justify nuking one of their cities? Maybe not. Which might tempt them to try. Hence you have the ability to nuke one of their carrier groups right back. Or one of their amphibious groups transporting troops to Taiwan. Trump of course did it badly, and in a way that alienated the rest of his NATO allies - but then equally his NATO allies were ignoring the Russian breaches of the INF under the Obama administration, because it was cheaper and easier to ignore the problem and hope it might go away.

So this one of those few issues where Trump wasn't being totally stupid - like his opposition to the Nordstream pipeline and his complaint of NATO allies under-investing in defence. Although, being Trump, his way of tackling it was of course megaphone diplomacy that was mostly counter-productive. Interestingly though it has since been revealed that Angela Merkel's government were so cynical as to offer to bribe Trump to drop his opposition to Nordstream with the promise that they'd also buy a certain amount of US liquified natural gas. And Trump refused. Thus being a rare example of Trump having the moral high ground, and acting on principal (God did I really just type that?) and Merkel being a cynical and dishones waste of space and not in fact the "new leader of the free world" as she was being hailed by her admirers back in the Trump days.

Re: Stability

One of the problems is that some countries are reluctant to let inspectors in. Particularly if nuclear weapons are stored on military bases that also do other things, you're allowing nasty foreigners to come and look at your military secrets.

it does therefore make sense to come up with inspection methods that can be done with minimal outside interference. As they're going to be more acceptable to the paranoid.

However arms control is currently on the retreat. Putin is quitting everything - and hasn't been complying with most of it anyway, China are ramping up their nuclear arsenal from roughly equivalent in size to Britain and France to something an unknown amount bigger. North Korea aren't interested in arms control. Iran have either been outright flouting their nuclear agreements, or at least somewhat in breach for the last two decades. Israel still don't acknowledge having any nuclear weapons officially, so aren't likely to allow them to be monitored. And if Iran do go fully nuclear it's going to be hard to stop Turkey and Saudi Arabia joining the club.

I'd also assume that even nukes in stockpile are going to get regular maintenance and checking. But you never know.

The other problem is that you don't need AI to defeat this technique. If the equipment isn't secure and tamperproof then you just wait until the inspectors have run the test and left - then run the equipment yourself. That then gives you their baseline measurement. Which means you don't need an AI to predict anything.

So the controls would need to be, if not tamperproof, at least remotely monitored?

I suspect this might end up being an interesting academic idea that won't survive contact with the enemy.

Sure it's an option. The People app was the best bit of Windows Phone. It connected your contacts, email, calls, texts and Facebook. Don't remember if it also did Twitter. That allowed you to look at a contact and see all your emails, texts, calls and Facebook interactions with them. Not that I used FB, but I did for the rest. So all you had to do was turn the Facebook bit of it off, and you could stil use the Facebook app, but it wouldn't connect with your contacts.

Or, and this was the reason that it was the best smartphone I've ever used, you could only display your personal contacts, while having the thousand Facebook friends in there. I did this. Because I had my Windows phones sychned to our CRM system. Which meant I had 6,000 contacts on it. But the only ones I saw were my contacts from my personal email address book. Which did have a few work ones in there, the ones I used regularly. I then either turned that filter off, or used the search function to pull up any work contact, which usually got them in just a few letters typed into search - and thus I could call any contact - but never see them in normal everyday use. But while looking at their contact could also refresh my memory on the last couple of emails.

You could also pin a contact to the home screen, so you'd see any new messages from them, and be able to call them with just two clicks.

Similarly you could have all your emails crammed into one horrible combined inbox, as iPhone does. Or have to faff in the same app to switch between them - or download separate email apps. But with Windows phone you used a single email app (so could switch between inboxes or combined view. And also have a separate shortcut on the home screen that took you to only one of your email accounts. From inside which you could still switch across - or easier to use the task switcher to go between them as if they were separate apps.

I never used it, but I think only Blackberry was capable of similar, or according to Orlowski, better control of your contacts and communications. I still miss these features in iOS and Android. Admittedly it's because I use my work phone for personal stuff, because I can't be arsed to have two devices - and I have to have a work phone.

I still miss it, but I wouldn't go back without some assurance that there'd be decent apps. There are just too many useful ones nowadays.

I got Win Phone for my Mum. It’s the only mobile she’s had, that I’ve barely had to support. Took me a bit to get it set up just right for her, and she could never get the hang of having to update the downloaded maps in the Satnav. But after sitting down with her and building her perfect Home Screen with all the apps she regularly used organised as big, friendly tiles, it was all gravy. She never got on with Android, and I was forever having to sort problems. And when we decided she’d be best with an IPhone SE last year, she expressed regret she couldn’t have another Windows one. That’s been easier, as she already had an iPad.

I liked my couple too. Probably the best, most integrated, communications devices I’ve ever had. Apps were rubbish though, and the browser wasn’t great. You lose some of the customisation options of Android, but then my Google Pixel is a lot less customisable than earlier ‘Droids I’ve had. I still miss it.

Re: Imagine the powerhouse $$INSERT_NAME_HERE$$ would become

The advantage of not being a dictatorship is that at least the politicians aren’t in charge of everything. The downside of a personalist dictatorship, as China has become under Xi, is that there aren't even the limited checks and balances you get inside a one-party system like China was for the last thirty years.

Julian Catssange?

Re: How’s that war* coming along Pooty?

I believe it's technically known as a special military clusterfuck.

With emphasis on the "special".

Re: Russia regards Zuck's biz as an extremist organization.

Remember that my enemy's enemy might also be my enemy too. Think of it as a target-rich envionment...

Re: Everyone's at it..

Yet one of the first actions in the SMO

The word you are looking for is war. Or unprovoked invasion if you prefer.

And then some whataboutism to bulk up your post.

By the way, RT and Sputnik aren't news services. They're straight propaganda. But we also didn't ban access to them. You can still get them online, if you so desire. I don't think the UK even did anything. But the EU banned them from their satellite broadcast. I don't know if that affected the UK service, or if they just decided to shut up shop because sanctions would have made it harder to pay the bills. Even if the EU ban knocked them off Freesat, they could have still gone out on Freeview.

Re: Pineapple on pizza...

It is absolutely bloody delicious.

But not a meal where you're under any illusions about the healthiness of your meal choices. Goes down rather nicely with a pint or two of ale.

Re: "We are laser-focused on rooting out the procurement networks fueling the Russian war machine"

How telling the arms manufacturers they can donate to the Ukrainian conflict only they won't get paid.

The arms manufacturers are making very little out of the Ukraine war directly. Mostly the vast sums of cash attributed to our donations to Ukraine are government accounting. We're giving them old tanks and infantry vehicles and then couting the current purchase price of a new one as the value of the aid we've given Ukraine.

We've given them a few new bits of kit, e.g. NASAMS air defence systems, that have either been manufactured for the purpose or were new in service with us so we've given Ukraine ours and then immediately bought replacements. But mostly it's been stuff our forces had in long-term storage or were due for replacement anyway. Even with missiles we've been donating the stuff that's about to reach its use-by date - and so will either need to be fired off in exercises or expensively re-manufactured and brought up to the latest standards.

The only area where we're reallly paying out the cash is artillery ammunition. We've run our stocks to the bare minimum before our generals start crying and been scouring the world to buy whatever we can grab - particularly of the ex Soviet calibres that are only made in small-ish numbers in Eastern Europe - and the Russians aren't selling.

So having donated them some of our old spare artillery, as well as some of the new shinies - we're now paying out a few billion to upgrade our factories to the level they should have been at before in order to service our war stocks. However even that is only something like a couple of billion from the US and a billion in the EU - I think the UK has bunged half a billion to BAe to get the Geordies to knock us up a few more rounds as well.

Global arms manufacturers are doing well because stupid Western (read mostly stupid European) governments that have been refusing to update their forces' equipment or recognise the threats from Russia and China, have just woken up and smelled the coffee. They've had a fright and now they're doing their jobs properly again, at least for a while.

The reason this war is dragging on is because Putin is too pig-headed or too stupid to realise that he's already lost. Or because he's not actual a Russian patriot at all, and realises that the best thing for Russia is to make peace and leave Ukraine - but won't because he fears it'll be the end of his regime.

Admittedly if we'd flooded Ukraine with weapons in 2022 - maybe he'd have got that message earlier. But then people were genuinely worried that he might go nuclear, so I can understand why caution played out. Although of course the real thing to stop this war dragging on would have been to give Ukraine $5 billion of advanced weapons after 2014 - to make the point to Putin's regime that aggression has consequences - and to make Ukraine too scary a target to attack. But of course that might upset your stupid narrative that this war is somehow the fault of anyone except Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin - who started it and continues it, despite it being a disaster for both his country and Ukraine.

Re: Why bother?

I can't think of a single piece of current Russian military tech that is even on a par with current Western tech, if not several generations behind it. Which wasn't true in the days of the Soviet Union, where they were ahead in several areas - particularly in the 50s and 60s.

One area where Russia was thought to be still in the top tier was their air defence tech. But that has not done very well during this war. Even 20 year old tech like Storm Shadow / SCALP appears to be able to attack well defended targets at will. It's a low level cruise missile - so only air defence at the target (or its unlucky enough to come across en route) is a threat to it. It's shaped to reduce its radar cross section, but doesn't have other stealth tech. We've also only shipped the early versions - because the later ones are longer ranged and we've signed treaties that we won't sell cruise missiles with more than 300km range. It's also not been terrible good at shooting down volleys of HIMARS rockets aimed at defended bridges. A faster target, but one not flying at low level, so there's loads of time to deal with it.

Now partly this has been Ukraine using decoy missiles and attacking search radars to blind Russia's air defences at crucial times. So it could be as much poor operation / training as poor technology. But these are the technologies designed to deal with the last of the Soviet systems still being highly effective against updates of those.

The one are Russia might still be a ahead in is electronic warfare. But as an amateur its even harder to work out what's going on there than in other military fields. And even there, they don't seem to have trained with their own kit, so that Russia was as hampered at the start of the Ukraine war by it's own EW as the Ukrainians were. Leading to them being forced to switch a lot of it off.

Meanwhile the Russian air force - which has had a lot of updated kit - has been incredibly ineffective. Despite being the bit of the Russian forces that has got the most recent combat experience in Syria - where it was quite effective. But I guess bombing hospitals against civilian rebels with no air defence is pretty easy - whereas bombing hospitals in Ukraine requires fighting ex Soviet air defence kit, so they've had to resort to lobbing drones and missiles from inside Russia. With seemingly poor to mixed results.

The Russian navy has probably had the most investment since Soviet times. And had some of the best air defence kit to start with. And yet seem to have lost a cruiser, a couple of amphibious landing ships and a submarine, plus a modern missile covette and destroyer damaged - to a country that doesn't have a navy.

We straight copied good ideas from the Soviets, like the BMP 1 infantry fighting vehicle, which caused us to develop the Bradley, Marder and Warrior IFVs and I believe the Soviets had helmet cued missile firing in planes decades before the West. I can't think of much we're trying to copy at the moment.

Re: Elderly and Vulnerable?

I can recommend the Unihertz Titan range. linky to website

Doing tech support for the olds (in their mid-80s) one's on an iPhone the other hates touch screens, partly due to arthritic hands - and is on the Titan slim. He found a ten year-old (brand new still in shrink) Blackberry for not as cheap as it should have been on Amazon. I had a look at setting it up for him, before sending it back. I was incredibly impressed with the quality of the keyboard, even though I hate them, due to fat fingers. And can now understand why they cost so much back in the day, that was some impressive engineering. Andrew Orlowski was always singing BB's praises. Andrew O the Jonah of mobile phone technologies...

Anyway I was quite impressed with the Titan. The keyboard is nowhere near as nice/elegant as the Blackberry ones, but it's perfectly decent. And you seem to be able to mostly use the phone without being forced to use the touch screen, if you don't want to. They're still bodging a touch screen onto Android, so it's not as integrated or functional as the old Blackberry days, but then those days have passed. And he's still happily using it a year later, I've had no complaints - and he's not gone out and bought an upgrade - which he has a tendency to do. So he's obviously a happy camper.

The techy friend who put me onto Titan also has one. Another Jonah, like Orlowski. He's still soldiering on with his beloved Palm Pre, until they turn off 3G, and he's forced to stop. But he's played with it and declares himself satisfied.

I haven't seen any other keyboard types. And Titan are available on Amazon, so you can sent it back if you're not happy.

Re: How International is international

Ah, but Ukraine do recognise it. And Putin chose to kidnap those children from Ukraine. Where the ICC has jurisdiction. Oops!