Gripweed posted:

Pharmacies should have free samples like Costco.

appropriatemetaphor posted:

I read half that xeet and wondered how the gently caress does a ship without "working propulsion" go to sea??

Tigey posted:

Runa posted:

beer_war posted:

Speaking of, has Gerasimov reappeared?

Nice piece of fish posted:

What pisses me off the most about letting Ukraine down with vehicles, weapons and ammo is how loving good they are at this. Like they are making Russia hurt like they haven't been for over half a century, and all with leftover poo poo. It is insane value for defence dollars.

Europe needs to arm the gently caress up anyway because Putin's ambitions won't stop in Ukraine. And for that we need factories and actual ability to produce. Juice that the gently caress up and send the first batches of everything to Ukraine, how hard can this be? Useless goddamned politicians.

wit posted:

Well Europe needs to arm up anyway because Trump is a cert to get inand do everything he can to line his own nest with Putin. I think everything happening right now is just trying to make sure the US can't be forced to pull out of efforts when he gets in again. It’s a genuine feeling that the US could flip in 2025 regardless of the public, you're already seeing the media change and bizarre pro putin stump speeches.
The lovely thing is that noises in europe to that effect have taken the form of "give less to ukraine, we'll need it soon".

Pot Smoke Phoenix posted:

Trump ain’t winning poo poo except more monetary judgements against him, more bad will, and more notoriety.

He’s a certainty for prison, but that’s about it.

He’s half a billion dollars in debt, the dumb bastard would have to sell over 800,000 pairs of his god drat clown shoes to foot that bill

Pot Smoke Phoenix posted:

Trump ain’t winning poo poo except more monetary judgements against him, more bad will, and more notoriety.

He’s a certainty for prison, but that’s about it.

He’s half a billion dollars in debt, the dumb bastard would have to sell over 800,000 pairs of his god drat clown shoes to foot that bill

quote:

“Gazprom understands that it will never again have as big and fat a slice of the pie as Europe, and it simply has to accept that,” said Marcel Salikhov, head of the Institute for Energy and Finance, a Russian think tank. “The only way forward now is to look for relatively smaller sources of revenue and gradually develop them, gathering crumbs.”
...
While Moscow decided early in the war to slash gas supplies to Europe, a move that initially boosted prices enough to offset the slump in exports, the effect was shortlived.
Pre-tax earnings hit a record Rbs4.5tn ($49.7bn) in the first six months of 2022 but slumped 40 per cent to Rbs2.7tn a year later, while net profits slid from almost Rbs1tn to Rbs255bn.
Researchers at the state-controlled Russian Academy of Sciences have even predicted the company’s full-year 2023 results will show it has ceased to be profitable, and that net losses could hit Rbs1tn by 2025.
The EU has proved more adept at sourcing alternative gas than many thought possible — Russia’s share of the bloc’s gas imports dropped from more than 40 per cent in 2021 to 8 per cent last year, according to EU data — while prices have collapsed from their peaks in the early days of the war. The EU is aiming to eliminate all imports of Russian fossil fuels by 2027.
...
With its main export business in tatters, Gazprom has sought to find new buyers but its deals in central Asia and minor supply boosts to China and Turkey will compensate for only 5 per cent to 10 per cent of the lost European market, according to Salikhov.
Achieving any substantial change in this scenario will require enormous investment in pipelines and other infrastructure to serve new markets, as well as the involvement of external partners that are in less of a hurry to commit.
...
The Russian market, which has always accounted for a much bigger share of the company’s output than Europe, has helped it stay afloat but with gas sold at a much lower price domestically, local sales cannot make up for the collapse of the EU market.
Gazprom has to sell gas domestically at regulated prices, while competitors such as Rosneft and privately-run Novatek can offer discounts to attract bulk buyers.
...
State-owned Sberbank’s investment arm in 2018 sacked two senior analysts after they published a report saying Gazprom deliberately opted for unprofitable projects to secure lucrative contracts for companies owned by the president’s close friends Gennady Timchenko and Arkady Rotenberg.
“Gazprom’s model, which consisted of generating excessive profits in Europe and then distributing them among contractors close to Putin . . . no longer exists,” said Vladimir Milov, a former deputy energy minister who was the architect of Gazprom’s reforms in the early 2000s and who later became an associate of opposition figure Alexei Navalny, who died in an Arctic penal colony on Friday according to Russian authorities.
...
While gas exports to China have risen, the volumes remain relatively small — Russia sent about 22bn cubic metres of gas to the country via pipeline last year, a fraction of the average annual 230 bcm it exported to Europe in the decade before the Ukraine war.
The company could improve its prospects if it reaches an agreement on the construction of the 3,550km “Power of Siberia 2”, which would connect the gasfields that once supplied Europe to China, and a second pipeline to the Asian nation. However, Beijing and Moscow have yet to agree on the PS2 project, which will pass through Mongolia.
...
Even under the most optimistic scenario the PS2 would take years to build and would not make up for lost European sales, independent analysts and state-sponsored researchers agree.
Construction of the pipeline will also be different from other Gazprom projects, as it will most likely be financed from the state budget — which has historically enjoyed generous contributions from the gas company — and not from Gazprom’s excess profits.
Meanwhile, while Russian liquefied natural gas exports are gradually increasing, they remain a fraction of the prewar pipeline deliveries. Novatek accounts for most of Russia’s LNG exports, with Gazprom lacking the specialised infrastructure to convert and transport the liquid form of the fuel, having bet on pipelines rather than liquefaction technologies at the dawn of the Putin era.
Gazprom’s oil business, Gazprom Neft, has become the company’s main lifeline, contributing 36 per cent of revenues and 92 per cent of net income in the first half of 2023. The division’s market value even surpassed that of its parent company last year.
...
Ron Smith, oil and gas analyst at Moscow-based BCS Global Markets, also said Gazprom’s financial position was not yet “catastrophic”.
But the company faces the risk that its fortunes and prospects will never be the same again.
“Gazprom will never again be the huge cash cow for those in power,” said Milov, the former deputy energy minister. “Instead of making excessive profits, there is a risk that the company will become the recipient of state subsidies.”

Computer viking posted:

Oh yeah Trump can absolutely win. The hard MAGA core see his crimes as evidence that the deep state is against him and he needs their support, the broader GOP are convinced that Biden is so senile he barely remembers his own name, and there's some movement among latino voters who like his general culture war bullshit, plus the "omg they're invading at the border and the democrats are inviting them" panic and Biden's generally low approval ratings.

That doesn't mean he will win, all the reasons he's a horrible candidate and should have practical and money problems are entirely true. But I'm not going to completely rule it out until the results are in.

Computer viking posted:

Oh yeah Trump can absolutely win. The hard MAGA core see his crimes as evidence that the deep state is against him and he needs their support, the broader GOP are convinced that Biden is so senile he barely remembers his own name, and there's some movement among latino voters who like his general culture war bullshit, plus the "omg they're invading at the border and the democrats are inviting them" panic and Biden's generally low approval ratings.

That doesn't mean he will win, all the reasons he's a horrible candidate and should have practical and money problems are entirely true. But I'm not going to completely rule it out until the results are in.

Pot Smoke Phoenix posted:

Sure, we have to wait for the results to come in.

In the meantime, Trump is pissing off judges and threatening their court clerks, still slandering E Jean Carroll despite not one but TWO judgements against him (and neither were criminal cases) and he's doing everything he possibly can to solidify the justice system against him.

The man is going to gently caress himself completely, and there isn't a legal team that can bail his stupid loving mouth out.

wit posted:

Well this is really the thing. There is no sitting and waiting for results to come in for europe and ukraine. You can't make plans and have something as ludicrous as him hovering over them. Even beyond him, its been a bit of a given for years that NATO isn't strategically as important to direct threats like china/iran to the states so even in the obama era while no public noises were made, it was known that the BFF status would wane eventually. Its just that Trump is literally the only dude that would leave nato and ukraine with their dicks in their hands in the middle of an effort mostly sabre rattled by the UK in the west. Any other candidate would at least have a team around them smacking that poo poo out of their hands. Even the nato childlock that congress had to push through to stop him unilaterally deciding to pull out of nato means nothing. He would still just refuse to send any support in.

Its terrifying that millions of lives in ukraine depend on how much people at the other side of the world like that guy from The Apprentice.

Pot Smoke Phoenix posted:

election integrity in the US is solid.

Pot Smoke Phoenix posted:

Sure, we have to wait for the results to come in.

In the meantime, Trump is pissing off judges and threatening their court clerks, still slandering E Jean Carroll despite not one but TWO judgements against him (and neither were criminal cases) and he's doing everything he possibly can to solidify the justice system against him.

The man is going to gently caress himself completely, and there isn't a legal team that can bail his stupid loving mouth out.

Pot Smoke Phoenix posted:

The political races that are being held throughout the US though are very bad news for Republicans, Americans are disgusted and appalled by their tactics. Reversing Roe v Wade, and then leaning into it like it was a good idea, is just one piece of the puzzle as to why they have so woefully hosed themselves sideways spinning, into the ground.

It's estimated that this year, in 2024, 41 million new American voters will be able to flex their muscles. If only half that number registers to vote, that's 20 million new voters. If half of THOSE voters are Democrat, that's 10 million votes against the guy that barely squeezed by in 2020. And that doesn't factor in disillusioned voters that Republicans have convinced that it's not worth the effort to even bother voting.

the holy poopacy posted:

He has SCOTUS and a couple district courts in his pocket and while they're not going to stick their necks out and crown him emperor they're going to slow down and softball anything meaningful. His legal troubles mostly seem to reinforce voters' existing positions on him, there aren't many signs they're changing minds.

Ummmm... if half those voters are Democrat, that's also half that aren't, and most of the rest probably go to Trump.

Special elections have been promising enough that I don't think it's in the bag for Trump but 2020 margins were very thin to begin with.

the holy poopacy posted:

He has SCOTUS and a couple district courts in his pocket and while they're not going to stick their necks out and crown him emperor they're going to slow down and softball anything meaningful. His legal troubles mostly seem to reinforce voters' existing positions on him, there aren't many signs they're changing minds.

redshirt posted:

What are the realistic odds Europe can help fulfil Ukrainian ammo needs if the US is not helping for some time?

CeeJee posted:

As it stands now, pretty dismal. Ammo needs to be made to very high specs for a 20 year safe shelflife at 3000 Euros a shot, the usual fate for the ammo produced since the Cold War ended. With practice and the occasional peacekeeping mission you'd fire a few dozen shells per year per gun at most.

Computer viking posted:

Oh yeah Trump can absolutely win. The hard MAGA core see his crimes as evidence that the deep state is against him and he needs their support, ... <snip>