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atomheartbevo

Certifiably Surly
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Posts posted by atomheartbevo

  1. 8 hours ago, Captainant said:

    That's an outright act of war to blockade a country. Black and white, that's definitionally an act of war

    We're definitely going to war.  Miller is justifying it after Trump's claims: "American sweat, ingenuity and toil created the oil industry in Venezuela. Its tyrannical expropriation was the largest recorded theft of American wealth and property. These pillaged assets were then used to fund terrorism and flood our streets with killers, mercenaries and drugs."

     

  2. 3 minutes ago, Chad Fuck said:

    Taking the Black Sea Fleet out of the game is...something.  That also means if you had some spare anti ship missiles laying around all those ships bottled up there would be sitting ducks.  

    Imagine if we invaded Mexico in 2022 and here at the end of 2025, Mexico is forcing the US Navy to confine their ships to New Orleans, Houston, and San Francisco because they can sink them anywhere.  

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  3. 4 minutes ago, scramblyn said:

    semi related, I was shocked to see Russia refining capacity only knocked down 6% thus far. Meaningful but is it enough?

    all that to say, I’d put the over under on this conflict ending at 2 years from now and I could be convinced it’s longer.

    It's a lot more than that, but it's also tough to quantify (paging @PTINS ).  They are refining far less, but they are exporting far less, so they are close to staying even on being able to refine what they need internally.

    This is a decent breakdown. 

    https://carnegieendowment.org/russia-eurasia/politika/2025/10/russia-refinery-damages?lang=en

    Quote

    On paper, Russia can refine 327 million tons of oil every year (or 6.5 million barrels per day). And the capacity of the 16 refineries that have been attacked by Ukrainian drones in August and September is 123 million tons a year—or 38 percent of the total. In other words, 38 percent is the upper limit of potential damage.

    Quote

    For Moscow, the current situation is far more serious than in the spring and summer of 2024 when Ukraine conducted a similar strike campaign. Now, Ukrainian drones can fly further, carry bigger payloads, and attack more frequently. Russia’s Volgograd refinery was hit twice in August and twice in September; the Novokuibyshev refinery has been struck three times (about one every three weeks); and the Ryazan, Saratov, and Salavat refineries have been hit twice each. Previously, Kyiv had only been able to target the Krasnodar and Rostov refineries with such regularity—because they are nearer the Ukraine border, and could be reached by light, low-cost drones.   

    Quote

    There are three important questions that must be answered when attempting to assess the current level of damage to Russia’s oil refineries: were they working at full capacity before the attacks? Was the damage complete or partial? Has the damage been repaired or is it still hindering throughput?

    That was from October, and it's safe to say their capacity has dropped a lot since then, at least temporarily. As things continue, their ability to repair refineries will drop as spare parts become scarce. Plus, when refineries are hit repeatedly, there comes a point where they may have to basically be rebuilt, which takes a long time. And you don't even have to wreck a refinery if the pipelines/pumping stations are wrecked and oil can't be moved (they can't store as much as we do).

    Having to export oil and then re-import the refined end-product is also telling.

    Ukrainian capacity to hit them hard and hit them deep is only increasing as well, both with drones, but also with their long-range missiles coming online, and Russian air defenses continue to be degraded.

    I don't think it was 38% (the article is probably right 38% was the upper range), but I wouldn't be surprised if it was in the 20s (only offset because they are exporting less). I don't think 2 years, but I think we will know how things will shake out over the next 6 months, because the tempo is such that Russia refining capacities are going to drop double-digits going forward and as more air defenses are destroyed/exhausted, we will see a lot more targets taken out.

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  4. 4 minutes ago, scramblyn said:

    I’m not confident in European policy but I would not be shocked if it was largely aligned with the US wrt to this war, that doesn’t mean they are aligned with the US now on broader regional security issues though bc they clearly are not. 

    Germany and Poland are really ramping things up in a way that the US is not. Sweden and Finland got off the neutrality fence and did some conference realignment/expansion when they've held out for over 70 years. Various European nations and defense companies are ramping up arms production, upgrading systems, adding systems, etc. I don't think Europe is aligned with the US anymore. Trump sees this as just a real-estate deal, if Ukraine will give up some, Russia will be happy. Europe is taking the stance that it will just buy Putin time to re-arm and try and fill out the ranks.

     

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  5. 25 minutes ago, TwiceHorn said:

    So, from what I can see of the VF article, there are some very subtle defenses of Trump and certain elements of Trumpco.  That seems to normalize the administration.

    But I have no idea who is the audience for that?  It's way too subtle for the base and they ain't reading, period, much less VF.

    4 minutes ago, Hank Kingsley said:

    The audience is themselves. They all shit on MSM publicly, but deep down they personally crave for validation from legacy publications like Vanity Fair.  

    It's really odd.  She knew she was being recorded, they posed for photos, they did follow-up interviews where they answered questions about things she brought up, etc.

    If there were no recordings and it was all off-the-record, Trump would have all of his cabinet members out there denouncing it as lies and fake and he wouldn't shut up about it and would be talking about shutting VF down and how it's engaged in treason.  But the recordings exist.  So she claims they were "out of context" and he trots out his cabinet to say she's a wonderful and powerful member of the administration, the bestest of the bestest.

  6. 13 minutes ago, Michael Knight said:

    I got Busey

     


    I don’t have my reading glasses on so I can’t read the text and I’m doing voice dictation so text maybe screwy, but holy fucking shit Dick Van Dyke may not make it to the end of 2025.

     

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  7. 53 minutes ago, immamac said:

    PC is really great if you are wanting the best experience possible on games. The problem for me with games now is I don't know that there is a difference between gaming at 1080p and 4k for a "dad gamer" vs if I was gonna be gaming 5+ hours a day. 

    Yeah, the only games I care about in 4K is Age of Empires II Remastered 4K edition and Civilization - I can tell a difference. Everything else, not as much and/or I'm more focused on FPS/speed (I still do Team Fortress 2 lol and some World of Warcraft and Ultima Online) and my son does most of his (few) games at 1080p - Hogwarts, some Hot Wheels stuff, and Minecraft (and he's constantly tweaking Minecraft depending on what he's doing).

    And most of it is okay on our RTX 2060, but I know for a few hundred bucks I could improve performance a decent amount. And I would be able to repurpose the 2060 for a second PC.

  8. 1 hour ago, Horn Under a Bad Sign said:

    Seriously, as litigious as these people are, you think Vanity Fair isn't going to have all their I's dotted and T's crossed.  The interview was exactly what Vanity Fair said it was. 

    And VF has audio tapes.

    Reading through it, I'm beginning to wonder if this is a conspiracy of sorts, but one not involving Trump. Like somebody or several somebodies in that photo above decided they were going to get some negative shit out there about Trump from a legitimate inside source. Whether VF chose her or they did and worked out the details with VF that she would be the focus, doesn't matter. I could even see some of them agreeing to have her say some negative shit about them (since people will soon forget it) so that it didn't look like she was just dissing Trump.  

    I'm not saying anything like 25th Amendment or anything that big, just laying the groundwork for some of them to try and show there was distance between them and Trump or laying the groundwork for 2028 and saying "Hey, you saw what Wiles said about Trump, we were doing the best we could, but that was Trump."

    Wiles didn't say this in a vacuum, it was over 11 interviews, with background interviews from some of the people in that photo (and they posed for multiple photos for this article) and it was all recorded. I don't want to toot the conspiracy theory horn, but she knew exactly what she was saying, regardless of context.

  9. 44 minutes ago, Sawbonz said:

    ok 2025 you can fuck right off nowimage.jpeg.0ef92eecef436ecf646ec13e361bcf9f.jpeg

     

    my lunch box in 4th grade

    Still have it somewhere. Erin was....something else.

    That statement from above in @tx 3 putt post...it's nice that he chose to write something to post after he was gone

    G8Vq5_IbYAA02Um?format=jpg&name=medium

     

    Ughh.

     

    Gerard’s death was confirmed by his wife, Janet, in a Facebook post Tuesday evening.

    “Early this morning Gil – my soulmate – lost his fight with a rare and viciously aggressive form of cancer,” read Janet’s post. “From the moment when we knew something was wrong to his death this morning was only days. No matter how many years I got to spend with him it would have ever been enough. Hold the ones you have tightly and love them fiercely.”

     

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  10. 11 minutes ago, Hank_Hill said:

    Are we great again?

    We have to make Maduro cry uncle.

    “Over lunch, Wiles told me about Trump’s Venezuela strategy: “He wants to keep on blowing boats up until Maduro cries uncle. And people way smarter than me on that say that he will.” (Wiles’s statement appears to contradict the administration’s official stance that blowing up boats is about drug interdiction, not regime change.)”

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  11. Lavrov: the Americans have told us clearly that those lands where Russians have lived for centuries must become Russian again. He didn’t specify whether that includes Kyiv or Odesa in addition to Donbas and Crimea.

    Draw your own conclusions about the value of “platinum standard” security promises.

     

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