naturalgasbad @ naturalgasbad @lemmy.ca

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2 yr. ago

1. The plane was quite clearly not taking off from Belgorod. Like I said, Sushko is entirely unreliable and does zero vetting of his "sources." His translations are notoriously poor.
2. The flight was entering Belgorod, which follows typical Russian POW exchange procedure according to the NYT. An IL-76 is used to deliver POWs to a nearby city, and they are then shuttled by bus to the border.

But also, if Ukrainian radars can't tell the difference between a fucking IL-76 and a Su-34 or cruise missile, what the fuck man. Their radar signature isn't even in the same order of magnitude.

This is an IL-76. It's literally the one of the largest whales of an aircraft used by Russia.

There's no reason it should be in Belgorod otherwise, because it's radar signature is fucking enormous.

China's peaking isn't on a minute-to-minute scale, but on a day-to-day scale. China is worried about two scenarios:

1. the US deciding to enter a hot war with China
2. a heat wave or cold snap (like they've been getting recently) that forces rolling blackouts

And has one key consideration for it:

1. China lacks substantial domestic O&G reserves.

These are critical geopolitical concerns that China needs to address.

Plus, Chinese coal plants are literally state-of-the-art. Whereas the US has one ultra-supercritical plant, China has at least a hundred. China has excess construction capacity, so demolishing a 30-yo plant for a new one is entirely practical. We also know that China's coal power plant capacity factors have been dropping like a rock, so SOMETHING is happening that's reducing their utilization significantly.

Something tells me you don't speak Chinese, huh?

Yeah, in the US.

Sushko is well-known for spreading propaganda. If you wouldn't take news from RT, don't take it from Sushko.

Afaik that passenger manifest was revealed to be fake. Telegram going to Telegram, so YMMV.

Current theory is that Russians told Ukrainian general staff that there was going to be a prisoner exchange that would be delivered by IL-76, but miscommunication led to nobody on the ground getting the news. I don't believe Ukrainian AD was acting out of malice.

We know a prisoner exchange was supposed to happen at the border near Belgorod, we know IL-76s were used to transport POWs in the past, and we also know Ukraine shot down the IL-76. We also know Russia doesn't usually operate IL-76 so close to the Ukrainian AD umbrella, so...

The new youth unemployment numbers now exclude students. In school. In China's notoriously challenging education system. Shocking. Massively corrupt. Politicized. Terrible. Basically communism.

Get a grip. Turns out, as your population increasingly pursues higher education, fewer youth are looking for jobs.

China experienced a significant increase in solar product exports in 2023. It exported 56GW of solar wafers, 32GW of cells and 178GW of modules in the first 10 months of the year, up 90%, 72% and 34% year-on-year respectively, according to the China Photovoltaic Industry Association. However, due to falling costs, the export value of these solar products only increased by 3%.

The funniest quote in the article. China is outcompeting themselves so hard on price that they can almost double export products without affecting export value. That's absurd.

So anyway, Sweden joined NATO...

That's because strikes are communist and communism bad

Western institutions fundamentally misunderstand the clean energy revolution. It's actually rather worrying, because it's a large part of why Western estimates of China's economic growth have been so far off.

The new IEA Electricity Report for 2024 shows what I've been saying for ages. The fact that China's building more coal power plants is not an indication that they're increasing coal consumption - quite the opposite. If China were using coal for base load, they wouldn't need so much more excess capacity. China is switching to using coal on-demand to deal with demand spikes.

This is such a good sign for the environment and I expect that things can only improve from here (especially since, imo, the IEA is underestimating China's renewables growth 2025+).

Solidarity for all labour ✊

Looks like the military sources cited by Ukrainska Pravda was an official AFU statement from the general staff.

I think there's no question that the plane has been downed by Ukraine. The only thing that's not been confirmed is whether the IL-76 was carrying POWs (though, given the fact that it was flying over Belgorod, what else would it be carrying? The IL-76 has the radar cross-section of a whale), but delivery of POWs to Belgorod airport by IL-76 is standard practice according to previous prisoner exchanges.

Ukrainian media outlet Ukrainska Pravda initially cited military sources as saying Kyiv had shot down the plane because it was carrying S-300 missiles, but later corrected the story saying that information had not been confirmed by other sources.

Confirmation of a Ukrainian shootdown from Ukrainian media.

Ukraine's GUR military intelligence spokesperson Andriy Yusov told the Radio Svoboda outlet that a prisoner exchange had been planned for Wednesday, adding: "It's not taking place at the moment."

Confirmation of prisoner exchange.

It's not looking good.

Tbh the experts for land wars in Europe was the Soviet Union... It's not even close. Soviet military doctrine won the Second World War against a better trained, better supplied, and more technologically advanced force. The scale and scope of Soviet operations is astonishing and enabled the Soviets to approach casualty parity in the later stages of the war.

This is disappointing, and I'll explain why:

Prior to Trump's sanctions on Huawei, it was widely recognized that Apple led Huawei in the smartphone space, and that by extension the US led China technologically.

Well, today, Huawei has L3 autonomy on lock and estimates it'll have general L4 technology ready "before 2025." Huawei has already led specialized L4 deployments at Tianjin Port and is testing L4 technology on China's network of test roads. Huawei has partnered with MANY car manufacturers in China to deliver their self-driving package across multiple price levels... All under the foot of US sanctions.

Meanwhile, Apple has dumped billions of dollars every year into their car project and can't seem to get it off the ground, and now comes news that they'll only be at L2 in 2028? Apple isn't just lagging Huawei, Apple's lagging domestic car manufacturers like GM.

Relevant Museveni quote from the G77 summit:

The World Bank and IMF are not serious people. They support consumption. The IMF gives money to support imports and that’s a debt to my people. And not imports of capital goods but imports of perfumes, wigs, and alcohol. We need money for investment.

Why would China intervene in the American empire's continued decline?