Ukraine

[nuttinnew]

I’m doing another trip on 9th June.

Edit - no I'm not, I'd totally forgotten that my passport went through the wash after the last trip and is now illegible. Passport website says no appointments are available for the expedited service and the regular renewal takes ten weeks. Crap.

Arse. Fwiw, last year my new passport (new pic needed etc) only took a couple of weeks to come through despite things being dire at the time. I did it through the post office, I don't know if that helped by them doing some of the work instead of the passport office. You may be as fortunate for a duplicate.

[JonMad]

Yeah, I think our normal renewals took 2-3 weeks. Tight, but maybe...

[Ascender]

We've just done our son's one. After managing to finally get a picture that met their criteria for online submission, we sent his old passport in by Special Delivery. 3 weeks later and they've now acknowledged they've received it... So I think its taking a bit longer than normal. Appointment in person might be the way to go.

[Sundayjumper]

Arse. Fwiw, last year my new passport (new pic needed etc) only took a couple of weeks to come through despite things being dire at the time. I did it through the post office, I don't know if that helped by them doing some of the work instead of the passport office. You may be as fortunate for a duplicate.

You presumably didn't use the Post Office in Camberley

I've just been there. According to the website, they offer "Digital Check & Send", where they do the admin there all electronically, including taking a photo, thus avoiding the need for filling forms or getting countersignatures.

https://www.postoffice.co.uk/identity/r ... rt-digital

1) First bloke on the counter gave me a form to fill in. No bother but not really what I expected. I went and filled it in.
2) The woman I spoke to next simply said "where's your photos?"
3) I explained, she pointed at a photo booth.
4) I went to the photo booth, it had a large "out of order" sign on it.
5) I went back to the woman, who gave a non-plussed shrug and said she didn't know.

Bloody useless.

[dinny_g]

They're saying 10 weeks but a friend from work got her's in 6. Came through last week. This was an electronic renewal if that's any consequence.

We've renewed Mini-dinny's last week but don't need until the middle of August so plenty of time

[nuttinnew]

You presumably didn't use the Post Office in Camberley

Indeed I didn't, and where I went they were very helpful. You can use a digital pic to do it online, I assume you could do the same through the po if their booth is ooo - but then you know this already

[Simon]

This is incredible.

[Beany]

In other news, Mariupol has been cleared out, soldiers taken to russian occupied locations for hospitalisation, expected to be returned for POW swop later.

Ukraine being very careful not to call it a surrender, but that's Mariupol lost. Not that there's much left of it.

Difficult for Russia to call it a victory I suppose, and Ukraine (eventually) get some 'heroes' back that can be used for savvy PR - give 'em their due, they've been holding out for fucking ages.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-61472025

[duncs500]

This is incredible.

Just watched this, the stones on this guy!

[Mito Man]

He’ll probably have a heart attack soon.

[Mito Man]

In other news, Mariupol has been cleared out, soldiers taken to russian occupied locations for hospitalisation, expected to be returned for POW swop later.

Ukraine being very careful not to call it a surrender, but that's Mariupol lost. Not that there's much left of it.

Difficult for Russia to call it a victory I suppose, and Ukraine (eventually) get some 'heroes' back that can be used for savvy PR - give 'em their due, they've been holding out for fucking ages.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-61472025

Just glossing over this - these surrendering men who have now been transported to Russian occupied are probably mainly from the Azov battalion.
I think quite a lot of them have dodgy tattoos so if anything I’m sure the Russians are now stripping them naked to justify their de-nazifying. Can’t see the Azov being prisoner swapped.

[Beany]

General opinion from those in the know is that there's less actual nazis in Azov than there are in most other modern militaries (the US for example reliably has thousands of members who are seriously, hardcore right wing thugs, tattoos or not) so that'll likely be used for propaganda.

That said, it's Russia - they'll just fake it anyway. Like their 'three SIMs' images from earlier.

It's also worth noting that the Russian vernacular in the conflict for 'nazi' is basically someone who had the option to 'become Russian', and decided against it. By that standard, literally all of Ukraine are 'nazis'.

[Beany]

Also today, the Russian parliament stated that 'Nazis aren't included' in the POW swap.

So that makes things.... Interesting.

[Sundayjumper]

I just went back and dug out this post I made early on:

Re: ATMs and a run on Russian banks, this fits with what I've been thinking in the last 24h, that this will be ended internally, by popular protest and unrest at home and a tipping point within the army when enough Russian troops just say "no".

I was chatting today to my friend who's a history & politics teacher, and whose knowledge of such things is vast, and he agrees that a military coup is looking increasingly likely. Russian senior officers have shown plenty of disregard for the lives of their troops but somewhere in the chain of command there's going to be some common sense and an appreciation that having *some* army left at the end of this is going to be a lot better than having *no* army left.

Putin - the person - is never going to back down. A sufficiently strong military uprising can put him behind bars* and (in effect) say "really sorry, it wasn't our idea, we're going home now". It would allow them to retain a tiny scrap of credibility. That genuinely seems like the best outcome right now.


* execution would be too good for him. Keep him alive as long as possible so he sees what unfolds after he's removed from power. That would be his own personal hell.

OK, so maybe not going behind bars, but illness, sympathy vote, quietly stepping back without admitting it was a horrific mistake, glorious leader taken from us too early, let someone else clear up the mess:

[Sundayjumper]

And I’ve got another idea, although this one might be a bit controversial amongst “environmentalists”. When the fighting has stopped and the rebuilding of Ukraine is underway, the seized oligarch mega yachts can be towed into the black sea and used by the Ukrainian military for training - boarding, specialised close combat, and general target practice from land, air and sea.

For the final scuttling by missile or rigged explosives, auction off the right to press the big red button. I’m sure there’s a few people that would bid on it. Ensure it is televised in great detail.

[Sundayjumper]

Now this, this is utterly brilliant. It might not make any difference but it's still brilliant.

A hacktivist group calling itself Obfuscated Dreams of Scheherazade has created a bot that sets up a conference call between multiple government entities, causing each to think the other one made the call. The stated purpose is to waste the government's time and tie up the phone lines.

https://www.techspot.com/news/94641-hac ... dJo0gFfkJo

[Beany]

That's good, but it's not as good as over confident Russian propaganda giving away the location of a major piece of artillery without realising, only for Ukraine to vaporise it less than 24hrs later.



OpSec is a thing, motherfuckers.

[Gavster]

High prices in the UN FAO food price index have previously been correlated with the start of the arab spring and massive political unrest in North Africa/Middle East during the 2008 & 2011 food price spikes.

See the following graph, published in 2011:



What happens if we look at the continuation of the food price index today and plot the Russian invasion of Ukraine on the graph too?



The war in Ukraine isn't explicitly about food, however the timing is spot-on. As food prices are expected to continue upwards, it would be reasonable to expect increased incidences of political unrest over the next year or two. Pretty depressing stuff, and seemingly predictable too.

[Sundayjumper]

What events do the red lines represent and what are the numbers in brackets ? They're varying heights but don't seem to be plotted to any scale - e.g. Mauritania (2) is higher than India (4). Around the '08 peak they're mostly single digits, in '11 they're much larger numbers but the price spike is only slightly higher.

And the thing that the red lines represent - did that thing completely stop happening between '09 & '11 ?

And I know you're rolling your eyes at me for asking these questions

[Gavster]

The answers should be in this paper, it’s quite short

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1108.2455.pdf