Jimmy_D

At the other end you know they spend at least five minutes with VAR looking for a reason not to give it.

Well it certainly wasn’t the challenge that knocked him over. Dean couldn’t wait to give it.

Dalek, is that you?

Almost certainly. Almost every developed country in the world has biolabs for the purpose of researching defence against bioweapons. It's extremely unlikely, however, that they're being used to research bioweapon technology that's ever intended to be deployed in battle.

For what it’s worth the ICJ at the Hague has ruled that the invasion must be immediately suspended. Can’t see it making any difference at this point with the war crimes already being committed, but it does mean that continuing the invasion at this point has been deemed illegal.

Do you think Russia's actions are justified?

https://www.reuters.com/technology/apple-says-it-halted-all-product-sales-russia-2022-03-01/ https://www.reuters.com/business/retail-consumer/nike-makes-online-sales-unavailable-russia-2022-03-01/ They’re already giving up a huge amount of profit. Moving away from manufacturing centres isn’t as easy, admittedly, but I bet China won’t be thinking it's impossible.

This is off at a tangent, but there was a mountain of evidence that Russia supported Trump with a huge range of activities. It was Trump or the Republican party being aware of it and being an active part of it that wasn’t proven.

You can say this much, if Putin planned for this to happen like this, it doesn’t seem like it was a very good plan. It’s already gone on long enough that, even with a well planned and executed logistics operation, Russia’s forces would have been stretched, and all signs point to it being a long way short of that. Russia way well still have enough forces to claim a military victory over Ukraine, but it’s looking more and more likely to be a Pyrrhic victory at best, leaving Russia bogged down with massive sanctions and a drawn out guerrilla war, even if they claim to control the country.

Oof, absolute disaster game for Burnley. Injury to Mee, red card suspension and a loss in a game they would have been targeting a point at minimum.

Hard to imagine that would have been sanctioned, it's still surprising it happened on state tv. Suggests that either Putin might be starting to lose control of the narrative a bit, or that Putin is starting to lay the groundwork for the possibility that withdrawing from Ukraine is their best course of action.

Everton/Leeds to end up getting saved from relegation by Chelsea getting kicked out? Seems unlikely, but it's less unlikely today that it was a week ago, that's for sure.

Well we just lost to a shower of utterly rank s***e. How they got two attempts on goal, let alone scored twice, will remain one of life’s mysteries. The refereeing was no better. It’s a shame the bunch of corrupt cheating ****s look like they’re getting out of the relegation battle, it truly would have been a favour to football for them to have been flushed.

I'd imagine Saints would most likely sell the away tickets themselves to Chelsea fans, possibly co-operating with Chelsea in terms of eligibility to buy.

Aye, unless it ends up really bad for Chelsea to the point of a fire sale, which I think is unlikely, this probably reduces our chances of getting Broja. They can’t sell him even if they wanted to until the sanction is lifted anyway.

Well, we do currently hold Broja’s registration... What it does do is reduce the chance that Chelsea activate Livramento’s buyback clause. They’re likely to have bigger problems to deal with going forward.

Our armed forces are now extremely highly trained and equipped, able to carry out operations using relatively small forces, and regularly train in cross-forces operations with other countries' forces. Losses are low because we don't commit huge forces to operations, and if we were to suffer more losses than expected, we'd still have the ability to operate extremely effectively with a small force. The idea that one cross-forces NATO operation could easily(!) render the UK armed forces ineffective in one weekend is as nonsensical now as it was when it first popped in your head.

Doesn't sound like much, but does a Russian care more about living their day to day life as they normally do, or more about parts of Ukraine being part of Russia? State TV in Russia might be telling them that everything is going according to plan to defeat the evil Ukraine nazified leadership that are going to point nuclear weapons at them, but it won't be adding up with what they see happening in the rest of their day to day life.

Indeed, feels like this invasion has been the beginning of the end for Putin. He might end up seeing no way out, and how he'll react to that is unpredictable. Before that though, the combined effects of inflation caused by the pandemic and the war in Ukraine aren't insignificant, people are already feeling it pretty heavily and it's going to get worse. Long term, the world is already moving away from fossil fuels. Probably not nearly fast enough, but it'll get there eventually. It'll be painful in the meantime though. Assuming Putin goes one way or another, most likely exile, prison, or old age, there's going to be a huge power vacuum in a nuclear armed country. I've got no idea of the leadership structure or path of succession beyond Putin acting as if he'll live forever and always be in absolute power. How that turns out is anyone's guess.

Ah, yep, sorry. So around a 2-3% cut overall. Even more manageable, although the point about knock on effects of overall demand still stand. One thing in our favour is the new energy link with Norway, which should allow us to make more use of our renewable energy generation and make sure less of it is wasted.

That's oil. It's about 40% of our gas. The UK's energy mix has about 40% gas, so the gas and oil being cut off from Russia would be about 16-18% cut in the UK's energy mix, so it's a significant cut, but probably relatively manageable, especially as we're coming out of winter. Russia cutting the oil and gas would impact other places, in some places far more heavily, so the remaining oil and gas that we use would see a far higher demand (or rather, the supply would be lower with the same demand) and see higher prices as a result, especially if this ends up stretching into next winter. Some of that increased demand would be mitigated by Russia being forced to sell into a far smaller market, hence at a far lower price. That'd result in China mainly buying more from Russia and turn reducing demand on remaining oil and gas, but it certainly wouldn't offset it completely.

We want 10!

The first mistake is taking anything Putin says at face value. There's more and more evidence mounting up that he's not even being honest to his own troops.

Oh good. That means Ukraine should be safe then.

Threats from Russia to not do something that wasn't Russia's decision to make are not an excuse for Russia to commit war crimes. Blaming the West or Ukraine for this is utterly utterly ridiculous.