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Post by captainconfident on Apr 27, 2024 12:16:08 GMT
Teenaged Indonesia offspinner Rohmalia created a new world record for best bowling figures in women's T20I cricket on Wednesday, when she returned 7 for 0 against Mongolia in their fifth T20I in Bali. That she achieved the feat on her international debut made it all the more special.
Needless to say, Indonesia won by a considerable margin
Damn. My money was on Mongolia for that one..
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Post by captainconfident on Apr 26, 2024 18:23:27 GMT
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General P2x Discussion
Crowdstacker
Apr 24, 2024 17:40:32 GMT
Post by captainconfident on Apr 24, 2024 17:40:32 GMT
New PDLs Chalkwell Avenue £388k 14 mths 17% Upper Bond Street £422k 12 mths 16% High St Odiham £169k 10 mths 13% (High St Odiham is NOT available on Loan Pledge) I'm vaguely cross with myself for stopping investing with Crowdstacker at the point they went into real estate. 15% was an alarm bell interest rate after Lendy etc and I took my bargepole away. But it seems like they have chosen these loans carefully over the last years. Anyone know what their track record is since the change?
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Post by captainconfident on Apr 22, 2024 19:45:49 GMT
Some perspective here on Russian defence spending.
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Post by captainconfident on Apr 22, 2024 18:39:51 GMT
Dry cleaners in Knightsbridge H******** C****** C******* Ltd Loan requirement £55 800 Interest rate 15% Duration: 60 months PG and second charge Funding open until 28.4.24 Established business. Looks OK to me.
Have you done an anti-money laundering check ?
Discreetly, I didn't want to air their dirty washing in public.
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Post by captainconfident on Apr 22, 2024 17:30:41 GMT
Dry cleaners in Knightsbridge
H******** C****** C******* Ltd
Loan requirement £55 800 Interest rate 15%
Duration: 60 months
PG and second charge Funding open until 28.4.24
Established business. Looks OK to me.
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Post by captainconfident on Apr 22, 2024 15:30:15 GMT
Not sure about the wisdom of poking the bear with 300km ACTMS. The Ukrainians have been doing perfectly well with their home made things. Its a fine line NATO treads. Surprised, I saw that I had typed NaZTO and quickly changed it. I could have got 200 roubles for that one, damn!
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Post by captainconfident on Apr 22, 2024 15:24:49 GMT
As a starter, russia is not a military superpower . Period . I am not sure we can call russian "military" a Military. I would opt more for a feral animals. There IS and Should be only one way to end this War . . . and we both know what it is. There was a Meat Grinder during WWI WWII and it is now. This is how so called russian "military" works and the only way they know. No Respect for humanity At All. Anyone know what he's talking about ? I need to report this informations to my comrades. Maybe you get more than the usual 200 roubles this week!
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Post by captainconfident on Apr 22, 2024 13:30:09 GMT
In this war, armour is being used as a delivery service behind the lines, unloading their human cargo who then go forward on foot. As opposed to tank echelons which punch through enemy defences. No armour has made a "breakthrough", mainly due to mines and drones. It is right to see the defensive arrangements as strongpoints rather than front line, second line trenches. Between large strong points are any number of small outposts, fortified craters, ditch positions, small dug fire points.
Strongpoints are sited such that they have fire support from two or more nearby strongpoints such that if one falls, approach to the position is covered by others in succession along with numbers of small firing positions. So a glide bomb can eliminate one strongpoint, but then there is the next and the next. Blowing up strongpoints with air launched glide bombs is expensive, risks the aircraft and the destroyed position still has to be assaulted on foot under enfilade fire from several other dispersed redoubts. At the current rate of advance the Russians will be in Kyiv in decades.
The only risk to the Ukrainians is that the Russians discover an area of the battlefield where the defenders are short of munitions. However the Russian objective, Chadiv Yar had been known for weeks, so you can be sure they are assaulting a position into which a lot of thought and planning has been put and adequate defensive weaponry. Better idea might be to find a weak point somewhere else but the problem for the Russians is that any build up of forces is seen immediately.
In 1916 and 17 the Germans were engaged in intense battles on an Eastern Front with Russia over 1000km long. On the Western front, the allied Somme, Nivelles and Passchendaele offensives were met with an allied manpower advantage up to and over 6:1 and yet German defences did not break even once. Excepting the first massed tank attack Cambrai 1917. Attack is far more costly than defence and we spend our time morning the victims of our attacks in Ww1, rather than those of our defensive battles of 1914 and 1918. There is only so long that an army can keep banging away before mutiny sets in.
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Post by captainconfident on Apr 22, 2024 11:39:53 GMT
The term "Meat grinder" originates from Russian soldiers' descriptions of their own army's human wave attack methods. The very fact that this is what the Russian army has been reduced to doing speaks to their utter lack of any ideas how to unlock and break through Ukrainian defences.
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Post by captainconfident on Apr 22, 2024 9:43:06 GMT
The problem faced by the West in this war has been that, despite having a many times larger defence industry than Russia, they were found wanting in the very area that such a war would require, basic artillery munitions. Russia sat on the enormous stockpile of former superpower The Soviet Union, while NATOs high tech shells were in limited supply. W estern defence companies have rapidly set up production lines to increase production but these would take eighteen months or more to come into full production. At the critical moment of shortage, internal US politics throttled supply to Ukraine while Europe could not produce or find sufficient stocks. Now the situation is that Ukraine has improvised its way through this darkest moment, and in six months the adjusted supply lines of Europe will be on stream. Meanwhile Russia nears the bottom of the pot of soviet leftovers and their current production will not be adequate to sustain their army in the field. The peace deal to end the war is probably 12 months away but its outline will largely be in Ukraine's favour because the boot, by this time, will be on the other foot. This is more optimistic than I feel and I think misses some points. Its not just that Europe came into this with minimal reserves and also severely reduced (suitable to peacetime) production capacity. Political will as also been lacking and only changed at glacial speed. A start on ramping up production facilities could have been made much sooner than it has. And even then, how much has it actually ramped up. The promise of a million shells by end of March (delivered, not necessarily even produced) was not backed up by action. Europe dithered insisting that funds were spend only with European manufacturers. Contracts were not signed, and not surprisingly manufacturers were reluctant to make big investment in expanding capacity in the absence of politicians actually putting money and signed contracts alongside to match their political grandstanding. Even the UK, acting on its own, managed to dither about contract placement. Even now, the best that BAE Systems says is that "its new manufacturing facility....will deliver an eight-fold increase in manufacturing capacity, by 2026." And as this is BAE Systems, is that early 2026 or Dec 31st 2026 (if you are lucky). I said on this thread a long time ago, that the idea that Ukraine must ultimately "beat" Russia because of the huge disparity in industrial capacity and capability of the west vs Russia, was not a solid argument. Russia was always going to be able to shift the entire country to a wartime economy. That was never going to happen in Europe or the US because it would not be politically viable to do so in order to support a war in "a far away land". I don't see anything that has happened that changes my view on that. It is all too frequently "just in time" or "too little too late" or "just enough but too late to do the job intended". That does not preclude a situation where ultimately Russia is so bogged down for a sufficiently protracted time that the Russian system implodes. Much as the Soviet Union ultimately did in trying to maintain very high %age levels of defence spending relative to a much more industrially productive west. But I'm not sure that the political will in the West has the staying power. Many fair points. One difference at play is that an autocracy can ramp up production straight away, while tens of separate democracies are slow to rev up. But that had to be set against the fact that Russia had ramped up an economy the size of Spain under sanctions restricting critical components, against the US and Europe combined plus Japan, Australia. So the timing of the entry of weapons and ammunition to the theatre is in favour of Russia. But once the other countries get their together, Russian defeat is inevitable. Co-ordinating democracies is a messy business but Putin has united them as never before. While Ukraine is suffering while the the giant wakes up, Russia has shown that with a current large advantage in weapons supply, it can make practically no significant progress on the battlefield. And this will slowly but inevitably go into reverse.
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Post by captainconfident on Apr 21, 2024 19:06:16 GMT
The other big Congress YES vote allows Biden to give Ukraine all the US frozen russian assets also ensuring China is paying attention. The Biden administration seems to have destroyed everything else they might as well destroy the Western Financial System as well - after they steal this money no one outside the west will trust the western banking system or want to deposit large sums there. If I didnt know better I would think Biden was working for the "axis of evil" to destroy the west. This is very bad news for the UK that relies on the City of London money laundering operation to maintain its unsustainable standard of living.... I must say, I was expecting you to take up some of the points I have been making as they are diametrically opposed to your own (Colonel) 's 'inevitable Russian victory' story. Regarding the point you make The Economist has this to say. The approach is an elegant one. Income earned on Russia’s foreign holdings can be seized in a manner that is both legal and practical. Many of the country’s bonds have already matured. Cash from redemption of bonds is held by the depository in which it currently sits until it is withdrawn, paying no interest to the owner as per the depository’s usual terms and conditions. Any interest earned thus belongs to the depository—unless, that is, the state decides to tax it at a rate close to 100%.
Next, as suggested by The Economist in February, would be to transfer the net present value of that income stream to Ukraine. Investing Russia’s cash holdings into five-year German bunds would yield €3.3bn a year, enough to service eu debt of about €116bn at the same maturity. The rest is financial plumbing: set up a G7-guaranteed fund that receives the depositories’ incomes on Russian cash, issue that fund’s debt to the markets and send the proceeds in bulk to Ukraine.
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Post by captainconfident on Apr 21, 2024 16:17:45 GMT
Russia has no plan but to keeping attacking. But their gains while Ukraine was at its weakest have been negligible. This is because of three factors, that defence is seismically less costly than attack, that tanks gave been ineffective and that military build -up of forces for attack has been impossible due to observation and long range precision weapons.
None of that is going to change but the Russians have kept up the pretence of success by cheering whatever field has been captured each day (without mention of the cost). Once even that becomes impossible, there is no daily capture of territory to announce week after week and yet the only plan is to keep attacking, the rot sets in. The result will either be a peace conference where a DMZ is agreed or collapse of the Russian regime and return of all Ukrainian territories.
Can it go any other way? The problem is there is no key to unlocking the Ukranian defences, breaking through and then rolling them up and storming to Kyiv. Unless a 'miracle weapon' was to show up. If Russia had a viable plan to break through, we would have seen it by now. They have nothing but superior manpower but that counts for nothing when you have to leave your foxhole and run through the enemy minefield towards their machine guns. Maybe a few of you get there but in the meantime they pulled back to the next prepared position and you gave to do it again tomorrow until someone says stop. Eventually they shoot their officers and refuse to continue.
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Post by captainconfident on Apr 21, 2024 11:09:05 GMT
The problem faced by the West in this war has been that, despite having a many times larger defence industry than Russia, they were found wanting in the very area that such a war would require, basic artillery munitions. Russia sat on the enormous stockpile of former superpower The Soviet Union, while NATOs high tech shells were in limited supply. Western defence companies have rapidly set up production lines to increase production but these would take eighteen months or more to come into full production. At the critical moment of shortage, internal US politics throttled supply to Ukraine while Europe could not produce or find sufficient stocks.
Now the situation is that Ukraine has improvised its way through this darkest moment, and in six months the adjusted supply lines of Europe will be on stream. Meanwhile Russia nears the bottom of the pot of soviet leftovers and their current production will not be adequate to sustain their army in the field. The peace deal to end the war is probably 12 months away but its outline will largely be in Ukraine's favour because the boot, by this time, will be on the other foot.
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Post by captainconfident on Apr 20, 2024 13:52:51 GMT
Interesting documentary from Deutsche Welle about indoctrination of children in Russia. It suggests that the West will face a generation of anti- Western trained killers. First 15 mins is best, the rest is not indispensible. www.youtube.com/watch?v=TaDxSo7oVuE&t=620s
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