Miscellaneous News

gelgoog

Lieutenant General
Registered Member
The key thing that most people don't consider is that while Russia is selling crude at a discount, the various sanctions and embargos have raised the prices of crude roughly 25-28% since February. This means both Russia and Iran might actually be grossing more overall with their energy sales than before. i.e. oil went from 65 to 90, but Russia is selling at a "discount" of 80, they still come out ahead.
Russia is selling their oil for more than they were before the war started. Initially they were providing India with a 30% discount on oil but now it is more like 10%. Check the oil price ticker for Sokol. That is likely the sale price of the oil they used to send to Europe at this time.
ESPO oil price, from Eastern Siberia which is sold to the Far East including China, is going down though.

Why do Iran and Russia need to export oil and gas in the first place? I thought they are decently developed countries with diversified industries and advanced technological base.

Was it sheer Iranian and Russian propaganda then? What else would explain the extreme reliance on hydrocarbon exports for these two countries?
Well Iran hasn't collapsed despite being sanctioned since the 1970s has it?

And Russia is more self-sufficient than most economies. But in the globalized modern economy even that has its limits.
I expect some Russian infrastructure which depends on Western supplies to slowly degrade. The gas turbine power plants will likely be one example. Another might be some of the petrochemical processing industry like making plastics and the like. The EU expected Russia to stop making diesel because Russia used to import all its catalyst on their refineries. Well it isn't that bad, since Rosneft has been able to produce its own catalyst for two years and is already using it. There are several examples of other inputs like this. Russia used to import bleaching agent for office paper production from Finland, that got sanctioned, so now they are selling yellowish office paper. There are smaller Russian enterprises which have their own complete production chain and they sell bleached white office paper, but their production isn't enough to meet market demand. Lots of little things like that. But I expect most of those issues to be fixed in 6 months as alternative supplies get found. Others might take 2 years as new production facilities inside Russia might need to be built.

Another example. PCB manufacturers in Russia stopped production as supplies of fiber from Europe got cut, they switched to Chinese suppliers, and now production restarted. And yes it likely will be cheaper to import a minute amount of fiber to make motherboards for a market with 150 million people, from a market over 10x the size with exports, than to make their own fiber.

Another case, one of the largest producers of butter in Russia was a Finnish company with a factory in Russia. Well they closed down production for weeks. The Russian government gave companies a time limit to either restart their operations, to sell their business, or get foreclosed and auctioned by the government. So they basically stopped production for a month, now sold the factory for peanuts, eventually it will restart since it was producing butter with Russian milk in the first place. Guess who will be the biggest loser?
 
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horse

Colonel
Registered Member
These comments about Turkey and NATO sound a lot like something I would say...

Don't be too hard on the poor girl, she's just trying to improve her social credit score :D

With her follow up I think she is missing the point... I approve 100% of Turkey milking NATO for all its worth. Not doing what Turkey is doing is dumb.

It's been a fun few days in NATO land

:oops:


What!?

Is she your sister?

:p:D

 

LawLeadsToPeace

Senior Member
Staff member
Moderator - World Affairs
Registered Member
This girl on Twitter is plagiarising posts from the SDF. We had this post on the SDF. This is like the fifth time I saw this from this girl. One of her threads was a copy of one of my answers here and I didn't see my nickname mentioned.

Dear Quanyi Li if you are reading this I personally don't have any problems with you Tweeting my posts but I'd rather have my nickname mentioned.
You aren't the only one. I did a skim through her posts and check this out:
Huge news. And big respect to Xi for managing to pass this. I can't even imagine how big the internal pushback would be for this move. Congratulations

She has to be using a web scrape bot for this.
 

ACuriousPLAFan

Brigadier
Registered Member
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Tsai says U.S. National Guard planning 'cooperation' with Taiwan military​

Does the US national Guard have a death wish? I thought that's where cowards go to serve in the US?
They are gradually inching towards stationing US troops on Taiwan. "Cooperation" between the US National Guard (itself a form of US military) and the Taiwanese military is just the beginning.

This would mean breaching Beijing's red line regarding the Taiwan issue.

China must properly respond in kind to show these bastards that Beijing ain't playing around.
 

Coalescence

Senior Member
Registered Member
They are gradually inching towards stationing US troops on Taiwan. "Cooperation" between the US National Guard (itself a form of US military) and the Taiwanese military is just the beginning.

This would mean breaching Beijing's red line regarding the Taiwan issue.

China must properly respond in kind to show these bastards that Beijing ain't playing around.
I recall US already have like "military training advisors" and contractors station on Taiwan. What would "cooperation" entail here?
 
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