Miscellaneous News

U.S.-Saudi Relations Buckle, Driven by Animosity Between Biden and Mohammed bin Salman​

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Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the kingdom’s 37-year-old day-to-day ruler, mocks President Biden in private, making fun of the 79-year-old’s gaffes and questioning his mental acuity, according to people inside the Saudi government. He has told advisers he hasn’t been impressed with Mr. Biden since his days as vice president, and much preferred former President Donald Trump, the people said.

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Saudi Arabia plans to highlight that effort this week in Riyadh, with its Future Investment Initiative conference. Organizers said they didn’t invite U.S. officials, who have previously attended at the cabinet level, after the Biden administration weighed withdrawing from participating.

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When Mr. Biden was elected, Prince Mohammed huddled with advisers at a seaside palace to complete a plan to woo the new president, according to people familiar with the matter.

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The Saudis delivered a few concessions on a topic Mr. Biden had campaigned on—human rights—including the eventual release of Loujain al-Hathloul, a prominent women’s-rights campaigner who says she was tortured in detention, and two Saudi-American prisoners. And they quickly patched up a feud with neighboring Qatar after leading an economic boycott against it which Mr. Trump had initially supported.

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Mr. Biden’s response shocked Prince Mohammed, the people said. In his first weeks in office, the president froze Saudi arms sales, reversed a last-minute Trump administration decision to label Yemen’s Houthi rebels a foreign terrorist organization, and published the intelligence report on Mr. Khashoggi’s killing which Mr. Trump had previously dismissed.

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For the Biden administration, these steps were a necessary correction. To the Saudis, Mr. Biden’s early moves were a slap in the face.

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One drastic option on the table: Saudi officials have said privately that the kingdom could sell the U.S. Treasury bonds it holds if Congress were to pass anti-OPEC legislation, according to people familiar with the matter.

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supersnoop said:

Do you really believe that? Take this for example, Time magazine last year

This guy was the former President of Mongolia and they have him on record with such nonsense. Without China, they’d still be using Cyrillic!

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Temstar said:

Aha, finally a question on this site that I can answer from a professional capacity.

Switching database for an application can range from trivial to very complex depending on the nature of query you run on it. For small applications where you might write to it infrequently and do simple select on the data a few times a second switching database would be a small project where you just have to come up with DDL for new schema, then do a data migration.

For larger applications with 3 digit number of users all constantly querying it at the same time, plus heavy lifting jobs like daily batch processing with more complicated reporting queries with lots of joins then it could be a year long project. Performance for large queries can be very sensitive to caching changes because they affect the query optimizer logic and even small changes can result in queries switching to a new query plan with disastrous consequences for execution time. I've seen at work when a normal 1 minute query in production picking up a bad query plan in non-production because the developer ran a gather stats on tables that is out of ordinary to normal production weekly usage pattern (he just happened to gather stats on table when the table was empty) and the query run time balloon to several hours instead.

Switching entire database means every query that has heavy dependency on correct query plan needs to be rechecked and performance tested, as different DBS have entirely different query optimizers logic.

When we switched from Oracle 13 running on locally hosted machine in our data center to Oracle 19 running on AWS RDS the project took more than a year with lots of headache involved in performance testing and optimizing queries in the middle, and that's just from one version of Oracle to another.

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tokenanalyst said:

I highly doubt that the Chinese air force will hire US pilots to train their forces. But let suppose for the sake of argument that he was hired to train Chinese air force pilots. It's him basically an open spy? He could have learned about their fighting doctrines, shortcomings, how good Chinese pilots are. Why someone don't want an spy asset like that? I guess that is your brain on McCarthyism, it becomes non functional.

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Sardaukar20 said:

Two major misconception of the West in this article:

1) Russia is getting weaker. What weaker? Russia controls affordable energy and minerals that Europe desperately needs. If anyone is getting weaker, its Europe.

2) China wants to take Siberia. A regurgitation of the Tom Clancy conspiracy theory. China is not interested in Siberia. It is just not worth the effort and expense to conquer Siberia. Better to just negotiate a good deal to buy resources from there. China has no ambition to conquer and plunder, that is a very Western thinking. Its yet another Western projection game. One can even ask if the oil in Iraq and Syria are worth the blood and treasure that the West have spent over there.

The Western elites are desperate. Their plans for world domination is falling apart. That's why they have to wet dream of some conflict between Russia and China. Still hoping against hope that Russia will somehow trust the West more than China. That train has already passed. The West had its chance to woo Russia, but they've blown it big time. Now, the Western elites are in big trouble, and deservedly so.

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supersnoop said:

Do you really believe that? Take this for example, Time magazine last year

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

This guy was the former President of Mongolia and they have him on record with such nonsense. Without China, they’d still be using Cyrillic!

Meanwhile most Americans probably think Cherokee is just the name of a Jeep...

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pmc said:

There is more to it than just some minerals and water. People often confuse Soviet with Russia. Soviet was Ukrainian elite creation thats why you see so many factories/pipelines/ nuclear reactors in Ukraine without the scientific knowledge/ engineering behind it. it was bound to fall.
MIG-25 Pilot defected to Japan at height of Cold war. do you see any Russian pilot defecting?. there are hundreds of transport planes that work round the clock. distance from Far East to Crimea is same as from US to Europe. this show that majority ideologically agree with this operation. There few percent liberals that will move to West that is understandable.
The Commander of Eastern Military district is from Dagestan. People from Caucuses works in large clans and families. once the leader is from there than it attracts further recruits. This will be transformation of Russian far East like never before.
Than there is that wider outreach to Middleast and North Africa. like Arabs as guests in FIFA opening match Moscow, Arabs in Arctic, Russian planes landing in Morocco in way to Latin America. these are all gestures.
I am sure Russians have more detailed inside data about demographics but seeing how this Ukraine operation is conducted is the reflection of reality. They are not doing anything illogical. Korea/Japan with similar income level has practically zero ability to mobilize.

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1583379315307073536

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pmc said:

There is more to it than just some minerals and water. People often confuse Soviet with Russia. Soviet was Ukrainian elite creation thats why you see so many factories/pipelines/ nuclear reactors in Ukraine without the scientific knowledge/ engineering behind it. it was bound to fall.
MIG-25 Pilot defected to Japan at height of Cold war. do you see any Russian pilot defecting?. there are hundreds of transport planes that work round the clock. distance from Far East to Crimea is same as from US to Europe. this show that majority ideologically agree with this operation. There few percent liberals that will move to West that is understandable.
The Commander of Eastern Military district is from Dagestan. People from Caucuses works in large clans and families. once the leader is from there than it attracts further recruits. This will be transformation of Russian far East like never before.
Than there is that wider outreach to Middleast and North Africa. like Arabs as guests in FIFA opening match Moscow, Arabs in Arctic, Russian planes landing in Morocco in way to Latin America. these are all gestures.
I am sure Russians have more detailed inside data about demographics but seeing how this Ukraine operation is conducted is the reflection of reality. They are not doing anything illogical. Korea/Japan with similar income level has practically zero ability to mobilize.

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1583379315307073536

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