Posts by I ain't Spartacus

Re: False flag?

I claim no expertise. Just a bit of reading on the subject. What do you say I've got wrong?

Re: Brexit

Bolocks!

One, it's the Falkland Islands. As named by the people who bloody live there.

Two, Thatcher's popularity was on the upswing due to the economy starting to come good. Helped by the unpopularity of Labour. Who knows what would have happened?

Three, what were either of them supposed to do? Not react? Neither chose the timing. They just played the hand they were dealt. Any PM who doesn't react forcefully to this situation, after the Litvinenko murder, is unfit for office.

Re: False flag?

They didn't kill many people with it though. Making chemical weapons is easy. Doing it without killing yourself isn't all that much harder. Weaponising them successfully is much, much more difficult. Iraq never got their sarin working properly. Most of what they used in the war with Iran was plain mustard gas.

What made the 2013 Syrian attack so obviously the governments' fault wasn't the sarin. It was the 1000-odd identically manufactured artillery shells with proximity fuses designed to disperse the agent evenly over a large area at the right concentration to be lethal. And the ability to deliver all those shells relatively accurately in a few minutes.

That was the tech the Iraqis never fully mastered. I believe the UN reports from the 90s also said that their chemical purity was pants - which meant their sarin stocks had short use by dates.

I don't buy this argument about the Russians being able to bear infinite pain. Putin doesn't have to worry about public opinion in the way Western leaders do of course. But, he does worry about it. Otherwise, why the censorship and murder of journalists and opposition figures?

He's never abandoned democracy, even though he's twisted and subverted it. And he's said one of the great traumas of his life was the collapse of the USSR. And that was brought down by public opinion due to the economy being consistently shit. Admittedly much worse than the Russian economy now though. But there are limits to the number of casualties he can take militarily and the economic pressure he can laugh off.

I wonder if he wants to torch the image of Russians in Europe to make it less attractive. A lot of the most talented young Russians will do anything to get out of the place. One reason being conscription. The Russian conscript bits of the army still don't value NCOs, and they're mostly just older short-termers. The bullying, murder and suicide rate amongst new conscripts is huge.

Re: False flag?

Cynic_999,

We don't have plenty of nerve agents in the UK. The UK gave up its chemical weapons program in the 1950s. Admittedly they're still finding old WW1 mustard gas shells kicking around, but they're far more dangerous to us than any foreigners. Plus we're still destroying stuff from Saddam's chemical stockpiles, and I believe other country's too.

Russia don't either, supposedly. They gave theirs up in the mid 90s.

As for your argument about why use this rather than a bullet. Who knows? Why poison someone with Polonium? That was a lot easier to trace back to Moscow, since the idiots who used it kept opening the damned flask, and contaminated their hotel rooms, their seats on the plane back to Moscow, their children, themselves, the diners at several restaurants and bars and God knows who else.

Re: Clever

There's been talk of reforming the UN Security Council since at least the 50s. It's never got anywhere, and probably never will. Given 5 members have vetoes, there's always bound to be one of them that won't like any proposed changes.

My point is, that although sanctions against Russia may be apparent, and forthcoming, there are many states that will trade with Russia.

Shadmeister,

International sanctions are almost impossible to get everyone to agree to. And even when you do, the nearby countries will always trade.

But Russia is massively dependend on exports of oil and gas. It has almost no capacity to export LNG and has very limited access to international capital in order to invest in it. Foreign companies who've tried to import capital into Russia have often had it stolen, and local oligarchs make sure to keep lots of their money abroad, as they don't trust the system either. The Russian government pays higher rates on short term borrowing than Greece, because nobody trusts them. They can't borrow long term.

So Russia will always be able to export its oil. But suffers from pathetic growth because it can't get the capital to modernise its oil infrastructure and is very vulnerable to sanctions on oil services companies - as was Iran.

There are only limited sanctions on capital investments in Russia, but people don't want to do it much anyway. Trust issues.

Putin is trying to rebalance their economy away from oil exports. But their economy is in trouble because of corruption from Putin's own cronies. It's hard to get people to build a business if local officials will randomly fine you, or take so many bribes to get the right permits that you can't make a profit. Which is why so many of Russia's middle class have buggered off abroad. Can his regime moderate their own greed sufficiently not to kill the goose that lays the golden egg? I doubt it.

Corruption is so bad in Russia that many large Russian companies sign contracts between each other in London. Do them under British law (not Russian), and pay to use British courts and arbitrators to settle disputes. To fix that problem means Putin first admitting his whole regime is massively corrupt and buggering up his own economy. I ain't holding my breath.

As for gas, they can only export to Europe at the moment, because that's where the pipes are. They're building pipes to China, but it's expensive will take several more years, and they make less profit. LNG infrastructure is also very expensive and takes years to come on stream. Where else can they export to that's in reasonable pipeline range?

Jack of Shadows,

Even a Japanese cult (Aum Shinrikyo) can produce Sarin and VX. Though it's much harder to do in industrial quantities and also hard to weaponise. These Russian nerve agents are much less well known and supposedly harder to synthesize. But I'm no chemical weapons expert. I guess the governent will have to go via the OPCW as one of its urgent jobs.

Re: "we are not outside the international rules of civilised nations and we don't want to be,""

John Smith,

I don't think Dobby's mates are the ones living in London. Though apparently some of them do send their kids to our public schools and universities - but presumably the ones on the international sanctions lists don't.

However obviously a lot of their cash is invested in the West. London, Paris, New York, Cyprus, Malta wherever. We could have a serious go at that. Bit of judicious hacking / snooping etc.

I don't think any major UK financial institutions are in the hole to Russia though. There are some that have major loans and share positions from the Middle East. Russia's economy isn't that big, and unlike many other disproportionate oil exporters they were spending heavily even at the end of the oil price boom - so they don't have a huge sovereign wealth fund to buy corporate influence. They do have a bunch of oligarchs with large foreign investments, but that's on a much smaller scale.

Re: Keeping the powder dry

So if we were to do that, Putin would say that we have declared war on him. And we know who will come off worse.

Yup Putin. Or everybody. Russia does not have powerful conventional forces - as compared to NATO.

They have been starved of cash, maintenance and training for too long. There's more money being poured in now, but that takes time to percolate through the system, and the new good equipment is in very short supply.

Obviously they have sufficient nukes to pretty much end the world though.

Shadmeister,

Perhaps you should have read the article more closely. Gazprom plan to sell gas to Europe and China. So they're going to be upping their capacity in order to be able to fulfill both demands and have to activate new gas fields in East Siberia that are too expensive to ship to Europe. So they're talking about spending $55 billion much of it over the next few years in order to be able to make $400 billlion over 30 years. So that's only $13bn a year sales - suddenly doesn't look like such a big number.

As I recall from when China and Russia signed the gas deal 2 years ago, they agreed it at a fixed price that was less than Gazprom got from selling to Europe.

Much of the European supply will also be from different gas fields, which means they'd need to spend more on inter-connector pipework - or they'd still be producing gas they couldn't sell. Russia have to sell that gas to Europe, or liquify it (more investment), or not get the money.

Oh, and finally, this first pipeline comes on stream in 2019. So no. Russia can't play off Europe against China for at least 5-10 years, and even then only to a limited extent as they'll be fed from different supplies. Though obviously they could choose to be poorer, and cut Europe off, and just live on the Chinese money. But not for a decade.

It's like those people who say the US are screwed because they owe China $3tn. Nope. Don't work like that. If China don't get paid, China sad - not US. Plus the US is China's biggest market, so collapsing the US economy would also destroy their own.

This is not a James Bond novel.

Ledswinger,

You're not quite right about this. Europe collectively has a lot of gas storage. The UK, not so much, but that's because we have supplies. Our storage is only designed to make up the difference between that and what we use, but we have got access to lots of LNG.

Russia can't just turn the lights off in the whole of Europe. If they cut Europe's supplies, it would take months to have any effect.

The Russian government gets 30-40% of its revenue from oil and gas export taxes and can't borrow on the international markets. It would be a race as to whether their central bank reserves would run out before European gas reserves.

And this is the nuclear option. If they do it - they'll not be able to sell gas to Europe again.

Their economy is more dependent on Europe, than Europe's is on them. Europe could reactivate coal stations, import LNG, burn more oil etc. It wouldn't be easy, there would be a hit to GDP - but that's nothing to what it would do to the Russian economy.

Sure, Putin could survive. But he'd have to go into full dictator mode. And it would screw up the lives of large chunks of his backers.

Russia does not have LNG export terminals. Nor do they have pipelines to ship their gas anywhere else but Europe. Russia stops being a Great Power the moment it does that. They'll still have the nukes, but they can't even fund their current military expenditure - let alone after they've nuked their own economy.

We already kick out known intelligence agents. At least the ones who are here illegally. Unless it's deemed worth watching what they get up to.

As for the legal ones, they work in the embassy. Again there's a trade-off. You can kick them out, but then the opposition will shuffle the deck and you'll not know who the new spies are. And it'll cost lots of overtime in surveillance trying to find out. So it's a hassle. Though if you chuck them all out at once, it's bound to throw a spanner in the intelligence works.

On the other hand, we have spies in our Moscow embassy. So now the Russians will kick them out, and we'll have to do lots of catching up.

As for sending diplomats home in body bags, no. That's a very bad idea.

Re: Keeping the powder dry

Surely if cyber weapons have a short shelf-life, all the more reason to use them? Many of them are going to be undisclosed vulnerabilities that are eventually going to get patched after all.

So no. I'd imagine that the real reason not to do it is that Russia would retaliate, so it would be stupid. Remember they're not a genuine democracy, so buggering up their economy is unlikely to have that much effect on the government. If we start it, our voters will blame our government.

They might do some targetted sneakiness with the spies, but then they probably do that already. But we could up the ante by trying to use our intelligence services to track down Putin's money (if he really is a multi-billionaire) and either seize it or just embarrass him.

As to Brexit, it seems irrelevant. The EU were no help during the Litvinenko murder, when we were all cosy-cosy friends. Why would they endanger their national interests to help now, when they didn't then? Not that it's possible to know this either way. There was talk in the EU of watering down the post-Crimea sanctions. If that doesn't now happen was that because of a UK diplomatic triumph? Or was that just talk to get concessions elswhere and never would have happened?

There might be some action via NATO (such as re-inforcing Eastern Europe) that gets announced next month that's related to this, or was on the cards anyway? How can we know?

You're wrong. And it's really easy to look up. An unexplained wealth order is an investigatory tool to try to force people to prove where their assets came from if they're linked with a criminal or political fun-and-games.

The new powers of “unexplained wealth orders” (UWO) and the supporting “interim freezing orders” commence on 31 January 2018 (except they will not come into force in Northern Ireland at that time). A UWO is an investigation order issued by the High Court (Court of Session in Scotland) on satisfaction of a number of tests.

A UWO requires a person who is reasonably suspected of involvement in, or of being connected to a person involved in, serious crime to explain the nature and extent of their interest in particular property, and to explain how the property was obtained, where there are reasonable grounds to suspect that the respondent’s known lawfully obtained income would be insufficient to allow the respondent to obtain the property. The test for involvement with serious crime is by reference to Part 1 of the Serious Crime Act 2007.

A UWO can also be applied to politicians or officials from outside the European Economic Area (EEA), or those associated with them i.e. Politically Exposed Persons (PEPs). A UWO made in relation to a non-EEA PEP would not require suspicion of serious criminality.

A UWO is a civil power and an investigation tool. It requires the respondent to provide information on certain matters (their lawful ownership of a property, and the means by which it was obtained). It is important to note that, as an investigation power, a UWO is not (by itself) a power to recover assets. It is an addition to a number of powers already available in POCA to investigate and recover the proceeds of crime and should therefore not be viewed in isolation.

My source being da government

Re: Tougher sanctions

Who says that's all that's going to happen?

I'm sure we won't be going too much further. There's not much we can do that doesn't have bad consequences we want to avoid.

We'll try to use the OPCW - as this would be an undeclared stockpile. Apparently the point of these novichok was supposedly about using pre-cursor chemicals that weren't on the prohibited list. Though I don't know why, as the Soviet Union had access to oil, so ought to have been able to make its own - as it did with other chemical weapons they held. But that could lead to investigations and maybe be a reason for / excuse for sanctions that are sector specific.

We could also have some diplomatic fun-and-games trying to pin some of the blame for Syrian chemical attacks on Russia. The Russians had a big presence at that airbase that Trump attacked with missiles after a chemical attack last year. Supposedly it was launched from there, in which case the Russians may have known about it, or even been assisting.

All that is important as it's not something you announce as a retaliation - but we probably need to try and redraw the red lines on use of chemical weapons. Letting Syria get away with it was always a bad idea, and trying to build some international consensus on this to deter future use would be a sensible diplomatic aim. But that's effort that will take years, and long diplomatic discussions and working groups.

Also she talked about hunting down Russian state money. This might not be a threat, it might be hard to impossible. Or the UK government may choose to do nothing. But this is where spies and maybe the odd cyber attack could be helpful. Many of the people around Putin are already under sanctions because of Ukraine. If we put a team of MI6, police and GCHQ people on hunting their money we could seriously upset them - in a way that would personally hurt and be very hard to publicly retaliate for. This would be one of the best avenues to pursue - but is not going to be public, or bear fruit for months/years.

What's that got to do with anything? The UK government didn't get to chose the timing of this. If there's any relation to the timing of Russian elections, then that will have been the deliberate policy of chose to make this attack now. Or they didn't care. Who knows?

Seeing as Russia doesn't have a free press, there's not much overt means of affecting the election anyway. The Russian media will only report on what it's allowed to, to give the propoganda effect the government want. To be fair, it's TV that Putin's government really care about. The press is afforded much more freedom, as its circulation is low.

For example the US killed a hundred-odd Russian mercenaries in Syria last month. Ones that attacked a US base in the South training anti-ISIS fighters. The Syrian government have had a couple of goes at that base, they can't get at the ones in Kurdish areas.

Putin could have used this story to ramp-up the anti-US rhetoric and provide good evidence of how them nasty Yanks are out to get him. Except the official story is that no Russian ground troops are needed in Syria, so it didn't get reported. Annexing Crimea was popular, the war in Syrian hasn't ever been.

The road to hell has a sign above it. It says: "The enemy of my enemy is my friend".

Huh what now?

If they are in London because they don't want to be in Russia, what's the problem? If they're here legally and doing nothing wrong. What's this sudden attempt to have a go a community of people who've chosen to make their home here?

Are you suggesting that we should use them as pawns or hostages in some game with the Russian government? Firstly that wouldn't be a moral thing to do, secondly what if the Russian government doesn't give a shit about them? At least if we decide to do something immoral, it should be effective.

Looking at the ownership of property in London and the London markets might allow us to seize assets of people connected to the regime. But the regime probably don't live here. It would be odd to try to govern Russia from London, rather than Moscow.

By the way, by the nature of their position prior to moving here plenty of them had full access to USSR stockpile of "weapons you are not supposed to know about". Pray, tell me, what is our guarantee that none of them has brought some with them? In fact, how do you think they have managed to remain alive if they did not?

Erm, your tinfoil hat is slipping...

Like polonium, exotic nerve agents are quite hard to come by. They're closely guarded, incredibly expensive and access to them severely limited. However the Russian government were given an opportunity to look at accidental releases of such materials and chose not to cooperate with that line of enquiry. I imagine the choice of such a weapon is deliberate. It's much easier, and cheaper, just to shoot people - or use ordinary poisons.

Ledswinger,

To be fair to the EU - they have learned quite a big lesson about gas security. There's still a lot more LNG capacity to come on stream, and the US are also building export terminals. Plus there's been a lot of interconnector pipework going in, so that gas can be shipped from those countries with LNG capacity (or their own supplies) to those without. Thus cutting off the Ukrainian gas (which also cuts off most of Eastern Europe) now doesn't work as there's a much greater capacity to switch.

That even went so far as Greece and the Southern Balkans refusing to join a Russian Southstream pipeline as part of the fall-out of the annexation of Crimea.

Admittedly Germany then did a secret deal behind everyone's back to expand Nordstream, and only admitted it at the last minute. But that's another story...

The leaks I've read so far are that this has solidified the current EU sanctions regime, which otherwise might have been watered down, but won't get anything extra. How accurate that is, who can tell.

Many (or even most) of those people are in London because they either don't like the Putin government - or don't want to live in Russia because it's not a great place to live. so exactly what good would targetting them do? They're not Putin's supporters, so why would he care if we sling them out?

Plus you sort of need reasons to confiscate peoples' property or throw them out of the country. That's why our system is better than the current one in Russia

After all, this is one of the reasons why Putin behaves this way. He can no longer tell people that his lot are in power because they're brilliant at stabilising the economy after the chaos of the Yeltsin years, because the economy's been doing badly and corruption has ramped up to similarly extraordinary levels. So now he has to wrap himself in the flag instead.

Many of Putin's closes allies are under travel bans, so they aren't in Kensington. If they were, they wouldn't be running Russia, and we wouldn't have so much of a problem with them.

Now Putin's own regime and his own supporters also keep their money abroad. Because they also don't trust the system. So they would be a legitimate and sensible target. If we can track their assets to London, then we can seize them. London and New York are the financial capitals of the world, so some of that money is likely to be there. But can we prove it? Lots of Russian money could be elsewhere, such as Cyprus or in fact anywhere else. If I were close to Putin my money would be hard to access for the US and UK government, given that they've been under some financial sanctions since the Crimea annexation. And many Russian companies have struggled to borrow in the West in the last couple of years, since people were nervous there would be even harsher sanctions in future.

An aggressive use of things like unexplained wealth orders might have some effect though.

With global cooperation we could do more here. But that's hard. Many EU countries want to reduce the post-Crimea sanctions, not increase them. And there was no support for the UK after the Litvinenko murder, so I'm not sure if there'll be much more now.

Re: Excel

Dump Outlook you say? Hooray! I've always hated it. What do you mean there's no replacement that does the same stuff? Well OK, whatever. Actually since we went to CRM software I already use that as my address book, and only bother to import into Outlook because it synchs with my phone. I don't like Outlook's calendar much either, even with email integration.

Word. Whatever. I'm used to it, but what's a letter Grandad?

Haven't used Access in years. Don't need it, and if I did need a database I'd rather crawl over broken glass naked than use it. Unless it's improved in the last ten years. [laughs]

Excel? You want me Excel? Never! You'll only prise it from my cold dead hands - and I don't plan on you living long enough to do that. Anyway who needs Word? I'll write all my letters in Excel. I'm not admitting anything mind. ...mumble, mumble, mumble... Oh look! A squirrel!

Anyway we pay £15 a user for Office for 7 users. And are delighted, we've had one problem and that was because our resellers are useless and cancelled our account while double-charging us. I shall soon be dumping them. If we had 120,000 users though who knows? After all, of our 7 users only 3 of us use Excel, only 2 use Word and one Powerpoint. Altough if I suggested killing Outlook 2 of them would probably murder me.

Re: Here we go again

It's not censored. Google are just choosing not to profit from it. Which given that at least 90% of ICOs are probably scams, seems fair enough.

The coin exchanges have a distressing tendency to disappear with peoples' money too.

Put simply, this isn't an area for ordinary consumers to be messing around. If you've got decent IT knowledge and an ability to secure your own wallet, then your main risk is the exchanges going pop. Which you can mitigate by not using them for large transactions. You also need to have a decent understanding of risk, given that there have been large gains made by some, but also lots of large losses.

If you're a company that makes a large majority of its profits from dealing with consumers (Google and particularly Facebook), then your reputation is at stake if lots of them start losing money because of stuff you advertise.

Re: Language

I thought Notes was coded in BASIC?

Re: Is this an improvement on IBM's usual business strategy?

I remember back in the day 20 years ago, when Outlook was a slow, bloated, crash-happy mess. Well OK it still was 15 years ago too. Especially if you wanted to have more than 10 emails stored in your .pst file. I still don't like it all that much, but its far better than it used to be and crashes very rarely nowadays. Email search even almost works properly nowadays...

I'm sure there's still plenty of kludge beneath the surface, but at least with modern PCs with power and memory to spare it's now OK. Sad if Notes hasn't achieve at least this.

Re: Nuke notes

Is it fair to blame Office 365? Has Sharepoint ever worked? I've used it (well tried to use it) a couple of times in my career - and don't recall it every actually working for more than a week. You either couldn't save files - or were forced to save a duplicate or couldn't open them. Or all of the above. I'd rather use Dropbox. Or just print all my spreadsheets out and pin them to a noticeboard...

That's not what it does, that's not what spent convictions mean, that's not how it works. Google are simply being asked to comply with laws newspapers already have to. You don't have to delete spent convictions, you just can't keep mentioning them.

Re: So if I fall prey to NT2 ...

Anyway: why go after search engines, surely the newspapers, etc, are the right targets ?

How many times does this have to be said...

The law on spent convictions doesn't force papers to shred their archives. Or even change old articles posted on their websites. It doesn't censor history. What it stops them doing is putting a headline on their front page now mentioning that so-and-so has a spent conviction.

And means that said people don't have to disclose spent convictions to employers.

If you don't like that, campaign to get the law changed.

The right to be forgotten attempts to force Google to comply with laws that everyone else already mostly complied with.

I disagree. If he was convicted of financial naughtyness and he still involved in the financial sector, it calls into question his character, rehabilitated or not.

Stuart Burns,

Blokey 1, from last week's testimony, was the one convicted of fraud.

This is a totally different case. Blokey 2, this week's, was convicted of hiring private investigators to get unauthorised info on people who were criticising him. So it's completely different.

How many average urban helicopters are there?

Do most cities allow helicopters to fly over them? Or land on the buildings?

New York banned copter landings on buildings, after an incident in the 70s I think (Pan Am Building?). I don't know the other rules. London only allows helicopter flights over the Thames - and they're only allowed to land at Battersea heliport.

Re: "it's a [..] electric bus that automatically switches between tunnels and lifts"

His 14 times quicker could be that he's arguing total building time - in not having to build the complex infrastructure of stations.

Or it could be (and this seems more likely to me) that as his lift-busstop-thingies are shafts drilled down to tunnel level, he could lower tunnelling machines down all of these and dig the tunnels from multiple machines. So it's the sort of idea where if you spend billions on tunnelling machines but have contracts for years ahead, you could use loads to make each contract much quicker and then re-use them on later projects.

I think Crossrail is only using something like 8 machines to dig a very large network. And they finished (and mothballed) a bunch of stations in 2016, so they could move on to the next bunch to finish about the same time as the network. So in principal they could have built the network twice as quickly by using twice the number of machines and employed loads of extra contractors to build all those stations simultaneously. I imagine they decided that added too much risk, as to time and cost over-runs, as well as disrupting the rest of London an unacceptable amount.

People under-estimate the cost of tunnelling though. It's not just having a few machines and crews to run them. You've got to do loads of geology and surveying. If you dig somewhere like London you've got to have a research team to track previous works too - and an archaology team to deal with all the plague pits and Roman remains. Plus time in the schedule to let the archaeologists sit in a trench for a couple of months on an unexpected bit of your site. Plus you need a factory to reprocess all the soil you dig out, and send it somewhere. And a huge amount of concrete infrastucture to line the tunnels - the machine sprays quick-drying concrete on the walls and then lays fitted concrete tiles over the top of that - and you need yet more for soil-grouting (to shore up weak spots and wet-spots).