681–690 of 774 posts
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I don't think anyone is that "in control", it was definitely an Israeli plan to start but they got awfully shy after Iron Dome was exhausted.
Theyre not shy in lebanon. Theyre invading with no regard for any agreement iran and the US sign
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China, in it's modern incarnation, and every living member of it's military, has never seen a single real battle. Nothing. No one has any rank that has bearing on any kind of combat. Just decades of self-congratulatory war games. China has tons of weapons and resources. But it would remain to be seen if they can actually fight when every single person along the entire chain is a total day one rookie.
Didn't at least some living generals fight in Vietnam?
Now they'll exhaust interceptors and other long range missiles like tomahawks and whatnot. And then China gets frisky with Taiwan and the US will totally not abandon them and tell them to just give up pressured by the lack of firepower to defend them, the risks of China getting back into bidding oil in international markets and the mess the treasury would be in if China raises capital by selling bonds (they just told…
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I'm not sure that any of that actually matters. Wars are not Call of Duty. It's politically difficult to invest actual manpower in Iran and Unless China were to nuke Hawaii, an all out war with China would also immediately be politically unpopular. China, like Iran, wouldn't doesn't need to defeat the US, they just need to hold out long enough for the US economy to collapse, which would happen way faster if China is…
I'm curious what the financial engineering you're referring to was. I've been trying to understand why gas is still comparatively cheap given the war and the best I've landed on so far is that the spread between feedstock (crude oil) and output (diesel, gas, jet fuel, etc) widened in large part die to flooding the market with strategic oil reserves. We keep crude prices low, which is what many indicators track, while…
If you google for the "oil price today" you will find something like $75. However, if you look closely, it's the price of oil futures for September. Futures are not oil, they are contracts. If you need to buy oil in September and you expect the price to be higher than $75 you can buy such a contract and guarantee your price to be $75 now. However, you can also buy such a contract even if you don't need to buy oil ever, hoping its price will go up and you can sell it at profit (you can also do it on margin i.e. only put enough money to cover daily price change). And a whole lot of people do exactly this (likewise, they also can sell these contracts even though they don't have a drop of oil to sell).
Normally, the large volume of these speculative contracts cancel each other before the expiration date and no oil changes hands. However, because most of these traders don't have oil or the ability to take delivery on oil, a "squeeze" is possible. Say, you bought $75 oil futures for September today, hoping to sell them at premium sometime before today and the last trading day at the end of August. As that day approaches you see that the price is still $75 or even lower. Oil spot price (the actual price) can be anything (it was about $100 last week), maybe $100, maybe $200 but nobody is buying futures at this price, because someone is selling them at $68. If you had a refinery with storage to take few thousand barrels, you'd be happy as you got a great deal on oil. However, if you are just a dude at a computer in a NYC apartment, you are now in big trouble - you have to pay $75K for each contract you hold and take delivery on 1000 barrels of oil. Either or both might be impossible for you so, instead, you just sell yours at $67.99 and take $7K loss on each contract, which 10x less money than you'd have to pay for the oil you can't take delivery on. This is a "long squeeze", as more people find themselves in such a situation they sell at lower and lower price causing the futures price to tank even more.
Someone causing a long squeeze is, obviously, taking a loss as some legitimate buyers will buy the cheap futures and take delivery but because of the sheer volume of the speculators, a long squeeze is not nearly as expensive as a direct undercutting the spot price and can be maintained for a long time with relatively small capital.
>The U.S. Army has used up much of its stockpile of highly accurate long-range missiles during its five-month war with Iran, according to three people familiar with the data, raising concerns about the military’s readiness for future conflicts. >The missiles are principally the Army’s surface-to-surface weapons, known as Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS) and Precision Strike Missiles (PrSM). The U.S. has used “v…
> That quite a bit less of an issue than the headline implies. Here's a point that I ran across: these long range missiles are there to take out air defences and such (along with stealth sorties), which allows you go go in with 'regular' ordinance and non-stealth aircraft—of which there is much higher quantities and availability—in later phases. In the early phases of the conflict you use stand-off munitions to reduc…
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Indeed fellow current events observer, this will portend the imminent collapse of the cowardly west and the grand rise of the stalwart and wise Ayatollahs of Iran (I was not paid by state actors to write this)
You seem well versed in the wiseness of the Ayatollahs. Fellow world events observer. The ayatollahs are stupid for their restraint. I wouldn't have their patience. They only recently resorted to 2 for 1 and promised 10 for 1 on escalation. I would have gone 1k to 1 on the first day if it were me :)
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You’re giving trump a lot of credit that you think he’s capable of thinking of second order effects of his actions.
Well I was assured by his supporters that he was a smart and successful businessman and 'very stable genius' so I'm sure this won't end in economic disaster and national humiliation.
I heard the commander in chief is not only acing cognitive tests and winning golf championships, left and right, due to TALENT.
They also are completely vindicated of all accusations, the most powerful man in the history of the world and taken very seriously by some of the stupidest, weakest people to ever exist.
When you have all that going for you and a comfortably filled diaper, what on earth could go wrong!?
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>where USN is destroying drug running boats >which is arguably against some maritime laws You get it completely backwards: the US Navy is "allegedly" destroying drug running boats, and it is completely, totally, "inarguably" against maritime laws - and laws of war (but there is no war, right?) and basic law principles in civilized countries. >it's an Elephant precisely stepping on a single ant. It is not a cute anima…
"It is widows and orphans." - you lost the argument by trying to characterize these people as innocents, because it's such an awful position it undermines your own legitimacy. These are 'Cártel de los Soles' etc they are thugs and killers, the source of untold violence and harm. This the hysterical rhetorical position that I'm actually hinting at - contempt for a party (in this case the US) renders people intellectua…
...it's not contempt, but man, the US is just not that special. It's just one of us. calm down.
Or, coming from another direction: you are verbally thrashing in an HN thread because you heard something you didn't like, you think countries don't do this on the regular, including with weapons if they feel it's worth the effort?
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No, it's like saying "I can easily afford a ferrari but I won't be able to afford groceries for a year after that because I've emptied my savings account. The military might be capable of a ground invasion and succeeding. It would be Pyrrhic. Even if Iran was a genuine nuclear threat (I am not convinced at this point that Iran would launch a nuke at anyone if they had it), is it worth 500k dead Americans? There was n…
> We aren't losing in Iran because of military incompetence, but policy incompetence. My point is these two things are inseparable, and to conflate them is simply Call of Duty-esque military fantasy. It's a feel good war story that doesn't actually reflect the reality of actually winning a war. If the US military does not have the ability to hold , occupy , and install allied regime change, then the US military canno…
The USA and its allies could sustain the Afghanistan occupation indefinitely, but chose not to(prematurely, in my opinion).
In Afghanistan, the west chose to lose, but victory was possible. We were(we, I was there in 2010) winning hearts and minds of the younger generation but abandoned them. Another Donald victory.
Iran is an impossible situation.
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How hard would it be for China to make sure no ships or airplanes arrive to Taiwan for a few weeks? The island has only days worth of food and energy. No bloody D-Day landings needed to force a political capitulation. To continue to borrow from your example, Russia has completely shut down all commercial Ukrainian seaborne and airborne traffic.
A blockade of Taiwan could be met with a blockade of China. China can survive much longer on their own supply and reserves. But it’s still something to make them think twice. They don’t have the blue water navy to respond to a blockade. Land connections do not have the scale to work around it. There’s a small port on the east side of Taiwan which could be used to supply some of the bare necessities. I don’t know if U…