G.I. Joe

Yeah, this is what I keep thinking about also.  Yes, some RU sectors will be strong, w good troops, gear, supply & leadership.  Other sectors..... exhausted older, unfit mobiks w bad leaders, insufficient gear, poor supply and inadequate defenses.  Just gotta find the right places to exploit.

/glances toward Hong Kong

Zelensky's read of Putin is exactly what was missing from that intel officers article. A mafioso mind, and about as trustworthy. 

This bit had passed me by:
So the Chinese are going to let Russia buy Yuan with their worthless Ruble? Two artificially-maintained (in the absolute worst sense) currencies trading is going to be a really fun game of "let's pretend" to build an economic system on, isn't it?
 

What the Chinese have done in Xinjiang is what Putin wants to do in Ukraine. And for the record it is bleeping ugly.

Any number of military FLIR and SAR type systems.  What is weird about this thing is that is sounds a lot like it was written by ChatGPT or somesuch.  A lot of technical terms and buzzwords (Kinetic Action) being used out of context or in an odd context.
 

"There I was, in the Congo....working out the declination, signal processing and backscatter energy analysis required for the band radar UAV op....as I considered what would be the best movies to have on hand for a winter deployment. Btw, these boots might work for you but they're hell on this old Nam Marine recon sniper's feet." 

First Slovakian MiGs are already in Ukraine, and it seems they were flown there instead of being dismantled and towed/ trucked. Another red line crossed and still not WW3. 
Also, while it's definitely not my area of expertise, the hardpoints visible at 0:28 looks rather suspicious, not very soviet at all.
 

The most informative sentence ever written was
I might add that in Putin's Russia you might add his life to the balance. When you simply cannot figure out why something works the way it does, start here.

My partner has an expression she uses whenever I say something dumb: "when you hear hoof beats approaching, is it zebras or horses?" In other words, from the evidence available (hoof beats), what is  the most likely answer (a herd of horses, or a herd of zebra). I don't live in Africa, so it's horses.
Soldiers crash vehicles all the time. All. The. Time. Combine testosterone with fatigue and pressure and poor handling characteristics and ****ty roads, and that isn't really surprising. There is, for example, any number of images of Abrams in the ditches and canals of Iraq, which probably weren't there due to poor training.
I'm happy this vehicle crashed (out of action is out of action, regardless of how it got to be that way) but I'd hesitate to put it down to a training issue.
Horses and zebras.

Did they really?  They directly attacked a US assets in international waters.  The US is now justified in all sorts of escalation and likely can generate the internal support to do it.  The US has over 300 MQ-9s, a dozen or so with Stingers and Hellfires handed over to the UA would be appropriate right now.  Maybe finally green lighting ATACMS to hit the airfields those MiG flew from.  Oh and let’s not forget the fact that the US can do offensive cyber too.
Said it before, will say it again - the west has escalation dominance here, not Russia.

It was completely reckless. The SU-27 could just have easily crashed alongside the Reaper.

Well so far, you:
- have applauded a Russian direct attack on a U.S. military assets in international waters.  “Perfect soft kill” was your exact term, which is just wrong on a lotta levels…not perfect, sloppy because we have freakin camera footage…not soft, hard as it was very likely by kinetic impact and not EW jamming etc.
- Argued that is was within some sort of justifiable ROEs because the US is supporting Ukraine while it fights for it’s life.  It is not justified, at least until this war expands outside Ukrainian borders - hell we are tip toeing around hitting targets inside Russia but apparently international waters and airspace are the Wild West now.
- Offered that we re-write international legal norms as they relate to international waters…reasoning and logic TBD.
- Linked the current incident to another over Turkey in 2015 (unless you believe the Russian position because they have a good track record of being truthful in these matters).  And somehow are trying to make the current situation, again, acceptable.
- Made a huge leap between WW3 and a couple banks collapsing in the US.
- And linked it all back to “elites” because we all know they run the world through a Star Chamber near the earths core…ok, I made up that last part but it really wasn’t that far off-narrative.
But I will accept you are not in the “nut-camp”, however, when you decide to join us in the “grown-up, I am over first year philosophy and political science” camp please let us know.
 

Bil is gonna have to correct you again and it isn't dinner time.

pretty much.  Not sure how we went from a drone over the black sea to an attack on NATO aircraft in NATO airspace in a single breath.  First off I doubt Russian aircraft would even get to take one down.  They'd get shot down and then Russia could complain about how an accidental overflight blah blah blah.

It would be a total miscalculation on Putin's part. Downing a drone might get a shrug, but downing an AWACS would immediately become the top story of every Western media site.
As It isn't uncommon for AWACS to be manned by service people from throughout NATO, everyone would have a dog in the fight at that point. Putin isn't that desperate yet, or is he?

Very glad it was unmanned, if the US had lost a live pilot this would be a very different day.  This will create an interesting little ROE conundrum though - should we kill a Russian human to protect an unmanned asset?

Not to be "that guy".. but the proper designation for this UAV is MQ-9.  
 

Yeah, I was more thinking about them being able to get back home, but I guess gravity works regardless of whether the meter has been fed. Keeping the ISS fully functionally probably just got a bit harder though.

Looks like maybe 5 Russians. Probably nobody on station cares. They can’t see the borders from space, and it’s more likely that both crews unite against the ground people than fight with each other.

ICC to issue first arrest warrants linked to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine

Tentative report, but Russia may have just de-space powered:
 
 

Ed is not pro-Russian by any means, he just lives in his own pure strategy world. Or more properly, it's like a ''Philosophy of Strategy', even more abstract and detached from empirical observation.
...It would be a bit like Hitler (or the Kaiser) sitting down and playing Diplomacy, and using that to determine his actual war/alliance plans.
 
[P.S. My daughter and 2 friends are studying WWI in school at the moment, so I pulled Diplomacy off the shelf last weekend and played 8 turns (6 players, Turkey armed but inactive). It was enough for them to grasp the 'two front war' dilemma facing the Central Powers, and Britain's balancing/spoiling role on the Continent. They actually got into it a lot more than expected.]

I've been working mostly in 3D printing (aka additive manufacturing, aka AM) since 2015, though leaving this job in a couple weeks after 22 years (to make robots!).  AM has great promise and also a lot of challenges.  One challenge is about DFAM (design for additive manufacturing).  People don't know how to take advantage of what AM can do and so just throw their injection molded or machined designs into AM, which is generally quite sub optimum. 
Other times, it's just people doing incredibly stupid things and then saying "look, AM doesn't work!".  Last week contact from an app engineer for my company in east asia who said a potential customer was making jig for factory use & it broke -- he said he was done w AM, we are trying to educate the idiot.  He took an aluminum part (E = stiffnesss modulus = 70,000MPa) and just switched to nylon PA12 (E=2000MPa) w same design.  Of course it f-ing broke!  They gave up 35X in stiffness!  To switch they would need more section to overcome the loss of stiffness, which is what my little team is doing right now.  
In general, AM will have less robust material properties than traditional methods, mostly in build direction (strength b/w layers), but you can design while accounting for that.  
Added note:  I've been to Oak Ridge Nat Labs AM lab twice, they were doing crazy stuff there, so impressive.  Like making molds for wind turbine blades, all kinds of things VERY large and regular size

Well, as Galeev pointed out many moons ago (perhaps more credible Russia threat analysts did as well) that, in addition to selling off a lot of the 'warehoused' kit and downsizing divisions to brigades to save money and focus on Chechnya-sized expeditionary wars, Serdyukov and the Kremlin also dismantled, or at least allowed to decay, the Soviet mass social mobilisation system.  So the folks who remember how to do that are all dead or retired, and the general population is out of the habit.  Not totally of course, but it's not a highly functional machine, and Putin can't simply will it back into being.