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Laxtonto

Burnt Ends
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Everything posted by Laxtonto

  1. This is good and bad, because if you throw up a map of rare earth minerals, you now have a defacto set of new boundaries for the Ukraine. Back to the carrot and the stick approach to all of these negotiations. I don’t necessarily like the approach because it now implies that the aid we now gives comes at a “price”, but it also now provides a legitimate impetuous for the US to provide assistance that make sure that the mineral rights they get are now being protected. Also it puts added pressure on Russia to be careful of over running locations now in which the US has territorial mineral rights to. The real question will be what aid does this buy and what, if any, conditions that aid comes with? Any new redlines in their use? Any old redlines removed? The devil is in the details.
  2. It provides a way to “invest” into projects to signal legitimacy of a project or desired direction of a technology or concept without having to straight up provide a grant or subsidy. Investing with the expectation of seeing a return is a much different signal than grant and aid. Now how it’s managed or the approach and targets is up in the air, but the major impact would be that that the US SWF sees something is a worthwhile investment or risk would bring legitimacy and there potentially other investors. I am torn if I like the idea of the US having their own SWF, but it’s not a complete waste or graft. The issue I see is that the US generally views that rest of the world see the power of the US market and economy and so outside investors solve all of our capital concerns and so a SWF isn’t really needed. Thinking out the box, could we use the SWF as an investment vehicle for nuclear power in the US and around the globe? Something that is sufficiently cost prohibitive and in the US may not be able to be funded by outside interest due to national security concerns.
  3. Laxtonto

    Hudson Card

    So did Card finish his degree here at UT before he left? Because if so he got a BBA from McCombs and a MBA from Krannert, all on some elses dime...
  4. My guess is that the ATC is going to take some blame for not providing specific detailed approach information vs. just stating if they see the incoming aircraft. The Blackhawk crew will receive most of the blame, and unless something extreme comes up in the aircraft black box, AA will be absolved from any wrongdoing or liability.
  5. DOD released his statement 20 minutes after the incident.
  6. Various reports of "14 on the beach" were pulled from the various emergency frequency chatter, but that could be bodies recovered or survivors.
  7. Transportation Secretary was sworn in this afternoon.... Holy shit first day...
  8. Speculation is that the Blackhawk pilots were wearing night vision and may have mistaken the aircraft lights for other lights in the distance. So most likely pilot error due to lack of depth perception via nightvision and failure to re3cognize where they were.
  9. PAT25 first started tracking NEAR CIA headquarters, unknown if it took off from there. Also unknown if there were any passengers on board, or if it was just the pilots
  10. Rumors right now are of 60+ dead or missing
  11. Who was on the helicopter? How VIP are we talking?
  12. All schools allow add drop with conditional signatures (generally up until week 5 or so) for various circumstances. My guess if he decides this weekend, he will be in class on Monday.
  13. https://surlyx.com/TWMCLtd/status/1883421271519637985
  14. This is the area that actually might force Trump to be more hardlined with Russia over the negotiations to end the war. He is very concerned with nuclear war and sounds like he seems the expansion of the global nuclear arsenal as a whole negatively. So the real question is what is the leverage of a reduced NATO timeline vs Ukrainian nuclear development? I have to admit this is an avenue I haven’t really thought about and probably requires more in-depth thought. I might reach out to some of the old school Eastern Europe nuclear proliferation scholars I know and see their view point on this. Funny how their area of expertise went to the way side and now is coming screaming back to the forefront.
  15. There is no rational argument that the Russia of today is better off than it was in 2021. There is no functional argument that allows anyone to believe that the 50-year timeline is more positive for Russia in the post-2021 version of events in comparison to a plausible per-invasion timeline. The problem is that Putin made a move, that if was successful ie the 3 day planned rollup of Kiev, that would have placed Russia in a much better place than they were in 2021 geopolitically. But that move failed and now we are all living Putin's sunk cost fallacy as he hopes to now win his Phrryic victory for his own legacy of expansion at the cost of Russia's well-being as a whole. This is a case of a leader being unwilling to recognize and disengage from a mistake. In many cases, he does not have a ton of positive viable off-ramps that would allow him to save face now. He caught the tiger by the tail and doesn't have a way to let go without getting mauled. All he can hope for is that the tiger starves to death before he does. I am starting to be of the belief that Putin really has some sort of slow terminal illness and all of these ideas and agreements are looking to blunt his steady slide into madness knowing full well that after the fact they will be overridden in the chaos.
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