“Sean Penn vows to achieve fuck all.”
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A major Chinese oil company just cancelleda half billion dollar deal to buy Russian oil.
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A multilateral development bank based in China suspends activities in Russia and Belarus
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I first became aware of this 20 years ago when I talked to someone who worked in the auto industry in the UK. He explained why every decade, cars look more and more alike. The parts are increasingly sourced from the same suppliers, and economy of scale applies pressure to use a mass-produced part. At the time, he commented “People think of VW as a semi-premium brand. Not top-shelf like Mercedes, but maybe just one shelf below that. And they often think of Skoda as budget-at-best. But a Skoda is about 80% VW Golf parts.”
So yep, the Russian auto industry is likely screwed if the parts suppliers aren’t delivering.
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Even without corruption, it’s really difficult in any organization to keep the “hot spares” stock from becoming the “spare parts” stock.
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Interview with a Ukrainian Mig-29 pilot. Still able to fly after a month fighting what was supposed to be one of the top air forces in the world.
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Even people who know nothing about Ukraine can see on a map it’s bisected by a major river
This must have come up before—all the usual empires must have wanted to carve it up that way
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It’s not just that. But the vertical integration that goes along with it.
The VW and Skoda don’t share that many parts cause everyone is buying the same bumpers from some 3rd party.
It’s because they’re different divisions of the same company. As are Porche, SEAT, and Audi.
So it creates huge efficiency across the supply and support chain. To use as many bits and pieces repeatedly across as many models and brands as possible.
Most modern car companies operate on the “platform” model. Where the drive train, suspension and frame are a standardized setup which can be used to make dozens of models. Put different bodies on them, different features and parts to differentiate. Parts and major components are designed to work on multiple platforms.
Companies will even license their platforms out. So your Ford, may basically be a Mitsubishi. With Ford stuff fleshing it out.
As goes Russia. They don’t do this. Sure they’re buying a lot of parts abroad, everyone has to.
But nobody is licensing Lada platforms. No one is importing GAZ engines.
Kinda the opposite. Their biggest car manufacturer is AvtoVAZ/Lada. It’s owned by Renault.
They mostly seem to make cars based on Renault platforms, or just rebadged Renaults. Looks like a couple models designed by Chevy.
Their other car companies either seem to be making industrial trucks, or like wise rebadging foreign cars.
It’s not just parts they won’t be able to get. They won’t have engines to put in anything, for some cars they may not have been making anything at all. Just final assembly on stuff from outside Russia.
So they wouldn’t have anything to assemble, and they wouldn’t have the tooling to make anything to assemble.
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Regime change may not be the official policy of the United States, but come on, there is no scenario where the world is safe with Putin at the helm of Russia.
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It would be nice if Russia also provided a complete list of all Westerners on their payroll and the location of said Westerners hidden funds. Yes. Yes. That would be nice.
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Definitely. Jets with smart bombs to take out Russian artillery sites ASAP.
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Also the word official is doing a lot of work there.
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Three people I’d just as soon have less exposure/platform:
Tulsi Gabbard
Tucker Carlson
Adam Kinzinger
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Officially sanctioned kleptomaniacs.
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Assuming you mean Kinzinger, he is only tolerable in comparison to what his party has become. Anti-ACA, anti-EPA, pro-concealed carry, Benghazi-obsessed. I’m not a fan.
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