You can see the code of what is send.
I’m not aware that Google claims they collect data anonymously, on everything where you are logged in.
So that’s a false equivalence.

The MAC address is anonymized with sha256, and IP adresses aren’t stored.
So this seems to me to be perfectly anonymous.

This may be illegal in EU if they don’t use opt in. Even then it may be illegal for under 18 year olds to collect MAC addresses and disk serial numbers, as those can potentially be used for identification.

The data is anonymized, and the IP is NOT stored. So I’m not sure this violates GDPR?

From the code we can see the machine ID is anonymized, sending only a SHA256 checksum.

def get_hashed_device_id():
    # Read the machine ID
    with open("/etc/machine-id", "r") as f:
        machine_id = f.read().strip()

    # Hash the machine ID using SHA-256 to anonymize it
    hashed_id = hashlib.sha256(machine_id.encode()).digest()

    # Convert the first 16 bytes of the hash to a UUID (version 5 UUID format)
    return str(uuid.UUID(bytes=hashed_id[:16], version=5))

This makes it somewhat a nothingburger IMO.

I hope it’s true they can help Ukraine, it sounds great on the surface, but the whole piece also sounds like an ad.

Yes and also Turkey and Iran. Most is supposed to come from Turkey.

The interesting thing is that allegedly this is caused by the unstable economic situation in Russia, it’s simply too risky to invest in production.
And as long as that is true, the Russian industrial output will keep shrinking, making the economy even worse.

Apart from general economic information, which has to be filtered for propaganda, I don’t have much.
But there has been pretty thorough reporting of the butter situation, like this article:

https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/russia-wartime-economy-butter-price-inflation-1.7371742

The central bank forecast 8.5% inflation for the year, but that seems unrealistic. But they can politically freeze some prices for instance on fuel and electricity. But they also dictate “free market” prices more widely now, something they’ve done to keep cost for the war machine down. This may dampen inflation, but instead is likely cause shortages. It’s hard to do that for food though, because shortages there is as bad or probably worse than high prices. So that may explain why inflation on food is higher than average.

@MrMakabar@slrpnk.net posted a very interesting link to a debate on twitter on inflation:
threadreaderapp.com/thread/1841884096655720630.html

Thanks for the twitter free link 👍, Interesting read. Despite examples on single items that are higher, I think 30% is a bit on the high end, but it’s good to see people debunk the official propaganda.

I found the butter situation mostly confirming my own estimate.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/russia-wartime-economy-butter-price-inflation-1.7371742

But even this article on a single issue doesn’t state the size of the package:

Reuters reporters found shopping bills showed the price of a pack of Brest-Litovsk high-grade butter in Moscow has risen by 34 per cent since the start of the year to 239.96 roubles ($3.41 Cdn).

Searching further I found that the brand is generally sold in either 120 or 180 gram packages.
So that doesn’t help much except here we generally used 250 gram but many have shrinked it to 200g, so Russia may suffer some shrinkflation too?
But the claim is that butter has officially increased 25.7%, but according to Reuter price checks it’s 34%. But butter is supposed to be in the high end.

For sure inflation is nipping away the value of Russian wages. And it’s weird to read about Russians that are puzzled about why prices are increasing? But maybe they don’t dare say what they are thinking.

Even after increasing interest rates 3 times from 16% to 21% over a few months, the value of the Ruble is still declining!
I haven’t been able to find much info on their inflation though, I’ve had to kind of extrapolate that, but if it’s really higher than 30% for food, there must be a lot of Russian families that feel that badly. Hopefully that will help cool the Russians support for the war.
IMO it’s unlikely that inflation is lower than 15%, which will already be a problem for many Russians, and will only get worse with Putins current economic policies.

I’d be interested to know where you get info on inflation in Russia?

Oh I misremembered what bitwarden is.

deleted by creator

121 vehicles! I think that’s a new record.
And Russia continue to find tanks enough to still be able to waste 19 of them in a single day.

I know the Russians are managing to progress slowly currently, but I hope they are sacrificing too much, so those are Pyrrhic victories.
That’s officially the Ukrainian strategy. Hopefully it’s working.

How do you fight all the inexpensive drones being mass produced?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flakpanzer_Gepard

Keeping your own population in check is way cheaper than waging war. Your own population doesn’t have their own military.

When the war ends, I expect they’ll reduce military cost dramatically, because they have to.

You’re basically saying “no way they don’t collapse”

No I’m not, I’m saying no way they wont go into a multiple year recession. And they MAY collapse as a single nation because of it.
There is no doubt their economy is seriously cracking already.

Yes if the war ended tomorrow, I suppose you are right they could rebuild some of what they’ve lost, and become stronger than they became at their weakest.
But it would be very dangerous politically to allocate a lot of ressources to the military after the war, when the country is in dire need of restoration to where they were before the war. Even if they haven’t been bombed much, Russia has lost a lot economically, investments in infrastructure and production has been near zero for almost 2 years already, even the already existing capacity hasn’t been maintained.

Russians a getting poorer fast, and just ending the war will not automatically turn things around, the economy is not healthy, and Russia needs to allocate ressources for restoring the economy, which will mean that ordinary household economies will be strained for years.

The “magic” economic growth we saw after WW2 will not happen for Russia, because the conditions that existed back then to create it, are not present today. For instance women entering the workplace in greater numbers. Where Russia will remain short on manpower.

Bullshit. The Russian army has lost massive amounts of valuable equipment, they’ve lost a significant part of the demographic that can be mobilized. The country has lost the war chest they’d built up over many years, and the Russian economy and infrastructure is set back many years already.
It’s much more likely that Russia will be split into multiple states, and Russia will become more irrelevant than they’ve been for a millennium.
The Russian economy will probably continue to struggle for decades after the war, as sanctions are only lifted slowly, and only if Russia promises to behave.

Før krigen og Russerne fuckede med energipriserne i Europa, var vi 5 naboer der købte træpiller sammen, nu er de 4 gået over til luft til vand VP.
Sjovt nok giver det ca. samme varme per kWh som 1 kg træpiller.
Som priserne er nu, koster det ca. det samme i drift på normal priser, men når den lavere afgift over 4000 kWh på el regnes ind, er varmepumpen billigere.
Men hvis man har solpaneler med batteri, falder fidusen med afgifterne hurtigt fra. så vi har beholdt pillefyret indtil videre.

OK, I’m surprised to see the numbers are so much higher in 2024 than 2023, it was apparently only by the end of 2023 the numbers were very high, still compared to being one of the highest numbers of casualties, the number of tanks today is relatively low, as it is below average.
And the number of tanks is on a clearly downwards trajectory since a year ago. October ending as possibly the 2nd lowest this year.

Tank losses this month are higher then most months of 2023

Are you sure? because that’s not how I remember it, as I recall numbers were generally close to 20 per day last year.
The average for the war according to these numbers is 9120 tanks /940 days = 9.7 tanks per day.
So considering this is one of the highest casualty numbers of the war, the tank number is relatively small.