Bear With Me On This One
Nothing to do with the species 'Ursa' in real life, but very much a metaphorical one, and I'm going to run with this theme to be able to wheel in a click-baity picture. Art!
Congrats if you figured out that the 'Bear' in question is a Ruffian one, but did you get what the 'necessities' part referred to?
I'll bet you didn't. Allow me to guide you in the right direction with a map I stole from 'Prune60' over on Twitter (ha! take that Elong Tusk!). Art!
It isn't the circulatory system of a Resimbulated Thiomine, nor yet the wiring diagram for a Sixties transistor radio. It is, in fact, the railway network of Mordorvia, appropriately enough in red, as it's a relic of their Sinister history. The rail network is relatively dense in European Ruffia, getting increasingly sparse as you move out of the regions with high populations to the poverty-stricken provincial backwaters, where a flush toilet is a thing of legend and teh Interwebz are satanic magic. Art!
'RZD'
Or, 'Rossiskoe Zhelenye Dorogi' in their barbarous tongue, 'Russian Railways' in proper language. RZD not only owns and runs the trains, it maintains the track network as well, and is wholly owned by the state, so they can't blame a single tech bro or oligarch if things go agley.
RZD - made up of 22 subsidiary companies - is tasked with keeping 85,000 kilometres of track in good condition, or at least not too bad condition, running 20,618 locomotives and over 250,000 freight cars, and is/was Ruffia's largest employer, with a workforce 700,000 strong.
Why the intermingling of present and past tense? O I thought you'd never ask! Art?
I enjoin you to go visit Ol' Pruney, either on the devi's digital desert, Twitter, or Bluesky, because she puts an awful lot of work into her analysis, of which this is a minor buffing o'er the surface of, never mind a scratch.
You see, there have been inherent problems in RZD for decades, which have been compounded ever since it came into existence in 2003. As of April 2024, over a year and a half ago, 50% of Ruffia's locomotives were over 20 years old. Their own management admitted that age was exacerbated by wear, incorrect operation, how good (or bad!) previous servicing and repair had been, spare parts, depot stocks and the quality of management. Conrad thinks this last one is a euphemism for 'how corrupt and incompetent they were before they got arrested.' Art!
"The train on Plaform 13 will never move again"
'Kyiv Insider', again in 2024, reported RZD's profits had fallen from ₽118 billion in 2023 to ₽14 billion in 2024, or a decline to less than 1/8th. You can probably anticipate where we're going with this. Art!
A return for 'Beefeater' whom we featured in the article about boars.
By May of 2025, RZD employees were having their salary cut by 50% to reduce staff costs. Individual divisions within the business were down to 60% of staff, with a hiring freeze in place, again to keep staff costs down
In his August 2025 Tweet he explains that RZD employees are now being sent on unpaid leave for three days of the month, and that their investment program has been slashed by 40%. Which means far less money for maintaining railway tracks, meaning travel by RZD is going to become as dangerous as travelling by Aeroflot. Art!
Case in point. A derailed train that had been ordered to do 100 k.p.h. on a stretch of track near St. Petersburg only rated for 50 k.p.h.
Beefy's latest update as of 2nd December quantifies how badly RZD is doing: ₽4.4 trillion in debt, or $50 billion in proper money. AND this is only up to the end of Q3, so there's another 3 months for it to get even worse. The business's cash reserves have shrunk from ₽251 billion to ₽21 billion, $271 million in South Canadian currency, which might sound like a lot. HOWEVER! O that word again - if we assume that a Ruffian RZD employee's average monthly wage is the equivalent of $1,000 - perhaps a bit on the high side but convenient for calculations - then their collective monthly salary comes to $700 million, or over $2 billion for Q4, that is, eight times what the business has in cash. Art!
This
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| With helpful Rosenburg Pilot Hi-Techpoint transalation |
None of this is helped by the gradually increasing number of Ukrainian - er - 'interventions' as exemplified by 'Igor Sushko' on Twitter. Art!
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That's a Ruffian 500 Kv substation going up in flames, which used to be able to provide electricity to RZD substations. Shocking.
DANGER! Will Robinson And Everyone In The Vicinity
Let me illustrate and perhaps entertain in equal parts with another example of outstanding stupidity, by one who will collect a Darwin Award in due course. Art!
Courtesy 'Discover Tech US'
The footage is rather grainy, so you may not be able to see that he's working on a lathe, which is spinning it's VERY SHARP edges at incredible RPM. He wants to reach a tool on the shelf behind the lathe and doesn't bother shifting a couple of feet over, choosing instead to stretch from where he stands, because idle. Art!
Before you even look at the next picture, you know what's going to happen, don't you? Art!
There's no sound on this clip, but I bet matey was yelling his lungs out, as his dog has woken up and started to get interested. Art!
Luckily for him it was a cheap and nasty t-shirt, which shredded apart faster than he could be pulled onto the lathe. Imagine if it had been anything more robust. No, he didn't get time to hit the 'Off' switch as the whole clip only takes 7 seconds from stretch to shorts-only.
Lesson learned. One hopes.
TACO Taco
That's the acronym for 'Trump Always Chickens Out', referring to how he consistently backs down, off or away when either pretending to stand up to Putinpot, or making hard decisions that require the intellect of a 10-year old. I have only just discovered, because it was announced with minimal publicity, that 200 food tariffs he had imposed have been rolled back. Art!
Donold hard at work. For him.
Sadly for DJ Tango, tariffs do not magically cause money to be created out of nothing, which he probably read in a Christmas cracker joke when he was 8 and took to heart. In fact they have pushed up the South Canadian cost of living and if there's one thing they hate hate hate above all else, never mind war, famine, floods, earthquakes, volcanoes or poison ivy, it's having to pay more for their groceries.
Half A Loaf
Conrad has been merrily bashing 'Tank Encyclopedia' for Lo! these many months as they use either the Bob Semple or another incorrect vehicle as the thumbnail for their items on my news feed.
Today they get it half-right. Art
'Captured' is stretching the truth, rather. You see, when the Nazis occupied Czechoslovakia, they also acquired the Czech armaments industry, and their tank park. They rapidly incorporated the Czech tanks into the Wehrmacht, as they were quite as good as any native designs the Teutons had. Art!
This is the tank in the thumbnail, a Panzer 35(t), the 't' being short for the Teuton word 'tschechisch' meaning 'Czechoslovakian'. All good, right?
WRONG! Art?
This is the tank the video is about, the Panzer 37(t), a completely different vehicle as you can tell from the chassis and lack of recuperator above the gun barrel.
Don't get it wrong in front of a hair-splitting pedant.
Finally -
Art!
Never mind Fat Caligula, this here is Nicholas 'Five Dinners' Maduro, the Venezualan dictator, whose waistline vies with that of BOOH in a country on permanent verge of famine. Conrad is intrigued as to what he's doing here - a very bad salute or cocking a snook?
Done are we that with and!
.* Dozy Don?
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