https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/russian-oil-refineries-terminals-burn-ukraine-hits-putins-war-economy-2025-08-25/ Some very good news: Reuters estimates that Ukraine's campaign of air strikes against Russia's economy has managed to take out 17% of oil refining capacity. Not just oil and gas either: farming has been so badly hit that Russia recently put restrictions on bankruptcies of farming companies to try to slow down the collapse. This has always been how Ukraine will win, and Russian violence will be stopped forever: accept that the "civilian" economy in Russia is a valid military target, and kill Russians and blow up their infrastructure until it collapses.

Libertarians are idiots to think market forces will solve this. Google and Apple have enormous incentives to lock down their platforms. View quoted note →

Building Ultra Cheap Energy Storage for Solar PV

Solar still needs storage cheap enough to move energy between seasons. I have been working on a startup to do this for the last two years.

Possible competition for Bitcoin mining heat reuse... If they can make this as cheap as they want it to be, mining might not be able to compete due to capital costs.

Possibly the highest elevation deployment of a naval mine:

Libre Relay v29.1rc2 is now available:

GitHub

GitHub - petertodd/bitcoin at libre-relay-v29.1rc2

Bitcoin integration/staging tree. Contribute to petertodd/bitcoin development by creating an account on GitHub.

The main thing notable here is Bitcoin Core v29.1rc2 merged the lowering of the minimum relay fee-rates. So Libre Relay has that too. sub-1sat/vB summer! ⛱️ Interestingly in testing this, I manually checked propagation of a bunch of sub-1sat/vB transactions. Looks like I'm not the only one running Libre Relay nodes with sub-1sat/vB! Not just Libre Relay either. Lots of nodes seem to be doing this.

https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/ukrainian-man-arrested-italy-over-nord-stream-pipeline-attacks-2025-08-21/ “Ukrainian man arrested in Italy over Nord Stream pipeline attacks” If found guilty, this man needs to be sentenced to a military parade and medals.

Some videos from inside Russia and occupied Ukraine showing the massive lines for fuel. Ukraine's campaign against Russian refineries and other oil infrastructure is becoming successful enough that fuel prices in Russia are rising and gas stations are rationing it. In some places you need Russian government approval to buy gasoline; ordinary civilians can't get it legally at any price. It's not hard. Russia's wars end when their economy is collapsed and they can't afford to fight.

“Peace must be lasting. Not like it was years ago, when Ukraine was forced to give up Crimea and part of our East—part of Donbas—and Putin simply used it as a springboard for a new attack. Or when Ukraine was given so called “security guarantees” in 1994, but they didn't work.” - Zelenskyy A rare example of low time preference thinking in politics. Trump is high time preference: he wants "peace" now. But it will inevitably result in a bigger war later. The only way to actually achieve a lasting peace is to actually win.

X (formerly Twitter)

Volodymyr Zelenskyy / Володимир Зеленський (@ZelenskyyUa) on X

I have already arrived in Washington, tomorrow I am meeting with President Trump. Tomorrow we are also speaking with European leaders. I am gratefu...

Reclaim The Net

Russia Blocks Voice Calls on WhatsApp and Telegram

Russia’s grip on foreign tech tightens one feature at a time.

Russia just blocked voice calls on WhatsApp and Telegram. Notice how this is happening now, after a decade of war invading Ukraine. The latest in a long list of Russian invasions. Russia doesn't need to hide the realities of the war from its population: Russian culture is all for theft, rape, and murder. It's a popular war. Hell, Russian telegram is full of Russian units bragging about their drone strikes on Ukrainian civilians. What Russia needs to hide is the fact that they're gradually losing. Just this year Ukraine estimates that military strikes on the Russian economy have already cost them 4% of GDP. Not enough. But combined with all the other costs of war, their economy is in bad shape and there is no path to things getting better without coercing Ukraine into surrender. _That_ is what Russians care about. And we need to be doing a lot more to destroy Russia's economy and impoverish that psychopathic society. Killing Russians and blowing up their infrastructure means they can't kill you.

“UK government states that 'safety' act is about influence over public discourse”

Bluesky Social

Simon McGarr (@tupped.bsky.social)

The U.K. Online Safety Act was (avowedly, as revealed in a recent High Court case) “not primarily aimed at protecting children” but at regulati...