Two and a half threads worth your time (including a great Big Con reference)

Twitter has loads of issue and a potential for abuse arguably second only to Faceb-- sorry, Meta, but unlike whatever the hell it's called, Twitter (if used properly and that's a big if) can be one of the best places online for finding interesting and unexpected conversations with smart people. You have to be selective and pay close attention to who is recommending, speaking and replying, but if you stick with the informed and trustworthy, you can come across fascinating threads on topics like tire maintenance and the fate of nations. 

This is a thread that will explain the implied poor Russian Army truck maintenance practices based on this photo of a Pantsir-S1 wheeled gun-missile system's right rear pair of tires below & the operational implications during the Ukrainian mud season.🧵

1/ pic.twitter.com/LmxW43v6gy

— Trent Telenko (@TrentTelenko) March 2, 2022

...turned over and moved once a month for preventative maintenance reasons.

In particular you want to exercise the central tire air inflation system (CTIS) to see if lines have leaks or had insect/vermin nests blocking the system.

CTIS Controller & CTIS diagram👇👇

3/ pic.twitter.com/70NQnURiUj

— Trent Telenko (@TrentTelenko) March 2, 2022

When you leave military truck tires in one place for months on end. The side walls get rotted/brittle such that using low tire pressure setting for any appreciable distance will cause the tires to fail catastrophically via rips.

See early video:

5/https://t.co/QuOcZRw4Lj

— Trent Telenko (@TrentTelenko) March 2, 2022

It turns out that for those invading certain parts of Ukraine in early spring, this is a big deal.

Given the demonstrated levels of corruption in truck maintenance. There is no way in h--l that there are enough tires in the Russian army logistical system.

So their wheeled AFV/truck park is as road bound as Russian Army columns were in the 1st Russo-Finnish War.
9/ pic.twitter.com/6hPrDll8LE

— Trent Telenko (@TrentTelenko) March 2, 2022

At this point another tire expert pops up with an equally fascinating divergent thread.

Bit of a tire expert here. Those aren't Soviet-era heavy truck radials. Chinese military tires, and I believe specifically the Yellow Sea YS20. This is a tire I first encountered in Somalia and Sudan; it's a bad Chinese copy of the excellent Michelin XZL military tire design. 🇫🇷

— Karl T. Muth 🌐✈️📊 (@KarlMuth) March 3, 2022

Remember what I said about paying attention to who's replying? Noah Smith falls in the trustworthy category.  

You don't even understand, Karl has this level of esoteric knowledge about literally hundreds of things

— Noah Smith 🐇🇺🇦 (@Noahpinion) March 3, 2022

Some of these threads read like first drafts of blog posts. The choppiness can be distracting, but it can also have a staccato quality where each point lands distinctly and has a chance to stand on its own.

14 year ago, the world's financial system came to the brink of collapse. Central banks scrambled to react. Businesses shuttered. People lost their homes. Many governments fell. Faith in our institutions shattered. The Occupy movement was launched. So was Bitcoin. 1/ pic.twitter.com/T0FKv7RpIw

— Cory Doctorow (@doctorow) March 2, 2022

The GFC was precipitated by "financial innovation": new tricks that allowed traditional financial activities to take place while evading the controls instituted to head off the kinds of systemic collapses that plagued nations for centuries. 3/

— Cory Doctorow (@doctorow) March 2, 2022

"Credit swaps" allowed for effectively unlimited leverage, so that every routine transaction in the real economy could result in fortunes changing hands in the shadow banking world. 5/

— Cory Doctorow (@doctorow) March 2, 2022

III. Bank-runs: When over-leveraged assets hit a bump, the leverage and the rigidity of the contracts meant to "de-risk" it triggered cascading price-drops, which sent investors running for the doors. 7/

— Cory Doctorow (@doctorow) March 2, 2022

The shadow-banking system created a whole menagerie of exotic "products" that all shared one characteristic: they were complex. The complexity of these instruments made it hard to know when you were taking a sucker's bet. 9/

— Cory Doctorow (@doctorow) March 2, 2022

I've been talking about Twitter vs. blogs and other platforms, but the relationships are symbiotic. 

If talk of leverage, complexity, rigidity and system risk gives you deja vu, you're not alone. In a superb new paper, @ProfHilaryAllen of @AmericanU's @AUWCL argues that #DeFi, the "distributed finance" wing of #web3, is really "Shadow Banking 2.0."https://t.co/tjjsKnHuDH 20/

— Cory Doctorow (@doctorow) March 2, 2022

And I love the way Doctorow connects this to the classic book the Big Con.

If the mark was a gambler, they'd send a telegram ahead to their confederates calling for a stock swindle, where the gambler would be out of his depth. If the mark was a stock broker, they'd call for a horse-racing scam, because brokers didn't understand the ponies. 30/

— Cory Doctorow (@doctorow) March 2, 2022

Scammers who work smart contracts don't even need to change up the swindle: no matter whether the mark is a coder or a banker, there will be key elements of the game they can't make heads nor tails of. 32/

— Cory Doctorow (@doctorow) March 2, 2022