UVZ

This acronym strikes terror into the hearts of Russia's enemies. 

The acronym stands for Uralvagonzavod--literally Ural Railcars Works. And, boy, look at them those "railcars" produced in the city of Nizhny Tagil. 

Not only those "railcars", starting from legendary T-34s, first of which rolled off the conveyor in 1941, to T-72s to T-90M Proryv, continue to roll off assembly lines today, but UVZ produced now undeniably the best tanks in the world--real combat in SMO left no doubts about it. Moreover, Russia is unbeatable in terms of quality and numbers of these tanks produced. By a mile, more than whole NATO combined. Today, UVZ celebrates its 88th anniversary. These are state-of-the-art, netcentric tanks which are capable to take on any self-proclaimed "best" Western tanks and defeat them, in fact--they did it many times already. 

Dmitry Orlov in his latest, symptomatically titled Uncontrolled Chaos, notes today:

It was a disaster 80 years in the making. At the end of World War II, the United States stood virtually alone as an economic power. Accounting for 50 percent of global GDP, it held 80% of the world's hard currency reserves. Fast-forward to 2024 and the share of the US in the world economy has shrunk to 14.76% (calculated from figures provided by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund). But even this number is misleading, for fully 20% of the US economy is made of what goes under the acronym FIRE: finance, insurance and real estate. These are unproductive parasites on the productive economy. Another unproductive parasite is health care: ridiculously overpriced, it amounts to almost a quarter of all spending in the US. Neither the resources consumed by FIRE, nor by health care spending, contribute much of anything to the standing of the US within the world economy. Adjusted for these, the US share of the world economy dwindles to just over 8%. While hardly negligible, this share is nowhere near sufficient to give the US anything like a majority vote or veto power in world affairs. The tragedy of the situation is that the mindset of Americans, particularly those occupying positions of authority in Washington, has been unable to adapt to this development. Their mindset appears to be fixed for all time: they believe that they can still dictate terms to the whole world and finding it increasingly awkward to cover up for the fact that almost the whole world (with some notable exceptions) now feels free to ignore them.

Here, you can see yourself overwhelmingly non-productive nature of the US economy. 

Get it? They consider a third world economy "based on services" a sign of a "developed nation". No wonder, when one looks at such "developed nations" like UK or Germany which increasingly look like a third world. Which also explains why the US is incapable of producing a new Main Battle Tank, with the reputation (primarily through Hollywood and propaganda) being blown up to smithereens by good ol' UVZ's T-72. Remember this? 

Well, in related news... Another SSK of pr. 636 Yakutsk (for Pacific Fleet) was floated today. 

But, but, I am sure that capitalization of the St.Petersburg's Admiralty Wharfs which builds those subs is nowhere near the capitalization of any business consulting company in the US. Hey, what do those losers at UVZ have on this monster--they'll tell you how to run business, right? Right?