Everybody. Peter Zein here coming to you from the Hoover wilderness. This is the Northwest shoulder slide mountain. I’m in the part where Yosemite merges into the Hoover. And there’s so many things to look at. They haven’t even bothered naming most of them anyway, taking an entry from the ask Peter forum today, specifically asking for comment about the effort in the Baltic Republics. That’s Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. There are three central European states on the Baltic Sea who are switching their electrical system over from Russian standard to European standard. This has been a long time coming. They’re actually already using European generation assets, but they do use a different frequency. If you remember back to the battle days of the Cold War, everyone was convinced for a while, pre 1985 roughly, that they needed to control their own manufacturing system. And so we all had our own electrical network. The Soviets had theirs. The Americans had theirs. The Brits had theirs. Mainland Europe had theirs. Australia and New Zealand had theirs. Blah, blah, blah, blah, wow. It was really annoying. Anyway, now that the Baltic states are no longer part of the Cold War, just be no longer part of the Soviet Union, they are finally switching over. And while the connections are already in place to draw power from the European Space, this will be changing the frequency as well. So basically, everything’s going to go down one day next year, I think, in March, and then it’s going to come back up, and they’ll feel a little bit more European. Little bit more European. This is one of the many problems that the Balts and really all of the central Europeans have had in adapting from Soviet life to European life. Most of these countries had their first taste of industrialization under Soviet rule in some way, and don’t make that think that they’re laggards, because, you know, Sweden had their first taste of real industrialization in the 1940s and 50s as well. This is just what had happened for many, many, many people. And so their systems were designed to work in a different world, and moving over bit by bit can be done, but it takes time and it takes resources. In the case of the Balts, they are definitely the laggards in this Poland, the Czech Republic Hungary and Slovakia, went over very, very early, because they have a lot more physical connections to Europe. So for example, you can basically walk from any part of Germany to every any part of Poland without a problem. The Balts are hanging off the northern end of Poland, and there’s a little problem in this little enclave called Kaliningrad, which inhibits direct connections between the greater EU and the Balts. Basically, you’ve got this little pocket of Russian territory that’s on the Baltic Sea. Kind of reminds me of, I don’t know, Washington, DC, without the governance, you get all the dirt, all the traffic, all the corruption, all the bad weather, but none of the, none of the power North Carolina feels like to me anyway. Um, rooting around that has always been difficult because there’s a security issue. Uh, there’s something called the, let’s see make I’m gonna butcher the same silhovaki silvaki sulevaki sulevaki gap, which is the thin layer of territory that connects a sliver of Poland to a sliver of Lithuania. They’re building out infrastructure to make that a more viable connection, but it takes time and remember that the Balts are they’re called the tiny Baltic Republics for a reason. These are not large states. And when they got into the European Union, and they got into the Schengen zone, and they got into the free movement treaty. A lot of people who were in their 30s or younger left. So the total population for all three Baltic states combined is only about 8 million. I mean, geography’s a bitch. You’ve got this kind of weak connection, and then that kind of population density, there’s only so fast that you can go without a lot of outside help. Now, the European Union with development funds has been paying for some of this, but ultimately, the balls have to dig deep. There’s also been talk about the Swedes and the Finns doing more, like maybe having a bridge or a tunnel from Finland to Estonia. But you should put that out of your mind right now, because Finland only has like, five, 6 million people, so it would never be viable anyway. This is one of the many, many reasons why, back in the day, in the 2000s I was like, You’re gonna expand NATO, great Poland, obviously, Hungary, obviously, Romania, obviously, but the Balts, should we really be extending the defense guarantee to countries that can’t be defended? But that was 20 years ago, and in that time, the Balts and the Europeans have come a long way in building connections among them, and more importantly, in the Ukraine, where we’ve seen very, very, very clearly that the Russian army is not all that, and they’re burning through their men and their equipment in a rate that they just can’t replace. So while it’s still a meaningful conversation about defense, about the Balts, because they are very exposed and at the very end of a very long chain of logistics, it’s no longer silly to have that conversation. So I see this electrical switchover as another small step on a multi decade pro.
Process to make the balls part of the free world so far, so good.