Im sorry for laughing at your comment, it was fun to read and now Im wondering how much does it affect on general population, surely chinese population must have a huge % of people with ulcers at the very least
They do as far as my observation can be a valid evidence. A decade ago when I went to a hospital in China, the line to the ailments of the stomach and intestine was the longest, and this was true in several hospital across different provinces.
My family is using a directv antena bought in colombia and paying service in colombia, in Venezuela, so I'm pretty sure the market will try to do that as soon as they lunch in colombia
Normal satellite TV services work by restricting the area the signal is broadcast to. It has limitations on how precise it can be, and the receiver is pretty much passive.
Starlink is an active two-way system. Not only are they using high precision beam guidance on both ends, the receiver also has a GPS antenna and will report it's location back to the network.
Starlink is capable of turning off groundstations that are not where they're supposed to be. Not only capable, but for 'fixed location' groundstations (i.e normal service), they actually do block service if you move too far from where your assigned service area is.
- Time. This one took over a decade and a half to build, and that's pretty normal
- Cost. Literally billions of dollars, all upfront. This one was budgeted at $3B and ended up costing $10B+.
- Inflexibility. Almost all of the cost is in building one, so if you aren't running it basically 100% of the time at 100% capacity you are losing money.
When it comes to $/MWh, nuclear simply can't compete with fossil or renewable when demand is low. And you can't run it to pick up high demand because it gets even more expensive. The private market is simply not interested in them, unless they get a government guarantee that forces their production to be bought at a fixed price.
And there's of course the whole safety and waste argument, but I consider that to be secondary. All in all, nuclear is a could-have-been and mostly a side-effect of nuclear arms development. Neat technology, but there are way better options.
We have to build lots of bigger, standardised reactors which will then reduce the cost due to experience and economies of scale. But then of course someone has to subsidise the tens/hundreds of billions in upfront investment to get to that point.
Where as with renewables this was all done decades ago. And we are now at the point where it is orders of magnitude cheaper than nuclear. And getting cheaper by the day.
Renewable+storage is not an order of magnitude cheaper yet, thus far it is just "a lot" cheaper. But that is a predictable outcome, because nobody is predicting when those costs will bottom out. (They will have to, at some point, as incidental cost becomes an increasing fraction of the total. But we are not close to that point yet, except on residential rooftops.)
See this nuclear positive website that doesn't have an imprint (I can find on mobile). I wouldn't bcall it research either. Summary would probably be fair.
> See this nuclear positive website that doesn't have an imprint
You mean an "Impressum"? That's just some weird thing that AFAIK (almost?) only German Web sites have, because they're required to by German law. The vast majority of sites on the World Wide Web get by just fine without it; it's not like that's some kind of minimum requirement for a reputable site.
Many, probably most, Web sites the world over have "About Us" or "Contact" pages. It's just that they're not universally called "Impressum" ("Imprint"); that's a Germany-only thing.
So saying "a Web site without an imprint" as if that in itself somehow showed the site were somehow bad is, if it's about a non-German site, just stupid. HTH.
Yeah but only where it fits the narrative which in the question of cost for example leads to this:
1) If markets valued the low-CO2 nature of nuclear, they’d be doing better
2) Multiple hypothetical approaches to reduce nuclear costs are ongoing. No one knows for sure if any of them will work, or which one will work best
3) Factory-produced large reactors on floating platforms is a surprisingly intriguing idea to make reactors cheap
or: 1) make everything else more expensive so we look better
2) let me consult the magic orb because I have nothing in my hands
3) I have a nice idea
Meanwhile we have HERE just another example of hilariously expensive reactor. Actual facts. Waved away with theories like "we don't have the people with experience anymore" which leaves you with the thought: should inexperienced people build nuclear reactors at all?
20 years ago I was all for nuclear, then I looked at terrible projects in Europe, like in the Finland and the UK, and realised that it's too little too late. Europe can't build nuclear, so rather than trying to fight a losing battle for another 20 years, Europe should be massively investing in what it can do (offshore wind, tidal, solar, pumped hydro)
I'm thinking proliferation as positive. Just think of countries recently in war had nuclear deterrent. They might not have been invaded in first place. Everyone having nuclear weapons would make world much more peaceful and safer place.
That is unless we sanction all nations that have nuclear weapons and blockade them from international trade until they get rid of them and subject themselves to being open to inspections for couple centuries.
Then again the so called "rational" actors would be less likely do bad things. Just imagine how much better place world would be if in response to drone strike by Obama or Biden the NYC or Washington DC was hit by nuclear weapon. That would surely put end to those antics.
If you think the near-certainty of getting wiped out entirely at some point is the right price for avoiding wars, then sure. I'm not sure most people share that preference.
AFAIK Finland is the only country in the world that has managed to build a long term (they're planning for something like 100000 years) nuclear waste storage facility.
* Plants are very expensive to build. Due to massive upfront costs, it cannot beat wind/solar today unless you use very unusual financial models. (ie. assume interest rates are zero for 50 years). If nuclear plants were built more frequently, cost would come down a lot - it turns out making everything bespoke is hugely expensive.
* Lots of public opposition due to the public being scared of nuclear waste, nuclear accidents, etc. The public far prefers taking on invisible risk (like the lung cancer risk from coal/oil/gas emissions) than the huge event risk of a nuclear meltdown, even if the overall harm to human lives is higher.
And if you manage to convince someone this is an airplane crash type of problem, they start about the finances.
And they're right about it not being the cheapest option, so what can you say? They win the argument.
Next time you meet the person is at a protest where they don't want a solar farm where there is now a nice forest or pasture, no 24/7 moving shadows from huge wind turbine blades and that's after they pushed for a law to require more space between the edge of town and the nearest turbine, protesting for fish rights when hydro is being proposed (if that's possible in their area in the first place)...
People also love to gloss over that electricity is 10% of the problem. Whenever you see a headline about Germany having run on 90% renewable power last month or whatever, mentally replace that with 9% because energy used in transportation, building heating, etc. don't count towards this. And then we haven't even touched upon the problem of cement/steel/plastic yet, we're going to need breakthrough materials or negative emissions with capturing plants that, you guessed it, also require electricity.
It's apparently very hard to understand that we need to work on all fronts, not pick a partial solution and wait until that's exhaustively implemented (all reasonably available space occupied) 15 years down the road, then wonder why emissions are at record highs (see 2021).
As a rule of thumb, greenhouse gas emissions are roughly equally split between electricity production, transportation, heating, agriculture and industry, about 20% each. Transportation is electrifying rather quickly in Europe, heating at a bit slower pace. So it's a bit better than "10% of the problem" - it's about 20% now, becoming ~40% in 10-15 years, eventually lowering total emissions by ~60% probably some time around 2050
Agriculture and industry are tough nuts to crack. With electricity, transport and heating, it's a problem of scaling out. With agriculture and industry - we don't even have a blueprint yet
Fair enough. My figures are from 2013 and even then it was better than 10% (namely 12.7% in the Netherlands where I'm from; that's the latest info Wikipedia has). I'll use 20% as a rule of thumb going forwards because that's indeed more future-proof.
If mere cost/time predictability were the problem we could double any worst-case projection. Even at that price point it's something I think we should pursue alongside the more renewable sources. That electricity has been dirt(y) cheap in the past decades was great, but that's just not sustainable.
But yeah if we argue for another five years before getting started on at least the legislation/planning stages (after which we could still declare it a sunk cost, based on how the situation looks in 2027), we might as well forget about it.
Firstly, the plant above has costed more than 3x projected time or money, so doubling is not going to solve anything.
Secondly, forget civic planning, could you or I go to our companies and say just double by budget because we don't know how to plan well ? What is the guarantee our plan is at least 50% accurate ? i.e. only 2x is enough ?
Poor planning cannot be solved by increasing budget (time or money), even in non public projects, work has tendency to get expanded to meet the budget, basically if Norway had thought 2x the $3B and actually budgeted $6B, they would likely have spent $20B in the end.
All this is only for operational life of the plant, it does not even include long term costs of waste storage because no one can even model that well enough or budget for it today.
I am not saying we shouldn't do nuclear, we really should, but truly commercial plans are meaningless unless we can handle costs better, We should invest more on that, there is encouraging work in SMRs(Small Modular Reactors) that could potentially address these concerns, until then most plants are experimental high risk projects from a public plan perspective.
You left out proliferation of dual-use technologies. The fewer countries with advanced nuclear capabilities, the more thinly spread the expertise necessary to build nuclear weapons.
If Russia didn't have nukes, its imperialistic ambitious would be curtailed. The ability to shield conventional assaults behind a nuclear threat is destabilizing for the rules-based world order.
Is this also sarcasm? So you're saying that building this plant has increase the chance Finland will try to acquire Nuclear weapons? And Russia has nukes purely due to political and military reasons, they'd still have more than enough of them if they mostly started closing/stopped building new plants after Chernobyl.
I don't think it's sarcasm. Maybe North Korea is a better example. It would probably just be "Korea" if they didn't have nukes, but you can't exactly go in and overthrow the government when they can just wipe out all human life on the peninsula in an instant.
(People get upset at the implication that one country would take over another country, but the people of North Korea would probably not be worse off if that happened. Instead they suffer greatly because nobody can help them.)
> It would probably just be "Korea" if they didn't have nukes
Their first nuclear test was in 2006. Even their production of refined uranium and plutonium only began in the 80s, decades after the war came to a standstill.
> People get upset at the implication that one country would take over another country
If anyone is upset that the people of the German "Democratic" Republic got to join the rest of "We, the people" in a free Federal Republic, they're cordially invited to go fuck themselves.
The same would go ten times over for anyone feeling that way about the much more oppressed North Koreans.
No, it's not sarcasm — I would appreciate it if you would be a little more generous when interpreting my remark. The proliferation problem is exacerbated incrementally by every additional plant in every additional country — including this one. The issue is not Finland in particular developing nuclear weapons, but any country developing nuclear weapons — especially a country governed by an autocracy. Or a country that might be governed by an autocracy in the future — the last few years have raised the urgency of the problem of democratic backsliding, which we need to figure out how to avert.
The countries which are least trustworthy wrt nuclear weapons are the ones that aren't going to ask the public's permission. An autocracy doesn't need to power itself by nuclear plants in order to have nuclear weapons. On the other hand having a sustainable, clean source of power not tied to autocratic regimes lowers the leverage those regimes hold over democratic countries.
In my particular country, a major chunk of the public budget goes towards paying fines to EU for use of coal, all while our government periodically passes bills allowing it to borrow more money from the central bank, increasing inflation. Negotiations with neighbouring autocratic countries can be pretty tough, when they can threaten us and rest of Europe, which is going to put pressure, with stopping energy transmission. Energy shortages in some parts of the country were a regular occurrence for decades, even before the current political problems.
Lack of nuclear plants does nothing to prevent a nuclear war, while it harms us on many very tangible levels.
See https://whatisnuclear.com/non-proliferation.html#how-is-nucl... for one of the mechanisms whereby dual-use technology presents issues: obtaining fissile material is difficult, and while nuclear power plants are not a prerequisite, they make it easier.
I agree that dependence on geopolitically and environmentally problematic fossil fuel sources is a pressing concern.
An interesting example is Japan. Japan has a large reactor grade plutonium stockpile. This was ostensibly for their fast reactor program, but that's dead now. So, the plutonium just sits there. It's not ideal for weapons (being reactor not weapons grade) but it can be made to work, so Japan has the potential capability to make thousands of warheads if they need to.
Russia imperialistic ambitions would be far more modest if Europe and US wouldn't fill Putin's coffers with hundreds of billions of dollars and euros in exchange for oil and gas. You know, the things they use instead of Nuclear energy.
Indeed, we are left with (from my perspective) all bad choices in the short-to-medium term. In the US, we made a least-bad calculation when choosing the environmental cost of fracking over the geopolitical costs of depending on dictator oil. Now Europe gets to make similar calculations.
I'd sure like it if less inherently dangerous technologies were further along. But every year they are gaining.
Look at the situation in Ukraine. A huge problem almost nobody is talking about is the largest nuclear plant in Europe was just captured by an invading military force just over a week ago. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zaporizhzhia_Nuclear_Power_P...
As soon as private industry is funding and running nuclear power including the decommissioning costs, plus selling their energy at market rates (in the UK we have guaranteed the new nuclear plants rates that are higher than the next most expensive generators costs) then I'll believe that.
The only way these are remotely economical is when they are funded by the tax payer before the are built, while they run, and after they close down.
Any examples that goes against that? I'd be very interested to learn about them. I think as a way to ensure energy independence and remove fossil fuels they are good, but we cannot pretend they don't come with massive costs, and don't yet pay their own way.
The problem is that markets are supremely bad at building a stable electricity grid. So on one hand wind and solar are getting cheaper per MW, but it doesn't include the effect they have on destabilising both the grid and electricity markets - in fact, solar getting cheaper is probably going to cause a stop on buildout in some places, because the price of solar MW is going to be too low to deal with all the time you're not producing - either due to lack of sun, or due to curtailment.
And we do not really have any storage available - the only systems that are 1) not experimental 2) usable for anything other than frequency stabilisation; are the pumped hydro - and those are geographically limited. At least when it's windy, you can use wind turbines as sinks for stability. Intermittent nature of solar and wind is too intermittent for most industrial sinks.
Meanwhile unpredictable nature of generation from wind and solar push the grid to buildout LNG/petroleum powered gas turbines, due to their very short delay on ramping up/down (IIRC, second only to hydro). So you end up in situation where market approach to electricity is going to prevent decarbonisation, unless you hugely upend what is being bought on the market.
Personally I've been thinking of electricity market paying only for predictable (aka "dispatchable") low-carbon power plants, or at least with huge priority. Solar and Wind could still compete on such market by being paired with storage systems into Virtual Power Plants (something that already exists), and the rest of the generation would be sold on spot market during peaks, or preferably to dedicated sinks like green hydrogen production.
The issue is, that in a traditional electrical system, you need both base load and dispatchable power plants. And while nuclear power plants work as base load, they're really bad for dispatchable power, both economically and in how they work.
So if you want to base an electrical grid solely on nuclear power without additional fossil fuel plants, you need either a lot of often unused (and thus very, very expensive) nuclear capacity or some kind of .. storage. It's similar to renewables in that regard, although much more predictable and reliable (with exceptions, such as france this winter).
That's why I'd rather see a variable sink like electrolysers producing green hydrogen for non-electricity related purposes or disconnected operations. A mix of renewable and nuclear that, instead of curtailment, uses excess renewable production for other purposes.
We do not have storage yet just because it is not built out yet.
Thus far, a renewable euro has been just overwhelmingly better used to build out generating capacity, even where intermittent. The only problems in storage are picking which will be cheapest or otherwise most valuable -- e.g. hydrogen, ammonia, and liquid air are entirely the latter -- and that by waiting, you get more for your euro. Storage cost is plummeting much faster even than solar, and solar is already so cheap that building 2x, 3x, 6x overcapacity is in easy reach.
The cheapest, most efficient present storage is pumped hydro, which can be used in very many places where native hydro generation cannot be, i.e. almost anyplace with hills. But iron-air battery factories are under construction, for very cheap and safe storage, and that will compete with many other alternatives. Each has strengths for certain places, all work, and operating cost is in all cases very small, so building "the wrong one" just means you spent more up front than you maybe had to.
Trotting out the "ooh, storage" argument only demonstrates you don't have one.
"But what if it explodes" is actually a valid question for fast reactors, since they can potentially go prompt fast supercritical in a serious accident. Edward Teller was famously suspicious (in 1967) of fast reactors for this reason.
> My opinion is that players should spend time in games because they consider it to be fun rather than to be the best for the sake of being the best, and the in-game whales who spend the most $ on a game shouldn't be overpowered to the point where free to play players should feel they need to spend money to win.
this is very debateable
all games have (egaming and regular sports) have a competitive level, you always start playing for the fun, then you either become bored or you realize that you are good and want to start playing vs people with your same or more level of skill/ability, and thats where monetization comes.
You talk about whales being able to pay for the best cards/items/etc in a game, but those usually get quickly demoralized as having overpowered stats/items/etc doesn't mean you can enter competitive skill inmediatly, it's easy for people in those games ti quickly identificate players who bought their way to the pro scene of the game, usually called pay to win players and defeat them
I see it as something that needs to happen, in the past I've been the one in the other side of the trade, mostly in MMORPGS, where I was able to farm/craft/bot for really rare/unique items and sell to those willing to pay thousands of USD for them and yet, beat them in regular matches/pvp/etc, so it somehow encouraged the economy inside the game, and kept actual pro gamers happy, kept devs happy, kept the general population happy, the only ones really unhappy were the ones that paid for the items and got sad when it really didnt help
of course, I understand that it should be regulated and not to make it fully stupid, but well, at the end, all of this things keep people invested and interested in games, otherwise, they would generally just die.
> Disrupting the everyday lives of Russian citizens
No it doesnt because is not a democratic country, why is it so hard for people like you to understand that things work very different in a democratic country than in non-democratic country?
Do you know what happens when you are in a country that doesnt respect human rights and you go to "protest"?
Do you know what happens when you, as a citizen with no power, try to fight a military regime?
Do you really think, russians right now are enjoyinig this and will somehow march to get Putin's head because their quality of life will be miserable now? no, they wont, because the moment they start doing it, they will be repressed and killed, and there you will be, super happy sharing your support posts to those people
the worst part of all of these, is that you don't realize that one of the goals of putin is to undermine his own state, so he can keep power for the years to come, and here you are, helping him :), good job at making every russian life even worse.
"No it doesnt because is not a democratic country, why is it so hard for people like you to understand that things work very different in a democratic country than in non-democratic country?"
I sympathize with this position but I also feel conflicted because despite the enormous amount of evidence that Putin was a bad guy as recently as 2017 he had 80+% approval rating. If had not had large scale popular support for most of the last 20 years despite his anti-democratic anti-freedom behaviour would he be in a position to execute this war?
I don't have good answers for this question but just as democracy isn't just having a vote political support in a non-democracy isn't just having the legal use of violence at your disposal. It is challenging for anyone from outside Russia that wants to oppose his regime to find a way that doesn't hurt ordinary Russians if most ordinary Russians mostly have supported him.
Protest isn't even a necessary event. If the reward of continuing the war becomes less than the damage of continuing it, it only needs Putin. Regardless, he always enjoyed a very high approval rating while amassing his position.
>Do you know what happens when you are in a country that doesnt respect human rights and you go to "protest"?
>Do you know what happens when you, as a citizen with no power, try to fight a military regime?
Luckily I am not Ukrainian, so I am not having this discovery forced upon me.
As a non-russia customer, I am inmediatly moving all of my domains I host at namecheap to another provider.
this kind of stuff from private companies are useless, and downvote me all you want, they do not work, and dont come to lecture me from your SF desk while im living in a sanctioned country, how did the 2017-2019 sactions for Venezuela worked? Everyone in the world moved on and even forgot about our country, and the comunist regime is more alive than ever, all the sactions just fucked the regular people like me, for example my gf is still explaining after 2 years to those idiots at transferwise support that her money sitting on their super awesome "no borders account" has nothing to do with the venezuelan govt and that it's from her US based remote job but they just decided to steal over 22k USD from her solely based on her citizenship. Or should I tell you how stripe completely killed my friend's startup by suspending their accout because they had venezuelans IPs and venezuelan citizenship and aparently they aren't able to check that they (normal citizens) arent the people on the OFAC list, (like 5 names LOL)
So yeah, dont mind me, get your likes, get all the nice advertisiment you want while prettending you are helping and is nothing more than a PR move while messing with normal people with normal lives, struggling everyday but you won't get me as a customer anymore, we are all suppose to be professionals at our tech jobs.
You inadvertently argued against your own point. Your friend's startup died, that damages the economy, that is what economic sanctions are designed to do. Whether the specific instance of sanctioning was justified is another matter of course, but the point is that the economy was damaged. That hurts ordinary people yes, but - this is a war. Better an economic hit than being bombed or shot.
> that is what economic sanctions are designed to do
Agreed - that is the point. To hurt ordinary people so that they care (not said lightly). Sanctions are designed to punish a whole country.
While messed up, you can't just affect/punish the leadership. If you could we would already be doing that. The way to hurt the leaders is to hurt the ordinary people such that they vote, rise up, etc against the governmental actions.
Russia's ruble has dropped up to 40%+ because of the sanctions and the people are pulling their money in droves. This puts huge pressure on Putin to rethink what he's doing by making it incredibly expensive to wage this war.
This is an super exaggerated number to attributte only to sactions, our TOTALITARIAN REGIME actions killed those people and the reality is that sanctions just helped them
Before the sanctions, (that started in 2015), we had already huge economical problems (and problems of kinds), mainly due the goverment focusing on making one of the greatest corruption acts of all times [1] and focusing on systematically making the venezuelan population poorer, sicker, hungrier and dependant, in order to keep the power and keep stealing money.
The thing is, sanctions did absolutelly NOTHING in favour of venezuelans citizens and their freedom, in fact, they made it easier for the Venezuelan totalitarian regime to justificate their acts (forcing hunger, violating human rights [2], etc) and made it stronger in a way that since our country got alienated, we got more support from other totalirian regimes such as China and Rusia.
So hurting the ordinary people, as that post say, was just putting an extra nail to the coffin of every venezuelan that died of hunger and sickness.. Was just encouraging more people to fight for freedoom with rocks vs guns and died or got detained [3] [4]...
All for nothing, and 6 years later, over 300billions usd stolen later, 2.000.000% hyperinflation later, 7.000.000 venezuelans gone later, over 400 people killed in protest later, over 5,000 political detentions later, the govt is still there and... blocking venezuelans from using stripe, transferwise, etc, is going to help us haha ..
If sanctions kill any amount of people greater than zero makes it a deadly weapon against innocent people and should never be used. Additionally, anyone who uses sanctions should be considered committing an act of terrorism because of their intended effect being killing innocent civilians.
By that reasoning the west would never have invaded Nazi Germany. Lots of innocent people on both sides died in that invasion, and yet the world is now a better place because of it.
Well you won't know without knowing the difference. Just say that we've a different order but for ordinary people probably make no difference.
You born after that so did I. Is like saying that the world is better place now because Napoleon invaded Europe. Well, you won't know what would be if he didn't so your argument has no logic (and, in addition you have no idea how life was during that time)
His argument also fails with the Ukraine situation. The world may be a better place today because the USSR disbanded, but Ukraine would not be being invaded by Russia today if the USSR never disbanded.
Uhm, no? If the USSR never disbanded, hundreds of millions would still be suffering under a broken system instead of starting on the path to recovery a few decades ago.
The breakup was unquestionably a good thing for humanity.
Instead of trying to use some vague "you haven't lived it!" argument, it would be nice if you could provide an example of someone directly killed by sanctions.
Do you have any proposal as to what the rest of the world should do while Russia brutalizes a country it has no business in attacking? It's definitely not a "defeat them in the marketplace of ideas" kind of situation.
Ignoring regime change for a minute, the two big levers EU/USA seem to have is sanctions and proxy war (by funding and equipping Ukraine). Anything else like bombings are immediately off the table due to nuclear deterrence. Not doing anything seems like the second worst possible outcome as appeasement will only lead to disaster in the inevitable follow up wars. If we take minimizing civilian casualties as the goal, is your position that equipping Ukraine and leaving Russia alone otherwise is the best option?
It is by far the weakest position to take. Your world with no aggressors is fantasy. The only person who had the choice to do nothing was Putin. Our failure to respond to him would result in many more deaths. Incidental casualties from sanctions are unfortunate, but in real life we always have make compromises.
That isn't even a good attempt at a straw-man. Let's be honest, what qualifies as "my gain" in your argument here is "less death." So yeah, I'm willing to do what it takes to reduce death.
You're arguing that we should do nothing and let Putin go on his rampage unopposed, as if that will result in less death. To say that I disagree with you would be pretty redundant at this point, and you're not making good faith arguments, so I'm out.
You are making the assumption that people _must_ die. Not only that, but the people that must die should be dying because of sanctions, which means those that must die should be civilians.
The gain I mentioned was that you and your loved ones live. You and your loved ones get to enjoy a longer life with the price of other peoples loved ones dying from sanctions. You believe that's the best way forward.
> that damages the economy, that is what economic sanctions are designed to do
They're designed to cause regime change, or at least diplomatic changes. That has failed in Venezuela's case (and Cuba's, and North Korea's, and Iran's, and so on).
What's funny (actually, it's very sad) is that any sanctions strong enough to truly harm Russia would destroy the stability of the world's financial system by triggering a global liquidity crisis; we would see a repeat of 2008 (likely worse due to some factors having changed since then). Be careful what you wish for, as those who virtue signal naively today, thinking it'll only affect citizens in faraway lands, may themselves face frozen ATMs, credit cards, and bank transfers in a few months, if the worst-case (i.e. their dream scenario) occurs.
"any sanctions strong enough to truly harm Russia would destroy the stability of the world's financial system by triggering a global liquidity crisis"
You'd need to back this up with some real evidence for it to be convincing.
As it stands right now the freezing of Russian reserves is in effect and international markets are essentially untouched, what are these additional sanctions you are referring to?
I am not an expert in this area but is seems to me that if Russia disappeared from the financial system, with an annual GDP of 1.4 trillion, nobody would really notice after the initial write-downs. It is one tenth of China, and has been chasing away FDI for over a decade - thus reducing its international impact. But I am open to explanations as to why this is a big deal, let me know!
I think the issue here is that sanctions require usually time to really take effect. The government is already installed by the time they come. The dictators and their cronies are shielded and live lo comfortably.
The population is either brainwashed or brutally repressed when it complains (particularly eliminating leaders).
It’s hard to make a case for sanctions as the solution as there are plenty of counter examples: Cuba has been heavily sanctioned for over half a century and little has changed no matter how dire the situation gets.
I wish they worked for sure, because what other resources you have against a nuclear power?
Edit to add: also, sanctions have exceptions (usually to shielding the sanctioning countries from suffering consequences, as in this case with Russia and the energy related transactions, with the effect of keep that money flowing for Russia).
And these tyrants workaround the sanctions in many cases with the help of other nations.
> I think the issue here is that sanctions require usually time to really take effect. The government is already installed by the time they come. The dictators and their cronies are shielded and live lo comfortably.
> The population is either brainwashed or brutally repressed when it complains (particularly eliminating leaders).
> It’s hard to make a case for sanctions as the solution as there are plenty of counter examples: Cuba has been heavily sanctioned for over half a century and little has changed no matter how dire the situation gets.
> I wish they worked for sure, because what other resources you have against a nuclear power?
> Edit to add: also, sanctions have exceptions (usually to shielding the sanctioning countries from suffering consequences, as in this case with Russia and the energy related transactions, with the effect of keep that money flowing for Russia).
> And these tyrants workaround the sanctions in many cases with the help of other nations.
Your reply doesn't seem to address my point directly. The appeal to "time" doesn't really work given that that Moscow stock exchange has been closed since last Friday and seems unlikely to open this week.
Cuba has changed quite a bit in the last half century, I would look into it if I were you, most resorts in the country are Cuba-FDI joint ventures - it is complicated but sanctions where most of the world actually disagrees with you are a lot more difficult than this situation.
In this particular case it seems that the work-arounds are not generally available. The Russian government was not prepared to have their own reserves frozen.
Not really, his point is that sanctions do more harm to regular people. Kenya right now is the only country pointing out how this will cause a humanitarian crisis, because they know what that looks like. We should stand together against autocratic imperialists regimes, sanctions should be targeted at the regime and russian oligarchs
>It's not a PR move. If my arm is being injured, I move to protect it. I'm sure you would, too.
Stop doing business with Russians who have no power over Putin is not really "mov[ing] to protect" an injured arm. It's more like an angry wail. Which, fair enough. It's a perfectly understandable desire. I'd probably feel the same way if I were a Namecheap employee in Ukraine. But it doesn't really do anything to protect Ukraine's interests.
They are choosing to stop doing business with the country dropping bombs on their employees and their homes. I didn’t read any grandstanding into it, just an expression of moral obligation toward their employees.
That’s about as cut and dried as it gets.
I think people on this board get very much caught up in the business aspect and fail to see the human side that is driving these actions.
I don't think it's a PR move. The company has many Ukrainian employees, and those people are understandably angry now, and want to lash out at something to do with Russia; so they found a target within their reach. It's still a bad idea because it doesn't actually help anything except Russian propaganda, but I can see where they are coming from.
I wouldn't be surprised if someone said that there are more tech companies with Ukrainian employees than there aren't. Ukrainians are very educated (they keep studying to avoid being forced to join in the military) and since there's not much happening in Ukraine when it comes to employment, they move out to work elsewhere.
Namecheap is entitled to terminate its business relationship with RU entities, just as you are entitled to do the same with Namecheap.
I, for one, will be moving my own personal domain to Namecheap at next renewal. This is a political issue, and I am on the side of sanctioning the invader.
It’s the regular folks who could wake up from their comfy lethargy and actually protest their government.
Yes, economic sanctions have limited potential to actually topple a totalitarian leadership. With Russia, the concern goes deeper. This country is armed to the teeth and poses a massive threat to Europe. Hence, the point of these sanctions is very much to also weaken the Russian economy and curb its capacity to finance more wars.
> It’s the regular folks who could wake up from their comfy lethargy and actually protest their government.
The problem is that many of those who use namecheap are already against the regime because they know English, have access to another point of view on actions taken by the regime in Ukraine.
Fucking them up may turn some of them back to the regime because current narrative of the propaganda is "West companies do not care about you and they will do everything in their power to screw you".
Who do you think you are calling people struggling to get by to wake up from their “comfy lethargy” and “actually protest”?
People don’t protest when they’re struggling to make ends meet and civil institutions are weakened.
The only effect of the inhumane economic sanctions has been tightening the ruling class’s grip. They did not work in Iran, Iraq, Venezuela, not even Syria. They have however caused enormous human suffering.
I also don’t like that the Russian people have to deal with the consequences of Putin’s delusions, but I can’t think of another option for governments and companies like Namecheap.
That said, I think you’re very wrong about this: “ People don’t protest when they’re struggling to make ends meet and civil institutions are weakened.”
I believe most revolutions are a result of “struggling to make ends meet”.
e.g. First example I could think of extreme struggle leading to revolution https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Revolution, another more relevant example where extreme struggle led to revolution https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Revolution, and history has a lot more (the US from the UK, India from the UK, the UK from the UK - i.e. the Magna Carta). Meanwhile, sadly history has almost zero revolutions where the population wasn’t suffering.
I’ll say again tho. This is me pointing out examples from history. I don’t like or enjoy that the world works the way it works.
I'm Russian. My mother is 78 and her life depends on regular supply of imported medical drugs. If the supply supplies stop due to sanctions, agree dies in 7 days max.
She was opposing Putin's power with everything at her disposal. So 'sanctioning the invader' will kill her.
Sanctioning namecheap users will not hurt Putin at the slightest. It will hurt people who are opposing him, so instead of protesting Putin - and IT people are the most of protesting group of Russians - they'll have to worry about their projects and having food. Good job, namecheap and their supporters.
I won't be trusting namecheap ever again after this. Also, targeting groups of people by their nationality, without individual guilt is something that fascists do.
I'm not from Russia but moved my domain from namecheap to gandi. I saw a lot of people here and on Twitter complain that they got the termination email but have nothing to do with Russia.
Now I pay 2 more Euros per year but I have peace of mind that the domain I use for my main email won't get shutdown because I fall into hastily setup filters, atleast I hope so.
Let me know how many domains you’re transferring out of Namecheap so that I can transfer that many back in. For everyone upset about this decision, there will be 100s who applaud it.
The point is to mess with Russian lives so they don’t put up with Putin as their ruler and world destroyer. Any way we can put pain on the Russians right now that doesn’t include nuclear war is better then the alternative.
As a russian who is going to move from NC - you are being very unproductive at least.
The russians who are using nc's services are mainly the ones who are protesting actively and who are concerned about their privacy for this reason.
Quite often NC is (was?) used to host email domains and such. This decision hurts people who are already anti-war and anti-government. Most of Putins supporters never even heard about Namecheap.
On the one hand, sanctions are bad because they often harm citizens of the targeted regime than they do the leadership they're meant to influence. Any right-thinking person should sympathize with the toll that they have on ordinary people.
On the other hand, sanctions are believed to work -- at least in the long term -- precisely because of this effect. The (usually unspoken) theory is that eventually the people won't be able to bear the impact on their day-to-day lives and will rise up and overthrow their leadership. Hopefully Venezuelans, like Russians, will eventually do just this.
I had the same thought after the phosphine gas discovery at Venus was announced. It will take so long to be certain about a claim like this, and evidence will mount so gradually, that by the time the confirmation is made it will be unsurprising. Sort of like the discovery of ancient liquid water on Mars - it took so long to prove it that by the time proof was certain, it had become a joke (NASA announces discovery of water on mars for Nth time! haha).
On the down side, we're less likely get a world-wide event to collectively celebrate; on the up side, we're less likely to panic subgroups of society.
Tether manipulation of 'prices goes up', leads to fomo, leads to cashout of big players, leads to bagholding from retail who has no other option than joining the crypto cult to try to fomo others and move price back up
Honestly I think the innovation there is that it's a distributed Ponzi.
With any normal Ponzi scheme, there is "a guy", a guy at the center of it all cooking the books and redirecting the funds from late investors to early and skimming a healthy bit for himself. One day that guy gets arrested or decides it's time to run and the scheme collapses. Maybe that day comes a year in, maybe twenty, but it's a-coming.
With a distributed Ponzi scheme, there is no one guy. If some people get arrested for fraud or take their loot and run off somewhere, other people can step in and keep it all going, pumping and dumping and scamming and scheming.
I honestly don't know what it would take to actually make it go away for good.
