That's really rough - I know it can be bad out there. I have a friend who needed to be crowdfunded a new pair of glasses and I felt like... "This is such shit." Particularly because both of his parents have died and he has no support network... There are a lot of issues out there, and... while we disagree on a lot... I am certainly sorry to hear about anyone's financial problems...
I've experienced poverty a little... Not a lot, and I still had a safety net I hadn't quite hit, but like... I know enough that I am very glad it never got really bad. And so I can say it really is traumatic and scary, and it can feel humiliating. I hope new opportunities come your way and that you can break the chains.
A good reminder that privacy may only exist now because the sheer volume of information is so large that it provides anonymity through overload.
This is exactly right - and Russia and the Russian people experienced this lifestyle in the Soviet Union. They are fully prepared to endure it once again...
After all, the elites & sub-elites will still get everything that they want, and the Russian people thesmelves are not doing any worse than folks in third world countries (that's for sure!) which manage to putter along under their own corrupt oligarchs, rain or shine.
... The way which you wrote this made me think there was a far more dramatic ending than being stuck at an airport for several hours due to mechanical failure.
My brother in Christ, I experienced that in Cleveland...
But I am not sure what you mean at the end - are these guys STILL in Dubai?! You said they were stuk at the airport for several hours... Like... What, they had to stay at the airport to wait for their boat because, as you said, they couldn't return by plane? ... Or they waited several hours at the airport to catch another flight..? What are you saying?
Russia lived with sanctions for 70 some years as the Soviet Union, and has always been prepared to endure more. They are an economy built around raw, natural resources and can be largely self-sustaining...
And it has been pointed out, that Iran has been fighting off sanctions very successfully over the last twenty, thirty yeas...
Their secret then is Russia' secret now, more or less:
India will trade with anybody and be neutral, and it isn't a large task to create a shell company in India that peddles your wares throughout the whole of the world, repackaged and rebranded. At the height of Trump's reintroduced sanctions on Iran, I was able to eat Iranian dates in South Korea - a country that followed US protcols and actually made it impossible for Iranians to start new private bank accounts unless in specific circumstances and did everything they could to place barriers on trade.
Heed you, these shell companies used to exist in places like Macao, Hong Kong, Singapore, etc., but US sanctions shut this down. It all moved to India...
Which is likely where a lot of Russian exports head when they aren't just being imported completely independent of the Western world to places like Iran and China... China, of course, is another factor, as trade between RU and CN have increased exponentially over the last few years since the war started...
I could go on but, already, I am rambling... Suffice it to say, there's a mssive block of countries that hate Western imperialism and/or are neutral and/or already face sanctions, and this network continues to trade with one another, and they also have begun to help facilitate one another trading with the West, either knowingly or just because they lack the will or robust enough resources to police it up.
Globalization is its own enemy when it comes to the West trying to impose sanctions, IMO.
It's interesting to think that if Wu had more love in the West that the Chinese authorities would have been more slow to crackdown on her...
I think we all remember back in 2017 or so when the Hong Kong protests were at the forefront of everyone's mind and, still, the crackdown continued, and the resistance was crushed.
And what has China's response to the popularity of the Ukraine war been? To question its generally positive relations with Russia? No, not at all. China shores up its own front against Taiwan and its trade with Russia is growing exponentially. BRICS gets stronger.
China will not bow to popular Western opinion no matter what. Blaming Musk for this is pretty asinine.
I apologize - I have not lived in the United States for 20 years, and I thought of them as public utilities that are provided by private companies that exist to fill the niche and are granted something of a monopoly. Like, a town will have one natural gas and electricity supplier, as I seem to recollect, and, of course, everything about it is regulated. It's not socialistic, but it is also not really to be understood necessarily as the free market in any conventional sense of the word.
I apologize if my remarks on Musk were offensive! I did not intend to do that.
instead of flammable and planet-warming gas, those pipes will carry water or other liquids that transfer heat from underground — or from other buildings and sources in the network — that can be used by heat pumps to keep buildings warm.
Heat pumps, which operate like reversible air conditioners, are much more energy-efficient than fossil-fired furnaces or boilers. They’re even more efficient when they can exchange heat and cold with fluid at a stable temperature, rather than from cold outside air, as the more common air-source heat pumps do.
The U.S. Department of Energy estimates that ground-source heat pumps reduce energy consumption and emissions by up to 44 percent compared to air-source heat pumps and 72 percent compared to standard air-conditioning equipment.
I didn't know anything about this but it's truly amazing - it really should be the case that all new utilities in any area that meets the right criteria should be required to provide heating in this way.
As it stands, utilities are basically public in the US entirely (correct me if I am wrong), and it is even the case that many people complain that it's so regulated that they have to sell their green energy back to the utilities company instead of using it themselves... There really should be no barriers for making it a necessity for utilities companies to go this route.
There's all these things that people say about how he's garbage and does nothing right, but the guy has managed to be involved with the project that made it easy to make payments over the internet, and then went on to be behind the most successful electric car and, of course, there's also SpaceX...
I have no idea about the details behind this other than what a Redditor coworker who totally negs on Elon has told me - all this inside baseball at PayPal that seems unflattering, and, of course, the persistent accusations that he brings nothing to the table...
But does lightening really strike thrice like that? IDK. Plus I am sympathetic to his desire to make X more free speech friendly - he isn't completely consistent in this, but it is better than what came before.
I am just going to give him the benefit of the doubt on this - not in saying that he absolutely deserves this raise, but in saying that he has a right to ask for it without being laughed out of the room.