ShindangAp

Very cool, thank you

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.

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.