The point of sanctions is as a disincentive against bad behavior at a national level. The bad behavior here is invading a sovereign country. If the sanctions worked it would cause internal pressure and shorten the war.
Of course no one wants hardship for everyday Russians, but we should be able to say the same about everyday Ukrainians, many of whom have had their whole lives upended.
The war is continuing because of only one man on the planet, and since violent options are off the table, functioning sanctions are the next best thing.
>The point of sanctions is as a disincentive against bad behavior at a national level.
There is an argument to be made that sanctions don't work. Maybe they used to in the long distant past, but they don't now.
Russia doesn't give even half a fuck, Iran gives negative fucks, North Korea gives no fucks, and China is turning the sanctions back against us, to name some prominent examples.
I appreciate the west's desire to settle diplomatic problems using something other than war, but sanctions aren't the solution (anymore?).
To the extent that they don’t work, a lot of that is because of bitcoin. North Korea steals enough bitcoin to cover half of their military budget.
Given that this thread concerns whether the legitimate use cases of Bitcoin outweigh the illegitimate ones, I think this is an argument strongly against the position.
You claimed this based on vibes without citing any sources. Do you really think North Korea is thriving right now? How about Iran’s booming economy? The mighty Russian bear is so crippled by sanctions that China effectively owns them, with Russia entirely dependent on them to for everything besides oil.
Every day that these sanctions against Iran, North Korea, and Russia are in place those countries fall further and further behind. Every day their economies become less and less competitive
You say that, but Iran keeps on war merchanting, North Korea keeps on lobbing missiles, Russia keeps on warmongering, and China keeps on owning the world.
Sanctions as they are right now don't work, and that is a problem.
The same ordinary Russians that voted for the person that was clearly a dictator on the raise? Or the same ones that are cheerfully sending their children to kill innocent people in Ukraine? Or the same ones that were completely apathetic to the political opposition being arrested, poisoned or killed?
I’d say yes. That’s the point of the sanctions. And somebody should be tracing that Russian money on the ledger and getting the ill gotten properties traced and arrested.
I don’t think many people would agree that Russia has free and fair elections. Russia declares political opponents to be terrorists, effectively narrowing the Overton Window to be perfectly Putin sized.
Of course Russians don’t deserve economic hardship, but they don’t deserve to live in an autocracy either. And Ukrainians don’t deserve to be invaded. The lesson here is probably that the “great man” theory of history kind of ignores the everyday people whose lives were ruined by leaders who didn’t have to deal with the worst consequences of their decisions.
It’s the people that empower and enable. They are given guns, tanks, military aircrafts, missiles. They are manufacturing the weapons.
It doesn’t look like any of these get accidentally launched onto Kremlin. Or turned against conscription. Or used in any kind of resistance.
There are people there that are sacrificing their lives. Only for some reason, they are sacrificing these lives on the wrong side. On the side of supporting the dictatorship.
I wish to remind you that many everyday Russians participate in the war in a variety of ways, from diffusing propaganda, to a variety of associations with the Russian military complex, to being on the frontlines themselves.
Those many everyday Russians punish people (Ukrainians mainly, Europeans in general) for someone else’s decision (Putin’s power trip).
I also wish to remind you that hardship in Russia does not compare to hardship in Ukraine right now.
I say this as someone with relatives in both countries today.
Someone else's decision, and you are just following the orders?
It doesn't work that way. Putin is not working in a factory building tanks and artillery shells. He is not in an office programming which cities ballistic missiles will hit. He is not piloting bombers or manning guns shooting at Ukraine. He is not sitting in tanks ravaging through Ukrainian countriside, he is not in cellars raping and torturing civilians, he has not personally committed any of the tens of thousands documented war crimes in Ukraine. Millions upon millions of "ordinary Russians" choose to do this every day. Without the majority of Russian society actively working to carry out Putin's ideas, or passively sitting on their asses and trying to pretend they have nothing to do with it, Putin would be just a raving madman without any influence on the world like Hitler in his final days.
USSR collapsed when "ordinary Russians" simply stopped following orders. They were told to go there and do this, and they said NO in large enough numbers that the leaders were simply unable to do anything, because eventually even police and military stopped listening them. Russia has not yet reached this breaking point, and millions upon millions remain Putin's willing executioners, and bear the guilt that comes with it.
Every day, Ukrainians put their lives on the line, and hundreds die, in a desperate attempt to stop the curse on the world that Russia has become, while "ordinary Russians" are unwilling to even stage a large protest.
There's an enormous separation between those "ordinary Russians" who are in survival mode and do all the things you said, and those other "ordinary Russians" like me who are actually affected by sanctions and have passports and care about traveling abroad and speak English and are against the war.
The sanctions target the wrong ones.
As for "unwilling to even stage a large protest", there's simply no one left to organize it. Those people who could do it are either in jail, in exile, or dead.
Do you think the world is a better place if ordinary Russians are nuked along with ordinary people all over the world?
Why beat around the bush? The reason we’re playing the sanctions game, or the proxy war game, or any other bullshit games nations are playing is because the alternative is worse.
Just wait until their home banks interrogate them about how they want to spend their local currency they wish to withdraw or banks shut off withdrawals entirely due to systemic issues.
Bitcoin may not be the end all solution, but it's a great current option.
I have often been described as oblivious (I prefer "focused") and I have yet to encounter someone with a worse sense of direction/orientation than mine. I could tell endless funny stories about how bad it is.
OP mentions a study involving navigating within a game, and I have the same problem in games. I simply cannot learn my way around a "map", as far back as Doom and still today. I can eventually learn specific routes, and eventually enough of these that I can perform reasonably well, but I don't form a mental model of the map even if I've played it hundreds of times and even if it's relatively small.
But I can follow directions, and I did passably well at military "land navigation" using a map, a compass and a protractor.
I would love to better understand why this is. My best guess currently is that "oblivious" is quite important - I've tried, many times, to start noticing landmarks so that I could use them later to get to a place without GPS or directions, but I always find myself having missed everything, or having "forgotten to notice" anything. My mind wanders, I guess.
He may be convinced that wherever the this Bitcoin will be tracked wherever it goes. And confiscated if it ever reaches a centralized exchange. (Due to pressure from law enforcement, the whale and even Binance)
So it's defined as policies expected to produce affordable housing, whether or not housing turns out to be affordable under those policies. And it's not affordable without those policies in place, regardless of price.
It's an old trick. Hayek described it well, way back in the '40s:
> "The most effective way of making people accept the validity of the values they are to serve is to persuade them that they are really the same as those they have always held, but which were not properly understood or recognized before. And the most efficient technique to this end is to use the old words but change their meaning. Few traits of totalitarian regimes are at the same time so confusing to the superficial observer and yet so characteristic of the whole intellectual climate as this complete perversion of language."
I see your point, but the whole purpose of an LLC is, yes, to prevent undue liability on those acting on the behalf of corporations, but at the same time, there needs to be a point where as a society we say "well, you can't claim limited liability because you knew directly what you were doing, and the negative effects of your actions, and you admitted as such in writing, so yes, you are liable".
Because otherwise, I could incorporate as XYZ LLC and say that any blatantly illegal act that causes real harm is just a byproduct of me doing business, and that I'm not actually liable for anything that happens to anyone else during me committing said illegal acts.
The slope here is so slippery it's effectively made of banana peels.
Because we know, and have known, murder is illegal, and is illegal under a criminal statute.
PFAS wern't always known to be bad, and even after knowing chances are everyone reading this has some in their blood -- and most of you are doing just fine. Maybe 0.01% crappier than if you didn't have it in you, but it's a far cry from getting stabbed to death by a hired goon.
It’s a tricky legal ground. Companies DO make decisions which they know will kill people. Sometimes, they downplay the risks in less than ethical ways- sometimes they actively cover up the risks/reality.
I don’t think that it is so far fetched that a corporation should be held criminally liable, and that executives should be criminally liable when they discover one of these risks and do not accurately disclose it and mitigate the risk.
It doesn’t strike me as intrinsically different to hit an LLC provided that the company knew about the impact of PFAS.
Yeah I don't get why people think holding LLC's and top ranking execs liable is problematic. If you work for an LLC and hold any sort of professional license you are held liable, but the executives who make all the policy decisions around you are not, even if the issue you are held liable for is really their fault.
It seems to me every licensing regime begins with incumbents lobbying for protection from competition, then goes down in history as absolutely necessary consumer protection programs.
This change doesn't prohibit hearing-impaired patients from seeing an audiologist to get set up with a hearing aid. It's just no longer compulsory. I can't imagine understanding that this requirement is an encumbrance, and being "against the philosophy" of unencumbering access to hearing aids.
