While the president brags about his “maximum pressure” campaign against Iran and throttling its oil exports, its weapons sales to Russia get a pass.
In the spirit of bipartisanship, I think we can all agree it is time to invade Iran.
Russia used to export a lot of refined products, so they loose the profits of doing the refining.
They liquidated a bunch of their industrial refining capacity in the late 90s/early 00s thanks to Yeltsin’s implementation of Shock Doctrine economic reforms.
My home town of Houston hosts a bunch of Soviet made refinery equipment bought for pennies on the dollar from overseas.
That’s got nothing to do with current EU sanctions. If anything, Russian reinvestment in heavy industry has been one of the brighter spots of the Putin Regime and a major source of his popularity.
Last year 17.5% of EUs LNG imports came from Russia. There is no reason for doing that more then three years after the full scale invasion.
There’s a strong economic reason to obtain gas from the lowest cost provider. LNGs floated in from the US can’t meet demand and cost 10x Russia rates at market.
Combine that with the US tariffing of trade deficits and insourcing of energy consumption for AI development and you’ve left Europe with no other option for gas power.
Maybe instead of whining about Panama paper doesn’t do as much as one can fantasies, read the report I linked again
The man running the law firm that managed the fraud never saw a trial, much less a conviction.
Your article of "Um, actually!"s doesn’t change that.
Researches, investigations, lawsuits, trails, laws and legislation tooks years or even decades to conclude.
After FTX imploded, Sam Bankman Fried was indicted within weeks and in prison within months. The Enron investigation and indictments came down four years after the company officially filed bankruptcy in December of 2001.
To claim prosecutions under the Panama Papers (or the Trump indictments or the Sackler oxycotin scandal or the Epstein case dismissal or the SEC investigations into Tesla or any number of other endlessly delayed prosecutions) required decades to wrap up only illustrates a deliberate attempt by domestic governments to slow roll and bury investigations that prosecutors had no personal interest in pursuing.
Joking about nothing has been done after Panama paper every time everywhere the topic came up over and over and over again is tiring and insulting
Ramón Fonseca Mora, the central figure behind Mossack Fonseca, was let out on bail a few months after his arrest and remained unconvicted until his death. How is that not a joke to you?
After the Panama Papers and similar leaks, people are ready to believe some kind of anonymous hacker collective is still out there investigating and releasing information. So they’ll jump on the headline, because it resonates with their memories of historical incidents. They won’t interrogate it, because they’re not in the position to sift fact from fiction.
This is one of the problems with Upvote-based news aggregators to begin with. You’re asking people to make evaluations of an article’s interest at the headline level, rather than relying on editors and ombudsmen to sift out what information is both credible and interesting to a wide audience.
EU purchases of laundered Russian oil worth an estimated €1.1 billion to the Kremlin in 2023
The fuel is entering through a not-so-small loophole left in EU sanctions which allows products refined from Russian oil to flow into the bloc. This has resulted in a ‘laundromat’ where refineries in countries like India and Turkey, can import discounted Russian crude, refine it into products like diesel, jet fuel, or gasoline, and legally sell the refined oil to embargoing jurisdictions like the EU.
Has this meaningfully changed? Because I’m finding a lot of news about EU states increasing their trade with Turkyie and it’s neighbors, without a hard look at where this glut of reserve is coming from.
Hinton’s lawsuit alleges that Tesla “employs an odometer system that utilizes predictive algorithms, energy consumption metrics, and driver behavior multipliers that manipulate and misrepresent the actual mileage traveled by Tesla Vehicles” and that his car “consistently exhibited accelerated mileage accumulations of varying percentages ranging from 15 percent to 117 percent higher than plaintiff’s other vehicles and his driving history.”
Here comes Big Government, trying to constrain cutting edge innovations in accurately counting how many times the wheel rotates.
I hope DOGE is able to save California from itself by defunding whatever court system might be involved in persecuting hard working odometer engineers with this flagrantly Woke and Soy legal case.
Trade Wars Are Good And Easy To Win
~ Sun Tzu, War of the Art of the Deal
You’re not totally wrong. But this isn’t “the public”, it’s just bots. For the same reason I wouldn’t want to get chased around by buskers demanding tips every time I visited the park, I don’t want my feed inundated with CamGirl amounts every time I log on.
The cam girl problem is simultaneously more difficult to solve (because there’s such a low barrier to entry) and an easier one (because you typically have a handful of bad actors churning out the bulk of the spam). But since there’s no profit on policing public spaces, BSKY’s already paper thin budget isn’t earmarking anything to address is.
A lot of the “randos” are people with strong business or social relationships in member states. Italy has a big expat community already thanks to the large number of finance bros and engineers that contract with Italian domestic industry.
It’s either that or no ukraine at all.
If this was all that Ukraine needed to win the war, Biden would have delivered it two years ago. But the Ukraine front is collapsing due to lack of manpower and the destruction of their older and more durable fortifications. Fifteen surface-to-air missile systems will - at best - curb the advantage of Russian air power (which has already been heavily degraded by the war). It won’t do anything to deter the older armor, howitzers, and increasingly advanced drone technology Russians are deploying.
Also if the ukraine would fall then all other loans would never be paid
I mean, NATO states have never had a hard time pissing away a trillion dollars here or there to no discernible benefit. Just ask the Iraqis or the Afghanis. The point of NATO support for Ukraine is to bleed Russian military capacity out until it is irrelevant, not to get an ROI on Ukranian IOUs.
The future of Ukraine’s debt will be paid back through mass privatization of the Ukraine western territory. And it’ll be paid to private US/EU industry, not to the state governments that financed the war.
What sense does it make if you raise your population and everyone is miserably poor or on the edge of becoming poor?
I mean, misery is extremely relative. One of the paradoxes of Japan, thanks to its extremely conservative immigration policy and hyper-competitive economy, is that they’ve made a genuinely beautiful country to live in but one in which foreigners can’t stay and most natives can’t enjoy it. This population of NEETs who failed the cut-throat academic setting lack the resources to live a comfortable middle class existence. Meanwhile, the new guest worker program simply brings foreigners in to crush the wage labor out and dispose of them. Only foreign tourists, wealthy labor aristocrats, and the handful of small business owners who figured out how to survive get to enjoy Japan for what it is.
But, like, it shouldn’t be a miserable place to live. The amenities are world class. The country’s ecology is well-preserved. The education system rivals international peers. They’ve got advanced industry, mass transit, modern health care, spectacular recreation, a population large enough to keep the ball rolling indefinitely without going Easter Island on their own turf, and excellent placement adjacent to other post-industrial powers.
All they need to do is reform their abysmal work culture. But the work culture has become a tulpa they’re convinced creates the beatific conditions, rather than a cancer that’s destroying it.
Looks like someone just solved Hanoi.
(19th century French mathematicians are loving this joke)
I mean, they’re advocating for the right decision. But I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for Cooper to take the advice. New Labour built itself up by accusing people live Thornberry of being antisemitic and purging them from the party.
I had thought easy immigration to EU countries was only if you were coming from another EU country
It varies by state. My wife got her Italian citizenship through birthright, despite being born American, for instance.
Are investors idiots?
A lot of investment is driven entirely by HFT algorithms and AIs now. The brokers oversee the broad strategy, but the trading is just a dozen different multi-billionaire hedge funds chasing one another’s tails. Market buy-ups and sell-offs are triggered by a handful of headlines and aggregator engines, snowballing up or down based on computers responding to other computers.
And because the market is increasingly liquid - as more mega-investors like Buffet cash out in pursuit of future buying opportunities - you’ll see sudden sharp inversions caused by the sheer amount of buying power that’s being pent up and released between announcements.
He’s just going to change his mind again in three days
Very difficult to price that as a risk variable. And in the meantime, there’s a ton of money to be made speculating on which way his wind will blow next.
in this case the “license to print money” is literal. No one can screw it up, right?
Ask Robert Mugabe
Stocks Soar!
All the way up to 40,157 from the Biden-Era dull-drums of 44,850
This is how West Germany chose copper, when even the by then almost bankrupt (and ruled by even more senile backwards looking geezers) GDR was already starting to lay down fiber optic.
In fairness, fiber optics were cheaper and easier to lay and worked better. So of course the socialists would adopt it first. They just wouldn’t monetize it properly such that they had the incentive to keep expanding it at an accelerated pace, until everyone in the country was paying $100/mo for $2/mo worth of internet.
For a real expansionist system, you either need people who are as greedy as they are ruthless (capitalism) or as ideological as they are hyper-competitive (dengism).
After Yemen, Syria, and Libya I think we’re closer to Iraq 6.0