Russia-Ukraine War (Threadbanned in op)
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Moderators, Science, Health & Environment Moderators, Society & Culture Moderators Posts: 60,148 Mod ✭✭✭✭
Join Date:Posts: 59077
IMHO too many assumed sanctions would have a more obvious effect in areas like you mention. Though prices have gone up and even before the war Russians paid more for things like food as a percentage of wages, so that will and does have an effect. This would be more in play in the big cities. People in the sticks generally had little enough to start with by comparison to say Western Europeans so won't notice as much.
Russia is an exporter of energy and food so they were never going to go hungry or cold any time soon. In contrast if the same level of sanctions were placed on China as major importers of both they'd be horrifically screwed. The sanctions on Russia telegraphed to the Chinese to pull their neck in over things like Taiwan, so it had more than one function.
But what sanctions really do is stymie growth. It's not about there's no Coke or iphones in the shops, or they've gone daftly expensive. It's about cutting off resources for future industrial and economic growth. No sanctioned state in history has avoided these issues. Never mind that Russia's economy peaked circa 2011-13.
If we look at the wider picture a good illustration of where the cash and economies and where people want to travel to and from, just look at flights.
There's cash, information and people in graphic form. No matter the time of day Russia is pretty "empty".
Now Russia is massive so has a little more wriggle room to try and sustain/kickstart an internal economy, but it's not the Soviet Union anymore. It's not nearly so big, nor is its population so big, nor growing. Quite the opposite. They're facing really bad demographics and unlike other nations with similar very few want to move there to prop it up. It doesn't have the homegrown economy and manufacturing of Soviet times either. If you visited a Moscow flat in say 1975, damn near everything you saw around you would be made in the Soviet system, if not Russia itself. That's no longer the case to nearly the same degree. The war helps them balance the books to some degree by going to a war economy and getting some growth there, but it's not sustainable in the long term.
But if you really want to see the effect of sanctions and how the Kremlin feels about them, just look how often they are at pains to claim they're doing nothing. They're like a jilted lover claiming to all that will listen they never really cared. You know they care.
Rejoice in the awareness of feeling stupid, for that’s how you end up learning new things. If you’re not aware you’re stupid, you probably are.
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Moderators, Science, Health & Environment Moderators, Society & Culture Moderators Posts: 60,148 Mod ✭✭✭✭ Join Date:Posts: 59077
The thing is American cities, or at least some areas of them were always a bit shít and dangerous, but perceptions are often counter to realities. This is common in perceptions of crime. If you look at violent and property crime rates have massively fallen since the 90's in the US;
A city like New York in the 1970's made the crap today look like Disneyland. It was horrifically unsafe in so many areas. I'm old enough to remember when people banded together in a semi vigilante way and came up with the Guardian Angels to help protect people on the New York subways.
And just look at the level of graffiti on the inside of the train. Even media reflected this unease with movies like Death Wish and Dirty Harry that were revenge/protector fantasies. It was pretty wild.
What has changed is exposure and perception because of the interwebs and misery porn to some degree. We think, rather we feel it's worse, but realities show it's not. A UK study looked into crime and perceptions and found the group most worried about being victims were middle aged women, the group least concerned, young men. Guess who are the least likely to be victims and who are the most?
When talking to panicky "Murican's online I often ask them to imagine if social media was around in the US decade they think was better(it doesn't matter which one). The 1960's Golden Age™? Cuban missile crisis, the Bomb, their president murdered like a dog in the street, racial tensions boiling over, MLK and Malcolm X murdered, drugs and free love sex, fringe groups all over the place, Vietnam, billions spent on NASA while the US had one of the worst child mortality rates, crime off the scale, rape barely making the news etc. Twitter would have melted down in panic.
Rejoice in the awareness of feeling stupid, for that’s how you end up learning new things. If you’re not aware you’re stupid, you probably are.
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