The ploy is that when Ukraine refuses it gives the US (Trump/Krasnov) an excuse to stop delivering military aid to Ukraine.

He already does.

Trump = Krasnov

Even if Putin’s successor adopts real democracy, it will take generations to change the national psyche that thinks they need a strong leader. As much as the west hates Putin, he does have real support among the people. At least as long as he remains strong.

As sad as this sounds. This seems to be the state of things. It would require generations to fix this. The best case scenario would be to split Russia into smaller pieces and then fix the individual pieces. Doing the same thing to the US and China. Wouldn’t hurt either.

Europe has changed its attitude as of late. As well as Canada and Australia. But we’ll see what happens when US invades Greenland.

Well, the police have qualified immunity and the president is immune to all law suits according to SCOTUS.

I’d say that the social contract has already been broken. Not to mention the blatant unequal application of the law according to your wealth.

teslas are really nice cars now that theyve dialed in the quality

Have they really? With all the problems with the cybertruck I don’t think so. Also there design issues that make them death traps.

Yeah, the secondary effects of a drop of that magnitude are going to be catastrophic.

Millions of people dead. Wars popping up everywhere. Hoarding on an industrial scale.

This is why I love EU’s GDPR. Reply to their spam with an official GDPR request to be removed from their records.

It doesn’t work all the time. But it works well enough.

Where the wild pigs will get them.

It should be obvious to all Ukrainian allies that this is in their long term interests.

But alas we have the “escalation paralysis”.

There was some talk about it a while back. But I haven’t seen any evidence of it yet.

Tax the rich! They taste bad!

Under Siege 2 was so bad that I remember it. Under Siege 1 was just meh and I don’t remember anything about it.

The media uses these idiotic headlines because it gets clicks. And this narcissistic moron is using it to advanced his career. “Career” being avoiding prison.

They did it right though. The 14 were all walking in front in a line unarmed. Two guys with automatic weapons can kill 14 unarmed people very quickly if any one of them tries anything. One or two might get away if they tried to run. But I don’t think they have a chance of overwhelming the two. Also they had drone support.

Before that happens Russia will likely implement policies that bring the price down to about a hundred. And then it will rise again in spite of them. Rinse and repeat.

The USD RUB comparison is tenuous at best. Ruble isn’t being freely exchanged and the volumes are so low that Russia can manipulate the price. They just don’t have the reserves to do it for an extended period of time. So they apply policies to achieve the same goal. But even that hasn’t worked in the long term.

Viva la Révolution !

For a growing economy with an excess of people and resources it’s pretty good.

Our current world, not so much.

The problem is that there isn’t a currently viable alternative.