I think you might be a bit hung up here on the word software which in your defence is not the correct word here.
Replace it with “operation” and it’s not at all a crazy number to suggest that an incredibly complicated multi year multi national intelligence operation to disrupt a covert nuclear weapons program inside of an actively hostile nation who have a serious counterintelligence and counter espionage apparatus ended up costing that amount.
You end up coming to the conclusion rather quickly that it’s actually great value for money.
While not at all about this particular operation but if you want to hear someone who actively ran another incredibly successful nuclear non proliferation operation inside of CIA I’d recommend checking out this interview with perhaps the “spookiest” CIA person I’ve ever seen https://www.youtube.com/live/AFnfTDbcPOA?
If a Payroll system can cost 2-3 billion (see phoenix Canada), which is basically a CRUD, ledger and business rules - something we’ve already done 1000s of times.
They probably add the costs of test equipment which I presume they had to procure and even destroy several times to make sure the virus worked.
The complaints from small business owners in the article remind me of the same situation couple of years ago when Facebook reduced brands ability to reach their followers on Facebook. Not to be picking on FB, in the same way Google is shrinking organic reach within SERPs with every passing year.
There is nothing new in this behaviour, it has happened and it will happen on any new platform that gets popular.
> There is nothing new in this behaviour, it has happened and it will happen on any new platform that gets popular.
The situation with Instagram isn’t due to it getting popular. What’s happening is that tiktok got popular and now Instagram is trying to mirror tiktok by focusing on video content, which is causing real damage to the platforms established creators and causing extreme confusion and annoyances with its users.
I agree. While Russia has lots of popular services which win over western counterparts (Yandex>Google, VKontakte>FB ...) they still do use Google/Apple devices. Blocking them would cause more powerful force than any government can currently yield.
We have a way to go though - Google generously offered $2M in Adwords credit as a response to Ukraine war. Let's encourage them to do more!
(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30476940)
The unquestioning desire to inflict serious harm on 100+ million civilians in this thread (by bricking their communication devices) is disturbing to me.
I agree. From what I understand the Russian people mostly don't want this war. It's Putin's war, not Russia's.
There's a point to be made "if the Russian people feel this, they might revolt against Putin since this is his fault.", although that could easily backfire in the opposite direction "if the Russian people feel this, then that means Putin was right, the west IS out to get us".
Bricking devices remotely sounds terrible for this reason already, let alone the damages regular civilians will feel.
> I agree. From what I understand the Russian people mostly don't want this war. It's Putin's war, not Russia's.
I'm no expert, but this is probably not a sufficient understanding. As I understand it, Putin's successful invasion of Ukraine to annex Crimea in 2014 was deeply popular and helped boost his popularity at a time when that was needed. It may be useful to look at this invasion of Ukraine through the same political lens, which you can't do if you see most of the populace as being unsupportive of it.
That's the depth of my understanding of the situation, though. So definitely don't take my word for it. It is fair to imagine that the attractiveness of annexation to the population is less now than it was in 2014.
It is certainly true that there's significant lack of support, though you said "most" which is much stronger.
I think there should always be something left on the table. If the west does everything possible to hurt Russia, Russia will have nothing to lose and will be more likely to attack NATO countries. This is something they should reserve in case there is a risk for such event.
This seems a bit useless to me. Its trivial for Russian networks to block out foreign requests before it reaches the sites. So effectively those sites would not be accessible from outside of Russia but inside , business as usual.
I am wondering if this automatically means Russia will switch off gas supplies? Understandably, how Europe will pay for Russian gas when SWIFT is switched off, and probably Russia won't be sending gas for free?
He might, though that would also cost russia dearly because all countries like germany that are dependent on russian gas will a) be royally pissed and b) make sure they lower their dependence on russian gas in the future. And russias economy is really dependent on their natural recourcess export
> And russias economy is really dependent on their natural recourcess export
Russia has been described as “a gas station run by a mafia masquerading as a country that happens to have nuclear weapons”, which isn’t far from the truth.
The US is also really dependent on the flow of dollars going through SWIFT. Kicking countries out means alternatives have to come online. If those get too popular it poses a huge threat to the entire US dollar reserve currency system.
It's not kicking countries out, it's just kicking Russia out. It will be a blow for all the Western countries and banks conducting business with Russia, but a necessary one.
It's not just dollars that are flowing via SWIFT. SWIFT is what blockchain wants to be, it's a way for banks to send and receive funds of many currencies.
SWIFT is a messaging system.
The actual transfer of funds is performed with correspondent banks, but they won't perform the transfer if the government says that they cannot have accounts opened by banks from other nations, then that's up to that government, not SWIFT.
SWIFT is being used as "shorthand" to mean that Russian banks will be cut off from the world financial environment. They will have to evade those sanctions via, for example, trading with multiple hops through China, if China allows them to.
I do wonder just how much German sentiment has shifted.
From the leaked clips of a high ranking German officer saying "Putin just wants respect" before the war. Now seeing a large shift amongst those I follow on twitter in German who were previous anti-action.
Assuming SWIFT access is cut, and then the Natural Gas supplies are turned off is there another escalation back? Assuming the US/EU can rally their resources how do they mount a quick recovery from the loss of natural gas which will certainly be devastating. Even if the Nuclear plants in process of decommissioning are reversed(if possible) I'm not sure how the EU gets through the next six months without a ton of pain.
> Assuming SWIFT access is cut, and then the Natural Gas supplies are turned off is there another escalation back?
Sure. We could sanction their oil and gas industry. Like we've done to Iran. There's also a whole world of plausibly deniable black ops stuff we could do to mess with their infrastructure.
I think a lot of people, without meaning to be disrespectful of Ukrainian identity and sovereignty, looked at the conflict in the Donbas and Crimea and thought:
"well, this isn't really acceptable in terms of respecting settled borders but the reality is that at least a very substantial percentage of the local population does want to be part of Russia so it isn't the worst thing in the world and probably Putin will move troops into areas he de facto controls or slightly expand borders there".
That doesn't make those things ok but it does put in a long list of other conflicts where the on-the-ground reality is complicated.
Many of us also have mixed feelings of at least partial support about other re-arrangements of sovereignty whether that is ethnic separatism within a country with a quasi-federalist state like Spain (i.e. Basque or Catalan) or other cases like South Sudan or even Kosovo where NATO actively carved out an ethnic statelet by helping an organisation that for all its roots of legitimate popular support was at least... organised-crime adjacent.
The speech that Putin gave though was not about border adjustment but about a denial of any kind of Ukrainian nation identity or nationhood. He wasn't saying, "the Russia / Ukraine border should be 10 or 20 km West of where it is" which might be unacceptable to a hardline territorial integrist or to Ukraine but is within the normal bounds of nation state conflict, he was saying "there is no Ukraine at all, it's not a real nation, they have no right to any kind of state" and that crosses many, many lines that are not crossed by taking territory here or there.
Not trying to make taking "taking a province or two" look like acceptable behaviour but I think that it's important to put previous and current EU/NATO positions in the context of the full horror of what he is now proposing to do which is to permanently destroy a nation state. Even the Ukrainian government didn't really believe this was how it was going to go.
The winter here in the Netherlands is also really mild. I'm in a 4th floor apartment with the main room facing the sun with all windows. if I clothed a bit warmer than normal I could go without gas until winder ends.
Of course not everyone lives in a small apartment facing the sun but still.
I echo this sentiment, and I am from Poland, with much colder winters. We could stop using it for heating, spend the year preparing for winter, spend a lot on insulation and then electricity, and dress warmer -- but we'd reduce the dependence on Russia. Totally worth the trouble and hardships, and long overdue.
I think for many Putin actually invading Ukraine was simply unthinkable.
Sure, some saber rattling and destabilization, but outright war?
US intelligence was not always credible, so when they presented facts that conveniently benefited American interests (shale gas export), people were sceptic.
That allowed Putin to prepare an invasion in plain sight.
Perhaps everyone thought Russia was Saber rattling in January when they gave a 1 week deadline to NATO saying they would invade if they didn't receive it.
That said, following Russia demand, the US president went national TV and announced that Russia will likely invade Ukraine and the US will not go in.
I'm reasonably sure that those calling for Russia's ban from SWIFT are doing so precisely for that reason. They may not understand that banning them for SWIFT doesn't exactly accomplish that, but that's the motivation for the call.
> may not understand that banning them for SWIFT doesn't exactly accomplish that
There are numerous workarounds. Most involve Russia submitting to China. Given how unpredictable Putin’s become, that’s preferable to them being a regional power.
> Or CIPS which will likely undercut this attempt of isolating Russia’s financial system
This is almost expected. The calculation being that Russia is safer as a Chinese vassal than a regional power. Settling via CIPS is also more burdensome and thus expensive than settling via SWIFT.
If Europe stops buying Russian gas (a big if, and something that might happen later rather than sooner), are there other countries which would buy it? China, for instance?
Probably, but this would hurt Russia immensely. Currently there is not much infrastructure to support delivery of that much more gas to China, so it would need to be built and that would probably take years.
At the same time, it would hurt Europe more than Russia in the short-term. (But it might be really worth it in long term)
If they can build it, they still do not have the demand for that much extra gas, probably just little.
The Chinese government is despicably authoritarian, but unlike Putin, they are not crazy and they are playing it long-term.
They won't condemn Russian invasion too harshly, but they don't want to break energy supply chains from West to help out a not-exactly-friendly state (just an enemy of an enemy).
Seems like Putin missed a trick by not kicking this off in November. With a whole winter of gas supply issues in store the EU would be walking on egg shells even more than they have been.
Regardless, it seems like a small price to pay for solidarity with the Ukrainian people.
Hard to fight a war in bitter cold although that is less of a problem when the entire force has vehicles than it was during Napolean's invasion.
I am curious why he didn't wait longer. Maybe he chose now to make the crossing of rivers easier. Also, ISTR that when the snow melts the roads there get so muddy they are almost unusable.
Dec-Feb is better cause the ground is frozen so the heavy machinery won't be stuck in mud. Currently is warm, Russian army has a problem and have to use roads for tanks, which means they are easer pickings.
So, it was unavoidable for Putin yo invade Ukraine because a few countries were joining a military club he doesn't like? And shelling and using clusters bomb on civilians was also unavoidable?
Yes I think that's the idea and the reason why it's taking a while to set up. Maybe they'll take bitcoin? It will be a test of whether this can really be a backup form of payment against the will of states.
I’m sure there are other channels but I’m pretty sure cryptocurrency markets have enough liquidity to prop up gas payments.
If this goes through and BTC price starts spiking, I’d interpret that as a signal that it is happening, which would be a validation for Bitcoin playing a significant role in avoiding banking restrictions.
This thread feels like dejavu for me. I had been going through exactly the same with MS Azure couple of years back.
MS gave us some Azure free credits and once they expired it was series of stressful months to get the billing going. Constant emails with different layers of support people and no one could help us to PAY for Azure.
I have been to that site twice , first time about 20 years ago as part of the diving course. I remember one of the exercises was to go to higher depth and do math exercises to prove that our thinking was not impaired due to the depth.
For sure that site was not branded as deadliest in the world, but already back then dive masters told us about people who lost their lives there.
