There might be public displeasure about it, but I think behind the scenes India buying Russia oil is expected and at least to some degree accepted (or possibly even wanted).
The bigger thing is Russia not generating profits from those sales, which I am speculating is not the case at the prices India is buying at. The upside of Russian oil still being available to the world market is keeping the prices lower, something Europe is very much interested in.
To be fair the article mentions that they did have it figured out, but later canceled the connection, which was part of a separate project.
Seems like the exact problem that could happen with anything, but ofc shouldn’t. Because it really is such a simple mistake that anyone with a brain, who is in charge of making those decisions, should look at the plans and see it. There for sure are systemic issues, if something this basic can fall through the cracks.
Italy, a member of the G7, emerged as another opponent because of the large number of Italians living in Russia, diplomats said.
Rome has argued that it would not be able to offer consulate services across Russia if the Kremlin responds with tit-for-tat bans on diplomatic movements.
Its government also voiced support for maintaining “open diplomatic channels” with Moscow and there were other tactics to fight Russian intelligence agents, a diplomat said.
Feels like you could have also included that part of the article. Because while the headline ofc isn’t technically wrong, it does imply that it is only Germany blocking the proposal. However the article itself also mentions Italy being against it (and who knows how the rest of the countries are leaning), including other reasons than just wanting to trade again. So it feels like they just wanna bash Germany specifically.
A more neutral headline would e.g. be “Europe still divided about Czech proposal to limit movement of Russian diplomats to combat spie activities”.
Personally i think as a layman it is kind of hard to judge who is right in this debate. My first thought would be that you know who you give those diplomat credentials to, so while they might be spies, at the same time it makes it easier to track them.
The proposal of limiting them to only the specific country they are stationed in only makes sense to me, if it is a problem keeping track of them when they change countries (which would be a problem that should be fixed in general I guess).
I do like the part with requiring a biometric passport, that seems like an easy enough and sensible requirement. But ofc who says that spies would come with Russian passports in the first place. Couldn’t they also come with passports from other contries like Kasachstan or Usbekistan for example?
We also shouldn’t forget that we most certainly are doing the same with our diplomats. At least as far as spying goes, maybe not so much the sabotage part.
Besides the obvious fuck up, just judging from the picture in the article I also see a complete lack of solar panels or charging stations.
Feels like when you are already spending such a huge sum just for a fancy place to store some cars, then you could at least add that functionality.
This is their best chance to escape their coming economic trap. They control so few actual resources beyond labor.
Is that actually the case? I am not sure how many resources china has in their own country (I assume there are a few with it being this vast), but I think they are tackling the resource problem more so with their investments in Africa and other poor countries. And because of the war Russia also has fewer countries to sell to besides China.
I think the true longterm problem is actually with the cheap labour force you mention. As the standard of living rises, so do wages. And more importantly they’ll experience the same demographic shift other developed countries are currently experiencing with an aging population. With the difference that it’ll be worse for them due to the one child polic.
So like the Stillsuits in Dune?
I think the satellite based cellular networks like ASTS is currently trying to launch will be ubiquitous.
The tech already seems good, so it’ll happen much sooner than 34, but I imagine by that point it will just be one of those things everyone takes for granted.
I can also see small autonomous drones playing a much larger role with various tasks.
That is one aspect of it: if you are 10, then 1 year is 10% of your whole life, more if you consider the first few to not really be conscious. If you are 50 it’s only 2%.
But I think another factor is what stays in our memories vs what gets filtered out. If you are young, you’ll experience lots of “first times”, major changes, and defining moments. As you get older there are more parts of your life that are routine and repetitive. Looking back at a year/a whole life what are the things you can vividly remember?
This is also what imo causes the shift in perception for the covid period. Suddenly a lot of events that usually create memorable experiences didn’t happen. No parties, festivals, meeting new people, or vacations in foreign places. For most of us it will have been a major change initially, but relatively quickly routines setting in.
I think it definitely has something to do with monetary factors.
Rising ticket prices mean that the audience expects a cinematic event for their money. Like if you are spending as much as $100 as a group for tickets and snacks/drinks, would you be satisfied with a short 90min film or would you rather have a spectacle like avatar?
And from the studio side there are all the factors that also lead to the death of the mid-budget movies. You are already spending a ton of money on marketing and for the general audience it’s probably a “winner takes all” scenario. The mid-budget movie with its similar sized marketing campaign can’t compete with something like a Deadpool 3. And if you are spending big on marketing you might as well spend more to make sure you hit. And stuff like good CGI that is expected nowadays is also not cheap
Additionally larger overall budget+returns give you growth. the amount of days in a year is fixed, so there is only so many release windows that make sense without movies cannibalizing each others returns. Even if you can only dream of the margins of some low budget horror movies.
Not a horror fan myself, so I actually don’t know if that’s the case, but I could imagine that niche genres that don’t need that much marketing campaign (and don’t have a potential audience large to support a larger one) will still have shorter run times.
Right, totally forgot about that step.
Haven’t used it myself, but similar to casa os there is also cosmos os, which looking here seems to offer some build in storage management options. Maybe this could be worth looking into?
openmediavault is ok for raid, but the containers aren’t one click wonder like in other NAS OSes
Since OMV also uses docker compose with a build in GUI to manage them, I don’t assume this would be what OP is looking for either? Unless trueNAS also comes with some repository of preconfigured compose files.
I am currently using Openmediavault for my NAS and can confirm that with an official plugin so far I havent had any issue with my ZFS pool (that I migrated from trueNAS scale since I didn’t like their kubernetes use and truecharts, but as someone mentions they seem to switch to docker).
Otherwise I am happy as well, but I am far from a poweruser.
Well i aswell hope that this isn’t just my bias speaking :)
Unlike France or GB, which recently had elections substantially changing majorities, here in Germany it’s still the exact same people in charge since the start of this war. With the only major change being the defense minister, and that was for the better. So the people deciding here are the same that (based on this article) doubled this years support budget. And as far as i am aware there really hasn’t been any major event that would have shifted the sentiment in foreign politics from what we’ve experienced until now.
On the side of internal politics as mentioned it is basically a self-inflicted struggle to balance the budget and limit new debt. Because for some reason we chose to write that into our constitution, restraining our options. So everyone is fighting for their share and by the looks the winners are the usual: more money to secure pensions for old people and the automotive industry. While not only the budget for Ukraine is on the chopping block, but also other stuff like a reform of welfare for children or infrastructure projects for railroads.
Might sound bad, but it’s nothing really new and so far lack of funds hasn’t been an issue delaying German support. So i don’t expect it to be going forward either. We’ll just keep moving in lockstep with what others provide, slowly build out capacity and react to new developments. Which would be no change to how we’ve seem to have handled it so far, and not like “the slashing the budget by half” would imply.
And as mentioned above i am sure there are plenty of additional ways to support Ukraine that don’t hinge on the budget. Like telling Ukraine to direcly purchase through the manufacturers and giving security assurances for loans. Might be a worse deal on paper for Ukraine, but in the short/medium term wouldn’t make a practical difference. And things can get sorted later.
But regardless of how this plays out we won’t have any type of deadlock like the one delaying US aid until recently. And the largest party in the opposition is also in favor of supporting Ukraine, despite taking any opportunity to take shots at whatever the governing parties decide.
Personally as a German. while disappointing at facevalue, i wouldn’t read too much into it in respect to any shifts in the commitment to supporting Ukraine (but i might also be wrong here).
To me this very much is an internal self-inflicted struggle about balancing budgets and we’ll only be able to tell whether it actually affected things in retrospect (if it’s even possible).
In the end maybe more purchases will be directed through EU funds (of which Germany pays a substantial share) or instead of direct aid things are financed through low interest rate loans (that later might even get forgiven). Or you have some other kind of schemes where aid indirectly goes towards Ukraine.
And who knows how the conflict will change, promting adjustments in deliveries. Like the recent airstrikes probably leading towards more air defense systems being delivered than originally anticipated (with a single Patriot system being worth as much as 1 billion if i understand it correctly)
Just to throw another option into the mix:
Maybe create a VPN connection with wireguard, then you can just transfer them however you’d do it in a local network? Tailscale would be an easy solution to achieve this.
For the US maybe, but I don’t think it is profitabel for Europe.
Refugees aren’t cheap (even though ukrainian people might integrate easier than others and later add value), a good part of money for weapon purchases flows towards America since they have more immediate capacities, and long term we do want to integrate Ukraine, which means Europe will ultimately bear a significant chunk of rebuilding costs.
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Makes sense, but what do these companies produce? Seems to me that 50 million (especially when spread over multiple recipients) doesn’t really go that far in the defense sector. At least if we are talking heavy equipment manufacturing or anything with complex technology.
I guess at a scale where this amount matters we are talking more basic products or something like small drones?
Thanks for the link. That is certainly a frustrating development, since they had to sell it for a much steeper discount before as the article mentions.