75% of Russia's Satellite Electronics Come From US 127
schwit1 writes: One Russian aerospace industry expert noted today that three-quarters of all their satellite electronics comes from the United States: "According to [Nikolay Testoyedov], up to 75 percent of the electronic components for Russian satellites come from the US. Consequently, if it retaliates should Moscow refuse to sell RD-180 rocket motors to Washington — which Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin has threatened — Russia's satellite program would be frozen for at least two years. "The imported electronic components in our satellites represent 25 to 75 percent of the total in communications; in military ones, somewhat less; in commercial ones, more," Testoyedov says. Of these imported components, approximately 83-87 percent come from the United States thus giving Washington the whip hand." If we stop providing these electronics he estimates that after their present stock runs out in about a year it would take at least two years before Russia could replace these American-made parts. As the above linked article at The Interpreter mentions, this is relevant in part because of recent talks about U.S. sanctions which could affect this kind of commerce.
uh, so? (Score:1)
They'll just find another French shell company to source from. Piece of piss.
Re:uh, so? (Score:5, Insightful)
Or buy it direct from China, where it's actually made.
Re:uh, so? (Score:4, Informative)
Texas Instruments fabrications are done in China?
Who knew?
(actually they do have one plant under construction in Chengdu. but most of their fabs are done in Maine, Texas, and Japan).
Re:uh, so? (Score:5, Informative)
well, yes, considering TI/NS supply most of the space hardened electronics for the entire planet...
Re:uh, so? (Score:5, Informative)
Is TX Instruments somehow related to this story?
Yep.
Who do you think builds radiation resistant [ti.com] electronics? Radio Shack?
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I'm kind of shocked there are still chip fabs in the USA.
Re:uh, so? (Score:5, Insightful)
Why? Manufacturing goes overseas because it's cheaper, but when you automate the process or require skilled labor it's not really any cheaper to offshore it. In fact, according to Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] the US has more chip fabs than any other country. Significantly so. In fact in general the US is third in the world (behind China and the EU) in total manufacturing output. It just doesn't have very many manufacturing jobs anymore, because most of the plants went hi-tech.
USA #1 (Score:1)
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I suspect skilled labour over there is still cheaper than skilled labour over here (for suitably Western values of here). And if your assertion is correct why is any electronics production offshored?
Plus there's more to it than labour. It's always good for business being able dump toxic effluent anywhere you goddam want.
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You can find the electronics components in many shops around the world. Will the US prohibit the sell of basic electronic componets to the entire world?
Really? Space rated parts? What planet are you from?
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Aren't ULA building engines to the RD-180 design in Alabama? The only real issue is the prohibition by the Russians of the US using their RD-180s for military payloads. They're looking for local contractors, Boeing just aren't interested at the moment.
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Unless all of NSA is busy sifting through Facebook status updates, I would expect any such purchase to receive some very special attention. As it should be.
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Yes. radiation hardened and MIL spec is used in a lot more places than just space. A lot of medical equipment or even just stuff that needs to last uses those specifications. If you're building something and you want to make sure it works when purchased and lasts for 20 years after that, that's what you buy.
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Or if you want to buy something that will be supported and available for 20 more years. I will have to track down the video of the storage vaults that TI(?) use to maintain older parts to enable some of the military requirements.
75% of Russia satellite electronics come from USA (Score:2)
And 75% of electronics in USA satellites come from Taiwan. - Lev Andropov
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uh... a movie quote presented as fact??
This is about as believable as the rest of the movie.
Re:'Comes from' (Score:5, Informative)
Creating radiation resistant computer components is not as easy as fabricating a consumer video card. It is extremely expensive and time consuming. In industries that deal with specialty military hardware, you'll tend to see that there are only a handful of those companies in existence and they are concentrated in America (in this case, Texas Instruments has that particular market). You cannot export that sort of fabrication to another country without also exporting the people, R&D, and military secrets along with it.
So yes, it would be very difficult for Russia to find another supplier for a lot of these components or to start manufacturing all of them locally. This is not consumer technology.
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Most of the time the 'rad hard whatever' is just an old chip manufactured at a lower density factor that is less susceptible to radiation. Like those i486 they put in the Hubble. At one time they did use sapphire substracts, gallium arsenide, and weird shit like that but I doubt they do anymore.
The Chinese have plenty of obsolete chip plants they could use to manufacture something like that. Heck even the Russians probably could manufacture some old SPARC CPU clones in their even more obsolete plants like t
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"A lot of modern parts are reasonably radiation tolerant: very small feature sizes helps, because it requires a lot of doping to make the junction work in such a small size. Large doping levels means less likely that a particle will upset the apple cart."
You missed the converse of that. As features get smaller there is a higher probability that a high energy particle can and will cause something to go wrong. A lower probability of it actually hitting something. Sort of a trade off.
Reminds me of the Solarsai
Russia can't win (Score:2, Interesting)
This is why Putin cannot afford to retaliate with their own economic sanctions. Economically, they are about the same size as Italy. Putin and his cronies can talk as much as they want to about shunning the West economically (or not cooperating with America in space), but if it really came to a trade war, Russian society and their military would suffer far more than America and the rest of the West. Aside from oil/gas exports, Russia makes nothing of use for the West.
If I were an official in Russia, I would
Re:Russia can't win (Score:4, Insightful)
Why can't Russia just switch to Chinese-made electronics? Certain, components may be inferior to what Russia gets from the west, but it's not like Russian space or military programs would grind to halt only because of Chinese-made components.
In terms of economic and trade wars, I suspect Russia could in theory afford to shut down all of trade with USA, all of it completely, because USA is a relatively minor partner for Russia. The EU on the other hand is much more important. Lots of Russian manufactured good imports could from EU, while Russian gas and oil are exported there.
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Also, Russia probably could shut down all trade and be self-sufficient. It has pretty much all naturally occurring elements and energy sources (oil, gas, coal, nuclear), so if they really wanted, they could just manufacture everything locally.
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Russia probably could shut down all trade and be self-sufficient
They tried that. They couldn't feed themselves reliably.
After 70 years of misery and decline they stopped and embarked on a new era of misery and decline, eased substantially by limited trade with the West.
They have the resources to be self sufficient. They even have the knowledge. Unfortunately, that's not enough.
To close the loop you need a functioning market of industry and ideas where property rights are respected and investors and entrepreneurs can flourish. Russians don't do that. Their cul
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Russia can be a pure autarky if absolutely necessary in a sense that it has all the resources and enough manpower... but it would be subsistence living. Not quite as bad as DPRK, but much closer to it, as opposed to the standard of living that currently has (which is above many Eastern European countries). I very much doubt the populace would be supportive of such policies for long. And right now, at least, it's essentially a populist dictatorship - there's a certain degree of political oppressiveness, but
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Why necessarily subsistence living? Yes, the living and economic standards would go down. People who have to go back to driving Russian cars, fly on Russian airplanes, and use Russian consumer electronics, which in the 1980s were a subject of many jokes in the west. Russian cars, washing machines, televisions, home computers, and VHS players of the 80s were indeed joke compared to what existed in the West at that time, but they all existed.
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I don't think you fully appreciate the difference between the USSR in 80s, and Russia today. USSR got to that point literally through decades of economic hardship, and even then it could offer a lifestyle at best close to American one from 20 years before that. Russia, on the other hand, had its economy pretty much ruined in the 90s, and only very slowly recovered since then - and said recovery involved making the country a part of the worldwide economy. A lot of the things that enabled relative autarky in
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Regarding the agricultural sector, I think it could respond well and quickly to the economic incentives. Soviet agriculture was a mess because the collective farmers were being paid a tiny fraction of the real market price of their produce. Why work hard when you get pennies on a dollar for all your work? Russian farmers of the last two decades had a different kind of problem.. the imports of cheap, western food, often the result of western food subsidies. I have no doubt that if the Russian state allowed
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Russian farmers of the last two decades had a different kind of problem.. the imports of cheap, western food, often the result of western food subsidies. I have no doubt that if the Russian state allowed Russian farmers to keep what they have earned, and to sell their products at market prices, Russia could certainly feed itself.
As it happens, I do know some people directly involved in it, and it's not actually the main problems. The main problems are the lack of a qualified labor force. The collectivist mentality is still quite alive and well in the countryside, and so a farmer who does well has to deal with rampant theft and even vandalism of his property, often from the very same people he has hired.
The other problem is that a lot of agricultural techniques and machinery in use are not very modern. They're literally getting a yi
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"As it happens, I do know some people directly involved in it, and it's not actually the main problems. The main problems are the lack of a qualified labor force. The collectivist mentality is still quite alive and well in the countryside, and so a farmer who does well has to deal with rampant theft and even vandalism of his property, often from the very same people he has hired."
I read about the same problems in the Russian countryside in the 1990s. But if you're correct, what comes as surprise is that the
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As it happens, I am a middle-class Russian :) By the time the purges happened in the USSR, most small businesses were already dead. They were going after people primarily based on their espoused ideology (if public - religion also falls under this), or else ancestry. Basically, if you were nobility by birth, or your daddy was a factory owner, tough shit. Of course, by 30s it all devolved into a random free-for-all - tag a man and they would find a reason. My grandmother's first husband perished like that.
An
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India is not a country that is seriously in the same league, sorry. It can barely afford to pay its own bills.
As for China, they don't really need Russia for top end weapons anymore. If you look at their newest military tech, it's pretty much all in-house. Sure, it's based on older Soviet tech that they had - and why not? they would be stupid to start from scratch where they didn't have to. But now they have both the manufacturing capacity to make those themselves, and the expertise to develop it all furthe
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If China finds itself in, essentially, a monopoly position, they might ask for a very hefty price (as already happened with Russian gas).
Why is math so hard? (Score:5, Informative)
That title is terrible, and not supported by the article.
The article presents some numbers, quoting Nikolay Testoyedov:
Now, I think Slashdot gets off the hook for the misleading title, because the firggin article attributes the 75% from the US number to Nikolay Testoyedov and used the same number in its title. But the article title demonstrates some terrible critical math and reading comprehension skills.
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Yeah, it is not like it is rocket surgery.
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To be fair though, missing just one component might be enough to make the satellite nothing more than an expensive paperweight. It's not really a question of what percentage of components come from the US, only whether any necessary components come only from the US.
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And Russia does launch a lot more commercial satellites then anyone else on our planet. If you can not use the hardware you have in your orbiter or it can not be launched, as the US says NO, you are years into development and pretty screwed.
So yes it could cause many problems
unfortunate no matter how it goes (Score:1)
Having lived through the cold war, and then not the cold war, and now a little miniature cold war again, I liked not the cold war better.
HobbyKing? (Score:1)
The point is that Russia's tech is crap (Score:1)
They've got little more than rusting cold war hand-me-downs that are horribly obsolete and few Potemkin village weapons platforms that look cool but don't actually work.
Half of it is about as scary as the death star from the star wars movie "actually" is... aka not at all because it isn't real. It's a model with some special effects.
I'd worry about most of their shit about as much as I'd worry about dinosaurs eating people in my city.
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Well they beat us into space with the first satellite because we weren't really trying at the time. We were more focused on things with some actual practical value.
As to them beating us multiple times, once our program got going, we left them in the dust.
As to terrifying us with nuclear weapons. Even a chimp with a shotgun is menacing.
And what did their brief moment profit them?
Imagine what would have happened to Russia if they had adopted a friendly posture to the US instead of an anatongistic one. Look at
Re:The point is that Russia's tech is crap (Score:4, Insightful)
hmmm... they are and are not. It is complicated.
We have strong business interests and the chinese NEED the western markets. The chinese also have ZERO experience with modern warfare so they don't want to fight the sole remaining super power even in limited engagements. Anything capable of firing back won't be touched.
The US of course doesn't want a problem with china either. Our concern is the sea lanes. The free movement of trade goods by sea is a center piece of US strategic policy. What US strategic policy even is often not understood by most people. Most people don't understand that there is a design in the US's over all agenda.
Free trade is critical. It cannot be allowed to be threatened. The exception obviously being if it serves our interests but it rarely does.
We're generally okay with whatever china wants to do so long as they don't invade any country we're allied with, invade a country that changes our strategic posture via our allies, or interferes with trade.
If China doesn't do these things then we're going to just do business with them.
Their actions in the South China sea have been troubling because it threatens trade, upsets maritime law, and makes the US and her allies by proxy appear weak. The US is therefore going to be interested in shutting that down to protect trade lanes, preserve the maritime status quo that has existed since the Victorians, and because to not act would cost the US "face" which is quite important in diplomacy.
If you respect me and I tell you "do that and there is going to be trouble" this has a different effect than if you don't respect me and I say "there will be trouble." Do you see? A lack of respect means the US will have to prove itself by force more often. But if the US is respected then this is not necessary. The US can simply say "stop doing that" and the situation is resolved.
The dynamics of US, Chinese, and the various pacific partners of the US is complicated. The US is currently engaging in a "shift to china" policy where we're stepping down involvement in the middle east and focusing on East Asia.
Our allies in the region are asking for this change and China does not want it. So you see... there will be trouble. But China's policy has been thus far to do what it can get away with and to not do what it cannot get away with.
The problem China is going to run into is that the US is a very complex culture. We are like an onion of personalities and interests. And in different contexts, different layers of our cultural onion are preeminent. Most cultures that try to best us in something get used to the way we act in one context and then get surprised when we act a very different way in what is to us a very different context.
Take for example the attack on US embassies. Osama bin ladin believed that because the US reacted one way to attacks on their embassies that the US would act the same way if he blew up a building in Manhattan. Now from the outside, this seems logical. The US had many attacks against it by terrorists and generally didn't do anything. In one case we fired some cruise missiles at a terrorist camp which could have been abandoned for all we knew. But the attack on the trade center buildings triggered a massive response.
This is typical of American interactions with various powers that try to anticipate our reactions without understanding our culture.
Another example was the attack on Pearl Harbor by the imperial japanese. The imperial japanese had been doing things to US shipping and interests in the pacific for years. We ignored it. The japanese assumed that because we didn't react to those provocations that they could sink our pacific fleet in a surprise attack and the worst that would happen is we'd send them a strongly worded letter. Yamamoto who had gone to college in the US and had a better grasp of US culture knew that the attack would trigger a massive response. He tried to tell his peers this but they didn't believe him. So instead he did his best to make the atta
Re: The point is that Russia's tech is crap (Score:5, Insightful)
China is not as complex. China has a highly centralized autocratic power structure. Their commander of their military is largely the head of the country. Not the president. You can tell because in times of crisis such as TIanaman Square, the people in charge of different branches will start changing hats. And person ultimately in control will be the commander of the military. Which is again, not the president.
The ways in which china is actually simplified via its power structure are many.
In the US, the political gestalt is relevant. In china it something to be controlled but which does not impose itself on the politicians or bureaucrats.
A simplified way of thinking about the US would be to imagine a group of high school students in a stereotypical horror movie. This is useful because the stereotypes can stand in as abstractions of the political mass.
Now, watch that group of teenagers in various situations. Depending on the situation, different teenagers will be in control of the situation. The brain nerd is going to be queried for his opinion when brainy nerd stuff comes up. The macho jock guy is going to be the most relevant when there is some kind of physical threat to the group. One or some collective of the girls might be relevant in various other situation.
And so on. The point is that the people that make decisions changes based on the circumstances.
Your violent alcoholic uncle is usually a joke. But if someone in your family needs to charge into melee or risk getting a bottle cracked off his head... he's probably going to be the guy that steps up. And no one in the group is going to suppress him in that situation.
In the context of the US, the economic and business people are relevant if there is money to be made. They care about that and will buy access... and on top of that, most people appreciate that they're the best people to send into that situation because they'll know what matters and what doesn't for business.
But the way they think and their priorities are specific to their subculture.
Now if you destroy the economic interests in that situation then the business people will abandon it and you'll probably get some faction of the diplomatic wing showing up to make nice with people.
If that all goes to hell and people start getting killed, then diplomats are going to get suppressed and you'll swing over to the hawks. And the hawks naturally have a very different way of looking at the world than do the other groups. Scare the country or present some sort of credible threat to the nation and these sorts of people that normally don't get a lot of attention or authority... are suddenly the most powerful people in the society.
This rapid shift in mentality confuses other powers because they get used to dealing with one faction and they assume that faction is the whole country or will regardless call the shots in any situation.
As such, the peace and diplomacy crew are often assumed to be the only faction in the US of relevance. Enemy powers get used to the dithering of this group when there are minor hostilities. But what happens when a major incursion happens is that these people lose all power. Literally all. They're dog food. And the often irrelevant hawks step into place... and basically do this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
If you don't understand American culture, then you don't grasp that the diplomatic core is the softly spoken words. And confusing that for weakness is a mistake.
The rage, ferocity, and merciless of the American people when this line is crossed is frequently a surprise to rival powers. They don't see it coming.
They get used to in some cases decades of inaction, tolerance, and unconditional forgiveness for various slights or transgressions. But the line is crossed... and things change completely.
We have far more factions than that. Different groups have more credibility in different situations. If you change the conditi
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As such, the peace and diplomacy crew are often assumed to be the only faction in the US of relevance. Enemy powers get used to the dithering of this group when there are minor hostilities. But what happens when a major incursion happens is that these people lose all power. Literally all. They're dog food. And the often irrelevant hawks step into place...
I think of it less as "lose all power", than "authorizing a temporary grant of power" to the "General Ripper" and "The Blood Knights".
Think of the US as "The Federation", who is quite willing to be the Picard most of the time, but if they think you're a credible threat, then you discover that those "exploration cruisers" are actually heavily armed battleships.
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You're missing the point in an attempt to gain some sort of illusory high ground.
The point I'm making is that when certain thresholds are crossed, the US is prone to rapid changes in nature and character.
This is not the case for Russia. Putin for example would remain in power regardless of the situation and the various people that advise him would remain largely static.
This means there is no sudden change in character.
The US is different. When the thresholds are crossed, different groups of people gain and
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Here I presume you're going to find my point inconvenient because you really wanted to compare the US to Sweden or something. Tough shit. Its an unreasonable comparison.
Not with the list you put up above. To quote the previous start of the entry for Sweden in the CIA world fact book "Though a military super power in the 17:th century..."
So if you can compare the US to the holy roman empire, then you can compare it to Sweden. The 30 years war for example, was the first true world war and it lasted three times as long as the two the US has been involved in, combined. There were plenty of people who said "the Swede will save us!" (and for a time we actually did), just about a
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You're missing the point in an attempt to gain some sort of illusory high ground.
I think you're misconstruing my point. What I'm saying is that the US doesn't fundamentally change, it just changes the tools it's using. You see it as one group losing all power, and I see it as the US as a whole just changing the tools it's using for a while.
After Pearl and 9/11 the US didn't turn into a military dictatorship, the civilian government just gave the OK to the military to do their thing and gave them the resources necessary to do so. The diplomats and politicians were still running things
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That's a distinction without meaning. First, you're not talking about modern sweden but about 17th century Sweden which had a very different character and nature than the modern Sweden. Compare the US morally and ethically against 17th century Sweden, and it is unlikely the modern US would look worse.
Second, while Sweden might have been threatening to their immediate neighbors, they had no where near the projection of true empires. I grant they were formidable. But only within their region.
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Point of note, here in the UK we never really gave a dam about what Sweden was getting up to in the 17th Century. I also suspect neither where the Spanish.
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I'm well aware. The super power claim wasn't taken seriously.
I only brought up that tangent because I could smell the moral equivalency coming and I had to head it off by insisting on ACTUAL equivalency. Such arguments tend to rely on conflating very minor powers that couldn't do anything really nasty even if they wanted with huge powers that often have no choice but to do nasty things. It comes with the power.
So if the US is to be judged morally or ethically, it should be judged against its peers... which
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The problem is that that isn't what happens. There is a sudden change in mentality.
You could say Russia or China or any country just changes the tools. They don't send their general to negotiate a trade deal or their diplomat to command their armies.
And yet this sudden change in US posture is unique to the United States so far as I know. I've seen no other nation that shifts that fast and will make changes that extreme to its policy.
The US will make 180 degree turns in policy in an instant. There's no other
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That's a distinction without meaning. First, you're not talking about modern sweden but about 17th century Sweden which had a very different character and nature than the modern Sweden. Compare the US morally and ethically against 17th century Sweden, and it is unlikely the modern US would look worse.
No argument, it was you how brought up the comparison with empires of yore, and then mentioned Sweden in the next breath.
Whether you'd look worse... Good question. "We" were pretty bad, so I'm not sure that's aiming very high. However, the world has also changed, we're much more peaceful now, so an absolute comparison is fraught with difficulty anyway.
Second, while Sweden might have been threatening to their immediate neighbors, they had no where near the projection of true empires. I grant they were formidable. But only within their region.
Well, by that token, so were many others on your list. Also, those that covered lots of land, often ruled vast "empires" of no-one, as many of the areas where
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As to what the British Empire told you... consider ulterior motives. This is an unavoidable consequence of the sort of power I'm talking about.
A lot of an empire's power is based on pretense... image... machismo... fear... respect... love... some kind of emotion. And the best application of that is to get people to do what you want them to do.
I know that the British were fighting the Crimean War around 1853. Do you have a date on when the British said "oh hey, you should totally go in that direction because
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Oh yes, there were plenty of ulterior motives. You see, the Swedish government in about 1670 before Charles XII realised that in order for Sweden to survive we had to have peace with the Russians. So the deal was made that we would help open the old silk road. We would help the Russians build canals etc. for a transport route that would take gods from India and China via Persia, across the Kaspian via Volga to Narva via Moscow. The endpoint would be where present day St Petersburg is, i.e. with handy access
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There you go. You know a lot more about this specific incident than I do, but I still predicted accurately that there were some unstated hijinks involved. I should note again, that I didn't claim the British were believers in Win-Win. This is an American belief... The British empire believed in the more traditional "win-lose" system.
The reason America believes in Win Win is not just altruism but what we think of long term wisdom. First, when people lose they are rarely destroyed. Which means they are left r
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The British empire believed in the more traditional "win-lose" system.
That may be a bit harsh. I would say it was more a "we win, we don't care particularly what happens to you". If you look at e.g. the African nations that won independence from their European masters the former British ones usually did OK. The Brits had taught the natives how to actually run a country, as they needed the country to be run and didn't want to waste their own manpower on it.
You can contrast this to many of the smaller players, like Portugal or, horror of horrors, Belgium. They were more likely
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I didn't mean to be unfair to the British. They knew how to run an empire but they didn't uplift nations in their spheres for the mutual profit of those peoples. They invested in those countries to profit the empire or make controlling the territory easier.
No one ran a global empire better or more benevolently than the British until the Americans came along. Our administration is very different in character but arguably more stable, definitely more profitable, and the people's within our sphere tend to be h
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I didn't mean to be unfair to the British. They knew how to run an empire but they didn't uplift nations in their spheres for the mutual profit of those peoples. They invested in those countries to profit the empire or make controlling the territory easier.
Sure, don't get me wrong, I didn't say they did. However, they were much better than most of the "competition".
No one ran a global empire better or more benevolently than the British until the Americans came along.
That is up for debate I think. :-) I even said as much during your past and current debacle in Iraq. "You even had the British with you, the best imperialists there have ever been, and you still couldn't take their advice and do the smart thing." (They moved to have Abu Ghraib bombed for example, it being such a powerful symbol for Saddam's oppressive rule. Did you? No instead you made it a symbol
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As to it being up for debate that the US was more benevolent... not by any objective measure.
Set hard standards that can be quantified and you'll find the difference is quite stark.
We have no colonial india. we have no colonial egypt. we don't even control the panama canal.
Stop and think. Would the British have given up something like the Panama Canal during their Empire?
Of course not. The US did. We gave it up on the understanding that if it is held hostage or misused in any way we might come back. But so
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And what makes you think Pakistan is an ally of China?
You can move economic goods that way. But then the US believes in free trade so we wouldn't interfere with that in any case.
Now imagine what happens if Chinese troops enter pakistan? The chinese are not muslim. ;) So the fun is pretty predictable. The beardy death cultists will cause problems.
What is more, pakistan is very unstable. They've a very tense relationship with India and the two can be played off against each other if you need them to change po
Re: The point is that Russia's tech is crap (Score:1)
When the Soviet Union collapsed you Americans were the first to loot the corpse. You basically privatized everything and stole the rest with the oligarks. You kept treating Russia with no respect untill Putin started to show some muscle. You could have really fixed the relationship between the two countries but you chose to humiliate and neglect.
Keep watching the History Channel and writing your history essays. Nobody cares for the guy who loves his own voice as much as you do.
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We did no such thing. If we had, we'd own Russia.
Do we own Russia or are you wrong?
Because... one of the two is true.
If we "looted" russia, what did we loot and where did that loot go? Did we steal Lenin's mummified corpse and put it in the white house as a hat stand?
Nope.
As to your oligarchs looting the country... how is that our fault? First the soviets had been looting the country for years. They were living high on the misery of millions. And when it fell, did the country really change? Not really. Some
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And another thing, Russia could have made it work, they had plenty of examples of making it work, but no, mafiya, kleptocracy and oligarchs. And they did it to themselves.
The USA is not perfect, as you said "shitshow", but we put people in federal prison for stuff that is considered expected and penny-ante in Russia and the Third World.
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No, their failures are their own. Denying this is merely self delusion.
As to the US having some negative consequences of fighting the drug war?... sure. Which nation would you rather be?
The US or Russia? Comparing the two isn't even close. Russia and has been for a long time... a sad joke.
If they weren't run by fools they could be very rich and very powerful.
But they are run by idiots and the price is to be an international laughing stock.
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No, their failures are their own. Denying this is merely self delusion.
Why do you think I'm disagreeing with you? I said "They did it to themselves" which is EXACTLY THE SAME as "Their Failures are their own"
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sorry, i was still basically reacting to this guy:
http://slashdot.org/comments.p... [slashdot.org]
he was saying the Russians failed to produce a prosperous democracy because the Evile Amerikanzis looted his country and some how instituted the oligarchy.
So we're on the same page that that guy had his head up his ass... sorry for the confusion. :)
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Well thank you for a typically illuminating comment from another gifted AC. It is because of minds like yours that most people have such a high regard for the common ACs on this site.
Keep up the good work.
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The Russians are fed so much propaganda that their opinions aren't worth a lot.
You believe what you're told. Like good little peasants.
As to the Soviets descending into the economic crapper, they were in the crapper before that. Your standard of living has been much lower than ours since always. Your people are poor and have been poor for a very long time.
And that is despite having great resources, great industrial capability, and a relatively well educated technical population that could have made Russia v
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Is the US debt load increasingly unsustainable? Yep. Comes from having an out of control welfare system pushed by idiot socialists.
Are you a socialist? Then it is people like you that create this sort of problem. If not, then welcome to the few that aren't responsible for fucking it all up.
That said, we have a 12 trillion dollar economy and our debt's interest rates are very low. So really it isn't so bad.
As to Wallstreet being out of control, yep. But again how does this grant Russia any superiority? Russi
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Wrong. Welfare spending has been increasing radically over the last 50 years.
Medicare, medicaid, EBT, disability insurance, etc etc etc.
You add it up and it is about 60-70 percent of the US federal budget... and growing.
To cite anything but the welfare as the problem with the budget is to declare your personal ignorance or deceit.
As to whether you're a socialist or not... Guessed right. You are a socialist. :D
You people are so predictable and obvious. You fuck up everything you touch and take no responsibil
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USSR did that. But today's Russia is not USSR, even though it tries pretty hard to cosplay that.