One of the surprising features of the crypto boom is the discovery of places where the price of energy is directly subsidized, or otherwise broken (e.g. you can just bribe the head of the city power plant, instead of paying your power bill).
The Xive, the biggest mining business there actually don't mine itself. They lease self-contained mines in ISO containers, and a membership in the pool.
Anybody with access to near free electricity gets it hauled, or even flown to him, then they only have to wire-in few kiloamps of power, and internet.
Not very easily: the capital expenditure required to build, say, an aluminum smelter (which is how Iceland converts excess geothermal into cash) is orders of magnitude more than some crypto rigs.
Containers or a warehouse of miners also has far less effect on anything local. You don't have to worry nearly as much about local oligarchs or regulators getting uppity and trying to shut you down.
> Containers or a warehouse of miners also has far less effect on anything local.
uhm what? the presence of miners mean energy prices rise as well as more environmental destruction to produce energy, especially if it's a place without green(er) energy production.
Even if it's green, wouldn't it be better if that produced energy goes somewhere to replace non-green energy, rather than to calculate hashes that are mostly thrown away?
Obviously it's all stupidly chaotic, there might be a huge waterfall somewhere, and if we ignore the natural beauty aspects, before some cryptobros show up with money (however tangible) to build a hydropower plant and some wires to their container site, that waterfall's energy is not being utilized...
> Even if it's green, wouldn't it be better if that produced energy goes somewhere to replace non-green energy, rather than to calculate hashes that are mostly thrown away?
yep, that's my argument above. and i personally wouldn't say hashes "are mostly thrown away", i would argue they're all thrown away, especially when considering this 'tech' will become defunct in a few years.
“In what may be the best expression yet of capitalist realism, a new tool for free market speculation has become for many a populist symbol of resistance to the ravages of finance capitalism.”
Censorship doesn't necessarily mean the thing being censored is deterministically "bad" or "evil".
Bitcoin is above morality, morality is a human construct, Bitcoin is math and computer science, by definition it cannot have morality.
Now, you might or might not agree that Bitcoin should be allowed to exist given it facilitates activities such as the one you linked.
But since it's uncensorable in the first place... you cannot outlaw it.
Pandora's box is open, and it cannot be closed once it is open (unless you break Bitcoin's cryptography).
Uncensorability /is/ valuable, to the people that don't want to be censored, and want to exchange money without asking anyone permission, whether that's a drug dealer, or an unbanked worker in Venezuela.
Then all of mining would just move to places like Venezuela, where a lot of drug trade (per your example) already goes on, and they would get even more money for their extremist endeavours. Sad.
Plus the whole environmental nasty thing. I was born in a town which hosted an aluminium smelter, my parents moved from there when I was 10 months old on the advice of a doctor who was a friend of theirs and who had told them they should most probably seek a better place for me to grow up, environmentally-wise.
I wonder if it's more complicated that that. Narrowly looking at the CO2 effects of shutting down AL smelters in Iceland, that will make the global supply for the metal lower, raising prices. Perhaps that would make it uneconomical for usage in vehicles, meaning that cars would again use heavy steel instead of aluminum. Perhaps that would cause the global car fleet to burn more fuel and net pollute more CO2.
CO2 doesn't directly poison people in the same way the industrial waste/emissions poison people. This fundamental fact is one of the major reasons it is difficult to coordinate CO2 emissions reductions -- the harm is global but diffuse.
What about storage of energy in batteries for resale to the grid? That’s very low (or negative) return by comparison? (Also probably not possible everywhere.)
Also, if the claim is correct (about crypto making energy price arbitrage much easier), then a motivated reasoner could argue that it has had the positive effect of eliminating inefficiencies by forcing energy to obey the “law of one price”.
Which, to clarify, doesn’t necessarily make it positive-sum overall, but still needs to be weighed against its energy usage cost to accurately gauge the full effect.
There’s an interesting short term versus long term discussion: if a place has cheap electricity (hydro, geothermal, solar, etc.) for a while it becomes appealing for people to reconfigure around it — electrification for homes & vehicles, building heavy industry or cloud data centers, etc. If someone can deliver shipping containers full of cryptocurrency mining hardware, they can very quickly soak up that extra capacity, maybe even drive prices up a bit, and it has no benefit to the surrounding community other than perhaps a maintenance job.
To make my point more concrete in terms of your example, the benefit would be something like:
Let's say Iceland has some natural advantage in fishing, because of the great fish around there. But, because our world violates the law of one price, it's instead of profitable to smelt aluminum there instead of fishing[2], and the world is deprived of the utility gain from the fish captured and shipped[1].
But then, once the world obeys "one energy price", the smelting doesn't make sense and they go back to fishing (while the imported crypto miners sop up the extra energy).
[1] hopefully with sustainable management
[2] They still fish there, today and in the hypothetical, but probably much less than the optimum.
Those seem fairly separate industries — I don't know how many power-plant operators would switch to fishing. The process I was thinking of would be more like this:
1. A major hydro / geothermal / solar / etc. project goes online providing n GW/day
2. Usage within the region where that power can viably be transmitted is 0.2n so there isn't pressure to elevate prices. Because the power supply is based on the local geography, there isn't a way to bring production closer to the consumers in distant areas (e.g. a solar farm is going to be more productive in Arizon even if you want to power a factory in Portland).
3. Ordinarily, someone who owns, say, an aluminum smelter might consider building a new one in that region to take advantage of the guaranteed green power rather than facing escalating prices based on competition and emissions controls take effect. However, if someone ships a bunch of cryptocurrency miners in to soak up any available power there won't be slack capacity and that's guaranteed to happen because they can ship containers of mining hardware in days whereas building an industrial facility takes years.
Where is the arbitrage? Mining crypto in Kazakhstan with subsidized energy can not do anything to reduce the MWh price in Germany. There is only up and up as energy is irrecoverably burned for crypto.
Even better, the price of crypto is so high that it can be profitably mined even in countries with very high consumer power prices. I want to see you travel to Kazakhstan and tell them that paying 35 cents per kWh now that all the production goes towards crypto has had the positive effect of eliminating inefficiencies - namely the consumption of people living there. You might not make it back alive.
Price doesn't matter, profit does. And mining difficulty automatically adjusts to price so that the profit (also from transaction fees) tends to zero (whether from the top or from the bottom). I've seen the average Opex estimated at 60%, but that was some years ago...
(Also, an expectation of prices being higher than they "should" would mean that one has to consider an incoming crash and the whole operation should probably start getting wound down, so as not to be left holding the bag with now (almost) worthless cryptocurrencies and mining rigs. In that sense, yeah, you're probably better off staying closer to home, which I'll assume to be one of those "high consumer power price" countries.)
>Where is the arbitrage? Mining crypto in Kazakhstan with subsidized energy can not do anything to reduce the MWh price in Germany. There is only up and up as energy is irrecoverably burned for crypto.
I already said in the comment that it is "probably not possible everywhere". But to clarify that hypothetical, the arbitrage would be reselling the energy to whatever energy use-cases exist in Kazakhstan that aren't subsidized (which probably exist since it's unaffordable to subsidize energy everywhere in a country without bound).
Also, really? Is that your standard for the merit of an argument? Whether Kazakhstanis will kill you over it? I explained in detail how the efficiency manifests in another comment [1], and (also) already said it doesn't necessarily cancel the negative effects of crypto.
And not particularly efficient : if you cannot beat the highest market prices...
And comes with the risk of catastrophic release of that stored energy. Which means that the authorities will be much more interested in getting involved !
And the biggest issue is that if you try to become an energy seller, it becomes much harder to go under the radar as part of the black or grey market ?
Just FYI most of the energy in Iceland goes into smelting. It's not excess the capacity has been expanded and continues to be expanded to power smelting.
It's also quite borderline as to whether or not it breaks even these days. Supply chain woes increasing prices have helped last year for example but before that they were losing money.
The electricity in this case is not "spare", just at non-global prices. Electricity generation has always been managed by turning down the generation to match the demand.
Your point below about battery storage: battery storage has only just become economically viable at the best of times, and that relies on getting paid to provide "fast frequency response" - stabilisation as a service.
> One of the surprising features of the crypto boom is the discovery of places where the price of energy is directly subsidized, or otherwise broken
are you really arguing that letting the market work on energy instead of having somewhat democratic state run utilities works well? i think the evidence speaks for itself. what do you see?
They are now disconnected from the global Internet. What happens to all BTC transactions made in Kazakhstan? Will the local network accept them? What will happen to them when the Internet connection to the global world is back?
As a someone ignorant occational user: It'd operate similar to a git repo no? Transactions within KZ would be accepted by the local chain, which would then be merged when reconnected. If there's a conflict you have to decide which chain is the correct one, which in this case would be the global version.
When the network is segmented multiple chains could form. Likely KZ would have a very low hash rate, so that segment would take very long to form blocks (or never complete any). Once the networks rejoin, the global chain almost certainly "wins" and the local chain is ignored. Transactions written to a KZ block will show some confirmations, but won't remain in the eventual dominant chain.
The global chain will "win" but transactions made in the local chain can be retried in the global chain after the networks rejoin so long as there are no conflicts. Absent deliberate or accidental double-spending, the biggest source of conflicts would be the mining rewards from the local chain since these rewards never existed in the global chain and cannot be carried over. There is a 100-block waiting period before mining rewards can be spent specifically to avoid this issue for shorter-term forks, but it could still be a problem in the event of sustained network fragmentation.
On the bright side, it's not necessary to have full Internet connectivity to keep the local chain in sync with the global chain. A single local node with access to the global blockchain (via a VPN or dedicated satellite receiver[0] or multiple upstream Internet connections near the border) can ensure that the local chain is constantly synchronized with the global one, and even forward local transactions for inclusion in the global blockchain.
The main question here is not "would a state shutdown internet if needed?", but "should a government have a direct control over internet infrastructure?"
Kazakhstan has no private Internet providers sans local ISPs. All long range fibre, and cross-border connections are owned by SOEs, and president's damat personally.
A state has direct control over everything it its borders. Ultimately you can send in the army to the IXPs and you pull the plug, be that North Korea or the USA
Jimmy Carter had zero shot at beating Reagan, with or without the oil shocks.
Carter and Ford were both extraordinarily weak candidates. Ford was a Bob Dole tier candidate (ie incapable of winning the Presidency in an election), with the Republicans still mired in the consequences of Nixon, and Carter still struggled to beat him in 1976. Reagan's carry of California was a near certainty, and it guaranteed the end of Carter with or without the energy problems. Carter was a weak southern Democrat that couldn't pull Texas and couldn't pull New York - there was nowhere for him to win from, there was no angle of victory.
but as an outsider, those protests just seemed like any other day in France :)
In the west, at least where I'm from, whether energy or other types of protests, the government usually finds a wedge to split the population into two major groups where in-fighting will exhaust and marginalize protesters. Cutting the Internet only brings more focus on the government.
Hm … not the internet at large but weren’t there cases of a subway system or other dense area in the US suddenly having no cell service during a protest? I remember reading stories about this.
I don't think turning off DNS servers is 1) actually possible (people would start running mirrors + other countries continue to run) and 2) would disable the internet into uselessness (anything IP based still works).
It doesn't have to be 100% effective, just as with the Great Firewall. Shutting down DNS would shut down most existing apps until they're updated (and also the app stores that are normally used to update them), and preclude the majority from accessing anything online.
Despite the centralization efforts of big tech, Internet is more resilient than you think it is.
> would shut down most existing apps until they're updated
Most apps are using DNS client APIs provided by their operating systems.
> and also the app stores that are normally used to update them
They too.
As for the OSes, they don’t normally have hardcoded DNS servers either. Instead, they rely on DHCP to get DNS servers from the routers. There’re many levels of caching involved: operating systems have a DNS cache, home routers have a caching DNS servers, ISPs usually running their own caching DNS servers for their clients, and so on.
Updating any single one of them going to fix the issue for all of these end-user apps. ISPs probably gonna be there first, it’s their job to support their network infrastructure 24/7.
If it gets to the point where DNS is shut down by government fiat, ISPs would be unlikely to push back, because that would just make them a target for more, shall we say, physical activities.
The servers that are run by the ISPs, which is what is used by the vast majority of end users in practice (usually indirectly via their router, as you've mentioned).
That's where we get back to my original point - the goal of these measures is not to ensure that there are no loopholes, but rather to make it difficult enough that the vast majority won't be able to / won't bother to use them.
According to a report released last month, Christopher Miller, who served as acting Secretary of the Defense on Jan. 6, told the Department’s inspector general that he feared “if we put U.S. military personnel on the Capitol, I would have created the greatest Constitutional crisis probably since the Civil War.” In congressional testimony, he said he was also cognizant of “fears that the President would invoke the Insurrection Act to politicize the military in an anti-democratic manner” and that “factored into my decisions regarding the appropriate and limited use of our Armed Forces to support civilian law enforcement during the Electoral College certification.”
So, yes, Miller *intentionally* delayed National Guard deployment.
Involving the military (which AFAIK is NOT trained to non-lethally deal with civilian riots ?) would probably have indeed been very bad without even this kind of risk.
What I still don't understand is why was the police so ridiculously under-staffed and under-equipped that day ?? (Where were the anti-riot water-spraying trucks ? The anti-riot gas ? The anti-riot walls ? The gapless shield wall formed by enough police people ?)
It's not like they haven't been warned by the FBI weeks in advance of the potential risks ??
OTOH I was impressed how the myth of the trigger-happy Trump fanatic who has a rifle like an extra body part didn't play out. I've only seen a single rifle, and AFAIK none of the rioters fired a single shot ? (The FBI probably helped here, since they supposedly convinced the "worst" ones to not participate... but OTOH they did still fail to prevent that truck filled with various explosive devices from parking nearby ?)
"intentional delay resulting in a failure" is very different than "intentionally failing". The DoD's hesitancy to touch civilian politics with a 10 foot pole is, IMO, one of the very best things about American government. The capitol police need to be empowered to handle these types of situations themselves.
at least in Belarus one can _receive_ from the sat but can not _transmit_ to the sat. precisely for that reason. i would not be surprised that in the rest of former USSR countries there are similar laws.
nonetheless, looks like protesters there are successful despite cut internet.
Not being able to send means they can't use Starlink in Belarus, right? There's no ability to send e.g. HTTP GET, so you can't actually use the internet. Right?
correct. last time i checked, sat internet is possible, but outbound connections are happening via local ISP. This worked quite well in the past to download large files. Nowadays with fast local internet such sat/local setup doesn't make much sense anymore.
Most countries do have something similar in place where they can turn off the outside connections if needed. I don't think it has happened yet in any western country, but those safe-guards are in place at the edges of the national network.
I remember trying to get internet in Kabul when we expanded an office there about a decade ago, there was one fibre over the khyber pass to Pakistan, and I seem to remember the connections north and south to Uzbekistan/Iran relied on a ropey copper ring circuit with c. 100mbit of connectivity - for the entire traffic.
That episode was released in 2008, a lot of countries in Africa then had just one subsea circuit, if that, before WACS, before EASSy. If I remember right, even bandwidth out of Austrailia cost a fortune.
The government had initially tried to calm protesters by conceding a reduction in the price of liquefied natural gas
(LNG), setting it at 50 tenge (€0.1) per litre, compared with 120 at the start of the year — a significant increase in
a country where the minimum wage is 42,500 tenge (€98.7) a month.
The price of the gas has doubled (the link does not mention it).
>the minimum wage is 42,500 tenge (€98.7) a month.
Surprising. Ukraine, where I'm from, has a minimum wage of €200 despite being resource-poor and simply poor-poor, if you go by relatively objective measures like GDP per capita with PPP. But oil-rich Kazakhstan seems to really keep their hoi polloi on a lean diet.
It's all a matter of costs and standard of living.
Oil (and generally resource rich countries) have a tough line to thread between spreading the riches among the population without making the said population dependent on that sharing ( e.g. Venezuela) and hoarding at the top. Most fail miserably, and honestly the only one i can think of doing a great job is Norway, and it was mostly by accident.
The reason why Norway is an exception is largely because its liberal democratic political system was already well-developed by the time it became a heavy oil producer.
Resource curse. Economies that depend on a single extraction resource tend to be pretty stagnant and rife with corruption. There’s also the issue that they need to discourage local consumption of the export resource, since local consumption doesn’t enrich the country, even if the locals need to consume to not freeze to death.
I am sure this will work great and not lead to historic route at the next election. Notice how fast Biden got on trying to contain the gas prices?
You have to understand that massive slices of society whole lives depend on gas prices being in certain range. They are not going to go eat cake.. they WILL do something about it.
By a dramatic margin the most polluting nations in all respects are non-Western nations. Your tax premise is backwards accordingly.
Insert retort: yeah but that's just because the West outsources its pollution. No, in fact 'developing' countries like China are self-contained pollution monsters. In order to fulfill their own gigantic consumer demand, China has to be the world's most polluting nation with how they've structured their grid and industry. Exports to eg the US are a small share of China's emissions problem and getting ever smaller as a share of the problem.
China is about to become the world's largest economy and gets 60% of its energy from coal, while they aggressively build a lot more coal power plants and their emissions continue to skyrocket (despite already outputting more emissions than the US + EU combined). While US and EU emissions continue to contract (their consumer demand growth + economic growth is largely net stagnant anyway), China will again double its emissions output, guaranteeing the planet will be partially destroyed (if the climate predictions are at all accurate).
Well, yes, and for the USA is likely different but for some EU countries the CO2 embedded in imports from China is now larger than their own CO2 production, so that's not something that can be neglected...
Even the EU has a lot of poorer member states. "Far higher energy prices" in Lithuania or Romania would be unbearable for the local population. Few people are ready to silently freeze to death in the name of climate protection.
In my city Cluj Napoca (Romania), I would welcome higher petrol prices, which might lead to less trafic and I'm sure the more needy could be helped with some form of subsidy from said taxes...
A SUV tax would probably be more efficient... btw I don't know how many of you know this but on Fridays public transport is free in Romanian cities...
>Almaty airport(IATA: ALA, ICAO: UAAA) has been reportedly seized by protesters. Evacuation of employees ongoing
>The press service of Almaty International Airport(IATA: ALA, ICAO: UAAA) confirms the lost of control. "There are now about 45 invaders at the airport"
>President Tokayev says that he is the chairman of security council from now, instead of Nazarbayev
This is a huge deal. Conventional wisdom was that Nazarbayev, an unchallenged strongman for almost 30 years, only gave up the day-to-day duties of running the country to a younger sycophant but retained the ability to make "higher-order" decisions via his chairmanship of the security council - one of the models which Putin might follow as well, since he cannot ever simply retire.
This either means Nazarbayev doesn't want to be associated with the fall of Tokayev and will attempt to feign conflict with him to retain power in case shit goes south, or perhaps Tokayev just used the situation to perform a "forced retirement" coup against Nazarbayev.
It's also unclear (judging from my twitter feed and a few liveblogs I follow) where Nazarbayev is currently located (and what he thinks about this mess).
I wonder if finally someone (Russian/China?) convinces him to go down and retire? After all he has been there for three decades, and maybe the other countries are not exactly happy about his way.
Nazarbayev is 81 years old. It doesn't seem likely he'll emerge as the new ruler, even with Russian backing. ...but he might lend legitimacy to any new leader the Russians try to muscle in.
As a Frenchman, it's also what we are taught about the French Revolution. One of the goals of the attack on la Bastille on July 14th 1789 was to seize the weapons there and march upon the rest of Paris and Versailles.
Powder and shot, more specifically. They’d seized cannons and small arms from the Hôtel des Invalides, but the under manned commander had transferred all his powder to the Bastille before the mob stormed his position.
If there aren't constitutional mechanisms in place for peaceful transfer of power-- along with a tradition of mostly following the norms and conventions around the constitution-- it can all go wrong pretty quickly.
People may get very frustrated with democratic governments, but the mechanisms that well established democracies have for the peaceful transfer of power offer a much needed release valve on this sort of pressure.
But it takes time to establish the foundations for this. Heck, the US had been around for most of a century and still had a failed revolution (well, it's called a the Civil War, but that's mostly because it failed. I'm sure if the US South had won, they would have viewed it very much as a successful revolution in the same way the original colonies did when they seceded from Great Britain. Yes, there are subtle differences-- Great Britain was somewhat of an absentee overseer, and colonies are not quite the same as states. Admittedly this makes the gray area resolve closer to Civil War.)
Can happen everywhere. Wait what happens if you cut down food supply to a rich nation like for example the Netherlands. Within a week people will kill each other for food.
I'm not sure which metric GP is referring to, but by total value of food exports they're 7th in the world. Extremely impressive for a country of only 17 million people.
It's probably because the Dutch diaspora has succeeded in getting their children hooked on stroopwafels (syrup waffles), salt licorice and those amazing dense raisin buns that seem to be approximately 50% raisins... I for one am happy to continue supporting their export economy!
Not per capita, in absolute numbers, a couple of years ago at least [1]. That said, there are different ways to measure; this is by value. You could also imagine e.g. measuring by calories.
We are indeed, but worth noting - that's per dollar exported and a lot of that comes from having Europe's largest ports, as well as a lot of processing and auctioning of food.
Still, we grow a very large amount of food, especially relative to the size of the country. We're the 9th largest potato producer [0] in the world, despite being a tiny country both population and size wise, because we have the highest yields in the world. Someone downthread linked a NatGeo article explaining more [1] but we have far higher yields, several times higher than any other country, on many crops, such as chilies, green peppers, cucumbers etc.
Don't even need shortages of anything basic like food, in some places it's just enough to ask people to follow common sense rules, and as a result to that people will take to the streets, people will try to overthrow governments.
This does not only apply to the US, with the January 6. "insurrection", it even happened in places like Germany [0] and recently Romania [1].
It's a combination of entitlement, and 2 years of pandemic forcing many people, and their businesses, into dire economic situations.
Such dire economic situations can trigger regime change anywhere, completely regardless of "democratic institutions" or all these other nice sounding words.
Because most people don't really want that much; As long as they have a job that allows them to put a roof over their, and their families heads, and food on their tables, that long the vast majority of people couldn't care less if the government they live under is considered "democratic" or "authoritarian".
These are way too high and abstract concepts for the vast majority of people to care about. They are too busy with every day live, working to pay rent and getting food on the table.
But what happens if they don't have the work anymore to pay for rent and get food on the table? Then they will take to the streets, they will demand change, completely regardless of what kind of regime they live under.
Even the Roman Empire already knew this; panem et ludos
Give people enough bread and circuses, and they couldn't care less about what happens on the higher levels above them or how they are being wronged in rather intangible ways.
I think it is a bit naive to think this is a grass roots "protest". This might be a knock-on effect after the US withdrawal from Afghanistan. Nazarbayev was a Soviet man, so it's possible this is a western intervention. It's also possible that Islamic interests are using the gas crisis as an opportunity to establish a new islamic state there also.
...but regardless of who may be have helped organize this sudden protest/coup, it's important to remember that Russian politicians have recently made comments about taking back land given to Kazakhstan during the Soviet days. The northern portions of the country hold the 25% of the Kazakh population that is ethnic-Russian - which includes much of the area just up to the capital of Nur-Sultan, also in the north.
I just wonder what made the government raise the price of gas? Kazahstan sits on a gas mine. Why would they risk such a full scale protest just now? Greed?
There's a pretty steep rise in gas prices in Europe these days related to the Ukrainian situation so I believe there must be some relation between that rise and the Kazakh prices
Yes but a 2x price increase? It seems that Putin has actually triggered this by using Russia's energy resources as tools for foreign policy and worsened the energy crisis. Russia controls most of the gas pipelines to Europe except maybe for the SCP/TANAP/TAP and the ones from Northern Europe.
The price hike was part of a government schedule to liberalize gas prices. But they were so dumb or ignorant that they've set the date in 1/1/2022, in the winter, which also happened to occur in the middle of an energy crisis. Kazahstan, being economically dependent on China is having problems with 12% unemplyment and the jobless youth has radicalised. People took to the streets to protest peacefully and requested theat the price hikes ar reversed, the resignation of the government and demanded that the former president, Nazarbayev, leaves and that the 1993 constitution is restored. The acting president Tokayev, used the protests to dismiss Nazarbayev and his allies in the government and the secret service and sieze the whole power for himself. This is when the protests turned violent. The acts of violence were most probably perpetrated by secret service factions loyal to the former president aided by criminal gangs and maybe also radicalised youth is involved. Tokayev ordered a state of emergency but the military and the security forces would not act on his orders, mainly because they take order from the former president whom Tokayev has ilegally dismissed. In a desperate attempt, Tokayev has requested outside help from the CSTO, which is mainly Russia, claiming that outside terrorist forces are trying to overthrow the social order. The key word is outside, because otherwise the CSTO cannot intervene in the internal affairs of another state. When the CSTO stepped in and sent troops, the Kazah military and security forces started to comply with the acting president's orders. Now Tokayev is basically at the mercy of the Kremlin and Putin will quite probably ask for favours in return. There is doubt that anything was planned except for the gas hike. It appears that the actors involved just siezed the opportunity to act in their favour. This is how transfer of power occurs in autocracies, sometimes even when it's carefully planned years in advance. For context, Nazarbayev hand picked Tokayev to be his sucessor but retained important attributes of power, for life, by changing the consitution in 2019.
>>The press service of Almaty International Airport(IATA: ALA, ICAO: UAAA) confirms the lost of control. "There are now about 45 invaders at the airport"
That map makes no sense in relation to your comment. The country is mostly ethinic Kazak, and peoples similar in the sense they are more Turkic than Slavic. Calling them Russian seems weird, making a case for irredentism even weirder considering they wont have the same idea as what is the "motherland."
Russia trying to recreate the USSR, I can see. They will start with the states the West is concerned with the least.
Oh, sure. But then again, many would argue that there was no Marxism in USSR, either (at least not after the first decade or so).
One particular interpretation that seems to be fairly popular in "patriotic" circles is that the original Bolsheviks were Marxist, and they almost ruined Russia because of that; but then Stalin took power, purged them, and restored the imperial glory.
There's no dichotomy here. In Putin's mind they were one and the same:
"It was a disintegration of historical Russia under the name of the Soviet Union," Putin said of the 1991 breakup, in comments aired on Sunday as part of a documentary film called "Russia. New History", the RIA state news agency reported.
"We turned into a completely different country. And what had been built up over 1,000 years was largely lost," said Putin, saying 25 million Russian people in newly independent countries suddenly found themselves cut off from Russia, part of what he called "a major humanitarian tragedy".
In any case Marxism was pretty much always window dressing in the USSR, anyway, post-Stalin. And in its final years the USSR was ditching any signficant pretext of Marxist-inspired socialism altogether. If it could have survived would probably would have evolved into a hybrid capitalist autocracy like modern China -- with significant state planning characteristics, but with the ideological mumbo-jumbo dialed down to a bare minimum.
I would argue that it was already a window dressing under Stalin; more so than afterwards, in fact, given that it was fairly common for high-level party functionaries and other important figures to have e.g. domestic servants.
Then again, if we take pure Marxism, a socialist revolution was supposed to be impossible in Russia anyway, simply because proletariat was not the majority of the population. Lenin and co had to do a lot of handwaving to explain that away, and one could reasonably claim that the result deviated sufficiently from what Marx had in mind that it shouldn't really be lumped together.
In Putin's mind, USSR and Russia might be one and the same. But I'm not sure Putin's words about the ideals and politics of a historical state which was originally built after a revolution led by a radical Marxist faction, the Bolsheviks, should be taken seriously. After all, the first anthem of the Soviet Union was "The Internationale" up until sometime in the 1940s. I am not completely sure about what was on Lenin's mind though, so I might be wrong - maybe he was secretly nationalist (or a left-wing fascist, if I could use this other loose term).
Consider policies like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korenizatsiya. Early USSR was already totalitarian for sure, but I don't think it could be described as nationalist in any meaningful sense.
Whether it was socialist or not is another interesting question. Some would say that it wasn't, on the basis that real socialism cannot be non-democratic, as that precludes meaningful common ownership of property - and Bolsheviks were consistently anti-democratic very early on, what with shutting down the Constituent Assembly, instituting kombeds to suppress local councils that were in opposition to them, and even explicitly writing a formula into the constitution that made urban (i.e. predominantly worker) councils have 5x voting power of rural (i.e. predominantly peasant) councils. But even ignoring that, it's hard to reconcile socialism with suppression of trade unions in politics (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workers%27_Opposition) - which also happened under Lenin.
The map shows heavy concentration of ethnic Russians in the north of the country. Russian ethnonationalists often refer to north Kazakhstan as "South Siberia" for this reason, and there's a long-standing desire in those circles to annex it to Russia.
This is quite similar to Ukraine, where Crimea is overwhelmingly ethnically Russian.
Euromaidan mk2. Putin now has a new problem on his hands, ahead of the Jan 10th talks on Ukraine with the US and now the EU as well. This is just great timing.
FYI: most of gas Russia sells to Europe is actually not Russian, but coming from Central Asian vassal regimes at less than a penny per cube, and then resold at incredible markups to Europe. I am talking exactly about Turkmenistan, and Kazakhstan.
This is why Russia is not really fearing for oil price. Their gas is incredibly profitable, and stable, unlike Siberian oil where freezing, rusting USSR era oil rigs require a lot of upkeep.
Without Kazakhstan, no "Russian" gas for Europe.
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P.S. I got blocked again, so posting news here through edit
>most of gas Russia sells to Europe is actually not Russian, but coming from Central Asian vassal regimes at less than a penny per cube, and then resold at incredible markups to Europe
It doesn't add up for me. Central Asian sources are less than 1.5% of GazProm total production, and Gas production of Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan is dwarfed by Russian fields. Further, output from Russian fields in Siberia is on the decline and new fields are being developed in the Yamal Peninsula to replace these, so no Soviet era oil rigs at all.
I'm from Russia and it's the first time I hear that almost all Russian gas actually comes from Kazakhstan, considering that my hometown literally sits on a pipe which connects Western Siberia to Europe. Sounds like some conspiracy theory to me, honestly. But I'm ready to change my mind if you provide some links.
Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan (lowerest of them all, placed 24) combined produce less than 1/3 of the amount Russia produces.
Also wiki (not the best source maybe, but whatever):
>Gas for northern Europe largely came from the Nadym Pur Taz (NPT) region in Western Siberia, but these large fields are now in decline due to depletion.
>Since the early 2010s Gazprom has been developing replacement gas fields in the Yamal Peninsula area of the Russian Arctic. As of 2020, Yamal produces over 20% of Russia's gas, which is expected to increase to 40% by 2030.
>The shortest pipeline routes from Yamal to the northern EU countries are the Yamal–Europe pipeline through Poland and Nord Stream to Germany. During the winter peak Gazprom does not have the capacity to redirect flows to the central pipeline corridor through Ukraine, built for the NPT gas flow. Gazprom intends to decommission some pipelines, over forty years old with high maintenance costs, in the central corridor as NPT production declines
Turkmenistan has almost endless gas and would LOVE to sell to Europe at anything even remotely close to the open market rate. But Russia dictates the cost of the gas they buy from TM and since they have no way to bulk export their gas except to Russia, they're pretty much stuck.
I think it is very interesting how these countries fall off the internet...
Specifically, if I was a country leader who wanted to turn off the internet, I would get my minister to call up all big ISP's and tell them to disconnect everyone. The ISP bosses tell their tech people to do it. And what do those tech people do?
Well, if I were in their shoes, I would head to the billing system and mark all customers as 'bill overdue, not eligible for service' or some similar status.
That gives me the ability to allow certain customers to still use the service (eg. the president and his mates).
Yet that isn't what we see... The actual BGP routes go down... That suggests to me that the story might be more like "army storms ISP headquarters, ripping out cables till their phone internet stops working".
No, what actually happens in practice is that the backbone connections to the outside gets disconnected (by the government) without the involvement of ISPs. Certain users who still want to access the internet has access to it via other means, sometimes even satellite connections.
This reminds me of how Gorbachev kept informed about the coup that was happening around him via the BBC World Service on shortwave. I wonder if there's a market for re-instating such services in areas that are prone to internet outages?
I'll miss that when they shut it down, I'm too young to have actual nostalgia for longwave as a primary way of listening to the radio but but I enjoy having Test Match Special on crackly old longwave as background noise when I'm working. I always liked how you can hear the lightning from miles away if it's stormy. I've also got a friend who still sometimes uses the Shipping Forecast on longwave when he's on smaller boats in the North Sea!
My understanding is that the longwave service is very expensive to run (on the order of hundreds of kW) and the only thing keeping it alive is the fact its carrier wave is used to switch over old electricity meters to night rates. AFAIK the energy companies subsidise it rather than the BBC and when everyone's on a smart meter it'll probably go off air. Having said that, I suspect the Venn diagram of 'people who'd be miffed about 198 kHz going quiet' and 'people who regularly write to their MPs' is basically a circle so maybe it'll last years after its execution date like the Irish longwave service has.
I'm not sure if that's still the case, but BBC longwave broadcast was also used as one of the checks that British nuclear subs are supposed to use to determine that a large-scale nuclear attack on Britain has taken out their command (and thus it's time to open https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letters_of_last_resort).
That's cool, I'll have to have a listen on a nearby SDR.
Interestingly the World Service's old mediumwave frequency 648 kHz is now being used by none other than the famous pirates Radio Caroline. They still use their radio ship, though the studios link over 4G to a land-based transmitter now to save fuel. Those guys would definitely have featured on HN quite often if it'd been around then, the engineering and hacker spirit that went into their operation was insane.
I listen to WS in my car in the UK via DAB. I knew someone from student TV who worked on DRM for BBC R&D for a while - DRM being "Digital Radio Mondiale", or Digital Shortwave.
DAB struggled to gain traction over the last 20 years, I don't know anywhere near enough about shortwave transmissions in general to know if DRM has any chance, but a quick look doesn't look very impressive compared with normal shortwave.
How, though? The backbone connections are still terminated at ISPs and interchanges. Somewhere an engineer still needs to either remove the routes in software, or pull a bunch of cables out.
Unless you're saying that the president himself has all the major backbone connections running through his office?
"On 6 July 2016, Sir John Chilcot announced the report's publication, more than seven years after the inquiry was announced.[3] Usually referred to as the Chilcot report by the news media,[4] the document stated that at the time of the invasion of Iraq in 2003, Saddam Hussein did not pose an urgent threat to British interests, that intelligence regarding weapons of mass destruction was presented with unwarranted certainty, that peaceful alternatives to war had not been exhausted, that the United Kingdom and the United States had undermined the authority of the United Nations Security Council, that the process of identifying the legal basis was "far from satisfactory", and that a war was unnecessary.[5][6][7] The report was made available under an Open Government Licence."
Yes, I still remember Colin Powell image showing "irrefutable evidence" in his hands to the United Nations, which ended up being a lie.
But again, did Tony Blair know it was a lie and misled the Parliament?
I remember the Chilcot report, but never read it. It's on my reading list now!
But from your quote, I don't see anything related specifically to Tony Blair?
Again, my point is, the executive power (Government/Prime Minister) came to the legislative power (The Parliament) with a motion to invade another country.
Both powers were using the same intelligence that they believed were genuine at the time, debated it for days, and then decided with 412 to 149 votes to start the invasion.
Why Tony Blair is singled out, for something in hindsight, and the other 411 people are given a pass?
> Both powers were using the same intelligence that they believed were genuine at the time
Didn't the US and UK both fabricate "evidence"? Even then, it was obvious to many observers that the evidence simply wasn't credible, and the only outcome was disaster.
Certainly "Sexed up" the evidence, the entire Dodgy Dossier killed the BBC - Greg Dyke (the Director General / CEO, who was on holiday at the time) had to resign because of it.
The Hutton Report claimed that the dossier was not sexed up (as the BBC claimed) and that it's all the BBCs fault. A few years later, Chilcott report basically said that the government did lie.
> But again, did Tony Blair know it was a lie and misled the Parliament?
Yes. This is why the British troops were under-equipped because Tony Blair was intentionally holding back the knowledge that the choice to invade had already been made but he couldn't do this while also requesting parliament to fund war funding.
He was holding two narratives open at the same time. The public one where everything was above board, following all approved channels, ratified by the UN and due to WMD that he used to gain approval from the UK and a private one where it was clear the UK would go to war with the US regardless of what transpired.
> Why Tony Blair is singled out, for something in hindsight, and the other 411 people are given a pass?
My very simplistic understanding is that he is singled out because he was responsible for pressing on it and the thing was voted based on the “evidence” he was presenting.
My understanding is also that Bush, Powell, Rice and Rumsfeld are treated equally to Blair by some people.
> My understanding is also that Bush, Powell, Rice and Rumsfeld are treated equally to Blair by some people.
That's unfortunate. The fact of the matter is that it was Cheney and Rumsfeld who personally architected the lie. Bush, Blair, et al, deserve plenty of blame for abrogating the duties of their leadership, but the history lesson here is that you don't ever let people like Cheney and Rumsfeld through the front door. Not because they're malicious (I admittedly always found Rumsfeld's politics beguiling), but because they're instigators and prime movers that won't hesitate to abuse power for their desired ends. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
Notably, the Bush campaign and administration had plenty of warning (including from conservatives) about who they were inviting into their inner circle. That, of course, makes Bush doubly culpable for a failure in leadership. But Bush's failures are of a different kind, and if we equivocate with those of Cheney, Rumsfeld, and their undersecretaries, we'll have learned nothing.
Worth noting that MPs don’t vote entirely independently, but rather are marshalled (using a variety of implicit threats) by the party officials to vote in support of party leadership. Many of those 411 would have been backbench MPs with scarcely more access to government information than the general public. So they probably either believed what the government were saying about WMDs, or were incentivized to vote for war by the party machine. I wouldn’t give them a pass as such, but it’s several steps removed from the culpability level of Blair (who in turn was a rung down from Bush, incentivized to support the USA in much the same way as the British MPs were incentivized to support the PM).
> Why Tony Blair is singled out, for something in hindsight, and the other 411 people are given a pass?
Your point that the legislature voted on the invasion is a reasonable one, but Blair's government gave them incorrect information on which to base their vote.
Blair was the head of the government that produced that bad intelligence. It makes sense to single him out.
The irrefutable evidence in question was nerve gas stored in glass bead configuration.
Now, you may ask yourself why would Iraqi scientist store WMD in glass beads, when those shatter easily and offer nearly nothing in return (maybe WMD doesn't react with glass, but then just use a glass canisters)? Was that some anal fetish or something?
It's because "" The source "" used Michael Bay movies as inspiration.
"Their proof wouldn't even convince one of the local court judge here!"
"If we begin to remove every dictator, who's going to be next? Why not Robert Mugabe? They told me he's not the same than Saddam. Well of course he doesn't have oil!"
Chretien was fully prepared to join in until it became very clear from protests and polls that the Canadian public wasn't going to stand for it. They hadn't fully committed to non-involvement until then. And even then, there was still support for the "allies" just not direct military involvement.
Many people may not remember or may be too young. Those Feb and March protests were the biggest protest ever in history across the whole western world. "According to BBC News, between six and ten million people took part in protests in up to sixty countries over the weekend of 15 and 16 February." (WP) Police estimates for London, UK were 750k, but they were likely higher.
I left work one evening when they first began bombing and marched through the streets of Toronto and the energy was crazy. The following saturday protest was 100,000 people at least and a lot calmer, but outside the US embassy the atmosphere was intense, angry and electric. It was much larger in Montreal if I recall.
Nothing written, just heard this before, but I think there's a hint in the date that the gov't announced it would not participate (March 17th). That was the day of the biggest protest in Montreal.
Tony Blair was the head of government and leader of the ruling party. Had he decided not to take Britain to Iraq, then the UK would not have taken part in the war and there would not have been a vote in Parliament. At the end of the day, the buck stopped with him.
Would lack of UK support have been sufficient to deter the US? Who knows, probably not given the neocon lunatics in the White House at the time. Harold Wilson's decision to keep the UK out of Vietnam was in retrospect a wise decision, and no doubt Blair would have had a better reputation had he made the same choice.
That all said, Blair's post-PM career seems to involve toadying up to every dictator left on the planet (in marked contrast to his successor Gordon Brown's work supporting refugees and global vaccination) so maybe his reputation is well-deserved after all.
> Had he decided not to take Britain to Iraq, then the UK would not have taken part in the war and there would not have been a vote in Parliament.
I don't get this.
He cannot just "decide to take Britain to Iraq", since the UK Government cannot start a war without Parliament's approval.
He came to the Parliament with the available intelligence at the time, and after days of debates, 412 people voted in favour of the invasion.
I would understand the hate if he knew the "irrefutable evidence" shown to United Nation by the Secretary of State was a lie at the time of the vote in Parliament.
But as far I know, he wasn't aware of that.
Is this just a blind hate of a scapegoat? Why are the other 411 people given a pass?
UK Parliament does not get a binding vote on going to war. Their recourse, if they disagree, is to remove the PM altogether.
Admittedly, I'm not sure there's much of a meaningful difference between the two. If an MP doesn't want to go to war, I'd think that a big enough difference if opinion to vote no-confidence. As such if a majority of Parliament didn't want to go to war, they may have taken that step.
> He cannot just "decide to take Britain to Iraq", since the UK Government cannot start a war without Parliament's approval.
Had Blair decided not to go to war, there would not have been a vote. He was leader of the Labour Party and instructed his whips to ensure MPs voted for war.
> He came to the Parliament with the available intelligence at the time, and after days of debates, 412 people voted in favour of the invasion.
We now know, from the Chilcot inquiry, that Blair knew the intelligence was poor and either deliberately misled Parliament or allowed his belief to blind his judgement. Either conclusion is damning.
> He cannot just "decide to take Britain to Iraq", since the UK Government cannot start a war without Parliament's approval.
Declaring war and deploying troops is a power held by the Crown (which will do it on request of its government). Parliamentary approval is not required, parliament merely can hold a no-confidence vote and remove the government afterwards if it disagrees.
The Afghanistan war just a bit earlier was debated in parliament, but not actually voted on by parliament.
For Iraq, there was a formal vote for the first time, but again, not a formal authorization that would have had legal force - although loosing it realistically would have collapsed Blairs government once he committed to having the vote. (And also made any Labour MPs voting against it not just the MPs who were against the war, but also the MPs who forced their government to fail).
Parliament has the power to remove the Prime Minister, and it's possible that they would have done so if the Prime Minister failed to come to the aid of a historic ally. PM's have had no-confidence votes, or been pushed out of office before one would occur, over lesser issues.
That aside, Parliament doesn't have to authorize via binding vote on these matters. They get a debate opportunity by normative convention, but any vote they took to override would not be binding unless they were willing to remove the PM.
Nonetheless I think it's fair to place a sizeable portion of the blame on Parliament: They can't decide to go to war, but they do have some levers of power that would stop it, if they were willing to remove their PM. I certainly don't know where I put % blame here, but I'm equally sure Parliament was checking complicit on the issue.
> Had he decided not to take Britain to Iraq, then the UK would not have taken part in the war and there would not have been a vote in Parliament.
Not only that, the 2005 London bombings most likely wouldn't have happened, that was direct retaliation for UK participation in the "coalition of the willing", willing to invade and occupy Iraq as part of a "crusade" on terror.
Starting wars does not in fact require parliamentary approval.
In 1999 Blair used "Queen's Consent" (the notional requirement that consent of the monarch must be sought in order to substantially alter their powers, but in practice these are government powers and so consent is sought from the government) to get rid of a Bill that would actually have required this, the "Military Action Against Iraq (Parliamentary Approval) Bill".
This isn't because Blair couldn't have won a vote and disposed of the bill but because he knew it would be embarrassing and indeed the embarrassment anyway resulted in the (non-binding) Approval bill you cited which has 412 Aye votes.
Even having a vote ("Division") is embarrassing. It forced Labour members who might have told their electorate over and over that they oppose war to choose, stick by their principles that war is abhorrent, and risk deselection for coming out against the stance of their government and many populist pro-war newspapers, or, bend over, vote for the government and hope voters forgive them when it inevitably all goes wrong.
Now, ultimately Parliament is sovereign and so you can argue everything "requires parliamentary approval", but only in sense that silence signifies approval because as a sovereign entity it could intervene but it does not.
If Parliament really didn't want the UK to go to war it can in principle get rid of the Prime Minister and install one who won't start a war. If the Speaker tries to stop them (e.g. by refusing to recognise a member who stands to propose "That This House Has No Confidence In Her Majesty's Government" so as to bring down the Prime Minister) the Commons can convene "The Committee of the Whole House" which is identical to the Commons except that they're picking who runs things, whereupon they can get rid of that Speaker, choose a new one, reconvene the Commons and call No confidence. But it isn't going to do that in fact.
Even for Brexit, while there was majority opposition to the obviously disastrous "No deal" plan, there was no majority in support of any other definitive course of action, including replacing the Prime Minister, all that was done was more kicking of cans down the road, until there was no more road.
The UK parliament ain't the only relevant institution here.
The invasion of Iraq was an open and blatant breach of the UN charter [0], it was an illegal war of aggression based on lies.
Lies that were so blatant that the whole situation lead to the largest global protest event in human history [1].
And that doesn't even go into the direct consequences of that; Refugees all the way into Western Europe, among them many disgruntled people who felt wronged, serving as potential recruits for an AQ that had by then become world famous thanks to the US.
What that lead to were the first major Islamic terror attacks in Western Europe [2], among them the 2005 London bombings by AQ, which were a direct response to the UK participation in invading Iraq, just like the 2004 AQ attack in Madrid, Spain.
In that context it's not really difficult to see why Tony Blair is such a controversial personality.
* Very poorly thought out creation of Scottish Parliament. While not a bad thing, he didn’t consider it to be all that important. Not like it could destroy the United Kingdom or anything.
* Very poorly thought reform of House of Lords. Again not a bad thing, but it hasn’t really improved much.
* Very poorly thought out creation of “Supreme Court.” It was presented as a simply a rebranding of the law lords, but now it’s much more powerful, which was never the intent.
* Not terribly interested in privacy.
* Unhealthy dependence on the EU. His motivation for the above was “the EU will take care of this so who cares.” This was a problem before Brexit.
* Incompetence, and lack of care. Notice how many of these points say “not itself a bad thing.” He lots of “not bad itself” things in a bad manner.
I read stuff like this (not this book specifically) from the OCCRP or ICIJ occasionally and I'm beginning to have my doubts about all of it. It's always based on innuendo and insinuation. Like "the grandson of this Nigeria politician is one of the directors of some Delaware company that also has a director that was arrested for customs fraud in Morocco. He also didn't respond to our phone calls. Therefore he is a 'potentially corrupt shadowy official'". And the call to action at the end of course is always to increase financial surveillance despite the current already heavyhanded approach massively failing.
Yes, you know how it is when you start knowing something you start realizing journalist reporting of it, while not entirely false, is quite imprecise and simplifying ?
I work in an investment bank, on the trading floor, and when I hear reports on how we're supposed to be and act, I feel it is so different from how people actually are and think. For instance, they ignore incompetence and always assign to malice, they think being legit is less important to us than robbing money, they always describe us as amoral, parasitic, conspiratorial. It's an enticing narrative each time, but except when they have actual email exchanges (like the Millenium emails during the Maddoff SEC investigation - that painted the right picture, professional, missing information, imperfect but not anti-blue collar conspiracy lol), I can't really trust it anymore.
The FinCEN files by BuzzFeed were so trash, it was surreal to hear... We gave regulatory reports they leaked irresponsibly about suspicious activity by our fee-paying clients we are forbidden to tip off by refusing to talk to them, and we're now "hiding crime", maybe even "facilitating" it, tsk. They warned a lot of people that day, good job.
The EU is vast, it's hard to say "EU justice is more corrupt". Maybe Italy is more than NL for instance ? As for the U.S. they operate on principles I disagree with: very heavy prison sentences, focus on lies rather than criminal facts sometimes (like lying to the FBI is more dramatically bad than missing a tax payment), elected AGs if I understood, something we can't do in Europe (it'll turn into plebiscits and push towards political law enforcement brrrr).
I'd correct you buy saying: "when justice happens in the US, it tends to be very punitive and detailed", maybe ? I really don't think the U.S. provides fairer reparation than Germany or Sweden, it's just difference legal ideologies.
Corrupt politicians use innuendo and hatred to corrupt politicians to attack their opponents in the West.
As their opponents are often corrupt themselves, you can’t just look at the narrative. After all the narrative is: “corrupt politicians are doing these horrible things; stop them!”
This sort of reporting is very hard and very fact dependent.
It contains horror stories of the Khazakh leader using Western courts to persecute his opponents.
That’s possible because (a) the opponents aren’t saints, and (b) money is necessary to buy justice.
The dictators use money to hire western lawyers, western lawyers to win court cases, won court cases to establish facts, facts to destroy opponents legal status, fewer opponents to get more power, and power to get more money.
Power -> money -> lawyers/consultants (Tony Blair) -> truth -> power.
1) People are looking for Linux resources as it might help them evade censorship or set up local networks
2) Residential traffic dropped but servers aren't affected and so Debian-based servers' update traffic now represents a much larger part of the country's total traffic
Most likely 2 since most people don't have internet RN. But I don't know who exactly still have; I assume most non-backbone civil servers got cut out too.
That made me remember reading about it, there is a satellite broadcast of the blockchain, by Blockstream [1] started by Adam Back I think. Not sure if it really works or is used/usable.
>Turns our there isn't much use for it if you unplug the cable huh?
Not really. Bitcoin transactions are typically around 500 bytes. Smuggling that out via alternative means doesn't seem too hard. As for the blockchain itself (for verifying transactions), there's this: https://www.blockstream.com/satellite/
The most likely government to be installed will be an islamic state, so I would not be very hopeful.
Also, Russia might intervene militarily and annex the norther half of the country - as they have recently made comments that the Soviets gave them too much land.
It is far more likely this will end badly for the average Kazakh citizen.
What do you mean by Islamic state? Something like in Iran, or something like in Turkey? I'm not sure what your sources are but if you mean something like in Iran it's extremely unlikely to happen in Kazakhstan. Russia taking some land is more likely but Russia would likely prefer better relations with Kazakhstan due to their gas and economic ties, and annexing that land isn't really that important compared to Ukraine.
> The most likely government to be installed will be an islamic state,..
The suffix "-stan" is very suggestive, isn't it? After all, there are Pakistan and Afghanistan -- massively Islamic countries.
Similarly, Thailand ends in "-land", yet no one thinks Thailand is in Europe despite the fact that England, Switzerland and Poland are all European.
Islam in Kazakhstan is non-pure, non-literalist and heavily tinged/influenced by local shamanistic traditions and old Soviet ways unlike that in Middle East.
Pure Islam in Kazakhstan would look jarringly out of place.
Alternative theories are going around now, but all say the previous pres fled some far away. From Russia, and China, to other Stand, to Switzerland, or UAE.
Do wonder what Russia’s reaction will be. Not wanting to belittle the impact on people’s lives from geopolitical turmoil, but amongst other things Baikonur Cosmodrome is inside Kazakhstan - where a lot of the Russian space launches are from.
Numerous Russian politicians have recently said that the Soviets gave Kazakhstan too much land, and that the northern portion of the country which holds the 25% ethnic Russian population, should return to Russia.
This seems like a possible opportunity for Putin to annex more territory.
This is hacker news, so cans of Pringles (not for eating), Soylent, (and yes, water, Soylent doesn't go well with Red Bull, sigh...). Fuel only for powering hardware, meatware can survive from hardware's waste heat. (/s)
What nobody says is that effective January the 5th non-vaccinated people who haven't had COVID and have no valid PCR test are not permitted to visit molls, food supermarkets and non-food chain stores. The government also plans to block access to MFCs, banks, post offices etc.
245 comments
[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 254 ms ] threadOne of the surprising features of the crypto boom is the discovery of places where the price of energy is directly subsidized, or otherwise broken (e.g. you can just bribe the head of the city power plant, instead of paying your power bill).
Anybody with access to near free electricity gets it hauled, or even flown to him, then they only have to wire-in few kiloamps of power, and internet.
A BTC mine fits into a few shipping containers, needs no in-out logistics, and can easily be transported around as needed
uhm what? the presence of miners mean energy prices rise as well as more environmental destruction to produce energy, especially if it's a place without green(er) energy production.
Obviously it's all stupidly chaotic, there might be a huge waterfall somewhere, and if we ignore the natural beauty aspects, before some cryptobros show up with money (however tangible) to build a hydropower plant and some wires to their container site, that waterfall's energy is not being utilized...
yep, that's my argument above. and i personally wouldn't say hashes "are mostly thrown away", i would argue they're all thrown away, especially when considering this 'tech' will become defunct in a few years.
“In what may be the best expression yet of capitalist realism, a new tool for free market speculation has become for many a populist symbol of resistance to the ravages of finance capitalism.”
https://mronline.org/2021/12/28/cryptocurrencies-a-view-from...
...yet creates absolutely zero actual value.
it is one of the greatest and most destructive speculative pyramid schemes yet.
It's only the first uncensorable / decentralized kind of money, nah must be nothing.
Censorship doesn't necessarily mean the thing being censored is deterministically "bad" or "evil".
Bitcoin is above morality, morality is a human construct, Bitcoin is math and computer science, by definition it cannot have morality.
Now, you might or might not agree that Bitcoin should be allowed to exist given it facilitates activities such as the one you linked.
But since it's uncensorable in the first place... you cannot outlaw it.
Pandora's box is open, and it cannot be closed once it is open (unless you break Bitcoin's cryptography).
Uncensorability /is/ valuable, to the people that don't want to be censored, and want to exchange money without asking anyone permission, whether that's a drug dealer, or an unbanked worker in Venezuela.
They'll catch up eventually. See how some politicians are already starting to call on mining bans.
They can easily fully ban it and enforce it. Let's say, put mining on the same level as growing weed or making heroin.
Your super first kind of decentralized money is now fucked.
Geothermal energy has very few emissions.
If Iceland shuts down aluminium smelters in favor of bitcoin miners it is a net benefit.
Also, if the claim is correct (about crypto making energy price arbitrage much easier), then a motivated reasoner could argue that it has had the positive effect of eliminating inefficiencies by forcing energy to obey the “law of one price”.
Which, to clarify, doesn’t necessarily make it positive-sum overall, but still needs to be weighed against its energy usage cost to accurately gauge the full effect.
Let's say Iceland has some natural advantage in fishing, because of the great fish around there. But, because our world violates the law of one price, it's instead of profitable to smelt aluminum there instead of fishing[2], and the world is deprived of the utility gain from the fish captured and shipped[1].
But then, once the world obeys "one energy price", the smelting doesn't make sense and they go back to fishing (while the imported crypto miners sop up the extra energy).
[1] hopefully with sustainable management
[2] They still fish there, today and in the hypothetical, but probably much less than the optimum.
1. A major hydro / geothermal / solar / etc. project goes online providing n GW/day
2. Usage within the region where that power can viably be transmitted is 0.2n so there isn't pressure to elevate prices. Because the power supply is based on the local geography, there isn't a way to bring production closer to the consumers in distant areas (e.g. a solar farm is going to be more productive in Arizon even if you want to power a factory in Portland).
3. Ordinarily, someone who owns, say, an aluminum smelter might consider building a new one in that region to take advantage of the guaranteed green power rather than facing escalating prices based on competition and emissions controls take effect. However, if someone ships a bunch of cryptocurrency miners in to soak up any available power there won't be slack capacity and that's guaranteed to happen because they can ship containers of mining hardware in days whereas building an industrial facility takes years.
Even better, the price of crypto is so high that it can be profitably mined even in countries with very high consumer power prices. I want to see you travel to Kazakhstan and tell them that paying 35 cents per kWh now that all the production goes towards crypto has had the positive effect of eliminating inefficiencies - namely the consumption of people living there. You might not make it back alive.
(Also, an expectation of prices being higher than they "should" would mean that one has to consider an incoming crash and the whole operation should probably start getting wound down, so as not to be left holding the bag with now (almost) worthless cryptocurrencies and mining rigs. In that sense, yeah, you're probably better off staying closer to home, which I'll assume to be one of those "high consumer power price" countries.)
I already said in the comment that it is "probably not possible everywhere". But to clarify that hypothetical, the arbitrage would be reselling the energy to whatever energy use-cases exist in Kazakhstan that aren't subsidized (which probably exist since it's unaffordable to subsidize energy everywhere in a country without bound).
Also, really? Is that your standard for the merit of an argument? Whether Kazakhstanis will kill you over it? I explained in detail how the efficiency manifests in another comment [1], and (also) already said it doesn't necessarily cancel the negative effects of crypto.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29809318
And not particularly efficient : if you cannot beat the highest market prices...
And comes with the risk of catastrophic release of that stored energy. Which means that the authorities will be much more interested in getting involved !
And the biggest issue is that if you try to become an energy seller, it becomes much harder to go under the radar as part of the black or grey market ?
https://nea.is/hydro-power/power-intensive-industries/nr/70
It's also quite borderline as to whether or not it breaks even these days. Supply chain woes increasing prices have helped last year for example but before that they were losing money.
https://www.ruv.is/frett/2021/09/14/icelandic-smelters-helpe...
Your point below about battery storage: battery storage has only just become economically viable at the best of times, and that relies on getting paid to provide "fast frequency response" - stabilisation as a service.
are you really arguing that letting the market work on energy instead of having somewhat democratic state run utilities works well? i think the evidence speaks for itself. what do you see?
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/04/10/texa-a10.html
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/06/01/texa-j01.html
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/03/08/texa-m08.html
So, an anti-state financial mechanism subsidized by governments and fraud. There is nothing new under the sun.
On the bright side, it's not necessary to have full Internet connectivity to keep the local chain in sync with the global chain. A single local node with access to the global blockchain (via a VPN or dedicated satellite receiver[0] or multiple upstream Internet connections near the border) can ensure that the local chain is constantly synchronized with the global one, and even forward local transactions for inclusion in the global blockchain.
[0] https://blockstream.com/satellite/
I think even western countries would do the same, they've just not had protests big enough in recent history.
The main question here is not "would a state shutdown internet if needed?", but "should a government have a direct control over internet infrastructure?"
The closest we came was the oil shocks of the 70s, and it cost Jimmy Carter a second term.
Carter and Ford were both extraordinarily weak candidates. Ford was a Bob Dole tier candidate (ie incapable of winning the Presidency in an election), with the Republicans still mired in the consequences of Nixon, and Carter still struggled to beat him in 1976. Reagan's carry of California was a near certainty, and it guaranteed the end of Carter with or without the energy problems. Carter was a weak southern Democrat that couldn't pull Texas and couldn't pull New York - there was nowhere for him to win from, there was no angle of victory.
but as an outsider, those protests just seemed like any other day in France :)
In the west, at least where I'm from, whether energy or other types of protests, the government usually finds a wedge to split the population into two major groups where in-fighting will exhaust and marginalize protesters. Cutting the Internet only brings more focus on the government.
One letter, from the right agency, can do a great deal.
> would shut down most existing apps until they're updated
Most apps are using DNS client APIs provided by their operating systems.
> and also the app stores that are normally used to update them
They too.
As for the OSes, they don’t normally have hardcoded DNS servers either. Instead, they rely on DHCP to get DNS servers from the routers. There’re many levels of caching involved: operating systems have a DNS cache, home routers have a caching DNS servers, ISPs usually running their own caching DNS servers for their clients, and so on.
Updating any single one of them going to fix the issue for all of these end-user apps. ISPs probably gonna be there first, it’s their job to support their network infrastructure 24/7.
The root servers are all over the world: https://root-servers.org/
According to a report released last month, Christopher Miller, who served as acting Secretary of the Defense on Jan. 6, told the Department’s inspector general that he feared “if we put U.S. military personnel on the Capitol, I would have created the greatest Constitutional crisis probably since the Civil War.” In congressional testimony, he said he was also cognizant of “fears that the President would invoke the Insurrection Act to politicize the military in an anti-democratic manner” and that “factored into my decisions regarding the appropriate and limited use of our Armed Forces to support civilian law enforcement during the Electoral College certification.”
So, yes, Miller *intentionally* delayed National Guard deployment.
What I still don't understand is why was the police so ridiculously under-staffed and under-equipped that day ?? (Where were the anti-riot water-spraying trucks ? The anti-riot gas ? The anti-riot walls ? The gapless shield wall formed by enough police people ?)
It's not like they haven't been warned by the FBI weeks in advance of the potential risks ??
OTOH I was impressed how the myth of the trigger-happy Trump fanatic who has a rifle like an extra body part didn't play out. I've only seen a single rifle, and AFAIK none of the rioters fired a single shot ? (The FBI probably helped here, since they supposedly convinced the "worst" ones to not participate... but OTOH they did still fail to prevent that truck filled with various explosive devices from parking nearby ?)
They weren't so hesitant during BLM protests(https://edition.cnn.com/2021/01/07/us/police-response-black-...).
nonetheless, looks like protesters there are successful despite cut internet.
via starlink themselves?
https://youtube.com/watch?v=zAJbOygaJ0o
That episode was released in 2008, a lot of countries in Africa then had just one subsea circuit, if that, before WACS, before EASSy. If I remember right, even bandwidth out of Austrailia cost a fortune.
Surprising. Ukraine, where I'm from, has a minimum wage of €200 despite being resource-poor and simply poor-poor, if you go by relatively objective measures like GDP per capita with PPP. But oil-rich Kazakhstan seems to really keep their hoi polloi on a lean diet.
Oil (and generally resource rich countries) have a tough line to thread between spreading the riches among the population without making the said population dependent on that sharing ( e.g. Venezuela) and hoarding at the top. Most fail miserably, and honestly the only one i can think of doing a great job is Norway, and it was mostly by accident.
https://youtu.be/rStL7niR7gs?t=758
What about Australia?
You have to understand that massive slices of society whole lives depend on gas prices being in certain range. They are not going to go eat cake.. they WILL do something about it.
Insert retort: yeah but that's just because the West outsources its pollution. No, in fact 'developing' countries like China are self-contained pollution monsters. In order to fulfill their own gigantic consumer demand, China has to be the world's most polluting nation with how they've structured their grid and industry. Exports to eg the US are a small share of China's emissions problem and getting ever smaller as a share of the problem.
China is about to become the world's largest economy and gets 60% of its energy from coal, while they aggressively build a lot more coal power plants and their emissions continue to skyrocket (despite already outputting more emissions than the US + EU combined). While US and EU emissions continue to contract (their consumer demand growth + economic growth is largely net stagnant anyway), China will again double its emissions output, guaranteeing the planet will be partially destroyed (if the climate predictions are at all accurate).
A SUV tax would probably be more efficient... btw I don't know how many of you know this but on Fridays public transport is free in Romanian cities...
>President Tokayev says that he is the chairman of security council from now, instead of Nazarbayev
https://twitter.com/Liveuamap/status/1478713537065369601
>The building of the Almaty Police Department has been seized by protesters, according to several Orda.kz sources. Weapons also captured
>Big proliferation event in Kazakhstan, hundreds of small arms will flow on the streets
https://twitter.com/Liveuamap/status/1478723503918653440 (UPD: unclear whether this is confirmed, according to some sources assault on police department is ongoing https://t.me/sputnikKZ/13893 (in Russian))
UPD
>Almaty airport(IATA: ALA, ICAO: UAAA) has been reportedly seized by protesters. Evacuation of employees ongoing
>The press service of Almaty International Airport(IATA: ALA, ICAO: UAAA) confirms the lost of control. "There are now about 45 invaders at the airport"
https://twitter.com/Liveuamap/status/1478747716356345861 (source in Russian: https://t.me/orda_kz/13180)
This is a huge deal. Conventional wisdom was that Nazarbayev, an unchallenged strongman for almost 30 years, only gave up the day-to-day duties of running the country to a younger sycophant but retained the ability to make "higher-order" decisions via his chairmanship of the security council - one of the models which Putin might follow as well, since he cannot ever simply retire.
This either means Nazarbayev doesn't want to be associated with the fall of Tokayev and will attempt to feign conflict with him to retain power in case shit goes south, or perhaps Tokayev just used the situation to perform a "forced retirement" coup against Nazarbayev.
People may get very frustrated with democratic governments, but the mechanisms that well established democracies have for the peaceful transfer of power offer a much needed release valve on this sort of pressure.
But it takes time to establish the foundations for this. Heck, the US had been around for most of a century and still had a failed revolution (well, it's called a the Civil War, but that's mostly because it failed. I'm sure if the US South had won, they would have viewed it very much as a successful revolution in the same way the original colonies did when they seceded from Great Britain. Yes, there are subtle differences-- Great Britain was somewhat of an absentee overseer, and colonies are not quite the same as states. Admittedly this makes the gray area resolve closer to Civil War.)
[0] https://wits.worldbank.org/CountryProfile/en/Country/WLD/Yea...
Presumably, per capita it's number one.
[1] This tiny country feeds the world - https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/article/holland-...
Still, we grow a very large amount of food, especially relative to the size of the country. We're the 9th largest potato producer [0] in the world, despite being a tiny country both population and size wise, because we have the highest yields in the world. Someone downthread linked a NatGeo article explaining more [1] but we have far higher yields, several times higher than any other country, on many crops, such as chilies, green peppers, cucumbers etc.
[0] the very helpful FAOSTAT is excellent for things like this: https://www.fao.org/faostat/en/#data/QCL
[1] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/article/holland-...
This does not only apply to the US, with the January 6. "insurrection", it even happened in places like Germany [0] and recently Romania [1].
It's a combination of entitlement, and 2 years of pandemic forcing many people, and their businesses, into dire economic situations.
Such dire economic situations can trigger regime change anywhere, completely regardless of "democratic institutions" or all these other nice sounding words.
Because most people don't really want that much; As long as they have a job that allows them to put a roof over their, and their families heads, and food on their tables, that long the vast majority of people couldn't care less if the government they live under is considered "democratic" or "authoritarian".
These are way too high and abstract concepts for the vast majority of people to care about. They are too busy with every day live, working to pay rent and getting food on the table.
But what happens if they don't have the work anymore to pay for rent and get food on the table? Then they will take to the streets, they will demand change, completely regardless of what kind of regime they live under.
Even the Roman Empire already knew this; panem et ludos
Give people enough bread and circuses, and they couldn't care less about what happens on the higher levels above them or how they are being wronged in rather intangible ways.
[0] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-53964147
[1] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/12/21/romanians-protesti...
...but regardless of who may be have helped organize this sudden protest/coup, it's important to remember that Russian politicians have recently made comments about taking back land given to Kazakhstan during the Soviet days. The northern portions of the country hold the 25% of the Kazakh population that is ethnic-Russian - which includes much of the area just up to the capital of Nur-Sultan, also in the north.
https://thediplomat.com/2021/04/is-northern-kazakhstan-at-ri...
The price hike was part of a government schedule to liberalize gas prices. But they were so dumb or ignorant that they've set the date in 1/1/2022, in the winter, which also happened to occur in the middle of an energy crisis. Kazahstan, being economically dependent on China is having problems with 12% unemplyment and the jobless youth has radicalised. People took to the streets to protest peacefully and requested theat the price hikes ar reversed, the resignation of the government and demanded that the former president, Nazarbayev, leaves and that the 1993 constitution is restored. The acting president Tokayev, used the protests to dismiss Nazarbayev and his allies in the government and the secret service and sieze the whole power for himself. This is when the protests turned violent. The acts of violence were most probably perpetrated by secret service factions loyal to the former president aided by criminal gangs and maybe also radicalised youth is involved. Tokayev ordered a state of emergency but the military and the security forces would not act on his orders, mainly because they take order from the former president whom Tokayev has ilegally dismissed. In a desperate attempt, Tokayev has requested outside help from the CSTO, which is mainly Russia, claiming that outside terrorist forces are trying to overthrow the social order. The key word is outside, because otherwise the CSTO cannot intervene in the internal affairs of another state. When the CSTO stepped in and sent troops, the Kazah military and security forces started to comply with the acting president's orders. Now Tokayev is basically at the mercy of the Kremlin and Putin will quite probably ask for favours in return. There is doubt that anything was planned except for the gas hike. It appears that the actors involved just siezed the opportunity to act in their favour. This is how transfer of power occurs in autocracies, sometimes even when it's carefully planned years in advance. For context, Nazarbayev hand picked Tokayev to be his sucessor but retained important attributes of power, for life, by changing the consitution in 2019.
The people don't have first world problems which they complain about from a chair on the internet.
They live harsh lives with zero perspectives and are somewhat grateful the government doesn't turn more violent or oppressive .
Then some event triggers a no point of return scenario where the people fear prison or death less than the potential future.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/rare-protests-draw-resi...
That is a weird place to stage a protest. Im getting little green men flashbacks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_green_men_(Russo-Ukrain...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_demography_of_Kazakhsta...
Russia trying to recreate the USSR, I can see. They will start with the states the West is concerned with the least.
USSR? Nope. Russian Empire? Maybe. Any resemblance to USSR, IMHO, requires at least some kind of Marxism derivative and state-planned economy.
One particular interpretation that seems to be fairly popular in "patriotic" circles is that the original Bolsheviks were Marxist, and they almost ruined Russia because of that; but then Stalin took power, purged them, and restored the imperial glory.
"It was a disintegration of historical Russia under the name of the Soviet Union," Putin said of the 1991 breakup, in comments aired on Sunday as part of a documentary film called "Russia. New History", the RIA state news agency reported.
"We turned into a completely different country. And what had been built up over 1,000 years was largely lost," said Putin, saying 25 million Russian people in newly independent countries suddenly found themselves cut off from Russia, part of what he called "a major humanitarian tragedy".
In any case Marxism was pretty much always window dressing in the USSR, anyway, post-Stalin. And in its final years the USSR was ditching any signficant pretext of Marxist-inspired socialism altogether. If it could have survived would probably would have evolved into a hybrid capitalist autocracy like modern China -- with significant state planning characteristics, but with the ideological mumbo-jumbo dialed down to a bare minimum.
Then again, if we take pure Marxism, a socialist revolution was supposed to be impossible in Russia anyway, simply because proletariat was not the majority of the population. Lenin and co had to do a lot of handwaving to explain that away, and one could reasonably claim that the result deviated sufficiently from what Marx had in mind that it shouldn't really be lumped together.
Whether it was socialist or not is another interesting question. Some would say that it wasn't, on the basis that real socialism cannot be non-democratic, as that precludes meaningful common ownership of property - and Bolsheviks were consistently anti-democratic very early on, what with shutting down the Constituent Assembly, instituting kombeds to suppress local councils that were in opposition to them, and even explicitly writing a formula into the constitution that made urban (i.e. predominantly worker) councils have 5x voting power of rural (i.e. predominantly peasant) councils. But even ignoring that, it's hard to reconcile socialism with suppression of trade unions in politics (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workers%27_Opposition) - which also happened under Lenin.
This is quite similar to Ukraine, where Crimea is overwhelmingly ethnically Russian.
[0] https://edition.cnn.com/2019/08/13/asia/hong-kong-protestors...
https://finance.yahoo.com/finance/news/kazakh-president-appe...
This is why Russia is not really fearing for oil price. Their gas is incredibly profitable, and stable, unlike Siberian oil where freezing, rusting USSR era oil rigs require a lot of upkeep.
Without Kazakhstan, no "Russian" gas for Europe.
--------
P.S. I got blocked again, so posting news here through edit
T7-VIP1 is a personal aircraft of Nazarbayev family. https://www.flightradar24.com/data/aircraft/t7-vip1
The news are there that he fled the country to Switzerland, got a boot from there, and was forced to flee to Uzbekistan.
>Without Kazakhstan, no "Russian" gas for Europe.
Do you have some links to back it up?
https://www.oxfordenergy.org/wpcms/wp-content/uploads/2021/0...
In 2009, I heard accounts of up to half of gas coming to Europe being Central Asian
https://www.worldometers.info/gas/gas-production-by-country/
Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan (lowerest of them all, placed 24) combined produce less than 1/3 of the amount Russia produces.
Also wiki (not the best source maybe, but whatever):
>Gas for northern Europe largely came from the Nadym Pur Taz (NPT) region in Western Siberia, but these large fields are now in decline due to depletion.
>Since the early 2010s Gazprom has been developing replacement gas fields in the Yamal Peninsula area of the Russian Arctic. As of 2020, Yamal produces over 20% of Russia's gas, which is expected to increase to 40% by 2030.
>The shortest pipeline routes from Yamal to the northern EU countries are the Yamal–Europe pipeline through Poland and Nord Stream to Germany. During the winter peak Gazprom does not have the capacity to redirect flows to the central pipeline corridor through Ukraine, built for the NPT gas flow. Gazprom intends to decommission some pipelines, over forty years old with high maintenance costs, in the central corridor as NPT production declines
You're getting blocked because half of your posts are literally poor trolling attempts with baseless takes against Russia\ex-USSR.
I'm not sure why are you so triggered but at least try to proof check your fantasies to make them more believable.
Specifically, if I was a country leader who wanted to turn off the internet, I would get my minister to call up all big ISP's and tell them to disconnect everyone. The ISP bosses tell their tech people to do it. And what do those tech people do?
Well, if I were in their shoes, I would head to the billing system and mark all customers as 'bill overdue, not eligible for service' or some similar status.
That gives me the ability to allow certain customers to still use the service (eg. the president and his mates).
Yet that isn't what we see... The actual BGP routes go down... That suggests to me that the story might be more like "army storms ISP headquarters, ripping out cables till their phone internet stops working".
My understanding is that the longwave service is very expensive to run (on the order of hundreds of kW) and the only thing keeping it alive is the fact its carrier wave is used to switch over old electricity meters to night rates. AFAIK the energy companies subsidise it rather than the BBC and when everyone's on a smart meter it'll probably go off air. Having said that, I suspect the Venn diagram of 'people who'd be miffed about 198 kHz going quiet' and 'people who regularly write to their MPs' is basically a circle so maybe it'll last years after its execution date like the Irish longwave service has.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/2x9tqt6mc05vB2S37j...
https://downloads.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/schedules/frequenci...
Interestingly the World Service's old mediumwave frequency 648 kHz is now being used by none other than the famous pirates Radio Caroline. They still use their radio ship, though the studios link over 4G to a land-based transmitter now to save fuel. Those guys would definitely have featured on HN quite often if it'd been around then, the engineering and hacker spirit that went into their operation was insane.
DAB struggled to gain traction over the last 20 years, I don't know anywhere near enough about shortwave transmissions in general to know if DRM has any chance, but a quick look doesn't look very impressive compared with normal shortwave.
Unless you're saying that the president himself has all the major backbone connections running through his office?
Covers the current situation in Khazakhstan. One of the most chilling chapters deals with what can happen to protestors in Khazakhstan.
Even more chilling, how the ruling elite manipulate the international press.
If you don’t hate Tony Blair already, this will help you cross that line in a big way.
https://www.amazon.com/Kleptopia-Dirty-Money-Conquering-Worl...
Specifically, the Khazakh leader was giving a speech in the Uk at the same time he was suppressing protests with torture and rape.
Blair wrote up talking points for him to help with damage control.
I don’t get it.
Prime Minister in the UK cannot go to war without parliament’s approval.
Parliament approved invasion with 412 to 149 votes.
Is Tony Blair the scapegoat?
Can someone explain?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_Inquiry
But again, did Tony Blair know it was a lie and misled the Parliament?
I remember the Chilcot report, but never read it. It's on my reading list now!
But from your quote, I don't see anything related specifically to Tony Blair?
Again, my point is, the executive power (Government/Prime Minister) came to the legislative power (The Parliament) with a motion to invade another country.
Both powers were using the same intelligence that they believed were genuine at the time, debated it for days, and then decided with 412 to 149 votes to start the invasion.
Why Tony Blair is singled out, for something in hindsight, and the other 411 people are given a pass?
Didn't the US and UK both fabricate "evidence"? Even then, it was obvious to many observers that the evidence simply wasn't credible, and the only outcome was disaster.
The Hutton Report claimed that the dossier was not sexed up (as the BBC claimed) and that it's all the BBCs fault. A few years later, Chilcott report basically said that the government did lie.
Yes. This is why the British troops were under-equipped because Tony Blair was intentionally holding back the knowledge that the choice to invade had already been made but he couldn't do this while also requesting parliament to fund war funding.
He was holding two narratives open at the same time. The public one where everything was above board, following all approved channels, ratified by the UN and due to WMD that he used to gain approval from the UK and a private one where it was clear the UK would go to war with the US regardless of what transpired.
My very simplistic understanding is that he is singled out because he was responsible for pressing on it and the thing was voted based on the “evidence” he was presenting.
My understanding is also that Bush, Powell, Rice and Rumsfeld are treated equally to Blair by some people.
That's unfortunate. The fact of the matter is that it was Cheney and Rumsfeld who personally architected the lie. Bush, Blair, et al, deserve plenty of blame for abrogating the duties of their leadership, but the history lesson here is that you don't ever let people like Cheney and Rumsfeld through the front door. Not because they're malicious (I admittedly always found Rumsfeld's politics beguiling), but because they're instigators and prime movers that won't hesitate to abuse power for their desired ends. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
Notably, the Bush campaign and administration had plenty of warning (including from conservatives) about who they were inviting into their inner circle. That, of course, makes Bush doubly culpable for a failure in leadership. But Bush's failures are of a different kind, and if we equivocate with those of Cheney, Rumsfeld, and their undersecretaries, we'll have learned nothing.
Your point that the legislature voted on the invasion is a reasonable one, but Blair's government gave them incorrect information on which to base their vote.
Blair was the head of the government that produced that bad intelligence. It makes sense to single him out.
"The buck stops here," and all that.
Now, you may ask yourself why would Iraqi scientist store WMD in glass beads, when those shatter easily and offer nearly nothing in return (maybe WMD doesn't react with glass, but then just use a glass canisters)? Was that some anal fetish or something?
It's because "" The source "" used Michael Bay movies as inspiration.
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2016/jul/08/it-was-such-obv...
They put the nasty stuff into test tube, then melt the tube shut. The result is a glass bubble filled with poison.
This makes it easier to store, move etc.
The movie portrayed glass bubbles of nerve gas as a way to deploy nerve gas, which makes no sense.
It also portrays glass a fragile, which isn’t true.
But scientists in a laboratory storing toxic chemicals in “glass beads” is very much something that “checks out.”
https://www.lapresse.ca/actualites/politique/politique-canad...
"Their proof wouldn't even convince one of the local court judge here!"
"If we begin to remove every dictator, who's going to be next? Why not Robert Mugabe? They told me he's not the same than Saddam. Well of course he doesn't have oil!"
Many people may not remember or may be too young. Those Feb and March protests were the biggest protest ever in history across the whole western world. "According to BBC News, between six and ten million people took part in protests in up to sixty countries over the weekend of 15 and 16 February." (WP) Police estimates for London, UK were 750k, but they were likely higher.
I left work one evening when they first began bombing and marched through the streets of Toronto and the energy was crazy. The following saturday protest was 100,000 people at least and a lot calmer, but outside the US embassy the atmosphere was intense, angry and electric. It was much larger in Montreal if I recall.
I don't have a reason to believe this is false, but do you have a reliable source confirming this?
I’m very glad Canadians made their voices heard, and their leaders listened.
But those protestors weren’t exactly questioning the (non-existent) evidence, as they were saying “fuck the Americans.”
It reminded me of footage from the Seattle 1999 WTO protests.
It’s better that be said before a war, rather than during. But still not fun to watch.
Would lack of UK support have been sufficient to deter the US? Who knows, probably not given the neocon lunatics in the White House at the time. Harold Wilson's decision to keep the UK out of Vietnam was in retrospect a wise decision, and no doubt Blair would have had a better reputation had he made the same choice.
That all said, Blair's post-PM career seems to involve toadying up to every dictator left on the planet (in marked contrast to his successor Gordon Brown's work supporting refugees and global vaccination) so maybe his reputation is well-deserved after all.
I don't get this.
He cannot just "decide to take Britain to Iraq", since the UK Government cannot start a war without Parliament's approval.
He came to the Parliament with the available intelligence at the time, and after days of debates, 412 people voted in favour of the invasion.
I would understand the hate if he knew the "irrefutable evidence" shown to United Nation by the Secretary of State was a lie at the time of the vote in Parliament.
But as far I know, he wasn't aware of that.
Is this just a blind hate of a scapegoat? Why are the other 411 people given a pass?
Admittedly, I'm not sure there's much of a meaningful difference between the two. If an MP doesn't want to go to war, I'd think that a big enough difference if opinion to vote no-confidence. As such if a majority of Parliament didn't want to go to war, they may have taken that step.
Had Blair decided not to go to war, there would not have been a vote. He was leader of the Labour Party and instructed his whips to ensure MPs voted for war.
> He came to the Parliament with the available intelligence at the time, and after days of debates, 412 people voted in favour of the invasion.
We now know, from the Chilcot inquiry, that Blair knew the intelligence was poor and either deliberately misled Parliament or allowed his belief to blind his judgement. Either conclusion is damning.
Declaring war and deploying troops is a power held by the Crown (which will do it on request of its government). Parliamentary approval is not required, parliament merely can hold a no-confidence vote and remove the government afterwards if it disagrees.
The Afghanistan war just a bit earlier was debated in parliament, but not actually voted on by parliament.
For Iraq, there was a formal vote for the first time, but again, not a formal authorization that would have had legal force - although loosing it realistically would have collapsed Blairs government once he committed to having the vote. (And also made any Labour MPs voting against it not just the MPs who were against the war, but also the MPs who forced their government to fail).
That aside, Parliament doesn't have to authorize via binding vote on these matters. They get a debate opportunity by normative convention, but any vote they took to override would not be binding unless they were willing to remove the PM.
Nonetheless I think it's fair to place a sizeable portion of the blame on Parliament: They can't decide to go to war, but they do have some levers of power that would stop it, if they were willing to remove their PM. I certainly don't know where I put % blame here, but I'm equally sure Parliament was checking complicit on the issue.
Not only that, the 2005 London bombings most likely wouldn't have happened, that was direct retaliation for UK participation in the "coalition of the willing", willing to invade and occupy Iraq as part of a "crusade" on terror.
In 1999 Blair used "Queen's Consent" (the notional requirement that consent of the monarch must be sought in order to substantially alter their powers, but in practice these are government powers and so consent is sought from the government) to get rid of a Bill that would actually have required this, the "Military Action Against Iraq (Parliamentary Approval) Bill".
This isn't because Blair couldn't have won a vote and disposed of the bill but because he knew it would be embarrassing and indeed the embarrassment anyway resulted in the (non-binding) Approval bill you cited which has 412 Aye votes.
Even having a vote ("Division") is embarrassing. It forced Labour members who might have told their electorate over and over that they oppose war to choose, stick by their principles that war is abhorrent, and risk deselection for coming out against the stance of their government and many populist pro-war newspapers, or, bend over, vote for the government and hope voters forgive them when it inevitably all goes wrong.
Now, ultimately Parliament is sovereign and so you can argue everything "requires parliamentary approval", but only in sense that silence signifies approval because as a sovereign entity it could intervene but it does not.
If Parliament really didn't want the UK to go to war it can in principle get rid of the Prime Minister and install one who won't start a war. If the Speaker tries to stop them (e.g. by refusing to recognise a member who stands to propose "That This House Has No Confidence In Her Majesty's Government" so as to bring down the Prime Minister) the Commons can convene "The Committee of the Whole House" which is identical to the Commons except that they're picking who runs things, whereupon they can get rid of that Speaker, choose a new one, reconvene the Commons and call No confidence. But it isn't going to do that in fact.
Even for Brexit, while there was majority opposition to the obviously disastrous "No deal" plan, there was no majority in support of any other definitive course of action, including replacing the Prime Minister, all that was done was more kicking of cans down the road, until there was no more road.
The invasion of Iraq was an open and blatant breach of the UN charter [0], it was an illegal war of aggression based on lies.
Lies that were so blatant that the whole situation lead to the largest global protest event in human history [1].
And that doesn't even go into the direct consequences of that; Refugees all the way into Western Europe, among them many disgruntled people who felt wronged, serving as potential recruits for an AQ that had by then become world famous thanks to the US.
What that lead to were the first major Islamic terror attacks in Western Europe [2], among them the 2005 London bombings by AQ, which were a direct response to the UK participation in invading Iraq, just like the 2004 AQ attack in Madrid, Spain.
In that context it's not really difficult to see why Tony Blair is such a controversial personality.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2004/sep/16/iraq.iraq
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/15_February_2003_anti-war_prot...
[2] https://www.datagraver.com/case/people-killed-by-terrorism-p...
* Very poorly thought out creation of Scottish Parliament. While not a bad thing, he didn’t consider it to be all that important. Not like it could destroy the United Kingdom or anything.
* Very poorly thought reform of House of Lords. Again not a bad thing, but it hasn’t really improved much.
* Very poorly thought out creation of “Supreme Court.” It was presented as a simply a rebranding of the law lords, but now it’s much more powerful, which was never the intent.
* Not terribly interested in privacy.
* Unhealthy dependence on the EU. His motivation for the above was “the EU will take care of this so who cares.” This was a problem before Brexit.
* Incompetence, and lack of care. Notice how many of these points say “not itself a bad thing.” He lots of “not bad itself” things in a bad manner.
* Fucking Rupert Murdoch’s wife.
Why should we hate him for this? Sounds like its own punishment.
And the ex-Mrs Murdoch probably has a case of buyers remorse.
I work in an investment bank, on the trading floor, and when I hear reports on how we're supposed to be and act, I feel it is so different from how people actually are and think. For instance, they ignore incompetence and always assign to malice, they think being legit is less important to us than robbing money, they always describe us as amoral, parasitic, conspiratorial. It's an enticing narrative each time, but except when they have actual email exchanges (like the Millenium emails during the Maddoff SEC investigation - that painted the right picture, professional, missing information, imperfect but not anti-blue collar conspiracy lol), I can't really trust it anymore.
The FinCEN files by BuzzFeed were so trash, it was surreal to hear... We gave regulatory reports they leaked irresponsibly about suspicious activity by our fee-paying clients we are forbidden to tip off by refusing to talk to them, and we're now "hiding crime", maybe even "facilitating" it, tsk. They warned a lot of people that day, good job.
It’s focused on the UK, but portrays the US legal and regulatory as system pretty positive compared the UK/EU (early 2010s).
When justice happens, it tends to happen in America.
Organizations like the FBI, FDIC, and US Attorneys are very powerful compared to their European counterparts.
Courts are much less corrupt as well.
I'd correct you buy saying: "when justice happens in the US, it tends to be very punitive and detailed", maybe ? I really don't think the U.S. provides fairer reparation than Germany or Sweden, it's just difference legal ideologies.
Corrupt politicians use innuendo and hatred to corrupt politicians to attack their opponents in the West.
As their opponents are often corrupt themselves, you can’t just look at the narrative. After all the narrative is: “corrupt politicians are doing these horrible things; stop them!”
This sort of reporting is very hard and very fact dependent.
It contains horror stories of the Khazakh leader using Western courts to persecute his opponents.
That’s possible because (a) the opponents aren’t saints, and (b) money is necessary to buy justice.
The dictators use money to hire western lawyers, western lawyers to win court cases, won court cases to establish facts, facts to destroy opponents legal status, fewer opponents to get more power, and power to get more money.
Power -> money -> lawyers/consultants (Tony Blair) -> truth -> power.
1) People are looking for Linux resources as it might help them evade censorship or set up local networks
2) Residential traffic dropped but servers aren't affected and so Debian-based servers' update traffic now represents a much larger part of the country's total traffic
[1]: https://blockstream.com/satellite/
Not really. Bitcoin transactions are typically around 500 bytes. Smuggling that out via alternative means doesn't seem too hard. As for the blockchain itself (for verifying transactions), there's this: https://www.blockstream.com/satellite/
Also, Russia might intervene militarily and annex the norther half of the country - as they have recently made comments that the Soviets gave them too much land.
It is far more likely this will end badly for the average Kazakh citizen.
The suffix "-stan" is very suggestive, isn't it? After all, there are Pakistan and Afghanistan -- massively Islamic countries.
Similarly, Thailand ends in "-land", yet no one thinks Thailand is in Europe despite the fact that England, Switzerland and Poland are all European.
Islam in Kazakhstan is non-pure, non-literalist and heavily tinged/influenced by local shamanistic traditions and old Soviet ways unlike that in Middle East.
Pure Islam in Kazakhstan would look jarringly out of place.
The news are there that he fled the country to Switzerland, got a boot from there, and was forced to flee to Uzbekistan.
This seems like a possible opportunity for Putin to annex more territory.
https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/troops-protesters...
(Especially these days, with millions of smartphones around, each one being able to work as a Wi-Fi router !)
Source: https://t.me/delyagin/14915