The problem though is that technically, legally most of this stuff is no longer classified as "gambling". It's now a "prediction market" of which team will win the game.
Why? If the objective is to weaken a regime, and the sanctions strengthen it, why should you help your “enemy”?
The classic mistake here is to consider that dictatorships are like democracies—they aren't, and their power structure is different and more resilient to economic shocks. Even Bachar Al-Assad, who was much weaker, took 13 years to leave power.
At some point, one should question if wide sanctions targeted at increasing the suffering of the civilian population are really worth it.
Your assumption here is that, since sanctions strengthen the regime, not having sanctions weakens the regime, which is not logical.
Not having sanctions potentially strengthens a regime more than sanctions do, embeds them in the global geopolitical/cultural/economic stage, normalises their behaviour, and goes against a lot of people's deontology.
Look at Israel: no sanctions, strong Zio regime, majority of US/German pop supported the "self-defense" argument for decades, complete normalisation of Palestinian genocide until the horror reached an unbearable threshold. Etc., etc.
Yes, sanctions are far from perfect, but I strongly believe that a world with Israel santioned would have been a much better place for everyone, including the Israelis (from having to contend with their ideology).
Edit: I'm also aware that my argument is not perfect either. For example, I wouldn't qualify what Cuba has or what Iraq had as sanctions in the sense that I'm talking about: these are to my eyes an economic war of aggression by the US/West. What I'm defending is sanctions on fascist and ethonationalist global/regional superpowers that are engaging in large-scale horror. But I'm aware how leaky my definition is.
You can do sanctions on items that allow the regime wage wars (weapons and dual-use products), yes, that can work. Or wide sanctions on small countries such as Israel can be a credible deterrent, since it lacks economic depth to find substitutes.
However, wide sanctions on large countries such as Russia or Iran are now proven to be quite ineffective in the long run. Even worse, by preventing the creation of a middle-class, you won't have the conditions to start a democracy later, after a possible regime change.
I know it sounds counter-intuitive, but it's what data shows.
And sanctions don't prevent countries from committing atrocities either. What about the deaths and suffering induced by sanctions? 500k Iraqi children were estimated to have died due to the US sanctions. The architect of the policy told that it was "worth it". Was it?
Is there evidence sanctions strengthen a regime? With Russia at war right now, sanctions do indeed seem to be helping Ukraine with Russia having a budget crisis.
Sanction strengthen the political grip of a regime on society, which can use them as a justification for its repression. They also hollow-out the middle class, which prevents a democratic societal change, which requires it.
In the case of a war, it is of course useful, but it won't solve the long-term issue of the nature of the Russian regime, which has gotten only more entrenched since 2014.
Sanctions also affect population and create indirect deaths and suffering in the civilian population.
I guess that, just like Madeleine Albright, you believe that 500k Iraqi children death caused by US sanctions were "worth it"? (US still wanted to invade after, proof that sanctions worked!)
Hypothetically, imagine that you become president of US today, inheriting current situation. What would you do regarding Iran situation?
What is the correct action now in current situation?
Spoiler: I think there is no “correct” solution, somebody will be hurt in the end despite best wishes.
Note: Lower supply of oil and fertiliser affects poorer countries more than the rich ones (possibility of famine in Africa).
Current Iran government just killed their own civilians a month ago in thousands to end protests; and repressions will likely repeat as protests are likely to repeat. (Irans populace seem to be quite educated and want some reforms)
Ground invasion of Iran would cost a lot of lives - civilian casualties always exist.
Paper is definitely not the only thing Russia was importing. Check statistics of Russian aviation accidents (not sure if Germany was in supply chain for aviation, but this is visible thing that clearly was affected by sanctions)
Moved on how? Satellites are useful for launch detection and cueing but as far as we know there isn't a satellite constellation capable of tracking airborne targets with enough precision for targeting. And the military couldn't really keep such satellites secret: the emissions would be impossible to hide.
It's always entertaining to see worthless idiots lose money on an obvious scam like cryptocurrency. Ha ha. Although in this case it seems that North Koreans might have ended up with actual valuable fiat currency, which is unfortunate.
We haven't been building much battery storage to go along with that solar power. Perhaps we will eventually, but until that actually happens the base load requirement represents a hard limit on the amount of solar generation capacity that the grid can handle.
We started scaling batteries after solar (because the technology reached the point where they were profitable after solar)... but they're being installed at scale now, and at a rapdily increasing rate.
Batteries provided 42.8% of California's power at 7pm a few days ago (which came across my social media feed as a new record) [1]. And it wasn't a particularly short peak, they stayed above 20% of the power for 3 hours and 40 minutes. It's a non-trivial amount of dispatchable power.
Batteries are a form of dispatchable power not "base load". There is no "base load" requirement. Base load is simply a marketing term for power production that cannot (economically) follow the demand curve and therefore must be supplemented by a form of dispatchable power, like gas peaker plants, or batteries. "Base load" power is quite similar to solar in that regard. The term makes sense if you have a cheap high-capitol low running-cost source of power (like nuclear was supposed to be, though it failed on the cheap front) where you install as much of it as you can use constantly and then you follow the demand curve with a different source of more expensive dispatchable power. That's not the reality we find ourselves in unless you happen to live near hydro.
I think the mysterious "Misc" electricity which sometimes appears at dawn and then dusk in the UK is likewise BESS†. The raw data doesn't seem to have labels for BESS, a lot of it was oriented around how electricity works twenty five years ago, there's an 850MW power plant here, and one there and one there, and we measure those. So it can cope with a wind farm - say 500MW or 1GW coming ashore somewhere, but not really with the idea that there's 10GW of solar just scattered all over the place on a bright summer's day and the batteries might similarly be too much?
† My thinking is: Dawn because in a few hours the solar comes online, you can refill those batteries at whatever price that is, so sell what you have now for the dawn price, and Dusk because the solar is mostly gone but people are running ovens and so on to make food in the evening, so you can sell into that market. But I might be seeing what I expect not reality.
> We haven't been building much battery storage to go along with that solar power
That too has pretty recently changed. Even my home state of Idaho is deploying pretty big batteries. It takes almost no time to deploy it's all permitting and public comment at this point that takes the time.
Batteries have gotten so cheap that the other electronics and equipement at this point are bigger drivers of the cost of installation.
Here's an 800MWh station that's being built in my city [1].
I think people are just generally stuck with the perception of where things are currently at. They are thinking of batteries and solar like it's 2010 or even 2000. But a lot has changed very rapidly even since 2018.
For full house backup, it sort of sucks right now. They are all charging a premium over what you can otherwise get if it's not specifically a whole home product.
What I've done and would suggest is right now looking for battery banks for big ticket important items that you'd want to stay on anyways in terms of an outage. A lot of those can function as a UPS. You can get a 1kWh battery pack for $400 right now. A comparable home battery backup is charging $1300 per kWh of installed storage.
I currently have a 2kWh battery pack for my computer/server/tv and a 500Wh pack for my fridge. Works great and it's pretty reasonably priced. The 500Wh gives my fridge an extra 6 hours of runtime after a power outage.
If I wanted to power shift, I have smart switches setup so I can toggle when I want to.
You will get a battery and BMS for that price. Decent inverters are expensive, however, so you won't get a whole 10kWh setup with appropriately sized inverter for under US$2K. Probably twice that.
I hesitate to offer any brand advice, because that is very situational, depends on what you're after, what experience level you have, what trade-offs you want to make, etc.
I don't know if the market has improved but when I looked at this a year or two ago I concluded that the consumer market here was utter crap with hugely inflated prices.
The cheapest per kwh way I could find to buy a home battery (that didn't involve diy stuff) was to literally buy an EV car with an inverter... by a factor of at least two... I ended up not buying one.
Unfortunately cheap batteries doesn't translate to reputable companies packaging them in cheap high quality packages for consumers instantly.
I don't know about Australia but there was an enormous amount of black market sports gambling in the USA before it was widely legalized. People who were unaware of this were just oblivious or led very sheltered lives. Broad legalization may have been a net negative for society but it's a complex issue.
define enormous? before it was legalized I knew one mate that was a gambler. I don’t have a friend anymore who does not sports gamble, hardly have relatives that don’t sports gamble. die-hard fans of teams now don’t give a hoot if the team wins (especially in the regular season)… not saying this is not a complicated issue but to say market was enormous is very much removed from reality
Control over European food supplies might have been a minor factor in Putin's decision to invade Ukraine but that was secondary to establishing a greater Russian empire with defensible strategic depth. A lot of Ukraine's wheat exports went to Egypt and they have suffered significant food cost inflation due to the war.
From the user perspective, Windows and Office certainly crashed more frequently back then. I don't mean that as a criticism of the Microsoft developers at the time: they did some great work within severe constraints. But overall the product quality is far better now.
I wouldn't take that as criticism; you are 100% correct. But that instability was a direct result of the issues I mentioned above: the ring transition protection/implementation was absolutely horrible; 3rd-party developers would discover a useful function in NTDLL and start using it in unintended ways, etc.
Do you remember the CSRSS Backspace Bug? [0]
A simple: printf("hung up\t\t\b\b\b\b\b\b"); from ring-3 would result in a BSOD. That was a pretty major embarrassment.
After retiring, I started volunteering my time to mentor CS students at two local universities. I work with juniors and seniors who have no idea what "heap memory" is because, for the most part, they don't need to know. For many developers, the web browser is the "operating system".
I absolutely love using Python because I don't have to worry about the details that were major issues back in the 90s. But, at the same time, when I run into an issue, I fully understand what the operating system is doing and can still debug it down to assembly if need be.
I can't imagine how much of a breath of fresh air Python / Java must have been if you were used to write typical business crud apps (and server software) in C/C++ (with no sanitizers / modern tooling to speak of).
It wasn’t. Java was very different from its current state before roughly Java 5. It felt like a downgrade from C++ to me at the time. C++ had templates and RAII and smart pointers, all of which Java lacked (and in some respects still lacks today). Not having something like the C preprocessor was quite annoying. Java performance wasn’t great. Tooling was better in some ways, worse in others. Linters did exist in C/C++, as did debug versions of libraries. You could load a crash dump into a debugger and could often get a pretty good picture of what went wrong. While Java certainly became preferable for business code, it wasn’t a sudden breath of fresh air, it was trade-offs that gradually became more favorable to it over the years.
I used to joke that using something like Python or C# felt like "programming with oven mitts". I never felt like I had any control. But that eventually morphed into "Well, I don't need that control and can focus on other things."
I spent the last few months building a toy LLM from scratch. I can't believe that within my lifetime I've gone from using punch cards to arguing with Claude when it does something ridiculous.
The oven mitts metaphor probably works really well, if you shift it into metal working. Yes, it takes getting used to wearing heavy gloves when working. No, you don't want to skip out on them.
Edit: Honestly, any job where gloves are standard works. Gardening. Sailing. Many sports.
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