4 ms·

I don't understand how my dead business can help to stop more PEOPLE from being killed.

kstenerud 5y ago
Your dead business isn't helping stop people from being killed. It's collateral damage from the sactions, but those sanctions ARE helping to put an end to this madness. I realize that this is cold comfort as the business you've put so much work into has now died for reasons outside of your control, and that's a really shitty situation to find yourself in. This is a black swan event. Your business acumen is not in doubt. You have no fault in this.
- WaxedChewbacca 5y ago
  > those sanctions ARE helping to put an end to this madness It's this part that seems not very well supported. From what I can tell, Russia thought about the probable sanctions quite a lot before starting this course of action, so it's not clear to me that sanctions are going to have much effect. Even if sanctions generally were accomplishing something, it's not clear to me that these particular sanctions are doing anything useful. It kind of seems like more Great Reset stuff, i.e., claim that something useful is being done while being incredibly disruptive in ways that destroy small businesses.
- crate_barre 5y ago
  I do feel like sanctions should better target large institutions. So you won’t cut off Gazprom but you’ll stop some average citizen from running their business, or in the case of Namecheap, stop them from registering a domain name? It’s like, we just don’t get it.
  - kstenerud 5y ago
    In ideal conditions we could do that, but the world is messy. There are many competing forces that need to be balanced, and it almost always can't be done without some blowback or collateral damage or compromise. So we take a pragmatic approach based on our best information at the time, and as quickly as possible. How do you stop a dictator with the world's largest arsenal of nukes from engaging in a 19th century style land grab without destroying the world political order, world economies, and perhaps even the world itself? Now how do you do it without creating a power vacuum? It's easy to stand back observing the results and criticize in hindsight (and believe me, we'll get plenty of that in a few months), but right now people need to make quick and possibly inefficient decisions using whatever information they can gather because the consequences are so grave.
    - mbg721 5y ago
      That sounds like it could also have been written to justify Japanese internment in WWII. Maybe hindsight buys us some luxuries we couldn't otherwise afford, but it's worth some hard thinking about what is really necessary.
      - kstenerud 5y ago
        If we want to go down that road to its logical conclusion, anything could be written to justify anything. But such argumentation is fruitless.
    - native_samples 5y ago
      If sanctions worked really well, that position could be justifiable. In practice, sanctions rarely if ever seem to cause violent revolution. They just end up hurting the little guys who can't do anything anyway, whilst the most well connected work around them anyway. See how North Korea has Apple computers ... for the leadership.
      - dragonwriter 5y ago
        > In practice, sanctions rarely if ever seem to cause violent revolution. Sanctions aren't supposed to cause violent revolution, particularly. They are supposed to: (1) Pressure the regime to change the course of action which caused them, and (2) Reduce the economic capacity behind, and this the effectiveness of, the targeted action so long as #1 doesn't work. Promoting violent overthrow of the regime is a manner of achieving #1, but while it is often an acceptable outcome from sanctions, it's generally not the preferred outcome. > They just end up hurting the little guys who can't do anything anyway All, even the most autocratic, regimes rely entirely on the at least tacit cooperation of “the little guy” to function at all.
  - Jxl180 5y ago
    Do you not consider Stripe a "large institution?" If Stripe allows these payments to process, they are a large institution profiting on fees despite the sanctions.
- s1artibartfast 5y ago
  >It's collateral damage from the sanctions, but those sanctions ARE helping to put an end to this madness. We can hope that this is the case, but we certainly don't know. We don't have knowledge of the future or alternative timelines. It is entirely possible that they are making the situation worse, the conflict more intense, or could lead to future Wars or nuclear annihilation. This is the gamble that we are taking, perhaps a calculated gamble but a gamble nonetheless. Anyone who says that they know for a fact what will happen is a liar
- xyzzy21 5y ago
  Has as much proof as that lockdowns and masks help.

Your dead business isn't helping stop people from being killed. It's collateral damage from the sactions, but those sanctions ARE helping to put an end to this madness. I realize that this is cold comfort as the business you've put so much work into has now died for reasons outside of your control, and that's a really shitty situation to find yourself in. This is a black swan event. Your business acumen is not in doubt. You have no fault in this.

WaxedChewbacca 5y ago
> those sanctions ARE helping to put an end to this madness It's this part that seems not very well supported. From what I can tell, Russia thought about the probable sanctions quite a lot before starting this course of action, so it's not clear to me that sanctions are going to have much effect. Even if sanctions generally were accomplishing something, it's not clear to me that these particular sanctions are doing anything useful. It kind of seems like more Great Reset stuff, i.e., claim that something useful is being done while being incredibly disruptive in ways that destroy small businesses.
crate_barre 5y ago
I do feel like sanctions should better target large institutions. So you won’t cut off Gazprom but you’ll stop some average citizen from running their business, or in the case of Namecheap, stop them from registering a domain name? It’s like, we just don’t get it.
- kstenerud 5y ago
  In ideal conditions we could do that, but the world is messy. There are many competing forces that need to be balanced, and it almost always can't be done without some blowback or collateral damage or compromise. So we take a pragmatic approach based on our best information at the time, and as quickly as possible. How do you stop a dictator with the world's largest arsenal of nukes from engaging in a 19th century style land grab without destroying the world political order, world economies, and perhaps even the world itself? Now how do you do it without creating a power vacuum? It's easy to stand back observing the results and criticize in hindsight (and believe me, we'll get plenty of that in a few months), but right now people need to make quick and possibly inefficient decisions using whatever information they can gather because the consequences are so grave.
  - mbg721 5y ago
    That sounds like it could also have been written to justify Japanese internment in WWII. Maybe hindsight buys us some luxuries we couldn't otherwise afford, but it's worth some hard thinking about what is really necessary.
    - kstenerud 5y ago
      If we want to go down that road to its logical conclusion, anything could be written to justify anything. But such argumentation is fruitless.
  - native_samples 5y ago
    If sanctions worked really well, that position could be justifiable. In practice, sanctions rarely if ever seem to cause violent revolution. They just end up hurting the little guys who can't do anything anyway, whilst the most well connected work around them anyway. See how North Korea has Apple computers ... for the leadership.
    - dragonwriter 5y ago
      > In practice, sanctions rarely if ever seem to cause violent revolution. Sanctions aren't supposed to cause violent revolution, particularly. They are supposed to: (1) Pressure the regime to change the course of action which caused them, and (2) Reduce the economic capacity behind, and this the effectiveness of, the targeted action so long as #1 doesn't work. Promoting violent overthrow of the regime is a manner of achieving #1, but while it is often an acceptable outcome from sanctions, it's generally not the preferred outcome. > They just end up hurting the little guys who can't do anything anyway All, even the most autocratic, regimes rely entirely on the at least tacit cooperation of “the little guy” to function at all.
- Jxl180 5y ago
  Do you not consider Stripe a "large institution?" If Stripe allows these payments to process, they are a large institution profiting on fees despite the sanctions.
s1artibartfast 5y ago
>It's collateral damage from the sanctions, but those sanctions ARE helping to put an end to this madness. We can hope that this is the case, but we certainly don't know. We don't have knowledge of the future or alternative timelines. It is entirely possible that they are making the situation worse, the conflict more intense, or could lead to future Wars or nuclear annihilation. This is the gamble that we are taking, perhaps a calculated gamble but a gamble nonetheless. Anyone who says that they know for a fact what will happen is a liar
xyzzy21 5y ago
Has as much proof as that lockdowns and masks help.