Lets see:

• Soviet era weapon storage is running empty
• national wealth fund is emptying
• sanctions hurting trade badly
• foreign workers stay out of Russia due to the massive increase of racisim
• huge emigration waves due to the war
• many foreign companies left Russia
• increase of crime, due to lack of cops and a lot of criminals being freed
• rubel looses a lot of value

But also fairly importantly a lot of Russians benefit from the war. The soldiers pay is great and the worker shortage means higher wages. That really has to break

The Russian military industry is already mostly owned by the government. The war related industry took on $200-250billion in new debt. That is about the Russian pre war federal budget for a year.

Are you really surprised that predictions 70 years into the future are not highly accurate? When you look at the 2004 report, then well we are below the high prediction, but above the mid case. So if the current forecast is of similar quality, then we would indeed have been past peak birth for the next 20 years or so.

In the 2004 report the UN got fertility rates in Africa wrong, believing they would drop much faster then they did. They also though AIDS would be worse then it actually was.

Oh and UN predictions go with a peak around 2070-80 or so since the 90s.

Did you really believe that any news with we are at the peak is not a prediction?

We do know the number of future parents for the next two decades pretty well, as most of them have been born already. So the only variable is how many children does the average women have. That has been falling every single year for the last 60 years with only a single year seeing a small increase. So this projection is most likely pretty good.

As for why it matters. It means the global workforce will stop its fast growth rate in two decades, increasing competition for workers. It means many countries are aging with all the consequences that brings. It means economic growth is not pushed as much by population growth as has seen before. Clearly there are other factors, but demographics matters a lot.

The key number here is the dependency ratio. So the number of retired and underage people to working age. The intressting part is that there are fewer younger people and the old ones tend to die. The other part is built up infrastructure. If you are a country with a falling population, you do not need to built a lot of housing, as there is already enough around. Public transport infrastructure just has to be maintained and things like the electricity grid work as well. Even many factories do not need massive upgrades all the time.

So for the most part it tends to work rather well, unless you have a really bad ratio. Obviously innovation helps as well.

The EU has already sanctioned Russian shadow fleet vessels. Russia just buys more and uses those instead, so it needs to be updated all the time.

It is also realizing that there are a lot of great things in the world.

MTC is the largest Russian mobile carrier. T-Bank is a Russian bank. Telegram is mostly Russian as well, certainly not terribly Western. TikTok is Chinese. If this is blocking, then it is from the Russian side and not due to sanctions.

Huawei still sells networking hardware to Russia. So that is not a problem.

Also T-Bank is Russian, as is Telegram at least somewhat. TikTok is Chinese and they do not sanction Russia.

This is just Russian internet infrastructure collapsing. Nothing to do with sanctions. Although digital sanctions have hit Russia, for the most part using a VPN works fine.

The term World Systems theory would use is periphery. Thailand would probably end up in semi-periphery though. Also it is a model best kept in the 90s. Currently it is really having a hard time. Russia for example should be periphery, but acts like a core country.

No worries. They can all just start working at Fakel…

They are also the main developers of the Mastodon software. It is not just hosting the service. The software needs to be able to compete with Bluesky and right now it quite simply does not. The only way to get the quality needed is to have some full time lead developers. Also they need some proper admins to run the websites. Mastodon social is at 250,000 active users right now, but it is also fairly likely to grow fast with what Elon is up to with Twitter. Just to compare Twitter used to have 7500 employees, with a 1000 today.

That is what Russia is doing, however the West is sanctioning entities involved in this all the time. That increases risk and means extra work. So Russia can not make as much money selling oil like this and if customers have a choice, it is easier to deal with legal oil. So if oil prices fall, then Russia is going to sell less oil.

That is somewhat true for all sanctions. Russia is going to find ways around them, but even then it hurts Russia.

Secondary sanctions. If a Chinese company trades with Russia, it can not trade with the US. That includes things like financing, handling US cargo and so forth. The US is the bigger market. Also the EU has also sanctioned Chinese companies for trading with China. Obviously if there are US sanctions, EU sanctions are much more likely as well.

There are ways around it, like link shorteners and so forth, but the main point is that Meta is afraid.

It also shows how incredible the impact of the wealth gap on climate issues is even in rich countries like the US. The 1% having per capita emissions of 76t, whereas US average is at 17.6t. It is even starker in Europe with a lot of rich people, but lower per capita emissions.

Not needed. The better target are the ports. Novorossiysk is pretty close to Ukraine and handles 30% of Russias oil exports. The ports around Primorsk and Ust-Luga are also within drone range, but they need longer range ones for those.

Just because a soldier ist dead, does not mean he does not recieve pay…

Because Saudi Arabia wants to show the world that it is more then an oil state and having EV production is a good way of doing that.