Yes I’m aware.
I am not saying everyone with dumb opinions is a bot, far from it. The world is drowning in idiots. But concentrations of message-friendly people is for sure one of the places you’d want to test narratives, not every message is intended for every audience. You need to recruit new folks to your cause and maintain your base. Messages that do well with your base are likely to attract cause-curious folks.
With pipeline stuff? Sure. There’s an infrastructure cost involved in switching sources. With tanker and rail stuff? Nah, it’s comparatively trivial to switch suppliers. Unfortunately for Russia, the most obvious declines are from pipeline sales in the first year of the war. The rest have decreased too, but those are the ones where you can just wave your hand at the graph and it’s obvious. They basically can’t afford to sell at market rate because their oil comes with too many indirect costs to the buyer at the moment.
More like, I’m trying to make a narrow point about international oil markets and they keep reading it as moral judgmet, East vs West, and/or Grand Narrative stuff. Also they keep getting verifiable facts wrong, which is annoying because then I have to correct them, distracting from the oil market conversation.
Anyway the reason I believe .ml is much more likely to have a higher bot ratio than other instances is that it’s a convenient concentration of Russian and Chinese friendly people, where narratives can be tested. The good ones that resonate get pushed by other members of the bot network outside the test bed (along with organic sharing and so forth). There are other test environments for narratives, but both China and Russia are surely interested in .ml more than other fediverse spaces.
To be clear, Western interests also have a presence here, but they don’t have the same kind of obvious choice for an instance to hang out in and test natives. I would guess they would pick lemmy.world to have more user-noise to hide in and less fear that their instance might collapse, but fuck if I know. In any case, we’re very much the backwaters and testing grounds for these bot farms. They’re not interested in us as some kind of nexus for narrative control, we’re just one of the many many places they test out stories and see which ones are worth amplifying with their big accounts on big platforms.
I’m sure .ml is loaded with bots. I’m currently chatting with a person who thinks Russia is a brilliant strategist for selling oil at a steep discount.
I’m sure .ml is loaded with bots. I’m currently chatting with a person who thinks Russia is a brilliant strategist for selling oil at a steep discount.
The strategic reality of Russia’s neighbours is obviously that they can’t change their geography and have to find a way to live with Russia. That should be obvious to anybody with even a minimally functioning brain.
Yes? We’re in agreement here. The neighbors are happy to get their oil at a discount. They would not be getting this discount were it not for the sanctions, since there would be more competition in the buyer’s market.
The war in Ukraine is a direct result of Europe acting in the American interest and participating in expansion of NATO.
If Russian leadership was under the illusion that NATO was secretly an offensive alliance, and thus needed to preemptively invade Ukraine, it should be clear with this Hormuz straight business that it really is a defensive alliance. Trump tried to get the NATO members to help and they all told him to pound sand.
Meanwhile, the report you yourself linked clearly shows that Russian energy exports have remained stable overall.
They’re down year-over-year, with the biggest hit coming in the first year. The sanctions did what they could (forced Russia to offer big discounts) and now they’re stable in their effect.
The harm that’s been done to Europe is far greater than any profits Russia has lost over the past 4 years.
I mean, this is an argument fraught with “nuh-uh” and hand-waving on all sides. “Worth it” is very subjective, especially when the harm to both sides is relatively minor, in the grand scheme of things. Both sides have adjusted to the new reality.
Not only that, but with Russian supplies cut off and now the Gulf, Europe finds itself entirely dependent on the US which is a predatory power.
The European oil sources are super diverse, there’s no need to make this a false East vs West thing. I’m literally just here to explain that Russia is selling oil at a discount because it has to, not because it wants to.
That wasn’t a moral judgment of the Russian invasion, it was just pointing out a strategic reality for neighbors. Likewise, Gazans would probably have issue with buying Israeli products if given choice.
Still, I don’t know what to tell you. Russian carbon energy export profits have fallen hard since the beginning of the invasion, with much of the losses coming out of their pipelines.
See this graph in this article/report. You can find quite a lot of other articles talking about how the recent spike in prices from the Hormuz bullshit is a huge boon for Russian carbon energy.
They’ve been selling oil and gas this entire time, there isn’t any need to secure customers, they already have them. The discount is essentially the effect that they have a smaller pool of buyers, and those buyers piss off a number of other players (countries, buyers, sellers, insurance, etc) by buying from Russia. A few buyers have to also contend with paying a country that has demonstrated a willingness to invade their neighbors. Many of the former Soviet states, for example, have continued to buy Russian oil this entire time, while putting in big efforts to transition away. Their oil and gas purchases have been heavily criticized by people who don’t understand how long it takes to change energy sources.
Yes, that’s what the sanctions are intended to do. Russia should struggle to make any profit from their gas and oil. It would be ideal if they couldn’t sell at all, but forcing them to sell at steep discounts is still very good. This Hormuz straight business has unfortunately caused the price of oil to go up, which will significantly increase the price Russia can sell at.
Similarly, the communists would have praised her as an examplary citizen.
On the one hand, longi is easier to say. On the other hand, I feel like they’ve been called denisovans for so long we really should stick with that…
Switching to universal healthcare would save the US money, it’s purely a corporate greed problem.
Mmm you know that’s a good point, I never even considered looking at mid or low tier programs when I was school shopping. Your point reminds me of Mike Israetel’s embarrassing doctorate that he likes to use as a kudgle. I could have done his dissertation without the typos and I am educated in a completely different field.
I mean that’s mostly true. Coming up with novel ideas and how to test them is a small (but critical) part of the job. Still I agree, you don’t actually spend that much time on it.
Generally speaking a PhD requires producing original research. Which ass-tier PhDs are you referencing that only require learning?
What’s the difference if your food has an expiration date?
When people spread across the globe, we hunted or out-competed so much shit to extinction. Mammoths, giant sloths, wooly rhinos, American cheetahs, American Lions, etc. IIRC the average is forty percent of all land animals above 100 pounds went extinct when we showed up someplace new.
Also, a lot of archeologists will tell you most of the work is sifting through trash, like ancient people’s actual trash.
What’s I2P?
I think you’re right, but now we’ve got the issue that such a spectrum makes zero sense for a pure compound. Why can’t my memes be scientifically perfect???
There’s 7, including the applicant. They meant 3, then 4.