(In Russian, obviously)
OK, I wasn’t quite right about it. Those 20 yachts cost more than all the ships that Russian Navy had built in the previous 10 years. Also the article is 3 years old but it’s unlikely much has changed for the better for the Russian navy.
People forget that while Russia is one of the richest countries in terms of resources and has a lot of very rich people the Russian state is poor and is getting poorer every year. I remember a few years back in a previous Russia scare some level-headed people dismissively talked about Russia as a “country with economy comparable to Italy”. Well, nowadays it’s not comparable to Italy anymore. It has dropped below Canada and South Korea. Now it’s comparable to Australia. It’s likely to be surpassed by Brazil soon.
Of course, it doesn’t change the fact that they have nukes and a big army. But they also have elites that have no interest in actually living in Russia, and the economy that will only become weaker, and therefore an army that will only become more outclassed every year.
ShivaX
1618
That I wouldn’t doubt for a second.
Russian naval power has always been an afterthought though. Despite what the people at Wargaming believe.
Wargaming is not a Russian company. They add those ships for the same reason the world is happy to discuss Russian threat.
That’s what Russia wants you to believe, in reality, Russia’s naval power is silent, so we don’t hear ir. :D
ShivaX
1621
They sell to Russians and make everything Soviet better than it ever was regardless of the game.
Like, it’s fine, but it’s also funny.
According to WG the Soviets had the best navy ever. Light-years ahead of everyone else.
Also the best tanks. They didn’t need to rely on superior numbers, because they had superior hardware.
Also also the best planes. No planes could compete with the Soviets!
It’s like across the board and they don’t even hide it. The jokes about Stalinium armor and shells exist for a reason.
ShivaX
1622
Actually that is true for the most part. They have good subs. But that’s all they ever really had.
Their surface fleet was basically pointless and they knew it so acted accordingly.
They existed (and exist) to wave the flag, threaten smaller countries and be targets for NATO planes and subs if anything ever pops off.
lordkosc
1623
Technically correct , at least until Sean Connery stole that one submarine a few decades ago.
The USSR’s surface fleet served the same purpose most surface fleets from non-naval powers serve, as a flag-showing prestige statement and a stick with which to beat less powerful countries that you want to coerce (those with coastlines at least). It also, during the Cold War, forced the US to devote resources to tracking and targeting more platforms, and in theory at least those ships packed a lot of big-ass anti-shipping missiles, which had to be taken into account.
But yeah, in terms of what they spent versus what they got, hardly a good deal. But we shouldn’t be too hard on them, as the Germans did the same damn thing…twice.
jpinard
1625
How many people are going to continue falling out of windows?
BTW temps that night were -12* C, so you know… not exactly open window season.
Wonder what minor offence he committed that angered the big baby at the top.
Houngan
1626
At this point there should be enough data to do a statistical analysis of how much more dangerous Russian windows are. Pella really needs to get over there.
Djscman
1627
Just as the knocker-up used to be a vital profession in Industrial Revolution-era England,
the pushem-out must be a profession experiencing incredible growth in today’s Russia. What kind of man or woman would take that job? Are there programs of study, or apprenticeships, or is it strictly on-the-job training? Does it provide a pension or other retirement plan?
CraigM
1628
There is a killer frequent flyer program.
jpinard
1629
I don’t understand how Germany can be so stupid. They need to limit their use of natural gas, move to electric heating, and increase not eliminate nuclear power to cut their dependence on Russia. This is insanity what they’re doing. Russia is going to have Germany by the balls for the next decade at least.
ShivaX
1631
“Why would we want to be the good guys?”
-Tucker Carlson’s worldview in a nutshell
And this is a person that people seriously think might have a chance to run as a GOP candidate in the future.
Really hope Europe gets its act together sometime soon, because Trump was just a taste of what is to come.
Nuclear power has a long and complex history, especially in Europe. During the seventies, when the US conventional forces were widely seen as incapable of defending Germany against a Soviet invasion, it was widely assumed we would use nuclear weapons if the Warsaw Pact invaded. It was about the only card we had to play. Combined with the residual anti-establishment, anti-capitalist fervor of the 1960s, which continued in Germany and elsewhere through the seventies, there grew up a strong association of nuclear power of any sort with everything a lot of people opposed. Additionally, the legitimate environmental/safety concerns about nuclear power in that era (Three Mile Island, etc.) got a huge boost in public awareness with Chernobyl in the mid-1980s. That event deeply shook the Germans, who were far closer than any other Western power to the fallout and who were already spooked about nuclear disasters of a different sort.
There are many other reasons I’m sure for Germany’s reluctance to do what seems on paper the smart thing, vis a vis energy–I’m no expert on German politics and society. But I think it isn’t necessarily a matter of them being panicky or stupid, but more of a case of very different priorities. Russia is unlikely to twist its customers too hard, Berlin could be banking, given Russia’s overall economic weakness and inability to exercise long-term decisive pressure outside of a narrow band around its borders.
Maybe they are wrong, maybe not. If it was possible for them to instantly convert their old nuke plants into shiny new (and safer and more efficient) modern plants, perhaps they would. There is a huge political as well as economic cost to keeping those older plants going, a cost that is hard to justify if (again, that big if) you believe the threat from Russia is ultimately overblown.
Remember, the Germans have always been somewhat at odds with American ideas of how central Europe should be structured/managed. They certainly fielded the bulk of the ground forces for NATO at the end, and would have been the ones to pay the heaviest price for any conflict. They cooperated nicely enough with the USA most of those years, but I can tell you they wasted no time erasing much of the evidence of our presence there when the Cold War ended. They were very eager to ditch what was, after all, a sort of continuation of an occupation that began in 1945.
You mean the legitimate concern of the system safely shutting down, in the case of Three Mile Island?
Honestly, the idea that nuclear power is unsafe because of a 2 extreme incidents over the course of 60 or more years just staggers the mind. Especially considering that the nuclear contamination is so much less then your standard Coal Plant.
ShivaX
1636
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/nuclear-power-is-safest-way-to-make-electricity-according-to-2007-study/2011/03/22/AFQUbyQC_story.html
Hirschberg and his colleagues used a Swiss nuclear plant to come up with such an estimate. They calculated that nuclear accidents in Europe can be expected to cost .007 lives per gigawatt year (1 million kilowatt years), compared with .12 lives for coal, .02 lives for oil and .06 for natural gas.
I get where your are coming from, and largely agree–the reaction to TMI was overblown, for sure. But the political and cultural impact of even the hint of a nuclear disaster had huge effects in places where nuclear power was becoming a mainstay. The concerns were legitimate in that, yes, there were risks. The failure was in rationally thinking through the available mitigation strategies and better assessing those risks.
I’m not trying to justify the German reaction to nuclear power today, just trying to show that it is part of a broader and much longer term pattern of interaction with the issue.
