The contracts are in euro/dollars, what "paying in rubles" actually means is that Russian exporting company must sell euros for rubles immediately upon receipt, so that the euros can't be frozen via sanctions.
But they pay in euro to gasprombank and Russia is doing conversion on their behalf. It's a flex to say that EU is paying in rubles for propaganda, when they are not...
But isn't the end effect the same? End result is euros are being dumped for rubles by EU nations themselves.
Once the euros are converted to rubles, it's unlikely they get converted back into euros somewhere else in the supply chain. As opposed to USD, which facilitates 87% of world trade.
There is a difference. Russia is free to convert money as they wish, just as they could do in the past, nobody is forced to do conversion by themselves
What definition of strong are you using? Ruble (only one l) has historically been around 85:1 and now its ~60:1. (Rubles:Euros, i.e. 85 Rubles for 1 Euro)
Can you actually trade ruble? For some reason, for example, Sep-2022 futures chart for ruble has a gap between Jun 15 and today. And forex.com claims USD/RUB and EUR/RUB are unavailable for trading.
Yes, you can still trade it. Foreign currency exchange is decentralized. Us and EU exchanges have stopped trading and ruble, but you better believe in the n in Chinese exchanges still trade it
I think you are theorising too much based on a bit of Russian propaganda. I looked at a few exchanges and the spread on rubble is so high you could not buy more than a few dollars at the rated prices.
Look at the spread at the Bank of China ( China's largest bank and foreign exchange).
They are buying rubles 10.75 RMB and selling at 12.5 RMB. They are selling USD add 674.
This gives 63 rubles to the dollar.
The fact is that major economic powers in the world have not signed onto sanctions and have access to both Russian and Western currency.
It is true that many parts of the West have lower need for rubles because of sanction, but if you I think that the entire Globe has frozen trade with Russia and trade in Russian currency, you are the one that has fallen for propaganda. They just no longer can use western exchanges to convert currency. See the link below.
That's a huge spread, which is exactly what I was talking about. You buy 1$ for 63 rubles on that bank chances are the 2nd dollar will cost you 64 rubles. Need to see the order book and market depths at different prices. High spread also means there haven't been many trades recently.
Did you read the link? $703 million worth of rubles is being traded a week, and that is just yuan and just one exchange.
So far you have changed your position from you can't trade it at all to the spread might become incrementally worse if trade exceeds 700 million US dollars worth a week
The ruble is strong because imports have been cut in half due to sanctions, while exports continue unabated. Actually, Europe sends more money to Russia now than before the war.
They did that indeed, especially in the early days to avoid a complete collapse, but since then it's not the primary mechanism at stake.
This is a great reminder that keeping your money afloat is not that hard as long as you can export. (For the record, what destroyed Venezuela comes from the fact that they needed to import light oil in order to process their heavy one. Once the sanctions cut the input flow, the output flow dried up pretty quickly and it was game over)
I don't think it will matter long, given the catastrophic failure of the Russian military (which is currently demilitarizing Russia pretty quickly, how ironic), but from the economics PoV it's still interesting to witness.
>The contracts likely have clauses related to failures to deliver, and Russia will have little influence over how those clauses will be implemented.
Im sure there are plenty of clauses, but once you are at economic war with a country, the contracts don't matter. They aren't worth the paper they are printed on. Thats my point.
Russia says old contracts are void and has the gas. EU Can agree to new contracts or go without. They cant use the old contracts to make Russia give them gas on the original terms. What will they do if Russia refuses? sue them for breach of contract, sanction them, and seize their foreign reserves?
The answer is easy. They are going to claim the money from the reserves that were put on hold until the war ends.
E.g. if Russia would continue with gas supplies, the money for gas would got into the locked accounts. After war would end, Russia would get locked accounts minus reparations. Now if Russia stops supplies, after war ends Russia will get locked accounts minus reparations minus penalties for the failure to deliver gas.
I dont think Russia cares about the reserves because they don't think they will ever see them again. Reparations could easily exceed the total reserve.
Plus, they aren't planning to leave Ukraine, so they aren't planning to get it back
Therefore the money is a sunk cost and not leverage. Therefore finical penalties don't matter.
There's a circular logic in your claim. You claim they aren't planning to leave, and therefore it is not leverage. But the point of that is to exactly affect the plan to leave, which is not set in stone, obviously. The fact that they aren't leaving right now doesn't guarantee they won't leave in the future.
I think you are confusing consistent logic for circular logic. Putin never plans to hand back eastern Ukraine, why would he care about something that affects russia only if it does? They are not planning for failure.
The u.s. and Canada have a demilitarized border. This would be bad for the u.s. if we went to war with Canada. However, we don't plan to go to war with Canada, so we aren't basing our decisions on that outcome.
There are certainly things that may make Putin and more specifically Russia (which can also let go of Putin) let go of eastern Ukraine. In fact, there's a spectrum of such things from nicely asking, through sanctions and military resistance, all the way up to a second front opening on the border with China or nukes flying. The plan (whatever it is) has a line drawn somewhere on that spectrum, which signifies it is time to let go. And every new bit of military equipment, fines, sanctions is pushing it slowly toward that line.
Your claim is essentially there's no line, or that there is not a spectrum or that that line is beyond any economic measures. But there's no proof of that, so the logic in your "proof" is circular because your proof predicates on you knowing exactly where the line is (or isn't), when the location of the line is the thing to be proven.
I'm not saying there is no line to get Russia out of Ukraine. Anything is possible.
I am saying that it unlikely to be reached and my personal opinion is we are moving further from it not closer.
I'm also saying that Russia is not making decisions as if it will be crossed. They are doing the exact opposite, making decisions assuming that they will not be forced out and will not get the reserves back.
I don't think they would realistically get the foreign reserves back even if they left, so that isn't much of an incentive.
The US and EU have to much politically at stake to hand them back, even if they leave. It would be seen as letting Russia get away without consequences for the invasion.
Time will prove one of us wrong. In 5 years Russia will either be occupying Eastern Ukraine or not. They will either have control of the foreign reserves back or not.
I think that's not completely obvious how it works at the moment. Russia has unilaterally required payments in Rubles despite long-term contracts saying something else. Some smaller countries have refused and got cut of any deliveries. EU has generally declared not to pay in Rubles, but I don't know what e.g. Germany does at the moment. There is no realistic exchange rate for the Ruble because Western companies don't want to touch it and Russian companies have been forced to buy Rubles for most of the foreign currency they get.
Sanctions would be stop selling gas. Just saying look we have this contract, we want to continue with it, but we change the terms without asking sounds something else.
To make priorities clear: Attack war is a crime and Putin, his government, and army leaders belong to Den Haag and then into prison.
But every westerner continuing to drive their car, fly to holidays and other wasteful lifestyle activites makes energy prizes go up and pays for Russia's war. Europeans a bit more directly than Americans, but in the end we have a global market so nobody goes free of reponsibility. Nothing they will end up in court for (would be a miracle if even Putin did, Bush and Blair didn't for doing not too differently), but certainly morally wrong.
Haven't checked recently but a month ago or so it was said Russia earns more money for oil and gas than in February, despite the volume having decreased quite a bit.
>The EU’s executive body told the EU governments in a closed meeting that the authorities were not preventing companies from opening accounts with Gazprombank and would allow them to buy gas in line with EU sanctions.
>The EU will get a taste of what this means as Russia is turning off the still-operating Nordstream 1 pipeline for ‘routine scheduled maintenance’ from next Monday, July 11th to July 21st.
Ok, I don't follow the details so closely, I assume you are correct.
Which Russian companies still have significant income in foreign currency? I thought trade has mostly stopped. Except for energy, but that is dealt with in a different way anyway as discussed above, because still excluded from sanctions from the West and the Ruble requirement from Russia.
Then there is of course China and India which seem to intensify trade. No idea what currency they pay in and whether the increase has already been significant during 4 months.
Constraints can be liberating and increase focus and creativity. See limited budget films vs formulaic blockbusters, or even twitters orignal 140 limit and how it led to the platform flourishing.
I think there is definitely room for a product like this, and maybe even some kind of max follower limit could also skew more to connection over influencers.
I love this segment of an interview with Charles Eames regarding design's need for constraints:
Q: Does the creation of Design admit constraint?
A: Design depends largely on constraints.
Q: What constraints?
A: The sum of all constraints. Here is one of the few effective keys to the Design problem: the ability of the Designer to recognize as many of the constraints as possible; his willingness and enthusiasm for working within these constraints. Constraints of price, of size, of strength, of balance, of surface, of time, and so forth. Each problem has its own peculiar list.
Funny seeing this as an Element owner, who is just dealing with the hell of having the catalytic converter stolen. With the relatively high ground clearance, these are absolute magnets for catalytic converter theft. Estimate to fix it with OEM parts ~$6k! Waiting to see if insurance totals it.
This is one of the things I enjoy as an EV owner. I don't need to worry about low-lifes stealing parts from my car.
I do worry about the time when the same people figure out that a regular-ass Type 2 charging cable is up to $300 and completely untraceable if stolen. A "granny-charger" can be up to $1k for the really fancy models. And most EV's have at least one of those onboard at all times.
Theoretically. In practice there will be a crispy fried battery thief under the car in the morning.
I'm not seeing a huge market in stealing batteries from EV any time soon. Most are literally built into the frame and would require taking apart the whole car.
That's crazy! If you're inclined to keep it, Rockauto [0] is a cheap place to get auto parts, and often cheaper than the local stores for the same stuff. $368 for a Walker cat for an '08 Element [1].
I know that some repair jobs can be a lot because of how modern cars are designed, but if the labor is a couple grand (sounds like it is), that sounds extreme.
If you live in a civilized state where there isn't mandated annual vehicle inspections, you can just go to a shop in a poorer part of time and most of the time they'll weld in a straight pipe so you can hook up the muffler again. Quick, cheap, and good enough.
There's precious metals (platinum) in the catalytic converter. That's why they get targeted by thieves & are expensive to replace. $6k seems high though. I had to replace one years ago and it was less than half that.
Switched to DDG + Brave browser on my laptop and I am surprised how subtly different browsing feels with this combo. Simply you realize how "watched" you feel on Google products and the tracked internet.
Without realizing it there is a "how would this search/page visit etc. look on a tracked profile" process running in my head that is greatly reduced by DDG+Brave. A chilling effect not just on speech, but on browsing behavior that we have to counteract.
I’ve found a similar effect by switching email provider. On Gmail (and others) I feel watched, and wonder how does this message/notification look for my profile?
I've found that it's becoming increasingly hard to browse the internet in Brave and Firefox because a. the increasing monopoly of Blink (doesn't apply to Brave) and b. how interconnected a lot of this tracking seems to be with the routine operation of sites i visit
>Brave
You are aware Brave is way worse than Google? They took crypto funds in people's names without telling anybody (this is essentially stealing however you put it) they injected unique identifiers into Http headers and their premise of fingerprinting defense is a joke seeing their browser is based on Webkit/Blink.
I'm surprised so many still categorize fruits and vegetables together in these studies and in general thinking, given all we know now about sugar.
Fruits in terms of calories are essentially sugar, and despite the fiber, more than 1-2 a day will start to impact insulin, fat storage etc. negatively for most people. Especially fructose-heavy fruit.
Non-starchy vegetables are not nearly as sugar or calorie dense, can be eaten in much higher volume with little effect, and as such should be thought of much differently than fruit.
(non-avocado) Fruit falls more in the dessert/candy category IMO.
Anecdotal, but I have eaten 5-10 mangoes a day, among other fruits, for long periods of time and remained at 8-10% body fat. I pay close attention to what I eat and how it affects my body composition, and I stopped worrying about eating too much fruit long ago.
The 2 main studies in this article are not very instructive -
1 was done on diabetics with groups eating more or less fruit, but no mention is made of what the rest of their diet was in relation to sugar/carbs. It mentions no impact to their weight or diabetes, but would their diabetes + weight have improved by cutting carbs, sugar & fruit?
The other study was n=17 so not very solid.
What's more interesting is research where fruit, sugar, and carbs are removed entirely or almost entirely (keto). T2 Diabetes is commonly reversed and weight loss adherence increases.
It's incredibly easy to overlook the calorific content in fruit - I was recently taking in at least 1000 calories per day from bananas/stone fruits/etc.
My rule of thumb is for vegetables to form the bulk of my intake (in terms of volume), with 1-2 cups of fruit per day as "dessert".
Basically, I treat most non-starchy vegetables as "free" - eat as many as you want. It's a mistake to think that fruit/starchy vegetables (pumpkin, potato, etc) are in the same category.
I think there is more to that, as I've never met someone fat who also eats a lot of fruits. My intuition is that you either feel filled more quickly with fruits, or too much fruit gives you the shit so you avoid it, or it hypes you so you consumes more energy?
Fruit _juice_ is more problematic. Drinks release a large amount of sugar very quickly into your system, they also don't "fill you up" and it is hard to quantify exactly how much you have consumed, meaning that people consume more sugar than they intended to. Drinks are directly absorbed into your gut without requiring digestion, and you can also drink fruit much faster than you could ever chew the same amount of whole fruit.
So yes, do avoid fruit juice, soda, smoothies, alcoholic beverages, ice cream, etc; but avoiding whole fruit is probably premature optimisation.
Thanks for the links and comment, I'm on the adtech side and largely agree - true measurement of effectiveness is unsolved, and we conflate measuring lift with causing lift.
IMO anyone paying attention in the industry knows the answer is probably less ad spend, aka most inventory is overpriced...but then the incentives take over and the firehose stays on full blast. Publishers, agencies adtech/martech, are not incentivized to right-size ad spend at all, and even for advertisers orgs, the slightest bit of silo/politics incentivizes CMOs to spend & protect their budgets.
It is a select handful of orgs with serious CEO level buy in that are willing to honestly tackle this and spend less, more efficiently. That tends to be a competitive advantage in a sea of waste.
Yep also I think there are incentives to look like you are investing in this space ... and for the vendors who are selling these tools, not many marketing managers are going to be happy if you make their placements or creative choices look stupid
It's not always about growth. Making it easier to meet your needs like this project does, replaces the need for that piece of income/job/growth so is still an economic positive in that way.
This easier path to consumption means the time/effort needed to own these things previously can be redeployed in a productive way.
