Punishing Russia With Sanctions
POSTED BY: THG
UPDATED: Tuesday, August 4, 2026 04:52
VIEWED: 33436
PAGE 13 of 63
Oh no sig, Russia can't get it done. I told you so. They are the army that can't shoot straight. Ater years of hearing your and kiki's bullshit about how good they are.
Comrade, can you see me laughing. Because I am.
T
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Get some help Ted.
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Me: "Remember Covid?"
Useless Idiots: "What's Covid, durr? Russia, Ukraine, Putin, NATO *drool*. DURRRR!!!!"
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Can Germany Break Up With Russian Gas?
March 15, 2022, 12:35 p.m. ET
Germany is one of the world’s great trading nations. In 2019, it imported $1.2 trillion worth of goods from all over the world. Only about 2 percent of that total came from Russia. In fact, the Russian Federation, with roughly 144 million people, was only slightly more important in German trade than Ireland, with around five million people. Ordinarily, then, you wouldn’t expect a disruption of economic relations with Russia to have a big effect on the German economy.
Unfortunately, Russia is a key supplier of one good Germany will find it hard to replace: natural gas. Nearly all of Germany’s natural gas consumption is imported via pipelines, and about 55 percent of its gas comes from Russia.
This situation should never have been allowed to happen; successive U.S. administrations going all the way back to that of Ronald Reagan have warned Germany not to let itself become so dependent on a despotic regime. (I witnessed some of those discussions during my own brief stint in government, in 1982-83.) But here we are. And while democratic nations have imposed a wide range of economic sanctions on the Putin regime, restrictions on Russian gas sales remain conspicuously absent from the list.
Yet Russian atrocities — and, to be honest, the surprising incompetence of Russia’s vaunted military, as the expected blitzkrieg enters its 20th day of apparent stalemate — have been rapidly changing the political calculus of the West’s response. Three weeks ago, it seemed inconceivable that German politicians would be willing to impose any significant pain on their voters in response to Vladimir Putin’s aggression. Now there are serious discussions underway about whether and to what extent Germany can wean itself from Russian gas.
A small reduction in gas consumption shouldn’t be hard to achieve. Precisely because gas has been cheap, some of it is currently being burned in low-priority ways, easily discouraged with moderately higher prices and/or modest regulation. Large reductions, however, are another matter.
Put it this way: An important new study by a group of German economists (there are nine authors, so I’ll just refer to it as Bachmann et al.) estimates that eliminating gas imports from Russia would require cutting gas consumption by about 30 percent, to around 600 terawatt-hours from around 900 TWh. Why not 55 percent, the Russian share of German gas? Because Germany can probably get somewhat more gas from other sources and limit the use of gas for electricity generation by relying more on coal and nuclear power. (Yes, coal must be phased out to save us from climate catastrophe — but not in the middle of a war. It’s the St. Augustine principle: “Make me chaste, but not yet.”)
https://web.archive.org/web/20220313040409/https://www.econtribute.de/
RePEc/ajk/ajkpbs/ECONtribute_PB_028_2022.pdf
Even a 30 percent fall in consumption will, however, be hard to achieve on short notice. Cutting consumption from 900 to 800 TWh might not be that costly; the reduction from, say, 700 to 600 TWh would be a lot more painful.
The German economists focus on a key economic concept called the elasticity of substitution — roughly speaking, how much demand for natural gas falls off for every 1 percent rise in its price. If that elasticity is low, the amount Germans would be willing to pay for an extra bit of gas once consumption has already been substantially reduced is large, implying that the economic cost of further reductions is also large.
Unfortunately, empirical estimates suggest that the elasticity of substitution for natural gas is low, at least in the short run. It’s not zero: Given high gas prices, households will turn down their thermostats, consumers will stop buying goods whose production requires burning a lot of natural gas, and so on. Still, the best guess is that we’re talking about an elasticity of around 0.18, which in turn means (if I’m doing the arithmetic right) that the price of natural gas would have to rise by around 600 percent to c
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You know SECOND based on Signyms posts listing all the things that are wrong with living in America and how fucked up it is, we can say without a doubt she would not live five minutes in a country run by Putin. She’s not kidding anybody.
T
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Quote:
Originally posted by THG:
You know SECOND based on Signyms posts listing all the things that are wrong with living in America and how fucked up it is, we can say without a doubt she would not live five minutes in a country run by Putin. She’s not kidding anybody.
You seem to be barely scraping along yourself right now.
I do hope you have somebody looking after you.
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Me: "Remember Covid?"
Useless Idiots: "What's Covid, durr? Russia, Ukraine, Putin, NATO *drool*. DURRRR!!!!"
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Russians Fight Over Food in Grocery Store As Sanctions Lead To Empty Shelves
A video that appears to show Russian citizens fighting for groceries amid empty shelves has gone viral on social media.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/russians-fight-over-food-in-groce
ry-store-as-sanctions-lead-to-empty-shelves/ar-AAV5oVW?ocid=msedgntp
I'm not a fan of Newsweek but if this is for sure I gotta say, I told you so signym. I told you so. The video can be found by following the link.
T
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Quote:
Originally posted by Thg:
Russians Fight Over Food in Grocery Store As Sanctions Lead To Empty Shelves
A video that appears to show Russian citizens fighting for groceries amid empty shelves has gone viral on social media.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/russians-fight-over-food-in-groce
ry-store-as-sanctions-lead-to-empty-shelves/ar-AAV5oVW?ocid=msedgntp
I'm not a fan of Newsweek but if this is for sure I gotta say, I told you so signym. I told you so. The video us can be found by following the link.
T
Ted LOVES him some people he doesn't agree with starving.
I TOLD YOU SO, Ted.
You are a waste of carbon.
--------------------------------------------------
Me: "Remember Covid?"
Useless Idiots: "What's Covid, durr? Russia, Ukraine, Putin, NATO *drool*. DURRRR!!!!"
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House Votes to Suspend Normal Trade Relations With Russia
WASHINGTON — The House voted overwhelmingly on Thursday to strip Russia of its preferential trade status with the United States, moving to further penalize the country’s economy in response to the invasion of Ukraine.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/house-votes-to-suspend-normal-
trade-relations-with-russia/ar-AAVcCo3?ocid=msedgntp
T
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More Russian civilians starving to death at your hands.
You must be so pleased with yourself, Ted.
--------------------------------------------------
Me: "Remember Covid?"
Useless Idiots: "What's Covid, durr? Russia, Ukraine, Putin, NATO *drool*. DURRRR!!!!"
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Quote:1) Putin said that Ukraines starved themselves to death. He claimed it had nothing to do with Russia.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
More Russian civilians starving to death at your hands.
You must be so pleased with yourself, Ted.
https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/ukrainealert/vladimir-putins-war
-to-crush-ukraine-is-part-of-a-long-kremlin-tradition/
2) People who are not Putin say Russia did starve Ukraine:
How Joseph Stalin Starved Millions in the Ukrainian Famine – Cruel efforts under Stalin to impose collectivism and tamp down Ukrainian nationalism left an estimated 3.9 million dead.
At the height of the 1932-33 Ukrainian famine under Joseph Stalin, starving people roamed the countryside, desperate for something, anything to eat. In the village of Stavyshche, a young peasant boy watched as the wanderers dug into empty gardens with their bare hands. Many were so emaciated, he recalled, that their bodies began to swell and stink from the extreme lack of nutrients.
"You could see them walking about, just walking and walking, and one would drop, and then another, and so on it went," he said many years later, in a case history collected in the late 1980s by a Congressional commission. In the cemetery outside the village hospital, overwhelmed doctors carried the bodies on stretchers and tossed them into an enormous pit.
https://www.history.com/news/ukrainian-famine-stalin
3) Russians are NOT starving. It is less dramatic: "There were empty shelves. There was no salt, no sugar, no pasta, no buckwheat, rice was expensive," Anna said (via Google Translate). "So people saw a cart of sugar, put it out, and ran after it. They just jumped on this cart. Everyone began to push aggressively."
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/russians-fight-over-food-in-groce
ry-store-as-sanctions-lead-to-empty-shelves/ar-AAV5oVW
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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