• 5 Posts
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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: December 20th, 2023

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  • Vladivostok is barely the closest populated Russian area. Even among major cities, Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky is significantly closer, not to mention Anadyr and other smaller ones. Besides, if Alaska would remain Russian, you bet there would be more connections. They just don’t make much sense in the current realities.

    Russia has the technologies and infrastructure for efficient resource extraction under extreme conditions, and some of those resources (for example, nickel) are primarily located inside the Arctic circle. Moreover, under American leadership Alaska has still been one of the resource extraction hubs, with up to 2 million barrels of oil produced per day at peak, and about 500 thousand currently, 17 metric tons of gold currently produced per year (and expected to grow), etc. etc.


  • Questionable.

    There’s about 60km between modern day Russia and Alaska, and plenty of troops are already stationed (and were at the time) on its eastern border. Alaska would provide a lot of resources, and it could absolutely be guarded.

    But, at the time, Alaska was seen as nothing but barren piece of cold land, not really useful for anything.



  • Yes, because at the same time they offer a better business environment. US, for example, can do pretty much anything, being de facto commercial center of the world, with highest scale operations historically based there and interconnected to the point they can’t just “leave”.

    Should you run this “experiment” in aforementioned Venezuela instead, you’re unlikely to enjoy the result. Although it wouldn’t benefit the US in the long run either.


  • In theory - sure. In practice - all countries in the world have to agree to raise taxes, even though individually they are better off betraying this agreement and lowering them, thereby attracting the rich and ending up with more, not less, money.

    And if all countries agree to tax the rich the way they should, we might as well go and build socialism everywhere, because not having everyone onboard is a main issue there too.







  • Having read them all at some time in the past, I feel like, while they capture a lot of modern problems and are scaringly accurate in many of the predictions they make, they still don’t create this “everyday” feeling.

    Brave New World is probably closest to capturing what I’m looking for, even though it too opens immediately with a dystopian picture.

    The thing is, it would be interesting to explore, in any form of art really, this progression from feeling completely normal about what happens to figuring out what everything actually means, which could lead to people questioning and investigating things in real life.