Germany has seized control of Gazprom Germania • Hacker News Board

Re: Germany has seized control of Gazprom Germania

#321

Post by timeon » Tue, Apr 05, 2022, 4:14 PM UTC

randomopining wrote: post #284

lobochrome wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe. I guess you can celebrate her for her "international leadership" (what are we exactly celebrating by the way?) and at the same time acknowledge that she completely missed the interests of her constituency.

Yeah I don't see how she made any strategic decisions that set up the long term success for Germany and EU. She's remembered bigly internationally for letting all the migrants in.

Bordering countries like Italy and Greece were becoming overwhelmed by migration wave. They were crying for help for quite some time til anyone even noticed the problem. So to ease the pressure there was plan to redistribute them in to EU. This was refused by several countries so 'Merkel' took some of them to Germany. It was not ideal but better then nothing.

That crisis was caused by instability in Middle East. Which was caused by several other factors like climate (farms without water in Syria) and international politics of Russia and USA. But like now everyone was blaming Germany.

Re: Germany has seized control of Gazprom Germania

#322

Post by lallysingh » Tue, Apr 05, 2022, 4:15 PM UTC

TremendousJudge wrote: post #264

tawaypol wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's tempting to think that the governments of these states have been infiltrated by their enemies.

Hanlon's razor applies here I think. Don't attribute to "the enemy" what can be adequately explained by incompetence.

Be careful. Incompetence is an almost infinite sink for blame, and it's easy to misattributed to it what really belongs somewhere else.

Re: Germany has seized control of Gazprom Germania

#323

Post by lallysingh » Tue, Apr 05, 2022, 4:16 PM UTC

barrenko wrote: post #300

mnadkvlb wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe. but existance of leaders like Gerhard Schröder displays a different story. (he is sitting on russian gas companies’ boards, after heavily going against nuclear). No shit the leaders failed the country for their own gains, seems like.

The incompetent and the corrupt and more often than not the same person.

They don't know what the right answer is, but they know the answer that gets them paid.

Re: Germany has seized control of Gazprom Germania

#324

Post by pphysch » Tue, Apr 05, 2022, 4:20 PM UTC

throwaway5752 wrote: post #254

Barrera wrote: post #225

> Russian gas accounted for 55% of Germany's gas imports in 2021 and 40% of its gas imports in the first quarter of 2022, Reuters reported. The country has pledged to end the use of Russian gas by 2024, the Habeck said in a March 25 press release. Some in this thread have asked how Germany could be so foolish to tie its economic destiny to such a problematic country as Russia. The answer seems to be "one step at a ti…

Let's be fair: this was a massive, strategic aim of the Russian state. Germany didn't randomly fall into this situation, there has been decades of influence, bribery, and espionage in Germany to develop that dependency. Kids may need to be reminded that Germany has only been reunified for 32 years and Berlin was divided from the USSR controlled East Germany by a physical wall. Russia is is so motivated to expand its…

Suppose everyone was simple and conspiracies didn't exist. Where might Germany get its fossil fuels? Perhaps shipped across the entire Atlantic Ocean? Perhaps from Mars? Or perhaps from the major producer on its same continent?

The bottom line is that European integration is a natural phenomenon. It is natural to have strong economic ties within one's neighborhood. You don't need a decades long conspiracy to explain basic economic advantage.

However, European/Eurasian integration is an existential problem for the one superpower that isn't part of Eurasia. Therefore we get a lot of chaos, misinformation, and artificial divisions.

Re: Germany has seized control of Gazprom Germania

#325

Post by scapecast » Tue, Apr 05, 2022, 4:22 PM UTC

nebukadnet wrote: post #52

sonicggg wrote: post #40

How many years has Merkel remained in power? This awkward situation is all her doing, but still nobody will mention her name. How can one country willingly put its entire energy sector in the hands of a terrorist state, which has been showing signs since 1999 when bombing its own citizens.

Lots of reasons. It was at the time the least authoritarian regime. The alternatives are Saudi-Arabia, where as I understand the gas is harvested with the help of human rights violations, and other nearby suppliers like Norway were already and still are at capacity. At the same time, gas is a relatively enviromentally safe, when compared to others, and since the relations to Russia were mostly friendly, the slight pr…

The issue is not people freezing. Wear a sweater and suck it up. Buy an electric heater. There are ways to hack your way through it.

The much larger problem is industrial manufacturing, in clusters like Ludwigshafen, where you have companies like BASF and Benckiser that rely on Russian gas for their refinery operations.

Fertilizers, chemicals, lubricants, etc.

You turn off Russian gas, you turn off the German industrial complex. Literally over night.

And that’s the reason why the German is so cagey about stopping the import of Russian gas. They can’t, because they don’t have an alternative.

Re: Germany has seized control of Gazprom Germania

#326

Post by winkeltripel » Tue, Apr 05, 2022, 4:22 PM UTC

neuronic wrote: post #174

archerx wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes I wonder if the Greens are actually funded by petrol companies because everything they do seems to benefit them in the end. In Switzerland the Greens are trying to be as dumb as the German ones.

There are dumb aspects about the German Greens ("Veggie Day") but they do a good job moving Germany into the right energy direction today. Your criticism is generally unwarranted and the data shows it. I think we shouldn't use words like "dumb" at all because we are all trying to bring about the most sensible, safe and productive energy future for our nations. These nations have different circumstances and demands an…

That market needs to be guided away from fossil fuels. How would such a market cover solar and wind when they dont make enough? Batteries? Huge hydro storage? That sounds more expensive than nuclear.

Re: Germany has seized control of Gazprom Germania

#327

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Apr 05, 2022, 4:24 PM UTC

throwaway5752 wrote: post #313

blub wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you put it like that, one almost has to feel sorry for Germany, bravely fighting influence, bribery and espionage every step of the way only to fall prey in the end to the Russian state which maliciously supplied the German industry with gas. But this is not at all bad for the US, it’s great! Russia is isolated and weakened and the EU is strangulated by yet another wave of refugees and weakened economically, bec…

I think that https://ceres.georgetown.edu/research/student-projects/geopo... is a fair assessment. I would add https://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/dec/13/russia.germany , also. It is plainly clear that the current Russian leadership is expansionist in nature, because they are killing thousands of people in a former satellite state to reestablish prior borders. This is definitely a less than zero-sum environment. R…

[deleted]

Re: Germany has seized control of Gazprom Germania

#328

Post by ganzuul » Tue, Apr 05, 2022, 4:31 PM UTC

_3u10 wrote: post #318

ganzuul wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If this insane idea that the sovereign nations of Europe have no agency of their own comes from American "news"-branded edutainment, I dearly suggest you defenestrate your television set. It is clearly rotting minds.

For a “sovereign” nation Germany is awfully dependent on Putin for energy and the US for defense. My position is not that Germany has no agency it’s that it traded away it’s much of its agency to appease the Greens. These opinions come not from American TV but from my relatives. Freistaat Bayern uber alles! Sorry about taking over Europe again, hope you are enjoying the EU dictating your countries economic fortunes.

Talk like that gets you World War 3.

Re: Germany has seized control of Gazprom Germania

#329

Post by throwaway5752 » Tue, Apr 05, 2022, 4:35 PM UTC

pphysch wrote: post #324

throwaway5752 wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's be fair: this was a massive, strategic aim of the Russian state. Germany didn't randomly fall into this situation, there has been decades of influence, bribery, and espionage in Germany to develop that dependency. Kids may need to be reminded that Germany has only been reunified for 32 years and Berlin was divided from the USSR controlled East Germany by a physical wall. Russia is is so motivated to expand its…

Suppose everyone was simple and conspiracies didn't exist. Where might Germany get its fossil fuels? Perhaps shipped across the entire Atlantic Ocean? Perhaps from Mars? Or perhaps from the major producer on its same continent? The bottom line is that European integration is a natural phenomenon. It is natural to have strong economic ties within one's neighborhood. You don't need a decades long conspiracy to explain…

Germany does need energy, and I actually give German leadership the benefit of the doubt, that they sincerely believed rapproachment with Russia was possible and Nord Stream 2 was a good faith endeavor. Sadly Russia ruined that impression, it required no work on the part of the United States to do so.

Re: Germany has seized control of Gazprom Germania

#330

Post by belorn » Tue, Apr 05, 2022, 4:38 PM UTC

ivan_gammel wrote: post #307

belorn wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

During the war with IS there were constantly talk about how funding terrorism goes directly into funding the wars, be that people who directly gave them money or people who bought their drugs. I also often see the police say things like "don't buy things from criminals, it directly fund more criminal activities". We have international agreements against blood diamonds and conflict resource, all focusing on eliminatin…

This is just a theory that does not take into account the circumstances of the Russian invasion. In the long term, it does make sense to stop importing oil and gas from Russia to prevent the future aggression, because it will indeed weaken the regime. In the short term, if EU stops buying oil and gas immediately, Russia still has: 1) possibility to export to China and other non-aligned markets (many countries which a…

I am not convinced. It still mean people will have blood on their hands when they knowingly are providing the funds for a war. It is a very dangerous bet to hope that the Russians won't have enough time to use the money, that peace will arrive before that funds reaches the military operations. People should aim to end the war before this summer, but what if it doesn't happen? That gas, oil and coal are means for missiles and hired mercenaries. How happy should German citizen be if journalists later traces the money from a fossil fuel transaction to weapons used in a war crime where citizens were tortured and killed?

In the short term we are seeing employees at European harbors and other places being put to the moral dilemma of either refusing to work or continuing working with Russian transports, knowing that they are working directly with the economic side of the Russian military branch. Many do not want to have to look in the mirror in a few months, knowing what they did, knowing what they knew, feeling like they have blood on their hands. Saving jobs and saving the economy is a poor comfort when on the news they see ordinary citizens laying on the street with a bullet in the head.

Every nation hope that wars will end in just a few days, weeks or months. Blitzkrieg. It will be over by the weekend. The Russian thought so when they entered Ukraine and they were wrong. It a nice aim to hope that the war will be long gone before the summer, but realistic there is a high risk that it won't. The assumption when funding war should be that the war isn't going to end.