A good reminder that privacy may only exist now because the sheer volume of information is so large that it provides anonymity through overload.

... The way which you wrote this made me think there was a far more dramatic ending than being stuck at an airport for several hours due to mechanical failure.

My brother in Christ, I experienced that in Cleveland...

But I am not sure what you mean at the end - are these guys STILL in Dubai?! You said they were stuk at the airport for several hours... Like... What, they had to stay at the airport to wait for their boat because, as you said, they couldn't return by plane? ... Or they waited several hours at the airport to catch another flight..? What are you saying?

Russia lived with sanctions for 70 some years as the Soviet Union, and has always been prepared to endure more. They are an economy built around raw, natural resources and can be largely self-sustaining...

And it has been pointed out, that Iran has been fighting off sanctions very successfully over the last twenty, thirty yeas...

Their secret then is Russia' secret now, more or less:

India will trade with anybody and be neutral, and it isn't a large task to create a shell company in India that peddles your wares throughout the whole of the world, repackaged and rebranded. At the height of Trump's reintroduced sanctions on Iran, I was able to eat Iranian dates in South Korea - a country that followed US protcols and actually made it impossible for Iranians to start new private bank accounts unless in specific circumstances and did everything they could to place barriers on trade.

Heed you, these shell companies used to exist in places like Macao, Hong Kong, Singapore, etc., but US sanctions shut this down. It all moved to India...

Which is likely where a lot of Russian exports head when they aren't just being imported completely independent of the Western world to places like Iran and China... China, of course, is another factor, as trade between RU and CN have increased exponentially over the last few years since the war started...

I could go on but, already, I am rambling... Suffice it to say, there's a mssive block of countries that hate Western imperialism and/or are neutral and/or already face sanctions, and this network continues to trade with one another, and they also have begun to help facilitate one another trading with the West, either knowingly or just because they lack the will or robust enough resources to police it up.

Globalization is its own enemy when it comes to the West trying to impose sanctions, IMO.

It's interesting to think that if Wu had more love in the West that the Chinese authorities would have been more slow to crackdown on her...

I think we all remember back in 2017 or so when the Hong Kong protests were at the forefront of everyone's mind and, still, the crackdown continued, and the resistance was crushed.

And what has China's response to the popularity of the Ukraine war been? To question its generally positive relations with Russia? No, not at all. China shores up its own front against Taiwan and its trade with Russia is growing exponentially. BRICS gets stronger.

China will not bow to popular Western opinion no matter what. Blaming Musk for this is pretty asinine.

Not wrong at all - it's also the case that the guy who founded Netflix had dozens of sticks in the fire - lots of failed enterprises he was trying out elsewhere, and this one just hit. He didn't even come up with the model, really, for Netflix.... he's just a privileged venture capitalist.

But what does that mean for us? Obviously, I wish it was me with the generational wealth, and not them. Obviously, I would prefer for 10,000 people to be lifted out of generational poverty in the Congo than to create more millionaires... But I treat the super wealthy capitalists tossing around massive wealth like this as something I do not have the right to do much about other than taxing them at a higher rate.

When they deliver good products by creating companies that utilize a lot of talent, I clap.

I think it is the case that technology and the mass production of goods will do more to alleviate poverty than anything else...

I mean, you go to poor countries now and even the poor people have access to a wealth of information and such through their non-flag smartphones you've never heard of. That's just wonderful. It has also assisted us by letting us see what is going on in Gaza first hand. So, all these billionaires & multimillionaire investors have actually contributed to society through the decades by bringing us to a point where even fairly poor people in India or Iran can not just enjoy having internet access and a smartphone, but can also use it to report on corruption and undermine corrupt & terrible governments.

Right, he isn't entirely consistent.

But it is also not the case that he is bringing back literal Nazis - last I checked Jared Taylor was not reinstated, Andrew Anglin is nowhere to be seen, and Kanye West was banned after his remarks. I think the list goes on- every once in a while you do see the Nazis complaining about this because, of course, it isn't hard to stay on that platform... Which si also why it's silly he didn't bring Jared Taylor back on - he was not removed because he said any slurs or was obscene, but was simply removed by Dorsey and the gang because he is an open "race realist."

Of course, I was flabbergasted when I saw that they would treat "from the river to the sea" as a call to genocide on X, and I really felt like he completely dropped the ball there. Nonetheless, it was a general improvement, though it is not what I would have envisioned.