And yesterday I told myself I would stop procrastinating for the last time...

Fair points. Idk how much it matters in the grand scheme of things but I have followed the Ruble over the last year. Since 8 months ago, its been dropping, and it hasn't stopped. It just reached it's pre-war level and it is still going down. So sanctions are hurting Russia, I wish it would be a faster effect to force Putin to stop the war, but it is hurting Russia.

What u/dikai was getting at was this

Imagine your country relies on products A, B, C, D, etc...

If you sanction A, well now the country needs to switch to B to keep things going smoothly. After a while, when your country has swapped over to B completely, you sanction B. Now that hurts more, and your country needs to scramble harder to fix that problem, so they switch to C, etc...

This is not a perfect analogy, but it explains one of the reasons that sanctions applied over time can hurt more than all the sanctions applied at once.

Also another reason for escalating sanctions as opposed to dropped every sanction known to man at once is to keep some leverage. If you sanction the shit out of Russia with everything all at once, well there is not reason for Russia to listen to you at all since you threw everything at it. But if you do it over time, it leaves you with negotiating power. Even if Putin does not care, many oligarchs may get increasingly nervous with increasing sanctions that hurt them more and more, and that will cause instability.

I know I already replied, but I figured out why this comment bothered me when I read it.

It kind of shows this mentality that a lot of Americans have that other countries have problems because the people refuse to fix them, or because America has such a focus on self-reliance, our assumption is not that outside forces are the reason.

Honduras has tried multiple times to fix it's corruption, and the sad thing is that every goddamned time the US has meddled to place a corrupt asshole in power who is willing to exploit the people for the US' benefit.

If you want to blame western countries who are corrupt for their failings, sure, they have had the ability to mostly carve out their own identity.

But to jump to "nah, it's the people of that countries fault" for a country which has been dominated by much more powerful groups than itself is such a ignorant and extremely dismissive take it's absurd. The US PUT THAT GOVERNMENT IN CHARGE, not the Honduran people, you can't blame the people for their corrupt government when they didn't put that government in place. The most pro-democracy and pro-honduran leader to fight corruption got fucked by the US in 2009, and that is not a new or surprising outcome.

Not saying you are dumb, this isn't an attack on you. This is me pointing out that you are ignorant in this particular topic, and if you want to take offense to that or learn from it is up to you.

The Japanese self defense force is going to be beefy as fuck

Hey China, stop being bad! .... but hey, keep those cheap manufactured goods coming okay.

I know, thanks in part to the US. I doubt things will resolve well anytime soon, but I can hope.

Good luck Honduras, there's a lot of corruption to stamp out, but I hope the government can fix it and deal with these gangs.

Forest fires wouldn't matter to Putin, and exploding methane craters, well, I am sure Putin would think that's fine, as long as it doesn't affect ethnic Russians.

but the shrunken demand for oil, that's more of a Putin starting this war issue than a global warming issue. Clearly most countries were fine with using oil even when presented with clear evidence of it's damage (talking western countries here, developing countries kind of need to use oil to catch up and it is unfair to deny them the same luxury western countries had).

This is pastastic, so strange it's news worthy, but hey, good on the Italians.

Ah, Russia will finally have more warm water ports. All this selling oil was just a 4D chess move from Russia to increase global warming.

"There are too many motherfucking minorities in this motherfucking campus!"

• Sviggum out there somewhere, probably