Having said that, I bet Microsoft knows which licenses are owned by the Russian government specifically.
Hindrance of aggression by the Russian government.... by wrecking their economy. Yes, the Russian people, being the economy, are the target, unavoidably.
The goal is both. You can't meaningfully punish a government without also punishing its people. The current sanctions are absolutely crippling to the Russian domestic economy. Their exporting businesses are dead in the water. What remains of their industry completely depends on imports, which have no stopped.
In their personal lives, they are accustomed to buying foreign goods, as basic as furniture. Russia currently doesn't manufacture enough furniture to meet its domestic needs... And doesn't manufacture enough manufacturing machinery to build said furniture factories, even if it wanted to.
So, you tell me, does mass unemployment, inability to buy basic consumer goods, and a collapse in purchasing power do - does it punish a government, its people, or both?
Is it? Or is the goal to turn the people of Russia against the Russian government for putting them into this position, perhaps even triggering regime change.
So far, they're not doing their job. Maybe we haven't incentivized them sufficiently.
"WTF I love online activation DRM now!"
This narrative of “oh my would you think of the innocent Russian people” is tiring. They’re all guilty, just like all of Germany was guilty in 1945.
E: My reply to the now deleted child comment by “from” which suggested that the sanctions are pointless because they probably won’t result in regime change.
But why do you think the sanctions are about causing regime change? That’d be nice, but nothing anybody is betting on.
It’s all about discouraging such actions in the future.
Do immoral things, let your leaders do them in your name, and well live with the consequences of a failed country/state.
This is tantamount to theft. Yes, I’m sure there’s plenty of weasel words in agreements. But at the end of the day, if you traded X for Y and end up with both X & Y, you have stolen from someone else.
Wanna know what Russia has been doing to the Ukraine?
What you're basically saying is that companies are acting in accordance with certain moral values, even though they don't intrinsically have those moral values. That's great news! That's downright fantastic! Instilling "true" morality is a difficult problem. We have bypassed that problem and gotten the same observable results by replacing it with a much simpler one.
Corporations are supposed to be automata that optimize an objective function. External pressure was applied, via both sanctions and public sentiment, and behold! Their behavior changed. The sanctions had the effect that was intended. That's better than you could say for many other policies.
Without sanctions, corporations could be competing over who would supply the Russian army with uniforms if the ROI was there.
Of course, from the perspective of neoclassical economics, it is true, and of course, there are obligations to shareholders. But generally, I think it is great that corporations are not automata that optimize an objective function. Corporations are social organizations, and I think it roughly holds that the harder the problem is that a corporation is solving for some business purpose, the more space it needs to give for social aspects. It's not that all of management thinks about profit optimization from morning to evening.
Paperclips Inc will now extract the iron in your blood in order to maximize the number of paperclips it can produce. No hard feelings.
I want a Venn diagram of people who endorse this kind of economic system and five minutes later tweet about how AI alignment risk is the biggest problem humanity faces
But then again, maybe US is the most "moral" country in the world, since nobody ever pulls out of the US for US foreign policy/military aggression. /s
Personally I read it as description of the mechanics behind corporate decision making and the possibility that for many companies this might be both ethically and financially a good move
I don't think this decision is good (not selling to Russians) but we can imagine much worse decisions that follow from companies yielding to, say, social pressure.
I consider these companies backing out of Russia just pragmatic: by getting out, at the very least you’ll save yourself a lot of headaches in the near future, avoid the risk of any negative publicity “because you’re still doing business with Russia!”, and also generate some positive publicity around all this.
The real panic would be about China. On the surface, it seems like they're getting a break from being painted as the evil force bent on destroying our heroes, but companies that are there can't give up being there. I look forward to the furious PR wave from industry trying to separate China from Russia, and the fake insider stories about how Chinese officials are worried about Russia's latest move. Just recently, Maduro got promoted to being president again*, so there's a lot to be gained while the US PR hate cannon is fully pointed at Russia.
* https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20220307-us-envoys-hel...
Some of the arguments I mentioned above I consider "incorrect" in the sense that they shouldn't affect a moral person, but still I decided to list them.
By the way,this is not a "bug" of capitalism, it's a bug of people mindlessly not caring about the ramifications of their own choices and decisions, which is nowadays everything and every action being subjected to pay for/sell.
Also, I hate virtue signalling, but at the same time one could argue getting rich, making money throughout all means, it's also a "signalling" of some sorts, especially in US. Now whether or not making money is considered a virtue, that's a more complicated subject.
That sounds very possible, but not very advisable.
To the comment below :
>everyone becomes poorer it will slow as people simply won't be able to afford to leave
the things have worked in opposite way - the brain drain of 199x slowed by ~2003/5 as economic situation improved until 2014/5 when it started to pickup again. Of course visa issues and potential "iron curtain", etc. will affect it.
Or are they even able to - are there increased visa restrictions yet?
I understand people wanting to deter aggression, but this is not the way.
What happens when it’s your country on the other end of bad choices?
Not every country can shrug it off like America did when invading Iraq.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/06/opinion/putin-ukraine-chi...
Friedman is right that this is economic war. Which I think most people will agree is preferable to nuclear war. But the principle is the same. What democratic countries are attempting to do just now is demonstrate an economic force so great that the enemy sees they cannot win.
These companies are doing it because of the strength of feeling of their customers, employees, and owners. There were dockers in the UK who collectively refused to unload Russian oil off a tanker. Didn't matter that the govt hadn't banned it yet.
People are making lists but they're of the companies that continue to do business with Russia. And they don't seem to spend a lot of time on the list before caving into the demands.
In fact, the sanctions should be even worse by your logic, since the people had much more power to prevent these wars, unlike the people of Russia.
Of course what Russia is doing is unacceptable, but it's hardly alone in the world in this type of behavior. Rather than getting on your high horse and condemning the people of Russia, it's better to send help to the people of Ukraine who are suffering in this brutal war, and maybe as well to the people of Yemen and Palestine and other invaded places.
Also, see if you can lobby your leaders to advance negotiations for treaties to dismantle all nukes - a major weapon that enabled Russia to bully its neighbors.
Sanctioning state organs and oligarchs is good and overdue, but the mob extending that to canceling all of Russian civil society seems stupid and evil to me.
There is significant risk of Russians blaming the West if NATO gets involved. Navalny's organization did a survey of Moscow's internet users, and nearly half think Russia is liberating Ukraine. It strongly suggests the vast majority of Russians do not see this as them having started an aggressive war.
https://mobile.twitter.com/PopovaProf/status/150105368420955...
The nation-state system tends toward distributed blame (to the nationals) even when there isn't distribution of power (autocracy). For once, most of the world is blaming the autocrat rather than the nation. That's an improvement.
But in the scope of this conflict, and as an European living in a country that borders Russia, I'm all for it. What is happening in Ukraine is horrific and it is happening because in the mind of the Russian leadership the country had aligned it self to close to the west. So they are in a sense attacked because they are to much like us.
There is also the question about what happens next if Putin succeeds in Ukraine, where is next on the path to rebuild the Russian empire? Georgia and Moldovia are candidates, in addition both the Baltics and Finland used to be part of the Russian empire, then there are all of the old Warsaw pact countries as well.
How can they and the rest of Europe ever be safe without a regime change or huge degradation of Russian military capabilities? One of the ways to accomplish this to thrash the Russian economy, while that is horrible to all the Russian that do not support the war, the alternative seems worse. Not that Redhat pulling out of Russia is going to have much of an impact on the Russian economy. But everyone's contributions helps a bit.
What is the way in this particular situation? What would you do?
There are 125 armed conflicts happening right now in the world. Hell we just started bombing Somalia again. Nobody is saying a word about that.
It seems like there's too much power in the hands of too few. It will bite us.
IMO, this war has demonstrated where power really lies. And that is in the hands of the people. Do you think any politician West of Poland really wanted this economic war with Russia?
Clearly, the lives of the rich and powerful would have been much easier had Zelenskeyy snuck off allowing Putin to annex a big chunk of South Eastern Ukraine like he did with Crimea. Energy bills go back down. No additional influx of refugees. Pandemic free. Peachy.
So why is it happening? Because the free press is out there documenting the horrors for all to see. And it turns out that people do care. And they are fed up of the lies and the fake news. These sanctions are being made because people demand it. That is customers, individuals, employees. This is what is driving decision-making processes at the moment.
The balance of power has always been like that. If anything, the internet has diversified power more than it has ever been before in history.
They still need food, energy, shelter, and security.
Just thinking about how far the pendulum can swing before it becomes immoral for other reasons.
Not really. There is a fast strategy and a slow strategy.
The fast strategy aims to convince elites to change course. If Putin withdraws, he gets his economy back. That's unlikely here; the real targets are e.g. his generals.
The slow strategy is about degrading capability. The slow strategy is a worst-case option for when the fast strategy fails. Smaller economies power smaller war machines. Brain drain, industrial decay and material shortages make unmanageable threats less potent.
They also undermine the appeal of popular uprising. External pressure tends to bring people together, which in this case means tolerating eroding freedoms in exchange for security. And starving, broken people don't revolt. When we deploy long-term sanctions, we're putting a nation in international quarantine. For a nuclear state run by a lunatic, that makes sense. (For e.g. Cuba, Iran or Venezuela, I find it deplorable.)
It kinda helps that their country is the major exporter of the first two. Not sure about construction materials, but it seems that whatever is missing will be readily supplied by China in exchange for the first two.
Hmm, lets ask the North Koreans!
Sanctions don't make a better world, but it's better than bombs.
We can also try another "Russian Reset", I think both Bush and Obama did a "Russian Reset" with Putin.
If we don't want Russia to have a powerful military, sanctions is the least evil tool we have.
For me one of those would be to deny someone food and water from my own surplus.
I understand that RedHat consulting is not the same, but as I see more and more companies pull out I wonder how long it will be until it's wheat, insulin, medical devices etc? The russian citizenry are not (directly) responsible for Putins insanity, nor for being brainwashed by state media.
So do the Ukrainians, is Putin affording them that?
But I think it's rare there is a tradeoff there, little reason we cannot do both (continue subsistence trade with aggressor, provide humanitarian aid as we're able to defender)
In a way it's good – people in these situations will flock to more resilient systems.
> It can also trade with China to survive
These statements are at very much at odds with each other. They might be able to squeeze some money out of Europe now, but if the relationship isn't mended with blinding speed then Europe is going to move away from Russian energy permanently. This situation would turn Russia into a Chinese vassal state.
Russia depending entirely on China in almost every aspect makes Russia super-fragile. Now China dictates prices. And why should those prices be high? Is it really in China's interest to help Russia?
That wasn't the goal, so this isn't terribly surprising.
For those wondering this would also mean that Russia doesn't have to care about GPL anymore, obviously.
[0] Which is something I'd be actually optimistic about if this wasn't happening in, well... Russia.
Sorry if I'm pedantic here, but you can sanction them more. Not only that, but the more "evil" Russia becomes, the more it drags its allies down and demotivates them to continue friendly relations with them.
Russia is at the ocean floor but it can also hear knocking from the bottom.
Or how do you feel about being canceled out yourself because you live next to the torturer and not preventing him from torturing your neighbours at your own expense?
I assume that all contracts have some force majeure actions baked in.
In other words: Russian businesses are just f**ed. The only option is - build your own tools, or use only russian based tools, services, etc - or go back to doing things in excel spreadsheets and paper/pen.
Ukrainians on social media are literally begging for more sanctions on Russia. They know Russia and they lived under a Russian-dominated USSR. These sanctions work and put pressure on Russia.
Putin has already walked back from his plans to put a puppet regime in Kyiv.
It's not like the Russian government went after pirates much, despite having the laws in place.
https://consortiumnews.com/2022/03/05/war-conflict-enemies-o...
