Russians, No more Boshoi Mac for you....

This takes canceling to a whole new level!

 

about time. yesterday they said they would remain open.

starbucks, coke and pepsi follow

 

124 Companies That Have Pulled Out of Russia | Kiplinger

Some interesting companies on the list.

 

bank of china is a surprise

glad to see toyota

 

List in #4 includes IKEA. It is largest global buyer of (non-pulp) wood and Russia is one of its main suppliers.

What wood IKEA do?

 

Knot a problem.
Other nations make and sell particle board and poorly transliterated instruction enabled DIY.

 

If Russia loses its largest wood buyer, that will alter their agricultural balance of trade (in the minds of those who view ag as food and fiber)

Da eto problem

 

China is trying to play both sides.

Or perhaps it is better to say that China is not a monolith. It is composed of groups with differing opinions and goals. For instance, they built cleaner energy supplies at home because the population is sick of fog, but build coal plants outside for the Belt and Road projects to appease their coal industry.

 

Both sides covers it

 

I'm sure China would be on our side if we showed them how we can regime change Putin with minimal losses and we'd let China steal most of Siberia if they work with us.

 

Siberia is not awash with accessible resources. It does have a northward-flowing river which would improve water supply in China if it could be engineered to flow south instead. It's the only potential grab known to me, and very hypothetical at that. Already mentioned trees.

This is not intended to inhibit other discussions, though.

 

lol, you're talking about the largest land mass in the world. The United States has 3 time zones out of 24 on the planet. Russia has 11 out of 24 time zones and most all of that is Siberia. To suggest what you suggest is absurd. Though climate change is moving much faster than expected at burning down every last forest on the planet so to frame this discussion as resource extraction isn't much different than discussing different methods of your own suicide.

We need an end to fossil fuel wars and end to deforestation! We need DeGrowth so humanity becomes more efficient and less wasteful and most of all better able to regenerate the ecosystems that have been destroyed.

 

Nuclear Winter ought to provide for de-growth AND fix Global Warming.....

 

A video on this subject:

 

Broken Link.....

(you ARE behind the bamboo curtain.....)

 

As that video description says: "Some 7 million Russian and 148 million Chinese are living along this border and little by little, the Chinese are crossing over the Amur River to settle on the Russian side."

 

Being a huge land mass kind of makes accessing resources hard. It was a challenge getting oil out of Alaska's North Shore. Thawed permafrost in Siberia will make any land access more difficult before we consider the landscape is literally blowing up already.

 

Yeah, I mean this is all good. Sanctions on Russia are great.

In the world of English soccer, sanctions on Russian oligarch and Putin ally Roman Abramovich have crippled Chelsea, who have been leading the English Premier League. The club has lost several major sponsors, and is no longer allowed to buy and sell players, or even to sell tickets.

This is good. Because what Russia is doing to Ukraine is appalling. And Abramovich's relationship to Putin is very close.

But it was all over the English soccer pages overnight. Just below that was a report on Newcastle United beating Southampton 2-1. Newcastle United is owned by Saudi Arabia's sovereign investment fund. And no-one seems to have a problem with that.

Yet what Saudi Arabia has been doing for years in Yemen dwarfs Russia's actions in Ukraine, not just in duration, but in violence and barbarity, and in the suffering of the victims.

Going through everyone's posts....
@Georgina Rudkus - McDonald's is still in Saudi Arabia.
@bisco - Starbucks, Coke and Pepsi are still in Saudi Arabia.
@bisco again - Bank of China opened its first Saudi branch two years ago, and Toyota is still there and has been for years.
@tochatihu - IKEA is still in Saudi Arabia

I mean, normally when we're looking at human rights abuses and companies' willingness to work or not work with a country, we can say it's complicated, and that there are different factors involved. But with Saudi Arabia and Russia, the parallels are genuinely remarkable:

- They've both invaded a neighbouring country to the South.
- They're both bombing urban areas.
- They're both targeting people on an ethnic basis.
- They're both killing civilians, deliberately.
- They're both using the weird and transparently false justification of getting rid of terrorists/Nazis (delete as appropriate).
- They're both actually doing it because their neighbour had the temerity to ally with a rival for regional dominance.

The only real difference is that the Russians don't seem to be getting away with it.

Could this be because we all toe our party line, and we don't want to criticise an ally? (The ally that killed more than 3000 people the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon, but an ally nonetheless, apparently.)

Or could there be something about the Yemenis that makes us not care? I'm not going to say what those things are, but I think we all know.

---------------

Don't get me wrong. I am absolutely in favour of what's being done in Russia. It just seems a shame that we care about Ukraine but not about Yemen.

And yes, I know. Xinjiang. But, as I said, there are always arguments - as there could be over, for example, Israel and Palestine, or the US/UK/Aus and Iraq - that things are somehow different and complicated. And often they genuinely are.

The thing here is that Russia/Ukraine and Saudi/Yemen are the same as each other - there's nothing different or complicated - yet our reaction to one has been moral outrage and sanctions, while our reaction to the other, if we've paid any attention at all, has been moral indifference and continued enthusiastic trade.