radon1 wrote:Presumably, they are working, but their production is off the official numbers.
They may not be working. US has the same problem in recent years -- millions have fallen "off the books." Not counted in unemployment figures anymore. They're classified as "discouraged workers." There's a "peak jobs" problem over here, and in Europe, and perhaps Russia as well.
For that reason, you guys may want to be careful about China there.. you can't afford to lose what manufacturing you have, or be swamped with cheap Chinese imports. It happened in the US -- if I go to the store and look at labels, clothes say "Nicaragua" or "Honduras" or "Mexico," and hard goods are all "China" or maybe "Mexico."
If Russians want to be nationalist, then do something nationalist that makes sense and keep your manufacturing base intact. Be nationalist in a *smart* way, just self-interested like Germany is, but not actually throwing up trade walls and jingoist rhetoric and trashing your rocket engine deals with Boeing and Lockheed and the US Air Force. Russia should want to manufacture things, and for people to rely on them and buy them.
Putin wants to expand Russian manufacturing exports, yet he trashed a whole sector here -- you guys had the rocket engine contracts for the whole US Air Force, and for NASA. Putin rocked the boat, outright threatened, outright shut down that business, so how was that smart?
(which I'm pleased with as an American, we need to make our darn crap again, especially *rockets* for crying out loud)
There are a lot of similarities between Russia and the US -- rule by billionaires and the top 1%, stagnant population (but we are open to immigrants and grow that way), and Russia is dependent on one sector -- energy -- while the US is now financial.
John McCain has called Russia "a gas station masquarading as a country."
But really, the US is just a big hedge fund. The masses of people in both places, Russia and US, don't get much of the pie from these ruling industries -- energy in Russia, and big finance in the US.
Absolutely. "Russia" here means Putin+.
Things aren't too bad in Russia, since you are at least free enough to be able to voice that opinion.
The concern about dictatorship is just how bad it can get -- which you know from Russia's communist history -- it really can get so bad that neighbors are spying on each other, to the point where nobody can feel safe to say anything bad about the Dear Leader.
Russia's a bit of a dictatorship, and hopefully for Russians it just never goes off further on that spectrum of oppression. Maybe there's a happy middle ground where you guys are pleased with it -- you give up some freedom and rights for security and strong effective leadership, maybe some minorities get slapped around and Pussy Riot gets whipped, but overall you're okay with it. That makes sense to me, I get that.
The same with finance. The Western finance will duly arrive. Why? Because there is no where else to invest. The world is awash with money but lacks projects and people willing to implement them. It is not clear however, whether the western finance will be needed at all. Perhaps, it will, but China has lots of reserves, and Russia has lots of reserves.
From what I've read, China has only agreed to $25 billion gas prepayment, but Gazprom / Russia must come up with the rest.
It's a smart investment and should be done.
I'll admit about Putin -- he is able to implement big projects. China is a bit like that as well, though they have a more delegated system on down through the bureaucracy (that's how the ghost cities happened, regional governors have these growth targets they're expected to meet no matter what, and so they've done a lot of building that doesn't make sense).
China has talked about a bullet train across Alaska, down to California. That actually makes a lot of sense if someone -- like a Putin -- could actually get a big project like that done.
We're really bad about that in the US. Government over here can't get anything done, like that. Where we excel though is with private industry and SpaceX is a great example of that.
I'm drifting off topic -- but if we had to have a dictator, I'd vote for Elon Musk. There's a can-do guy.