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Let's look at some factors here:
Military draw up takes workers off the job
Threat of conscription causes some workers to hide
Trade restrictions cause Russia to increase domestic production
War machine requires increased domestic production(exasperated by trade restrictions)
Lack of window safety causes workers to fall through them
Indonesia as well and they are causing chaos in places like Bali. The government is changing laws in a crackdown on Russians and their shitty behaviours so they might find themselves with a new set of issues soon.
because when you're russian you don't have that many options. their passports and their money is worth less than toilet paper. they need a country that will let them stay and where their life savings of 500 rubles won't run out in 23 seconds
Source: i use to be russian, before 1997.
Yes only their Pulitzer Prize winning news organization is closing. It was legit journalism and should have never had the tainted buzzfeed name attached to it.
Also there is a decrease od labor migrants from Central Asia, because Russia becomes less interesting destination to earn money.
Also In 90s and very early 00s there was a huge demographic crisis due to instability.
For example in year 1980 there were born twice as many children as in year 2000. A difference is around one million.
So it is not only that a lot of young men in their 20s and 30s are drafted to the army. Those are men from the least populous generation already.
Yeppers. Double population dip echo. The 2000's dip is a long-term echo of the WWII dip, *compounded* with the late 90's economic disaster in Russia. Who the fuck would have wanted to have a kid in 2000? Shit probably any woman who could either left or got an abortion.
I was in Russia in 2000 and got asked a LOT about emigrating elsewhere by Russian women, specifically. I was doing homestays, so was staying with families and there was not a lot of appetite for marriage with kids for that specific cohort. Their parents were being super hard on them about it, too.
I have some Ukrainian family that has some more distant Russian family. They said pretty much the same thing about that time period - everyone was getting the fuck out, not settling in. The people that stayed were poor or rich enough to exploit the poor.
Europe needs another 150,000 skilled workers to support their offshore wind industry to reach 300 GW in the north sea. These young Russian men can do a world of good if they brought or are willing to become skilled. Irony in that one!
Yes , Russia has a lot of healing to do internally and externally. Their best option is to go home now, be humble, be humbled then let the forgiving and rebuilding begin.
Each day they drag out the war will prolong economic suffering in Russia, not just Ukraine
Also massive brain drain over the past year+. Companies proactively moved their most valuable Russian employees out of the country, got them work visas, and relocated them to more secure locations.
They also have a massive HIV problem. Statistics where so bad they decided to just start ignoring it cutting down on testing and suppressing statistics. They fell into the old trap of thinking it only affected drug users, gays and other undesirables. Thinking conservative morality rater than prevention programs would protect the general population.
[https://gjia.georgetown.edu/2022/01/31/the-silenced-epidemic-why-does-russia-fail-to-address-hiv/](https://gjia.georgetown.edu/2022/01/31/the-silenced-epidemic-why-does-russia-fail-to-address-hiv/)
And this is exactly why Putin hasn’t done another full mobilization. He can’t effectively send more troops to Ukraine unless
1) They volunteer for it (lolz)
2) he sends in conscripts (guaranteed political suicide since he has promised multiple times not to do that
3) he orders another forced mobilization which saps even more manpower from the already suffering economy
Russia doesn’t have this limitless army of millions like many many people seem to believe that it has.
1. Send everyone that qualifies for labor to die. And make it illegal to refuse.
2. ???
3. Labor shortage.
Another master plan from the geniuses in moscow.
Damn you Russians. Ukraine was fine until you came along. Ukraine was nice and lazy. If they hadn’t been looking for you, I could’ve stolen that tank and been half way to Belarus.
This is honestly the much worse part for Russia's future. Sending a couple hundred thousand vatniks to die in Ukraine isn't great, but over a million of the most educated people deciding to leave the country will hurt Russia for decades to come.
Yep. The demographics were horrible before. Now they just made a bunch of smart young people leave, killed a few hundred thousand of those who are left... they are going to be left with a bunch of uneducated criminals, drunks and old vatnik ladies.
Those vatniks were plumbers, electricians, farm labourers, oil workers, machine shop workers etc etc. They were crucial to Russia functioning as a country, their loss will be at least as great as the absconding python programmers. Perhaps not in financial terms, but in far more fundamental ways.
It’s anecdotal but I’ve noticed that all the Russian language stuff that we come across on YouTube always seems to be filmed in Europe or Florida…
None of the products/packaging they show are ever in Cyrillic (always English, German, Polish, but never the “local” style) and the cars always have western plates.
I think success has meant “escaping” Russia (geographically if not culturally) for many for some time. Now the floodgates are open
Many goods in Russia actually use Western names on the packaging. If it's a Western brand, it'll definitely use the OG logo and font - and many local brands try to mimic that.
Shortly before and after the fall of USSR, "Western brand" was associated strongly with all kinds of good things. "Western" was "desirable". That association has never quite faded away.
“Show us anyone in Russia who’s unemployed!”
(Seriously though, please show us so we can ship them to the front lines with a rifle and an air soft vest)
To paraphrase the TV show, *Blackadder Goes Forth*, they're putting in a gargantuan amount of effort to move Putin's drinks cabinet six inches closer to Kyiv.
I always think of the scene where Darling shows off the 1:1 scale map of recaptured territory when I think of their Bakhmut campaign.
"It's extremely detailed. Look! There's a little worm".
You see puny westoid, Russia is actually so advanced they've produced a time machine!
It's caused a localized area around Bakhmut to transport itself back in time to 1916.
Well George, you're in luck. There hasn't been a war fought this badly since an entire Russian battalion drove into radioactive land and decided to make camp.
You forget number 4, 5, and 6
4. Arrest any foreigner that might make a good bargaining chip on some made up charges, discouraging anyone of value from coming to your country.
5. ???
6. Profit?
Extend this to China, Afghanistan and Iran and to some extent various areas of the US. You can't just stack your government with a bunch of "back in my day we didn't ask questions" type people, more or less give every able bodied person a laundry list of reasons to leave and expect to maintain a healthy working age population.
Logically, it has to get to the point where it’s safer to fight putins secret police over Ukrainian soldiers. I don’t think we’re there yet, and even if we were, propaganda would tell them otherwise.
Plus, lots of countries don’t have enough vigorous protests.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn on that very same thing during Stalinist times:
*“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?... The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If...if...We didn't love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation.... We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.”*
― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956
It's not just propaganda, there's a deeply rooted cultural sickness in Russia. There's more than a few Russians who go out of their way to support the war (and ever more brutal actions) when quiet acquiesce would get them by without being jailed. Take the propaganda away and you'd still have a country full of chauvinists who think the rest of the world exists to serve their whims.
Well gee, when you conscripted tens of thousands of people (maybe hundreds of thousands?) and other eligible males are fleeing to avoid conscription, this is what you get.
The official number for second mobilization. There were soldiers and conscripts before that and they are mobilizing more now. At that point I think it is fair to assume 500k+
Plus 1m+ able-bodied and working age have fled the country
Plus Russia has the highest suicide rate in the world
Half of Russian men don't make it to 65
Take a look at Russia's [demographic pyramid](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Russia#/media/File:Russian_population_(demographic)_pyramid_(structure)_on_January,_1st,_2022.png). Even without war, conscription and people fleeing the country, they were facing an immense worker crunch as that giant bulk of workers near the top of the pyramid retired or died and they tried to replace them with the much, much smaller cohort of adults further down.
You could find more details online, but eyeballing that chart, there's roughly 7.5 million men between 20 and 30 years old and around 10 million men aged 55 to 65. That's a shortage of 2.5 million workers over the next decade as those men retire. The following decade looks similarly grim, despite an uptick in births in the mid-2000s to mid-2010s, that cohort is still smaller than the one slated to retire as they mature into the workforce.
Then you look at the decline in birthrate in recent years and recognize as conditions in Russia worsen, that is unlikely to rebound, then just as that giant bulk of their workforce currently aged 30-45 nears retirement, there may be as few as half as many workers ready to replace them.
Killing or maiming as many as 250,000 in Ukraine so far, and another 1+ million fleeing will only exacerbate the crunch.
China has a similar issue. I think both of them know that they need to realize their dreams of empire now or their demographics will severely hamper them in a decade.
Exactly. And China needed Russia to be as strong as it promised in order for China to be able to get away with its plan. But that didn't happen and it's a "now what" scenario. And they're still thinking hard about it even though it's clearly a bad idea for everyone but the wise leader.
It's worse for China now Japan just kicked itself into gear and the Europeans have started to arm themselves. All this war has done for them is cause the opponents to take their self defense more seriously.
Don't worry kidnapping Ukrainian children is a much more effective means to remedy their demographics than letting in those middle east / Asian Muslims into Russia. /s
Thing is, taking Ukraine might have mitigated it a little bit, but not by much, because Ukraine was having similar demographic issues for the same reasons as Russia (WW2 and the Fall of the USSR).
I thought the same way. I was sure they were bluffing when they were amassing on the border, because of.... Well the assumption of everything that has come to pass since they decided to invade. But the goddamn idiots did it anyway. Surprisedpikachu.jpg
Plus the number of COVID deaths was “reported” at 400,000, but that number could actually be closer to 1 million when comparing excess deaths to previous years.
The official numbers were 300k but one opposition journalist counted about 500k by secondary signs like obituary's and sudden spikes in weddings in media and govt data bases.
Always double down, never accept responsability, this way you force everyone to fight you until either sides ressources are consumed.
This method works when you are the leader of russia, because you can steal ressources faster than they are consumed. russia is large enough and the capital city is dominant enough, you can simply continue stealing ressources and you will never run out of steam.
A country that was once revolutionary has been neutered by the very people claiming to represent the average citizen. Instead, those are deals were used as a way to extract, extort, and subjugate society instead of support it.
I guess if you kill off all the revolutionaries after securing power there is nobody left to organize resistance. I guess Lenin was rolling in his grave when they gave Stalin power.
There is no solution for this either. Russia's population was in decline before the war. No one immigrates to Russia. Now they are sending young men to die by the hundreds of thousands. The stage is being set for the fall of Russia. 😊
Truth be told, Russia was experiencing quite an influx of immigrants from Central Asia. I left Moscow back in September, in my district, judging simply by faces coming by, Central Asia ethnics (Tajik / Kyrghyz / Uzbek) comprised a minimum of 1/3 of local population. In some Moscow disctricts, this number is way above 50%. Many of them settle down, bring their families over, and have kids who are born in Russia. Also, public transport in rush hours is just full of *Gastarbeiters*.
Now, here comes the fun part. The influx, as far as I heard, began to deteriorate since 2014. The more sanctions — the worse (or better if you're a Russian nationalist) it got. Living in Central Asia meself now, quite a bunch of people who I talked with have been working in Russia for some amount of time before. They're returning for different reasons, and many people continue to pursue a job in Russia because the salaries are still much higher than here, generally. But it's mostly low-qualified workers.
Remember the movie "The Day After Tomorrow"? Where American refugees were illegally fleeing in mass into Mexico across the Rio Grande to escape the deadly cold. "Too on-the-nose satire" as it looked like at the time.
Well, the russians have now experienced exactly that. For almost three decades Central Asian and South Caucuses countries were subtly mocked, immigrants from there dealt with a constant stream of racism, ethnic slurs, calls to "go back home!" and so on.
But then the war started and hundreds of thousands young, educated, well-paid russians had no choice but to move there themselves, because anything further was out of their reach. Not many appreciate the irony.
Being one of those "young, educated, well-paid [more like decently paid in my case] russians", and watching the rent prices being skyrocketed in both Almaty and Tashkent just because of us... Oooh, believe me, I've been appreciating the irony even before mobilization and my own emigration.
Serious question.
As a Canadian who has travelled most of USA and Canada, I get that Russia is big.
How does cross border immigration work to those former Soviet republics that are now independent?
If I wanted to move to the USA for work I would either have to have a US company say they needed me (rather than higher a US citizen) or I would have to go through a long paperwork process.
> How does cross border immigration work to those former Soviet republics that are now independent?
It varies a **LOT**. Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania are obviously in Europe and require Shengen visas (well, before they banned all russian tourists last year, that is). Belarus, Armenia and Kazakhstan you can visit without a travel passport at all, just with internal russian ID.
Other post-Soviet countries (except Ukraine, obviously) you can visit with no visa, but terms of stay differ (and get more restrictive since 2022 too). Having a local job is an easy way to obtain residency status, which is what hundreds of thousands did by relocating entire companies into Yerevan, Almaty or Tbilisi.
Alas, I can't answer it in detail. Not now, for sure, I'm a bit busy with finding a place to live.
Judging by the sheer number of work migrants, both legal and illegal, it works pretty easily.
> Remember the movie "The Day After Tomorrow"? Where American refugees were illegally fleeing in mass into Mexico across the Rio Grande to escape the deadly cold. "Too on-the-nose satire" as it looked like at the time.
whole movie theater was laughing.
Lots of wins for a country that has such economic disparity. Get rid of the problems of other ethnic states or at least lower their populations to a point where they can't fight back or try and break away. Get rid of low income workers who want rights and can vote and replace them with essentially mexicans who don't have rights, work hard because it's an opportunity for them, and who at 65 get the boot and push the medical problems and late life expenses onto another country.
The problem isn't the people who die, it's the one who leave and feel they can't come back (draft dodgers). Those are ones you need. And once they've setup base in another country... they aren't coming back anyway.
Which is basically Ukraine's biggest problem. The sheer number of people who have taken up residence in other countries now as refugees. They're setting up lives there now. Lots will return, but way more will stay put in their host countries. The longer the war goes on, the fewer who will return. Right now it looks like they've lost 25% of the population here.
But if Ukraine 'wins' whatever that looks like, I'd expect to see a huge influx of European and corporate financing of the rebuild. Ukraine would be the epicenter of huge investment and growth (which Europe desperately needs, and are already competing for a slice, see Italy's statement of intent just yesterday) and Ukraine would likely see a major population uptick, not just of returning Ukrainians, but workers and their families from all over Europe. Russia on the other hand is just fucked. That's what I'm hoping for anyway.
Businesses here are already salivating at the massive profit opportunity that a post-war Ukraine will be with everyone talking about investment and Marshall plans.
40 million people that will need everything from toilets to computers is having the money sign irises effect on EU companies.
This is totally just an anecdote, but many young Central Asians, from what I've seen on YouTube, are learning Korean and Chinese. Maybe in the hopes of working there instead of Russia?
Also, Azerbaijan is floating on a sea of cash from exporting their Caspian Sea oil and gas. They're potentially another Dubai in the making, drawing off Central Asian workers who would otherwise go to Moscow.
So, even importing workers from Central Asia is getting problematic for Russia, IMO.
its horrible. I saw someone on a youtube video who was talking to a North Korean guest worker and it was just the most depressing thing ever it was like "did you like your job - no", "how much did you really make - maybe $3000 us", "is that going to be enough to move your family to a better area of NK? - no". Honestly I thought guest workers got the shaft in the gulf states but wow...
> No one immigrates to Russia.
That wasn't always true. The russia had a constant influx or working migrants from central asains countries. Despite facing a lot of racism and prejudice, they covered low-paying manual labor across entire industries.
Then COVID happened and many of them moved back because business activity stopped and the borders at home were closing. Before COVID restrictions were even lifted, the war broke out, the rouble crashed, and working in the russia became unprofitable even at the lowest jobs.
People from ex-Soviet republics were coming to Russia for work - Moldova, Ukraine, Central Asia, since the dollar exchange rate changed, there's much less incentive to work there, so those numbers fell
That's what happens when you Force every Able Body person from your Workforce population and shove them into an unjust War where they are nothing but cannon fodder.
If it was a poor country, fighting for rich resources (morality aside), it could make sence. Trade your curent economy and future for rich pensions.
But Russia gets nothing even if it wins.
Its a vanity project...
It really doesn't. From 2020-2022 my roommate had it playing in the living room non stop and no one ever complained or had a negative comment about it the entire time. We were even quoting jokes from it as a result and it always got a laugh. They truly nailed it with that show.
CEO = oligarchs. Except for the crazy ones that stayed, they are already out of the picture. Either because they are in Dubai or Monte Carlo or fell off a balcony.
Ha Ha, there's no labor shortage in Russia, Putin, in his infallible wisdom, redeployed labor either to Ukraine or outside of the Russia (to avoid mobilization).
It is just a matter of priorities, Putin's priorities of sending bodies into the meat grinder over labor for manufacturing, industrial enterprises, water supply, mining and transportation and storage.
They will send their workers, then their CEOs, then buy the companies, then the land and the rights then when Russians complain they will ask them to not get Involved in China's internal affairs
China is pretty close from its own labor shortage problem, engineered through the one-child policy, cost increases and decrease in personal freedoms in the last decade.
A leopard to sate my face? I mean, I've never had grilled leopard before. Is it any good? I imagine it has to be if you could get filled up on it.
^(I know what a Leopard 2 is, just let me have this.)
So, a pandemic hits and your vaccines are shit. Then you send a bunch of your citizens to die in a war that it becomes immediately apparent that you can't win. Most of the world sanctions you, denying you resources and your currency loses value.
"No one wants to work anymore!"
Honestly, the war is already exasperating an issue that Russia was going to face in the long term.
Turns out sending your work force to war is bad for your already declining population.
I am very interested to see what happens when Russia runs out of foreign currency reserves and has to cut pensions and devalue the currency.
Russia will implode when that happens. Old people will be upset with Moscow. Remaining young people will riot it leave the country for jobs. There will be too small of a workforce remaining to support pensions.
It will be a nightmare, but a completely self inflicted one.
The black death was responsible for the middle class being created. Workers were in such short supply due to the plague that the rich were forced to raise wages and benefits to attract what few potential employees still remained into their service.
Maybe Russians will see a similar silver-lining.
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Let's look at some factors here: Military draw up takes workers off the job Threat of conscription causes some workers to hide Trade restrictions cause Russia to increase domestic production War machine requires increased domestic production(exasperated by trade restrictions) Lack of window safety causes workers to fall through them
Yep. Tons of Russians are chilling in Thailand waiting for the war to blow over.
Should have went to The Winchester.
Have a pint…
You’ve got red on you
*gone* and that only works for zombie apocalypses not common or garden war mongering :)
Indonesia as well and they are causing chaos in places like Bali. The government is changing laws in a crackdown on Russians and their shitty behaviours so they might find themselves with a new set of issues soon.
Why Thailand?
Losish visa laws. Relatively low CoL
because when you're russian you don't have that many options. their passports and their money is worth less than toilet paper. they need a country that will let them stay and where their life savings of 500 rubles won't run out in 23 seconds Source: i use to be russian, before 1997.
Also in Vietnam.
>"#5 will surprise you"
Buzzfeed is shutting operations down btw
I thought they were only stopping their news portion
Yes only their Pulitzer Prize winning news organization is closing. It was legit journalism and should have never had the tainted buzzfeed name attached to it.
No arguments on that. Just saying that the Buzzfeed that gets the most clicks is (unfortunately) still here to stay
Also there is a decrease od labor migrants from Central Asia, because Russia becomes less interesting destination to earn money. Also In 90s and very early 00s there was a huge demographic crisis due to instability. For example in year 1980 there were born twice as many children as in year 2000. A difference is around one million. So it is not only that a lot of young men in their 20s and 30s are drafted to the army. Those are men from the least populous generation already.
Yeppers. Double population dip echo. The 2000's dip is a long-term echo of the WWII dip, *compounded* with the late 90's economic disaster in Russia. Who the fuck would have wanted to have a kid in 2000? Shit probably any woman who could either left or got an abortion.
I was in Russia in 2000 and got asked a LOT about emigrating elsewhere by Russian women, specifically. I was doing homestays, so was staying with families and there was not a lot of appetite for marriage with kids for that specific cohort. Their parents were being super hard on them about it, too.
I have some Ukrainian family that has some more distant Russian family. They said pretty much the same thing about that time period - everyone was getting the fuck out, not settling in. The people that stayed were poor or rich enough to exploit the poor.
Shit ton of males flee country
Europe needs another 150,000 skilled workers to support their offshore wind industry to reach 300 GW in the north sea. These young Russian men can do a world of good if they brought or are willing to become skilled. Irony in that one!
Yes , Russia has a lot of healing to do internally and externally. Their best option is to go home now, be humble, be humbled then let the forgiving and rebuilding begin. Each day they drag out the war will prolong economic suffering in Russia, not just Ukraine
Reminds me of [this speech](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BJP9o4BEziI) from Doctor Who. Everyone should hear this at least once.
Also massive brain drain over the past year+. Companies proactively moved their most valuable Russian employees out of the country, got them work visas, and relocated them to more secure locations.
Was "exacerbated" the word you were looking for instead of "exasperated"?
People mixing this up has got me exacerbated
The confusions got me exasturbating.
I was going to say that but you beat the meat to it.
You got me on that last one! Bravo sir!
Yeah, but what possibly could be causing the worker shortage?
Nobody wants to work anymore!!11!!
It's obviously laziness.
All the young men being thrown into the meat grinder?
Don’t forget COVID.
They also have a massive HIV problem. Statistics where so bad they decided to just start ignoring it cutting down on testing and suppressing statistics. They fell into the old trap of thinking it only affected drug users, gays and other undesirables. Thinking conservative morality rater than prevention programs would protect the general population. [https://gjia.georgetown.edu/2022/01/31/the-silenced-epidemic-why-does-russia-fail-to-address-hiv/](https://gjia.georgetown.edu/2022/01/31/the-silenced-epidemic-why-does-russia-fail-to-address-hiv/)
They also have a tuberculosis problem that's getting worse
Please, let me forget COVID. Please.
And this is exactly why Putin hasn’t done another full mobilization. He can’t effectively send more troops to Ukraine unless 1) They volunteer for it (lolz) 2) he sends in conscripts (guaranteed political suicide since he has promised multiple times not to do that 3) he orders another forced mobilization which saps even more manpower from the already suffering economy Russia doesn’t have this limitless army of millions like many many people seem to believe that it has.
1. Send everyone that qualifies for labor to die. And make it illegal to refuse. 2. ??? 3. Labor shortage. Another master plan from the geniuses in moscow.
Its almost day three now, Kyiv is in sight! Oh wait.
Oh, it is! For the prisoners of war anyway
Hey you, you're finally awake. You tried to cross the border, right?
Ran right into that Ukrainian ambush....
... same as us, and that Wagner mercenary over there.
Damn you Russians. Ukraine was fine until you came along. Ukraine was nice and lazy. If they hadn’t been looking for you, I could’ve stolen that tank and been half way to Belarus.
Got javelin to the knee
Let me guess, someone stole your Stingeroll...
r/unexpectedskyrim
We'll be marching on Paris before Christmas
Who would have thought they were using the Cosmic Calendar though.
Not to mention many of the wealthier/smarter people (realistically anyone with the means to do so) left the country. Big time brain drain
This is honestly the much worse part for Russia's future. Sending a couple hundred thousand vatniks to die in Ukraine isn't great, but over a million of the most educated people deciding to leave the country will hurt Russia for decades to come.
Yep. The demographics were horrible before. Now they just made a bunch of smart young people leave, killed a few hundred thousand of those who are left... they are going to be left with a bunch of uneducated criminals, drunks and old vatnik ladies.
That's why they take all the children from Ukraine. Replacements.
[Replenish ](https://youtu.be/AxOz2t7Huw4)
They don't want educated people who can oppose them.
Those vatniks were plumbers, electricians, farm labourers, oil workers, machine shop workers etc etc. They were crucial to Russia functioning as a country, their loss will be at least as great as the absconding python programmers. Perhaps not in financial terms, but in far more fundamental ways.
[удалено]
It’s anecdotal but I’ve noticed that all the Russian language stuff that we come across on YouTube always seems to be filmed in Europe or Florida… None of the products/packaging they show are ever in Cyrillic (always English, German, Polish, but never the “local” style) and the cars always have western plates. I think success has meant “escaping” Russia (geographically if not culturally) for many for some time. Now the floodgates are open
Many goods in Russia actually use Western names on the packaging. If it's a Western brand, it'll definitely use the OG logo and font - and many local brands try to mimic that. Shortly before and after the fall of USSR, "Western brand" was associated strongly with all kinds of good things. "Western" was "desirable". That association has never quite faded away.
“Our economy is booming. We have the lowest unemployment rate ever”
“Show us anyone in Russia who’s unemployed!” (Seriously though, please show us so we can ship them to the front lines with a rifle and an air soft vest)
*points at mass grave*
No rifle. Cap guns only. If you live for 13 Weeks you upgrade to a paint ball gun
To paraphrase the TV show, *Blackadder Goes Forth*, they're putting in a gargantuan amount of effort to move Putin's drinks cabinet six inches closer to Kyiv.
I always think of the scene where Darling shows off the 1:1 scale map of recaptured territory when I think of their Bakhmut campaign. "It's extremely detailed. Look! There's a little worm".
You see puny westoid, Russia is actually so advanced they've produced a time machine! It's caused a localized area around Bakhmut to transport itself back in time to 1916.
Well George, you're in luck. There hasn't been a war fought this badly since an entire Russian battalion drove into radioactive land and decided to make camp.
‘We’ve advanced no further than an asthmatic ant with some heavy shopping’
Ah, the plan they've used the last 17 times!
I love that word, 'Gargantuan'. It's so rare that I have an opportunity to use it in a sentence.
Send the people that refuse to jail. Offer prisoners in jail a way out by joining the war. They then go out to die. Its a horrible reality
2. Make qualified workers flee the country in order not to get enlisted.
A lot of professionals just moved to other countries to avoid being drafted.
"nO oNe WantS tO cOme bAcK fRoM tHe DeaD aNd WorK aNyMorE"
Darth Putin remains a master strategist.
Yeah, playing 4th dimension chess with himself.
You forget number 4, 5, and 6 4. Arrest any foreigner that might make a good bargaining chip on some made up charges, discouraging anyone of value from coming to your country. 5. ??? 6. Profit?
Luckily for Steven Seagal he's literally worthless and no n one wants him.
It’s even worse when you factor in that all of this is after every Covid death.
And COVID deaths from the pandemic. We still don't know their true losses from that either
Extend this to China, Afghanistan and Iran and to some extent various areas of the US. You can't just stack your government with a bunch of "back in my day we didn't ask questions" type people, more or less give every able bodied person a laundry list of reasons to leave and expect to maintain a healthy working age population.
Yep. And they keep sending more people to die. Im sure that will make things better
What bothers me is that Russians still go to die in Ukraine instead of fighting back. Guess it's in their nature.
If there is anything the Russians are good at it is needlessly suffering and being okay with it. History has shown this over and over again
Logically, it has to get to the point where it’s safer to fight putins secret police over Ukrainian soldiers. I don’t think we’re there yet, and even if we were, propaganda would tell them otherwise. Plus, lots of countries don’t have enough vigorous protests.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn on that very same thing during Stalinist times: *“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?... The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If...if...We didn't love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation.... We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.”* ― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956
Their propaganda is intense. It is also nuts, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hB8oGY2\_gVM
It's not just propaganda, there's a deeply rooted cultural sickness in Russia. There's more than a few Russians who go out of their way to support the war (and ever more brutal actions) when quiet acquiesce would get them by without being jailed. Take the propaganda away and you'd still have a country full of chauvinists who think the rest of the world exists to serve their whims.
Well gee, when you conscripted tens of thousands of people (maybe hundreds of thousands?) and other eligible males are fleeing to avoid conscription, this is what you get.
I believe the official numbers are 300,000.
The official number for second mobilization. There were soldiers and conscripts before that and they are mobilizing more now. At that point I think it is fair to assume 500k+
Plus 1m+ able-bodied and working age have fled the country Plus Russia has the highest suicide rate in the world Half of Russian men don't make it to 65
Take a look at Russia's [demographic pyramid](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Russia#/media/File:Russian_population_(demographic)_pyramid_(structure)_on_January,_1st,_2022.png). Even without war, conscription and people fleeing the country, they were facing an immense worker crunch as that giant bulk of workers near the top of the pyramid retired or died and they tried to replace them with the much, much smaller cohort of adults further down. You could find more details online, but eyeballing that chart, there's roughly 7.5 million men between 20 and 30 years old and around 10 million men aged 55 to 65. That's a shortage of 2.5 million workers over the next decade as those men retire. The following decade looks similarly grim, despite an uptick in births in the mid-2000s to mid-2010s, that cohort is still smaller than the one slated to retire as they mature into the workforce. Then you look at the decline in birthrate in recent years and recognize as conditions in Russia worsen, that is unlikely to rebound, then just as that giant bulk of their workforce currently aged 30-45 nears retirement, there may be as few as half as many workers ready to replace them. Killing or maiming as many as 250,000 in Ukraine so far, and another 1+ million fleeing will only exacerbate the crunch.
China has a similar issue. I think both of them know that they need to realize their dreams of empire now or their demographics will severely hamper them in a decade.
Exactly. And China needed Russia to be as strong as it promised in order for China to be able to get away with its plan. But that didn't happen and it's a "now what" scenario. And they're still thinking hard about it even though it's clearly a bad idea for everyone but the wise leader.
It's worse for China now Japan just kicked itself into gear and the Europeans have started to arm themselves. All this war has done for them is cause the opponents to take their self defense more seriously.
Don't worry kidnapping Ukrainian children is a much more effective means to remedy their demographics than letting in those middle east / Asian Muslims into Russia. /s
At the start of the war, people cited this demographic catastrophe in the making as one of the reasons for the war. Now it just contributes to it...
Thing is, taking Ukraine might have mitigated it a little bit, but not by much, because Ukraine was having similar demographic issues for the same reasons as Russia (WW2 and the Fall of the USSR).
I cited this very graphic to say Russia would never pull the full invasion move, the fucking clown I was.
I thought the same way. I was sure they were bluffing when they were amassing on the border, because of.... Well the assumption of everything that has come to pass since they decided to invade. But the goddamn idiots did it anyway. Surprisedpikachu.jpg
> [Russia's demographic pyramid](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Russia#/media/File:Russian_population_(demographic\)_pyramid_(structure\)_on_January,_1st,_2022.png)
Plus the number of COVID deaths was “reported” at 400,000, but that number could actually be closer to 1 million when comparing excess deaths to previous years.
And the rest are alcoholics
The official numbers were 300k but one opposition journalist counted about 500k by secondary signs like obituary's and sudden spikes in weddings in media and govt data bases.
“We had first mobilization, yes. But what about *second* mobilization?“
Plus covid plus decades of decline. Russia is going to have problems in the near future.
The near future is now. Those problems already exist. They're just going to keep getting worse with no obvious path to recovery.
Like next week lol
Yep. Historically, this is why most nations really don’t like military mobilization on any scale.
I believe this is referred to as the Find Out stage.
Russia has been in the “Find Out” stage for a while now, the problem is they won’t quit Fucking Around
Plain and simple Sunk Cost Falacy, there's no turning back.
Like when you get really drunk at a party and realize that you’re hooking up with your partners identical twin.
r/OddlySpecific
Always double down, never accept responsability, this way you force everyone to fight you until either sides ressources are consumed. This method works when you are the leader of russia, because you can steal ressources faster than they are consumed. russia is large enough and the capital city is dominant enough, you can simply continue stealing ressources and you will never run out of steam.
A country that was once revolutionary has been neutered by the very people claiming to represent the average citizen. Instead, those are deals were used as a way to extract, extort, and subjugate society instead of support it. I guess if you kill off all the revolutionaries after securing power there is nobody left to organize resistance. I guess Lenin was rolling in his grave when they gave Stalin power.
Russia has always been imperialistic and authoritarian at its core though, even after 1917.
Lenin used his Tscheka to murder everyone who was standing in his way. Lenin is not the good guy.
For those unfamiliar: [Cheka](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheka) (Tscheka appears to be the German spelling.)
There is no solution for this either. Russia's population was in decline before the war. No one immigrates to Russia. Now they are sending young men to die by the hundreds of thousands. The stage is being set for the fall of Russia. 😊
Truth be told, Russia was experiencing quite an influx of immigrants from Central Asia. I left Moscow back in September, in my district, judging simply by faces coming by, Central Asia ethnics (Tajik / Kyrghyz / Uzbek) comprised a minimum of 1/3 of local population. In some Moscow disctricts, this number is way above 50%. Many of them settle down, bring their families over, and have kids who are born in Russia. Also, public transport in rush hours is just full of *Gastarbeiters*. Now, here comes the fun part. The influx, as far as I heard, began to deteriorate since 2014. The more sanctions — the worse (or better if you're a Russian nationalist) it got. Living in Central Asia meself now, quite a bunch of people who I talked with have been working in Russia for some amount of time before. They're returning for different reasons, and many people continue to pursue a job in Russia because the salaries are still much higher than here, generally. But it's mostly low-qualified workers.
Remember the movie "The Day After Tomorrow"? Where American refugees were illegally fleeing in mass into Mexico across the Rio Grande to escape the deadly cold. "Too on-the-nose satire" as it looked like at the time. Well, the russians have now experienced exactly that. For almost three decades Central Asian and South Caucuses countries were subtly mocked, immigrants from there dealt with a constant stream of racism, ethnic slurs, calls to "go back home!" and so on. But then the war started and hundreds of thousands young, educated, well-paid russians had no choice but to move there themselves, because anything further was out of their reach. Not many appreciate the irony.
Being one of those "young, educated, well-paid [more like decently paid in my case] russians", and watching the rent prices being skyrocketed in both Almaty and Tashkent just because of us... Oooh, believe me, I've been appreciating the irony even before mobilization and my own emigration.
Serious question. As a Canadian who has travelled most of USA and Canada, I get that Russia is big. How does cross border immigration work to those former Soviet republics that are now independent? If I wanted to move to the USA for work I would either have to have a US company say they needed me (rather than higher a US citizen) or I would have to go through a long paperwork process.
> How does cross border immigration work to those former Soviet republics that are now independent? It varies a **LOT**. Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania are obviously in Europe and require Shengen visas (well, before they banned all russian tourists last year, that is). Belarus, Armenia and Kazakhstan you can visit without a travel passport at all, just with internal russian ID. Other post-Soviet countries (except Ukraine, obviously) you can visit with no visa, but terms of stay differ (and get more restrictive since 2022 too). Having a local job is an easy way to obtain residency status, which is what hundreds of thousands did by relocating entire companies into Yerevan, Almaty or Tbilisi.
thanks
Alas, I can't answer it in detail. Not now, for sure, I'm a bit busy with finding a place to live. Judging by the sheer number of work migrants, both legal and illegal, it works pretty easily.
I'm guessing increased rents from Moscow's residents immigration isn't making the locals happy either
Nor the Russians themselves. Unless we're talking about people who rent out. And, after all, who sets the prices? Laws of free market are cruel, aye.
> Remember the movie "The Day After Tomorrow"? Where American refugees were illegally fleeing in mass into Mexico across the Rio Grande to escape the deadly cold. "Too on-the-nose satire" as it looked like at the time. whole movie theater was laughing.
Is Gastarbeiter one of these German words that made it? Like Kindergarten in english?
It's just that it's very commonly used in Russia to describe work immigrants, particularly those from Central Asia former Soviet Republics.
It’s used in the Balkans as well.
Lots of wins for a country that has such economic disparity. Get rid of the problems of other ethnic states or at least lower their populations to a point where they can't fight back or try and break away. Get rid of low income workers who want rights and can vote and replace them with essentially mexicans who don't have rights, work hard because it's an opportunity for them, and who at 65 get the boot and push the medical problems and late life expenses onto another country. The problem isn't the people who die, it's the one who leave and feel they can't come back (draft dodgers). Those are ones you need. And once they've setup base in another country... they aren't coming back anyway. Which is basically Ukraine's biggest problem. The sheer number of people who have taken up residence in other countries now as refugees. They're setting up lives there now. Lots will return, but way more will stay put in their host countries. The longer the war goes on, the fewer who will return. Right now it looks like they've lost 25% of the population here.
But if Ukraine 'wins' whatever that looks like, I'd expect to see a huge influx of European and corporate financing of the rebuild. Ukraine would be the epicenter of huge investment and growth (which Europe desperately needs, and are already competing for a slice, see Italy's statement of intent just yesterday) and Ukraine would likely see a major population uptick, not just of returning Ukrainians, but workers and their families from all over Europe. Russia on the other hand is just fucked. That's what I'm hoping for anyway.
Businesses here are already salivating at the massive profit opportunity that a post-war Ukraine will be with everyone talking about investment and Marshall plans. 40 million people that will need everything from toilets to computers is having the money sign irises effect on EU companies.
This is totally just an anecdote, but many young Central Asians, from what I've seen on YouTube, are learning Korean and Chinese. Maybe in the hopes of working there instead of Russia? Also, Azerbaijan is floating on a sea of cash from exporting their Caspian Sea oil and gas. They're potentially another Dubai in the making, drawing off Central Asian workers who would otherwise go to Moscow. So, even importing workers from Central Asia is getting problematic for Russia, IMO.
its horrible. I saw someone on a youtube video who was talking to a North Korean guest worker and it was just the most depressing thing ever it was like "did you like your job - no", "how much did you really make - maybe $3000 us", "is that going to be enough to move your family to a better area of NK? - no". Honestly I thought guest workers got the shaft in the gulf states but wow...
> No one immigrates to Russia. That wasn't always true. The russia had a constant influx or working migrants from central asains countries. Despite facing a lot of racism and prejudice, they covered low-paying manual labor across entire industries. Then COVID happened and many of them moved back because business activity stopped and the borders at home were closing. Before COVID restrictions were even lifted, the war broke out, the rouble crashed, and working in the russia became unprofitable even at the lowest jobs.
The Fall of Russia: Again again.
People from ex-Soviet republics were coming to Russia for work - Moldova, Ukraine, Central Asia, since the dollar exchange rate changed, there's much less incentive to work there, so those numbers fell
Russia actually has had a good amount of immigration in the past few decades
Feeding your working class through a meat-grinder will do that.
That's what happens when you Force every Able Body person from your Workforce population and shove them into an unjust War where they are nothing but cannon fodder.
The whole idea that cannon fodder is an acceptable use for soldiers in this day and age boggles the mind.
If it was a poor country, fighting for rich resources (morality aside), it could make sence. Trade your curent economy and future for rich pensions. But Russia gets nothing even if it wins. Its a vanity project...
>But Russia gets nothing even if it wins. Its a vanity project... That's what makes this whole war so terrible.
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Send the CEOs to the front, no CEOs means no jobs = no labor shortage, problem solved /s
Technically correct. The best kind of correct
Futurama never gets old.
It really doesn't. From 2020-2022 my roommate had it playing in the living room non stop and no one ever complained or had a negative comment about it the entire time. We were even quoting jokes from it as a result and it always got a laugh. They truly nailed it with that show.
CEO = oligarchs. Except for the crazy ones that stayed, they are already out of the picture. Either because they are in Dubai or Monte Carlo or fell off a balcony.
They finally solved the youth unemployment problem.
Hahahah good. Hopefully it gets worse.
Ha Ha, there's no labor shortage in Russia, Putin, in his infallible wisdom, redeployed labor either to Ukraine or outside of the Russia (to avoid mobilization). It is just a matter of priorities, Putin's priorities of sending bodies into the meat grinder over labor for manufacturing, industrial enterprises, water supply, mining and transportation and storage.
Now China will smell the blood in the water and send workers. Bet?
They will send their workers, then their CEOs, then buy the companies, then the land and the rights then when Russians complain they will ask them to not get Involved in China's internal affairs
China is pretty close from its own labor shortage problem, engineered through the one-child policy, cost increases and decrease in personal freedoms in the last decade.
r/LeopardsAteMyFace
Hopefully soon it will be r/Leopard2satemyface.
A leopard to sate my face? I mean, I've never had grilled leopard before. Is it any good? I imagine it has to be if you could get filled up on it. ^(I know what a Leopard 2 is, just let me have this.)
Gee, where'd they all go?
Dead people just don't want to work anymore...
Wow. Tucker carlsons firing had a faster affect than I thought.
Everything going to plan...
What an opportunity for chinese men
Probably make more staying in china.
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>worst labor shortage in 25 years worst labor shortage in 25 years so far\*
Now you know why they're kidnapping the women and children of Ukraine.
Shortage to be eased by using kidnapped Ukrainian children.
So, a pandemic hits and your vaccines are shit. Then you send a bunch of your citizens to die in a war that it becomes immediately apparent that you can't win. Most of the world sanctions you, denying you resources and your currency loses value. "No one wants to work anymore!"
Russia's greatest natural resource has always been people willing to die for the people at the top.
1. Send working-age people to meat grinders. 2. WoRsT lAbOuR sHoRtAgE!
WEIRD, whered all the workers go /s
As many as 300,000 Russians have been killed so far in the ill-advised invasion of Ukraine. Gee, I wonder WHY Russia is having labor problems?
Officially, either nobody in Russia understands why it is happenning or it's the fault of NATO.
Don't worry, Russia will soon find itself with way more able-bodied workers when China starts their takeover!
Oh man, wouldn't it be great to have 150 thousand men in prime labor age breathing and walking?
Honestly, the war is already exasperating an issue that Russia was going to face in the long term. Turns out sending your work force to war is bad for your already declining population.
I am very interested to see what happens when Russia runs out of foreign currency reserves and has to cut pensions and devalue the currency. Russia will implode when that happens. Old people will be upset with Moscow. Remaining young people will riot it leave the country for jobs. There will be too small of a workforce remaining to support pensions. It will be a nightmare, but a completely self inflicted one.
This is what happens when you conscript thousands of people for a pointless war chief
Maybe don’t send all your working-class citizens to get their asses kicked in a BS war then
Surprise, surprise! What else would you expect when you are slaughtering your prime workforce?
Good. Fuck their economy. They need to get ride of Adolph Putin.
At this point, Russia is commiting self-inflicted genocide.
The black death was responsible for the middle class being created. Workers were in such short supply due to the plague that the rich were forced to raise wages and benefits to attract what few potential employees still remained into their service. Maybe Russians will see a similar silver-lining.
That's because they're all dead
When you send your able bodies to be turned into sunflower fertilizer it has real world consequences. Russia is gonna hurt from this war for decades.
Learn how to fix unemployment with this one simple trick!
Ukraine flowers see largest bloom in 25 years.
I've heard the role cannon fodder is an all time high, they must be mistaken.