Another argument for alternative appstores
Wait…Apple’s still doing business with/in Russia?
Well, just a month ago they couldn’t pay out a bounty to Kaspersky for a 0day exploit they found due to the sanctions, so this seems a little off.
Pretty much every brand, that was doing business there before, does it the exact same way, but under a shell company name. Capitalism doesn’t give a fuck who’s doing what, and how wrong it is
I remember an article from last year or so that German washing machines ended up being sold to Russia through Kazakhstan and other places where they stripped the microchips to repurpose them in their missiles.
Lots of western companies are. Not everything is subject to sanctions — the U.S. government still buys uranium from Russia and there’s cooperation on space launches — but even the companies that tried to divest for moral reasons found it challenging, to say the least. The ones who tried often had their assets essentially stolen or sold for pennies on the dollar to a Putin loyalist oligarch.
I’m not sure what Apple is doing there besides having the App Store. They did stop all exports so any new Apple products there are smuggled and probably way more expensive. On balance, I think it’s better keeping the App Store and software updates available to Russians. Some dissidents and journalists use Apple products too and you don’t want their devices left insecure.
probably way more expensive
Nope. iPhone 15 pro max 128 gb could be bought in Moscow for 109490 руб, which is $15 higher than in the US.
Before the war Apple had a weird price policy in Russia when they just multiplied the official US price by the factor of 100 to get the price in roubles. It resulted in a +30-60% increase in prices.
So… the war has actually dropped the price for the Apple products dramatically for regular russians. The only problem with the Apple products the war has introduced is that you can’t pay in AppStore
Well of course it does when pretty dumb and easily visible schemes to do that do not lead to prison sentences and huge fines.
All those government regulation supporter types look right at this and don’t realize that this is the answer to “why people of more libertarian views on economics don’t want everyone to be happy”. Because government regulation just gives someone power to collect bribes when there’s a power difference involved.
God forbid Apple take a 0.01% hit to their profits to allow the flow of factual information to people stuck in Russia under a monstrous dictator.
The vast majority of russians support imperialism and a majority hold genocidal views (they would never openly agree to this, but on an outcome basis they do support eradication of Ukrainian culture and not only).
Even to this day, every russian with a smartphone has access to uncensored youtube available within 10 secs on their phone.
Not saying what apple did was right, just pointing out the “lack of factual information” narrative is largely incorrect. It’s more a lack of respect for the rights others, nihilism and overwhelming supremacism; no VPN or technology is going to solve this.
I’m not talking about the people happily living in self-delusion. We have plenty of those in the US too. Free information channels are still important and can be a crushing loss to the people who do care about reality.
There is different people in different countries. No question about that. And free information channels are definitely very important. My argument is that in the case of russia, this factors don’t really come into play in a meaningful way.
Information channels even after the full scale invasion are available and easy to access, it was less restrictive before Feb 24 2022, but the difference is somewhat marginal. Access to information isn’t going to magically change the imperialist, supremacist mindset of the overwhelming majority of russians.
It’s not an access to information problem, it’s a social and cultural problem. I’ve lived there for 10 years (in addition to living a decade in north america and many years in asia), the imperialist/genocidal mindset has survived 3 regimes (Tsarism, USSR, authoritarian capitalism) with very different technological currents and economic structure profiles. It’s not going away just like that.
Full disclosure: I am Ukrainian, but I would argue you can come to the same conclusions by taking a critical look at their history, current attitudes (even among the “liberal” opposition) and broad worldview.
Just wanted to share my thoughts. Re-reading my posts, I think I come off a bit more pushy than I wanted to.
The vast majority of russians support imperialism and a majority hold genocidal views (they would never openly agree to this, but on an outcome basis they do support eradication of Ukrainian culture and not only).
That’s a major simplification. The fact that russians do not stand against a genocidal war doesn’t mean that the vast majority do support it.
I disagree. While my statement did not include any kind of elaboration. This is not a simplification.
At the very least a strong majority (and I am being conservative) support the annexation of Ukrainian territories and elimination of Ukrainian culture and language in areas under occupation. On the quantitative side this is confirmed by various polling initiatives that use different methodologies (including in-direct polling with attempts to estimate preference falsification).
On the qualitative side, you can look at genocides committed in the last ~100 years by the russians (and there are several, includes less well known ones) and review the attitudes towards these crimes among various socio-political groups (not necessarily in a purely quantitative manner).
I have one interesting anecdote. Currently among the “liberal” russian opposition there is a big debate around a 3 hour YT series about the 90s in russia.
One bit topic that was completely excluded was the actions of russians in Chechnya; the creators (Navalniy’s organization) said it was out of scope.
During their intervention in Chechnya in the 90s, they killed approximately 5% of the civilian population; it would be like if 7.5 million russian civilians were killed.
Don’t get me wrong, a relatively small % of russians would openly admit to that they support extermination of Ukrainian identity (still 10s of millions). But even among the reminder, there is a strong undercurrent of supremacism, a desire of expansion that de facto is support for genocide.
The vast majority of russians support imperialism and a majority hold genocidal views (they would never openly agree to this, but on an outcome basis they do support eradication of Ukrainian culture and not only).
Don’t pretend there’s any difference to yourself in this though. Just different allowed targets.
Even to this day, every russian with a smartphone has access to uncensored youtube available within 10 secs on their phone.
You have access to whole ass uncensored Web yet I’m certain you don’t know shit about siege and ethnic cleansing of Artsakh, while the 3 mediators there were (and formally still are) USA, France and Russia.
And the USA representative publicly said they won’t allow ethnic cleansing days before it happened. And, say, in case of Ukraine they well knew months before and were very loud with warnings. And after said ethnic cleansing they immediately started talking the way it became clear that they supported it. And no sanctions have been put on Azerbaijan (which is also a big proxy for Russian strategic exports and imports, but that’s unimportant, of course).
So being Armenian I say shut up.
Also no, vast majority of Russians don’t support anything such, they are just in apathy because kinda big protests were not successful in changing the government.
I’ll add that when those protests were happening, “the West” mostly supported Putin by recognizing his stolen elections, just like they did during Chechen wars and, of course, with opposition to Yeltsin’s fascist tendencies. Cause there were lots of money to be made in Russia for politicians making those decisions.
Any such moralizing westerner should go to the frontline and replace some Ukrainian life in the total number of the dead.
Just different allowed targets.
I’m sorry, I can’t get past that first paragraph. What “targets” do you think most people are okay with genociding? The fact that you think everyone has a group they’d be fine with wiping off the face of the earth completely is extremely concerning.
I’m of the opinion that Apple services ought to be geofenced out of Russia entirely.
Google too.
