>I don’t understand the sentiment calling it a vulnerability

  - You're Germany.
  - You join NATO for protection from Russia, an actor with a long history of military aggression[1]
  - Your export economy is based on manufacturing.
  - The energy driving your manufacturing sector is ~60% cheap gas from Russia, your military aggressive partner.
  - Russia invades Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine in 2014 to no ones surprise
  - Leaders of USA and Eastern Europe warn you of Russia's influence on your economy
  - You ignore all this and build another gas pipeline from Russia
  - You are surprised Russia invades Ukraine(again) and gas sanctions cripple your manufacturing economy

MFW German leaders and HN commenters see no vulnerability in this.

Someone please stop the planet, I wish to get off, my sanity can't handle this level of stupidity anymore.

[1] https://natoassociation.ca/a-timeline-of-russian-aggression/

> Someone please stop the planet, I wish to get off, my sanity can't handle this level of stupidity anymore.

News from an American here, on an antidepressant and deathly fat from stress eating:

I’m worried about the eventual welfare of those protesting. I’m hearing that people of color are being told by their pastor to stay home rather than protest so as not to risk being used as scapegoats.

My family and friends are divided and still dividing over politics. I recently was crazily ranted to by big-personality entrepreneur immigrant that told me his story of how easy it was to come to the states, rags-to-riches, and how they were supporter of the administration because “they don’t want to pay taxes for illegals”. Part of the half of the U.S. that supports the administration isn’t just brainwashed, but has a very strong, angry, and desperate look, and the other part says “just wait four years and it will be over”, but it won’t; before the election, this party used gerrymandering and legal action to ensure that election, then post-election replaced election officials and many government officials.

The DOE is claiming anti-semitism and the need to have viewpoint diversity to deny funding to schools that are known for their open viewpoints.

And yet somehow I’m still surprised when they kill the CVE program.

It’s an ever-escalating circus of chaos, because our administration thinks this was needed to ensure U.S. interests, because those vulnerable in the U.S. were manipulated by outside actors and internal power-hungry politicians and zealots, and all is spun to just feed into the chaotic nationalism that is trying to one-up every other dictator that has ever lived.

To top all of this off, AI, which I use daily, will take my job before I retire, and I have no backup plan.

Despite all of this, I have the will to live, to support those whom I love (even the crazy ones), and to try to make the world better. I continue to pray for direction on all of this.

Follow the money...

"German journalist dubbed the ‘Putin connoisseur’ had secret book deal with Russian oligarch" - https://www.icij.org/investigations/cyprus-confidential/germ...

"Russia's best friends in Germany: AfD and BSW" - https://www.dw.com/en/russias-best-friends-in-germany-afd-an...

"12 Germans who got played by Putin" - https://www.politico.eu/article/blame-germany-russia-policy/

The sources you mention are straight out of a propoganda handbook. Not worth the read and hugely fabricated fake sensational news.

Instead of countering a single fact, you labeled the whole thing. That’s usually how people protect a narrative, not challenge one.

Politico, ICIJ and Deutsche Welle are hardly unknown fringe sources with shady backgrounds

Except what Russia states and what Russia does are only aligned when it serves Russia. Russia stopped delivering gas through NordStream 1. After that, Germany took note of the danger and decided it would do better without that dependency.

https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2022/9/2/russias-gazprom-k...

> Germany took note of the danger and decided it would do better without that dependency.

So they just swapped dependencies. And it's not that the new dependency will have no strings attached.

Diversifying while keeping russian energy in the loop, as part of a risk-management strategy, would make more sense. Completely cutting off russian energy just gives more bargaining power to their new energy provider.

If we put half the effort into shoring up our institutions and reinforcing our shared norms and cooperative values as we are into "de-risking" everything, right now, and all at once, we'd all be in a much better place. Overnight we all just accepted that this new transactional, mercantile, hostile mentality was the way of things and the only way it can be. This is a self-fulfilling fatalistic prophecy and is going to move us backwards into a much worse, less prosperous world, empowering the bullies and the tyrants even more.

Greed got us here. There's a rules based world possible where Russia sells gas to Germany. Russia did not transform from an free and democratic society with respect for human rights and the international community into an authoritarian dictatorship overnight; we turned a blind eye to this when it suited our short term economic needs and that is how we allow ourselves to sleepwalk into the situation we are now. Had we held first to our principles we'd have either had the impact the neoliberal trade focused policies were supposed to eventually deliver or at the very least not ended up with dependencies that gave such governments leverage and eventually blow up in our faces. Had we instead put human rights first and foremost we would not have created and empowered these monsters.

Same thing with Trump's reelection in the US. By all rights in a functioning democracy Trump should be sitting in jail right now along with the January 6th insurrectionists. The Biden administration had 4 years to prosecute, but felt it was not politically expedient to do so. Likewise what is left of the GOP within the republican caucus right now faces a similar choice between short term benefits and upholding the principles which nearly everyone in congress and even the Trump administration has previously claimed they would uphold.

> Had we held first to our principles

*our alleged principles

Something can't be called a "principle" when it is only selectively applied.

Except that Russia did not deliver (not any meaningful amount anyways), when the pipelines were still intact. And yes, they pretended to be willing, firing off a series of excuses sufficiently transparent to make it clear between the lines that it's a demonstration of power. Get your history straight: "Russia stated clearly if would continue" has between zero and negative value.

> There is still a working pipeline available and Russia stated clearly if would continue delivering gas, if Germany wants to.

You conveniently leave out that minor detail that it was RUSSIA who stopped the gas.

Germany tried hard to keep it going, even making a sanction-exemption or a Siemens turbine repaired in Canada, which according to Russia was needed. Only that when they were to receive it nothing happened, gas stopped anyway.

Nordstream 1 which had if I recall correctly one working turbine left and went into inspection during which an oil spill was noticed and the restart of the service was postponed. Shortly after Nordstream 1 Pipeline A + B and Nordstream 2 Pipeline A was been blown up. It’s up to debate if the oil spill which was uncovered during the inspection which postponed the gas delivery was a political move. The turbine, which underlies sanctions, should have been still in transit during that time and even if delivered useless.

There is still Nordstream 2 Pipeline B intact available to deliver gas and it uses Russian made turbines compared to Nordstream 1.

The whole discussion is very special to say the least if you leave out that some adversary blow up the infrastructure.

Russia refused to accept the turbine! It was in Germany, and Russia blocked the delivery.

"Moskau blockiert offenbar Weitertransport von Nord-Stream-1-Turbine" ("Moscow apparently blocks further transport of Nord Stream 1 turbine") -- https://www.rnd.de/politik/russland-blockiert-offenbar-weite...

I'm German, I followed those developments closely at the time. Russia refused to deliver gas! The blowing up of the pipes happened quite some time after that!

You also don't mention that German Gasprom, which controlled German gas reserves, emptied them just before the war! -- https://www.faz.net/aktuell/wirtschaft/gas-speicher-in-deuts... (German, paywall), -- https://www.zeit.de/news/2022-01/21/ungewoehnlich-leere-gass...

That shows that Russia prepared for using gas as an economic weapon against Germany especially well before they even started the war.

From the Zeit article:

German

> "Die Gasflüsse über die deutschen Grenzen sind unüblich niedrig für diese Jahreszeit - mit Ausnahme von Nord Stream 1, die sind konstant hoch", sagt Fabian Huneke. Es sei verwunderlich, dass vor dem Hintergrund der hohen Preise und der hohen Nachfrage die Gaslieferkapazitäten Richtung Europa so wenig genutzt würden. "Wenn Gazprom sich marktrational verhalten würde, würden sie die Gaslieferungen nach Europa auch durch die Pipelines, die durch Belarus und die Ukraine führen, verstärken." Den Grund für dieses Verhalten sieht der Energiemarktexperte in der Ukraine-Krise.

English, translated by Google

> "The gas flows across the German borders are unusually low for this time of year - with the exception of Nord Stream 1, which are consistently high," says Fabian Huneke. It is surprising that, given the high prices and high demand, the gas delivery capacities to Europe are so little used. "If Gazprom behaved in a market-rational manner, they would also increase gas supplies to Europe through the pipelines that run through Belarus and Ukraine." The energy market expert sees the reason for this behavior in the Ukraine crisis.

The transport of the turbine was accompanied by sanctions and each party didn’t wanted to get punished, awaiting exemption documents for delivery. As the article already states in the headline and further acknowledges in the content Russia was not refusing to get their turbine back but waiting for documents themselves which the article beautifully conceals with the little word ‘apparently’.

The unusual low gas storage reserves at the beginning of the year 2022 in Germany with 45% compared to usual 75% while Nordstream 1 is delivering at full capacity could be related to the sanctions which lead Poland to stop transit through the Jamal pipeline and other transit routes through Ukraine and possibly gas market trade activities. Having just the ‘economic weapon’ argument is lacking, especially in regard that Russian gas is still to today reaching Germany and it is in the interest of Russia to deliver.

> Moskau

Tangentially... how did the German name of the city/region get into _that_ form? Is it a loan from English?? Germany and Russia have been closely entwined for centuries.

Wikipedia has a comment which appears to make no sense:

> The [old] form Moskovĭ has left traces in other languages, including English: Moscow; German: Moskau; French: Moscou; Portuguese: Moscou, Moscovo; and Spanish: Moscú.

Seems its actually (in both German and English) developed from older Russian forms, and Russian shifted afterwards again: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moscow#Etymology

But all of the older forms include a /v/. How did that drop out of every language except Portuguese?

(There is an English term Muscovy for the region, but wiktionary suggests that it derives from the formal name given to the region in international Latin rather than deriving from Russian. In that case, a /w/ would also generate a letter V, so there's no explanatory power.)

U, v and w are all derived from the same letter v, for which no distinction existed in latin (same for i, j and y).

Apparently, when different languages started to make the distinction, they picked a different letter combination: ov, ou, ow, au, ú, etc. probably depending on the local way of pronouncing the word.

Same for latin ivvenis, modernized to juvenis, which gave young, jeune, jung, joven, etc.

The letters "U", "V", and "W" are all derived from the same letter, the Latin "V". The sounds /u/, /v/, and /w/ are different.

We're talking about a period many centuries after Latin phonology might have been relevant. The word doesn't come from Latin. Old English has no confusion between [v] and [w] to begin with; [w] is part of the phoneme /w/ and [v] is part of the phoneme /f/. In Middle English there's a distinction between /f/ and /v/, where we see French-derived words like village and vine distinguished from English-derived words like fill and fire, and from French-derived words like fine.

So what happened?

> Same for latin ivvenis, modernized to juvenis, which gave young, jeune, jung, joven, etc.

Please don't just invent things that sound good to you. Young and (German, I assume) jung don't come from Latin either.

> U, v and w are all derived from the same letter v, for which no distinction existed in latin (same for i, j and y).

Again, please don't just make up random non-facts. Latin has no letter J. It does recognize Y, as the Greek letter upsilon, which it distinguishes from all Latin vowels. The fact that Romance languages name "Y" the "Greek I" should have been a hint of this. You can hardly read any Latin that mentions Greeks without running into it; compare Pyramus, Thucydides.

NordStream 1 had been stopped from Russian side for nearly 4 months before this, with constantly shifting goal post excuses.