To put numbers to the relativity, for a somewhat smaller datacenter in Central Europe with a 100Gbit/s connection, the running Cost of transit is somewhere around 0.00004€ per GB, on a theoretically fully sustained connection(not realistic, also with no redundancy or hardware).
Peering is basically free(after initial buildout) with around 3k€ per 100Gbit/s (https://www.ams-ix.net/ams/pricing). This all excludes cost of investment for initial buildout and hardware.
On a scale on amazons level this becomes even cheaper, since operating your own network is cheaper than buying transit.
Hetzner charges 1,19€ per TB, amazon 90$(on the first 10 TB). So amazon probably doesnt really care about the price differences per region and went with a mixed calculation, since their margins are so absurdly huge.
also, major parts of the cost are in hardware and staffing/development, of which amazon has way more, due to the demands of SDN.
More Background, why this is in fact important: Gazprom Germania is also a critical part of the german Gas-Market, because it owns the largest gas-Storage with 1/5 of total capacity in Germany, major Gas Pipelines and Platforms for trading the ressource. This is both through Sub-companies Wingas and Astora.
It also has contracts with Gazprom in Russia with guaranteed Prices and Deliveries.
> It also has contracts with Gazprom in Russia with guaranteed Prices and Deliveries.
Is anyone under an illusion that Gazprom in Russia will honor these contracts, now that their branch was seized? And if not, what methods are there to enforce these contracts?
The Russians seized the planes, which can fly but need spares and checks. The Germans seized the pipelines and the storage. Both have some utility in the interim, but both are ultimately useless.
> Is anyone under an illusion that Gazprom in Russia will honor these contracts, now that their branch was seized?
In this case because both parties need it (for now) even through currently neither of them wants it. (Russia needs the money, Germany the Gas, if Russia could afford it they would already have cut of Gas to destabilize Germany. If Germany could afford it they would already have cut payments to force Russia to stop the war.)
Also I think some people misunderstand what sizing means in this context it doesn't mean "hey this is now ours" but is much more subtle and complex, and most important temporary by nature.
“We seized your property under exigent circumstances, but you better honor your contracts rather than cancel them under exigent circumstances!”
- NATO, apparently delusional
The idea people will “honor” contracts while you’re (illegally) seizing their property in effort to enact an economic siege of their nation is mental illness — either delusions or megalomania. That strategy doesn’t make sense.
I’m personally sad to see how deluded US and EU leaders are.
This is nonsense. Gazprom Germania attempted an illegal transfer of ownership. From what I can tell, Germany isn't appropriating anything. It's just seizing control in a regulatory measure.
I'm sorry, what did NATO seize again? It was Germany. Germany is not NATO. If you're going to participate in the discussion, at least keep your actors straight.
> Da die Gazprom Germania GmbH jedoch kritische Infrastruktur betreibe, müsse jeder Erwerb durch einen Nicht-EU-Investor vom Ministerium genehmigt werden. Unklar sei, wer wirtschaftlich und rechtlich hinter den beiden genannten Unternehmen stehe. Zudem habe der Erwerber "die Liquidierung der Gazprom Germania angeordnet, was, so lange der Erwerb nicht genehmigt ist, nicht rechtmäßig ist".
(Use Google Translate etc.)
So the sale had to be ratified by the ministry, which didn't happen. Gazprom ran afoul of the law, the government stepped in and took over temporarily.
But of course this is the internet, the more radical nonsense you spread, and the more emotional outrage your project, the more clicks you get...
Russia has just had its foreign reserves frozen. Those are debts too, which the West has repudiated. Why shouldn't Russia do the same in reverse?
Countries export solely to gain imports if they have any sense. If there are no imports to be had - due to sanctions - then there is no need to export. Far better, from Russia's point of view, that the oil is left in the ground, and the workers redeployed elsewhere. To the war effort for example.
If those workers are fine with a substantial fail in their QoL. It’s gonna be most painful for the oligarchs and people in their environment who are used to consuming massive amounts of foreign goods.
Btw even the USSR which was generally much more autarkic couldn’t survive without foreign currency for energy exports. What makes you think modern Russia could? Also it was illegal for workers to leave Russia back then, unlike now (so assuming there are countries willing to accept them they might be more likely to choose that over ‘being redirected to work in the war industry’.
"It’s gonna be most painful for the oligarchs and people in their environment who are used to consuming massive amounts of foreign goods."
If 'tax the rich' works and reduces the power of the rich, then hasn't the West just taxed the rich of Russia and reduced their power to remove Putin?
Democrats can't have it both ways. They propose a billionaire tax in the USA to reduce the power of the rich to interfere with people in charge, then actually implement a billionaire tax in Russia and expect it to increase their ability to interfere with people in charge. It's an illogical position to hold.
"Btw even the USSR which was generally much more autarkic couldn’t survive without foreign currency for energy exports. What makes you think modern Russia could?"
If there are sanctions in place, what are they going to spend the 'foreign currency' on?
You can't eat dollars.
"so assuming there are countries willing to accept them they might be more likely to choose that"
The 'leave for other countries' is a globalist position. Most ordinary people are rooted in social support constructs on the ground. They don't leave, and prefer their own country.
In fact the attitude to those who leave from those who remain is likely to be good riddance to bad rubbish.
Well supposedly over 200,000 left since the start of the war. If true, while it might not seems like a lot in relative terms, this is still a pretty huge deal. These people are likely generally more productive and educated than an average Russian and if this trends continues it does not bode well for the Russian economy. Of course politically this might benefit Putin since those people are very likely opposed to his regime. In any case Russia’s demographic situation is not great so an additional few million young people leaving might have huge negative consequences in the long term.
> West just taxed the rich of Russia and reduced their power to remove Putin?
Arguably no. They’ve lost access to some of their wealth in the west but their actual power relvant (in the form of companies they own in Russia is still in Russia). So the expectation is that loosing access to the west would incentivize them to use any power they still have to get rid of Putin. Considering how intertwined their sources of wealth and power are with current regime I’m not sure how likely is that. But basically the west wants to make it so that keeping Putin in power would seem more expensive than replacing him with something/someone else.
> You can't eat dollars.
Individuals still want to buy foreign good (while they might be harder to access or more expensive it’s still possible to acquire them).
Also most people would probably prefer to store their savings in USD/CHF/EUR rather than Ruble since it’s value is going to collapse the moment Russia lifts capital controls. This arguably only increases the demand for foreign currencies.
Main categories of goods imported by Russia in 2021 were: ‘Machinery & Equipment’ and ‘Medicine’ and it’s not like Russia can just stop importing these of they want to keep their pump jacks and hospital running.
"Also most people would probably prefer to store their savings in USD/CHF/EUR rather than Ruble"
Only globalist anywhere people. Ordinary Russians keep their savings in Roubles for the same reason I keep mine in GBP - because that's where we live and where we intend to continue to live, with everything around us priced in that currency.
I don't even care what the current GBP/USD exchange rate is. Why should I? Same with Russians with Roubles.
"Main categories of goods imported by Russia in 2021 were: ‘Machinery & Equipment’ and ‘Medicine’ and it’s not like Russia can just stop importing these of they want to keep their pump jacks and hospital running."
This idea that Russia is a backwater that can't make its own stuff is very peculiar.
We've just removed the cheaper competition. Russian producers can now expand, massify and gain economies of scale.
Hence they've confiscated a load of planes which they intend to make parts for themselves. Since IP rights have been suspended in Russia for foreign goods, they can make whatever they can physically make with nobody skimming off the top.
They _want_ to pay their debts, to preserve better borrowing terms in the future and to not look bad. If you research at all you'll see that they're actively trying to pay their debts to avoid default.
I guess the answer to that would be "and Germany can keep their cash and maybe have to burn it to heat homes or generate electricity"?
The war we're seeing (the economic war) is a point of mini-singularity, where a lot of we know to be true about the world is invalid. Such as an assumption that a state having debts will actually pay them.
the storage and the pipes are the most valuable thing, since gas is just a commodity.
Add another supplier, load it up, use pre-existing storage and distribution, Gazprom replaced.
This is also why this is so dangerous from a legal perspective. Gazprom probably spent a great deal building this network and storage. Only to have it seized....
That is a disadvantage, but pipelines are very valuable. For example, Russia would love to sell gas to China, which would love to buy it, but pipelines take a heck of a long time to build. And regional, lower volume pipelines can be a nightmare to build.
To me it seems that actually the reason for the seizure was that Gazprom did not store enough gas, while they have the biggest capacity:
> In Germany, a third of gas storage belongs to Russia's Gazprom (GAZP.MM), whose facilities in Germany had lower levels of stored gas this winter than those operated by other companies.
A plausible scenario but probably won’t happen in this case, Could be more like overseas subsidiaries of Bayer, seized by various allied countries in WWI and only reunited in 1994.
The reparations bill (both during and after the war) will be high and I assume various assets, including foreign currency reserves, will end up going to fund the reconstruction of Ukraine.
You seem to mix up Spotify and Shopify. The Announcement is made by Spotify, you talk about Shopify. But interestingly, your point still stands, as Spotify is also a big Google Cloud customer.
..just dont go to Germany. We are not very advanced in that regard.
Of course huge amounts of stores offer contactless paying, but generally Cash is still dominant around here. Change is slow, and currently, Cash is still king, especially with small or street merchants.
Since I'm dreading the coming of a cashless society, I'm really rooting for the German to push back against it as long as they can so that I can keep using notes and coins in euros.
I always found that so weird! The Exportweltmeister, producing some of the most advanced equipment... and in many places you can't pay with a card at all. Why do you think it is?
For many small businesses non-tax registered money is the lub which makes them run well.
Jokes aside the price of getting a card terminal where for many businesses completely unattractive for a long time and often still are if put in context to the number of people which will use it.
I know one local takeaway which stopped accepting card payment after their terminal broke recently, as it wasn't worth it to buy a new one. Instead they now allow sending money by PayPal, but non-advertised and mainly for a single specific big recurring customer and sometimes if someone doesn't has cash with them.
We Germans seem to love our cold hard cash, so the incentive to get a card reader is lower. There are even automatic coin counting machines in some self-checkout desks...
It has gotten much better in the pandemic. I pay at the bakery etc with cards. Not sure when I last paid enything with cash. Only caveat is that "cards" not always means Visa/MC/AmEx, but can mean Girocard only. If that is the case (and I'd just ask) then you as a non German will have to pay cash.
All ISPs in my country run their own recursive resolvers (with IPs resolving to my country). How "big" a resolver is does not matter at all - it's not a social network; the resolver either works or it doesn't work.
Some of the root servers are also in the EU, so there is zero dependence on the USA for resolving european ccTLDs.
There is some level of importance in bigness. All the major public resolvers let nameserver operators (well, anyone, really) clear cached records. Which turns out to be a not-uncommon occurrence. I wrote my own DNS server, so I've been paying a ton of attention to this stuff, and I've found several scenarios where website operators (even, for instance, instagram!) seem to have wanted to change some DNS records but weren't happy with the TTLs they'd advertised on them, and instead of waiting them out, just cleared caches with the major resolvers and then gone ahead and turned off the old IPs.
With the end result that I had to go in and remove those records from my cache, too.
nah, wrong. If you go over the allowed bandwith, you can get either limited to 10Mbit/s or pay 1,37€ per TB. In comparison, this is pretty cheap, but that is about waht you pay, when you buy transit.
Source: https://wiki.hetzner.de/index.php/Traffic/en
Bandwith cost highly depends on the scale and target network. Cloudflare has a good blogpost on relative bandwith cost: https://blog.cloudflare.com/bandwidth-costs-around-the-world...
To put numbers to the relativity, for a somewhat smaller datacenter in Central Europe with a 100Gbit/s connection, the running Cost of transit is somewhere around 0.00004€ per GB, on a theoretically fully sustained connection(not realistic, also with no redundancy or hardware). Peering is basically free(after initial buildout) with around 3k€ per 100Gbit/s (https://www.ams-ix.net/ams/pricing). This all excludes cost of investment for initial buildout and hardware. On a scale on amazons level this becomes even cheaper, since operating your own network is cheaper than buying transit.
Hetzner charges 1,19€ per TB, amazon 90$(on the first 10 TB). So amazon probably doesnt really care about the price differences per region and went with a mixed calculation, since their margins are so absurdly huge.
also, major parts of the cost are in hardware and staffing/development, of which amazon has way more, due to the demands of SDN.