The additional Kremlin state ties seem only an additional technicality. (I mean the formalized acknowledgement of what I presumed existent.)
"If there's one mistake this story makes, it's in trying to come up with complicated theories about why Yuri does well. He's simply smart."
> Come now, Paul. Yes, Yuri is smart. But he also has huge sacks of money to throw around, most of which comes from oligarch Alisher Usmanov
> It's kind of sad, to me at least, the extent to which a sort of amorality has really taken hold in Silicon Valley. It's nice that he's helped your investments out, Paul, but where does Yuri's money come from? Have you looked into him and Usmanov? I mean, the sad thing about Yuri Milner to me isn't that he's an ostentatious outsider, it's that he fits in so darn well in Silicon Valley. I wish this was the sort of place that looked completely alien to someone from Moscow or Wall Street. Every year, it seems that's less and less the case, at least in terms of culture.
The line between investing for potentially-corrupt interests and acting at the behest of a geopolitical competitor is night and day. DST didn't just hand cash over to companies. They conducted extensive diligence and sat on Boards.
What will be interesting here is how fast it falls off HN.
Remember your priors.
You assumed wrong. A moderator changed it because the submitted title ("Yuri Milner's money is from Putin (via Gazprom, oligarchs, et al)") was an obvious violation of the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
We often put individual names back in HN titles when the audience here can be expected to recognize the name. I've done so above. That's a rather specialized moderation practice, which not everyone who edits HN titles knows about. The basic edit was valid and routine.
For what it's worth said oligarch, Alisher Usmanov, is also a major shareholder of Arsenal Football Club, one of the English Premier League's top clubs. Most of the club supporters don't care one bit from where the transfers money comes.
However I do have the feeling that Russia's current behaviour is quantitatively if not qualitatively different.
In it's scale, it's cynicism and in it's deliberate single mindedness. I'm not a great believer in good vs evil on the geopolitical stage but a move this blatant needs to be resisted because if it succeeds it will become the new normal.
And yet here you are discussing "cynicism and [...] deliberate single mindedness".
As a lefty, you fail to put things in perspective... But I guess it's just not convenient, sometimes, is it?
PS - I'm from the UK - not US if that changes things.
I think you may be arguing with an imaginary straw man version of me. I'm not sure I stand for the things you're railing against.
As a language, it's a disaster. I better worry about more important things, and not waste more time with it.