Internet disrupted in Kazakhstan amid energy price protests

It's also unclear (judging from my twitter feed and a few liveblogs I follow) where Nazarbayev is currently located (and what he thinks about this mess).

I wonder if finally someone (Russian/China?) convinces him to go down and retire? After all he has been there for three decades, and maybe the other countries are not exactly happy about his way.

Nazarbayev is 81 years old. It doesn't seem likely he'll emerge as the new ruler, even with Russian backing. ...but he might lend legitimacy to any new leader the Russians try to muscle in.

As a Frenchman, it's also what we are taught about the French Revolution. One of the goals of the attack on la Bastille on July 14th 1789 was to seize the weapons there and march upon the rest of Paris and Versailles.

If there aren't constitutional mechanisms in place for peaceful transfer of power-- along with a tradition of mostly following the norms and conventions around the constitution-- it can all go wrong pretty quickly.

People may get very frustrated with democratic governments, but the mechanisms that well established democracies have for the peaceful transfer of power offer a much needed release valve on this sort of pressure.

But it takes time to establish the foundations for this. Heck, the US had been around for most of a century and still had a failed revolution (well, it's called a the Civil War, but that's mostly because it failed. I'm sure if the US South had won, they would have viewed it very much as a successful revolution in the same way the original colonies did when they seceded from Great Britain. Yes, there are subtle differences-- Great Britain was somewhat of an absentee overseer, and colonies are not quite the same as states. Admittedly this makes the gray area resolve closer to Civil War.)

Can happen everywhere. Wait what happens if you cut down food supply to a rich nation like for example the Netherlands. Within a week people will kill each other for food.

I think it is a bit naive to think this is a grass roots "protest". This might be a knock-on effect after the US withdrawal from Afghanistan. Nazarbayev was a Soviet man, so it's possible this is a western intervention. It's also possible that Islamic interests are using the gas crisis as an opportunity to establish a new islamic state there also.

...but regardless of who may be have helped organize this sudden protest/coup, it's important to remember that Russian politicians have recently made comments about taking back land given to Kazakhstan during the Soviet days. The northern portions of the country hold the 25% of the Kazakh population that is ethnic-Russian - which includes much of the area just up to the capital of Nur-Sultan, also in the north.

https://thediplomat.com/2021/04/is-northern-kazakhstan-at-ri...

As a conspiracy, as Kazakhstan crisis happens just before Russia/NATO summit, it may not be as simple as a "price protest".

Its to be expected in very poor countries with a dictatorship masquerading as government.

The people don't have first world problems which they complain about from a chair on the internet.

They live harsh lives with zero perspectives and are somewhat grateful the government doesn't turn more violent or oppressive .

Then some event triggers a no point of return scenario where the people fear prison or death less than the potential future.

It should be noted that Kazakhstan is often mentioned as one of the potential flashpoints when it comes to Russian irredentism. This map shows why:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_demography_of_Kazakhsta...

Wasn't considered a weird place when the people of Hong Kong did that [0]

[0] https://edition.cnn.com/2019/08/13/asia/hong-kong-protestors...

He was a highly paid advisor for the oligarch ruling Khazakhstan.

Specifically, the Khazakh leader was giving a speech in the Uk at the same time he was suppressing protests with torture and rape.

Blair wrote up talking points for him to help with damage control.

"On 6 July 2016, Sir John Chilcot announced the report's publication, more than seven years after the inquiry was announced.[3] Usually referred to as the Chilcot report by the news media,[4] the document stated that at the time of the invasion of Iraq in 2003, Saddam Hussein did not pose an urgent threat to British interests, that intelligence regarding weapons of mass destruction was presented with unwarranted certainty, that peaceful alternatives to war had not been exhausted, that the United Kingdom and the United States had undermined the authority of the United Nations Security Council, that the process of identifying the legal basis was "far from satisfactory", and that a war was unnecessary.[5][6][7] The report was made available under an Open Government Licence."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_Inquiry

Tony Blair was the head of government and leader of the ruling party. Had he decided not to take Britain to Iraq, then the UK would not have taken part in the war and there would not have been a vote in Parliament. At the end of the day, the buck stopped with him.

Would lack of UK support have been sufficient to deter the US? Who knows, probably not given the neocon lunatics in the White House at the time. Harold Wilson's decision to keep the UK out of Vietnam was in retrospect a wise decision, and no doubt Blair would have had a better reputation had he made the same choice.

That all said, Blair's post-PM career seems to involve toadying up to every dictator left on the planet (in marked contrast to his successor Gordon Brown's work supporting refugees and global vaccination) so maybe his reputation is well-deserved after all.

Starting wars does not in fact require parliamentary approval.

In 1999 Blair used "Queen's Consent" (the notional requirement that consent of the monarch must be sought in order to substantially alter their powers, but in practice these are government powers and so consent is sought from the government) to get rid of a Bill that would actually have required this, the "Military Action Against Iraq (Parliamentary Approval) Bill".

This isn't because Blair couldn't have won a vote and disposed of the bill but because he knew it would be embarrassing and indeed the embarrassment anyway resulted in the (non-binding) Approval bill you cited which has 412 Aye votes.

Even having a vote ("Division") is embarrassing. It forced Labour members who might have told their electorate over and over that they oppose war to choose, stick by their principles that war is abhorrent, and risk deselection for coming out against the stance of their government and many populist pro-war newspapers, or, bend over, vote for the government and hope voters forgive them when it inevitably all goes wrong.

Now, ultimately Parliament is sovereign and so you can argue everything "requires parliamentary approval", but only in sense that silence signifies approval because as a sovereign entity it could intervene but it does not.

If Parliament really didn't want the UK to go to war it can in principle get rid of the Prime Minister and install one who won't start a war. If the Speaker tries to stop them (e.g. by refusing to recognise a member who stands to propose "That This House Has No Confidence In Her Majesty's Government" so as to bring down the Prime Minister) the Commons can convene "The Committee of the Whole House" which is identical to the Commons except that they're picking who runs things, whereupon they can get rid of that Speaker, choose a new one, reconvene the Commons and call No confidence. But it isn't going to do that in fact.

Even for Brexit, while there was majority opposition to the obviously disastrous "No deal" plan, there was no majority in support of any other definitive course of action, including replacing the Prime Minister, all that was done was more kicking of cans down the road, until there was no more road.

The UK parliament ain't the only relevant institution here.

The invasion of Iraq was an open and blatant breach of the UN charter [0], it was an illegal war of aggression based on lies.

Lies that were so blatant that the whole situation lead to the largest global protest event in human history [1].

And that doesn't even go into the direct consequences of that; Refugees all the way into Western Europe, among them many disgruntled people who felt wronged, serving as potential recruits for an AQ that had by then become world famous thanks to the US.

What that lead to were the first major Islamic terror attacks in Western Europe [2], among them the 2005 London bombings by AQ, which were a direct response to the UK participation in invading Iraq, just like the 2004 AQ attack in Madrid, Spain.

In that context it's not really difficult to see why Tony Blair is such a controversial personality.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2004/sep/16/iraq.iraq

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/15_February_2003_anti-war_prot...

[2] https://www.datagraver.com/case/people-killed-by-terrorism-p...

Reasons to hate Blair other than Iraq war:

* Very poorly thought out creation of Scottish Parliament. While not a bad thing, he didn’t consider it to be all that important. Not like it could destroy the United Kingdom or anything.

* Very poorly thought reform of House of Lords. Again not a bad thing, but it hasn’t really improved much.

* Very poorly thought out creation of “Supreme Court.” It was presented as a simply a rebranding of the law lords, but now it’s much more powerful, which was never the intent.

* Not terribly interested in privacy.

* Unhealthy dependence on the EU. His motivation for the above was “the EU will take care of this so who cares.” This was a problem before Brexit.

* Incompetence, and lack of care. Notice how many of these points say “not itself a bad thing.” He lots of “not bad itself” things in a bad manner.

* Fucking Rupert Murdoch’s wife.

maybe its failing because people who own money and thus influence resist the regulations.

Yes, you know how it is when you start knowing something you start realizing journalist reporting of it, while not entirely false, is quite imprecise and simplifying ?

I work in an investment bank, on the trading floor, and when I hear reports on how we're supposed to be and act, I feel it is so different from how people actually are and think. For instance, they ignore incompetence and always assign to malice, they think being legit is less important to us than robbing money, they always describe us as amoral, parasitic, conspiratorial. It's an enticing narrative each time, but except when they have actual email exchanges (like the Millenium emails during the Maddoff SEC investigation - that painted the right picture, professional, missing information, imperfect but not anti-blue collar conspiracy lol), I can't really trust it anymore.

The FinCEN files by BuzzFeed were so trash, it was surreal to hear... We gave regulatory reports they leaked irresponsibly about suspicious activity by our fee-paying clients we are forbidden to tip off by refusing to talk to them, and we're now "hiding crime", maybe even "facilitating" it, tsk. They warned a lot of people that day, good job.

That’s one of the issues Kleptopeia addresses.

Corrupt politicians use innuendo and hatred to corrupt politicians to attack their opponents in the West.

As their opponents are often corrupt themselves, you can’t just look at the narrative. After all the narrative is: “corrupt politicians are doing these horrible things; stop them!”

This sort of reporting is very hard and very fact dependent.

It contains horror stories of the Khazakh leader using Western courts to persecute his opponents.

That’s possible because (a) the opponents aren’t saints, and (b) money is necessary to buy justice.

The dictators use money to hire western lawyers, western lawyers to win court cases, won court cases to establish facts, facts to destroy opponents legal status, fewer opponents to get more power, and power to get more money.

Power -> money -> lawyers/consultants (Tony Blair) -> truth -> power.

This reminds me of how Gorbachev kept informed about the coup that was happening around him via the BBC World Service on shortwave. I wonder if there's a market for re-instating such services in areas that are prone to internet outages?

How, though? The backbone connections are still terminated at ISPs and interchanges. Somewhere an engineer still needs to either remove the routes in software, or pull a bunch of cables out.

Unless you're saying that the president himself has all the major backbone connections running through his office?

It's all a matter of costs and standard of living.

Oil (and generally resource rich countries) have a tough line to thread between spreading the riches among the population without making the said population dependent on that sharing ( e.g. Venezuela) and hoarding at the top. Most fail miserably, and honestly the only one i can think of doing a great job is Norway, and it was mostly by accident.

Resource curse. Economies that depend on a single extraction resource tend to be pretty stagnant and rife with corruption. There’s also the issue that they need to discourage local consumption of the export resource, since local consumption doesn’t enrich the country, even if the locals need to consume to not freeze to death.

What do you mean by Islamic state? Something like in Iran, or something like in Turkey? I'm not sure what your sources are but if you mean something like in Iran it's extremely unlikely to happen in Kazakhstan. Russia taking some land is more likely but Russia would likely prefer better relations with Kazakhstan due to their gas and economic ties, and annexing that land isn't really that important compared to Ukraine.

Kazakhstan is one of the most secular countries in Central Asia (20% self-reported as "irreligious" in a 2019 poll), so I find that rather unlikely.

> The most likely government to be installed will be an islamic state,..

The suffix "-stan" is very suggestive, isn't it? After all, there are Pakistan and Afghanistan -- massively Islamic countries.

Similarly, Thailand ends in "-land", yet no one thinks Thailand is in Europe despite the fact that England, Switzerland and Poland are all European.

Islam in Kazakhstan is non-pure, non-literalist and heavily tinged/influenced by local shamanistic traditions and old Soviet ways unlike that in Middle East.

Pure Islam in Kazakhstan would look jarringly out of place.

I expect Putin’s forces will now move in to secure the country, and will never leave

debian.org jumped to the 14th most visited according to that page coming from the low 400th

Not very easily: the capital expenditure required to build, say, an aluminum smelter (which is how Iceland converts excess geothermal into cash) is orders of magnitude more than some crypto rigs.

The electricity in this case is not "spare", just at non-global prices. Electricity generation has always been managed by turning down the generation to match the demand.

Your point below about battery storage: battery storage has only just become economically viable at the best of times, and that relies on getting paid to provide "fast frequency response" - stabilisation as a service.

What are the prior examples of this happening?

They can use a satellite connection. There are ready-made setups for this: https://blockstream.com/satellite/

As a someone ignorant occational user: It'd operate similar to a git repo no? Transactions within KZ would be accepted by the local chain, which would then be merged when reconnected. If there's a conflict you have to decide which chain is the correct one, which in this case would be the global version.

Kazakhstan has no private Internet providers sans local ISPs. All long range fibre, and cross-border connections are owned by SOEs, and president's damat personally.

A state has direct control over everything it its borders. Ultimately you can send in the army to the IXPs and you pull the plug, be that North Korea or the USA

There have never been widespread energy shortages in Western countries.

The closest we came was the oil shocks of the 70s, and it cost Jimmy Carter a second term.

Hm … not the internet at large but weren’t there cases of a subway system or other dense area in the US suddenly having no cell service during a protest? I remember reading stories about this.

Have you considered ICANN? Or USA-based DNS providers?

One letter, from the right agency, can do a great deal.

> >30% of the population are on the streets with pitchforks

The mob was not that significant. It's the defense system that failed intentionally.

Capitol, not White House.

Not being able to send means they can't use Starlink in Belarus, right? There's no ability to send e.g. HTTP GET, so you can't actually use the internet. Right?

It doesn't add up for me. Central Asian sources are less than 1.5% of GazProm total production, and Gas production of Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan is dwarfed by Russian fields. Further, output from Russian fields in Siberia is on the decline and new fields are being developed in the Yamal Peninsula to replace these, so no Soviet era oil rigs at all.

https://www.oxfordenergy.org/wpcms/wp-content/uploads/2021/0...

Most countries do have something similar in place where they can turn off the outside connections if needed. I don't think it has happened yet in any western country, but those safe-guards are in place at the edges of the national network.

I remember trying to get internet in Kabul when we expanded an office there about a decade ago, there was one fibre over the khyber pass to Pakistan, and I seem to remember the connections north and south to Uzbekistan/Iran relied on a ropey copper ring circuit with c. 100mbit of connectivity - for the entire traffic.

That episode was released in 2008, a lot of countries in Africa then had just one subsea circuit, if that, before WACS, before EASSy. If I remember right, even bandwidth out of Austrailia cost a fortune.

This is hacker news, so cans of Pringles (not for eating), Soylent, (and yes, water, Soylent doesn't go well with Red Bull, sigh...). Fuel only for powering hardware, meatware can survive from hardware's waste heat. (/s)