Disney to pause all business in Russia | Hacker News Reader

Disney to pause all business in Russia

reuters.com

12 pointsmudro_zboris6 comments

... I suspect Russia will react by relaxing copyright laws on Disney films. Business will continue as usual, only without profits flowing back to Disney (or foreign reserves flowing out of Russia).

On a mile-high level, sanctions make sense to me. Many of the specific reactions seem less than thought out, beyond wanting to appear to be doing something.

Not buying stuff makes sense. Not selling critical resources makes sense. Cutting communications, education, culture, and entertainment? I'm less sold on that.

I expect a lot of sanctions to backfire. Like Russia migrating from swift to the newish Chinese system and never coming back, Russia nationalizing foreign companies operating on their territory (as they already hinted with McDonald's)

Lot of these "second wave sanctions" sound like virtue signaling, these company probably would have had a greater impact by using Russian profits to fuel the Ukranian effort and/or help the refugees

I know we already shot ourself in the foot, a necessary evil, time will tell if we also shot the other one.

Guess it will depend if Russia can use it's internal resources to create an independent economy, or whether they become another North Korea.

Maybe they get lucky and collapse like the USSR and some of the oblasts and republics get a fresh start as their own new nations.

I wonder how to square with the fact that continuing to do business in Russia would mean continuing to pay taxes, that would fund a war-waging government.

Maybe they can point Russians to an online store outside Russia's jurisdiction. Sadly for the ordinary Russian, Visa and MasterCard have also disabled the ability to use their cards overseas (within Russia it seems they outsourced the processing to a Russian company, which is still functioning).

Why only in Russia ? Why are russian childen spared and the rest of the world must suffer ?

I understand “cancel culture” and the impact of ESG in today’s capitalism but isn’t much of the American media industry a fundamental soft power asset? The Soviets had strict control over such access because of this.

Wouldn’t restricting access, specially for media that is mostly targeted to an already western friendly demographic, be more harmful than beneficial geopolitically wise?

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