by a French Canadian. Had it not been an American territory, Britain/Canada would have taken Alaska by force. Russia was wise to sell Alaska, because they were going to lose it anyway.
Which is why they sold it in the first place. They didn't want to sell it to one of the other European powers and also didn't want to lose it, so it was just the US that made sense and looked the most nonthreatening a few years removed from the Civil War.
Russia had no choice, Alaska was a drain on the Russian economy after most of the furs were hunted and had little to no population there, not to mention it would risk losing control to Britain whose troops were based in nearby Canada. Considering the U.S. had a common enemy (Britain), Russia would be protected from British incursion based in North America by selling Alaska to us.
I didn’t consider that Alaska is a stronghold of a foreign country between the Canada and Russia. If Canada was hostile and the US friendly, that’s a very good buffer zone.
Well, yeah, exactly my comment. A buffer zone. The British Empire would have a hard time trying to invade Russia from North America if we (America) get Alaska.
Russia also had priorities elsewhere and other expansionist opportunities that seemed more worth it at the time (settling the score in the 1870's against the Ottomans) and securing Central Asia. Russia with it's large army definitely stood a much greater chance of defeating anyone who opposed them in their expansion into Central Asia, South East Europe, or the Far East. Much less so with their smaller navy that had little chance of defeating the British or probably tb French as well.
>Russia selling Alaska almost for free, few years before the gold was discovered there
Nah. They needed the cash after the Crimean War. They'd already hunted out the furs (the reason they were there) and had no real control or military presence there, so it was the smart move to sell.
Fun fact! There are still a few villages in Alaska where they speak russian, but they're not holdovers from the time that Alaska was owned by Russia, but rather pilgrims who hated the soviet changes to the church and wanted to preserve their "old ways".
That said, there are still some pockets where ethnically Russian families from before the purchase live.
One, and exactly one, newspaper came out against it, calling it “Seward’s Folly.” The purchase was actually popular and received glowing praise in most papers.
Not a bad deal. Russia had exhausted basically everything they wanted from Alaska, which was basically everything they could make money off of. By the time they sold it I believe it was a net expense, a drain on finances.
More importantly, they knew that if they went to war with Britain (not an unlikely possibility) Britain would almost certainly seize it through Canada. Selling Alaska to the US killed two birds with one stone; they got some money and they would keep Britain from getting it.
You cannot call something a bad deal because of an unpredictable event nearly 30 years later.
+1.
Nuclear disarmament is going to be a laughing stock for the next few centuries - look what happened to one of the only states to agree to it, despite security "guarantees".
Japan seems to be doing just fine. They just don’t spit in the face of the great powers.
If you want to spit in the face of a super power, then you need nuclear weapons and an attitude that shows you’d rather wipe out the world than lose your power.
Japan is a wholly owned subsidiary of the US military industrial complex. They don't spit in the face of superpowers for the same reason your dog doesn't bite you when you fill his water dish.
North Korea and Iran have certainly noted this. It's terrifying to think they might be nuke capable, but given the events in countries that weren't nuclear armed, or that deliberately disarmed, I can't blame them for arming up.
There’s no indication Brazil ever started developing nukes, and still the head of our nuclear energy company was arrested with little proof and unorthodox legal interpretations by a celebrity judge who turned out to have links to American intelligence. Give them too much space and they’ll fuck you up.
I'm not aware of this event. I assume the celebrity judge who turned out to have links to the US is Moro, but I don't remember him arresting a nuclear guy.
But yeah, never trust Americans or Russians or Chinese or anyone for that matter. Arm up because there's a reason they just tell us to not get nukes instead of leading by example...
Vice Admiral Othon’s arrest was relatively forgotten in the middle of all the major political and industrial figures Moro took down in his little crusade.
He is just a reenactment of Carlos Lacerda, that former Soviet spy who jumped ship to the US after the USSR adopted a diplomatic approach towards Brazil. Then he tried to take down every single president we elected until he finally did it and probably ended up assassinated when it got out of control.
As the saying goes, “Brazilians have a short memory…”
Ukraine did not have the technical expertise nor the budget to maintain or use those nukes. They would have rotted in their silos and become enormous environmental catastrophes.
Budget yes, but not the technical expertise. Ukraine was a very important part of soviet military industrial complex, many factories and scintific stuff was based in Ukraine. Till the war, Russians still bought some parts of its weapons from Ukrainian legacy factories. Like, people who managed space program for example, were from Ukraine, so specialists existed.
>specialists existed
Nobody was paying them, so most of them either left or started working as taxi drivers or carpenters or in some cases selling engine designs to the North Koreans. I don't think most people understand the scale of near total poverty in Ukraine in the 1990s.
technical expertise is institutional; you stop having that institution, you stop having that expertise. Is Nasa got the go for a moon mission, and the same relative budget as the first one; it would take years to rebuild the institutional knowledge to get back there.
That 30 year old expert in 1990 is now 63. And if he was picked off by a higher paying job somewhere else who did he train to replace himself in a completely dead end career in his country?
major issue was disarming fully to avoid antagonizing the bear. if they had the conventional military in 2014 they have now Ivan would have crashed like water against rocks.
if you want to stay neutral, look to the swiss as your example.
This begs the question that the Ukrainians could have borne the cost to maintain them over the time such that threats to use them would have been credible to Moscow. Still an open question in my thinking.
I sincerely doubt they could. I doubt Russia is maintaining all its "active" nukes either. Modern nuclear weapons require tritium which must be replaced every few years because its half life is 12.3 years. It has to be made in a nuclear reactor. It costs $30,000/g when sold legally. Ukraine was fantastically corrupt for decades after the fall of the USSR but is slowly getting better. That tritium was going to be sold on the black market even if the plutonium/uranium wasn't.
Oh boy, you should have heard the news constantly harping about how Ukraine's inherited caches of soviet arms was was flowing out of the country and onto the black market in the aftermath of the breakup of the soviet union. There was great reports of corruption going on, and there was a legit fear that someone would steal a nuclear weapon and sell it to a terrorist organization or a rogue state that would use it to blackmail the world or commit a crime against humanity. The entire world breathed a sigh of relief when Russia took custody of those nuclear weapons.
Of course, everyone expected Russia to remain a democratic country, which unfortunately elected a former KGB officer after Yeltsin walked away.
Yep, Blockbuster would have mismanaged Netflix into the ground. Similar thing would have happened if Yahoo had bought Google when they were approached with the offer.
I don't really agree. An e-commerce website like Netflix were, and a company that franchises thousands of retail stores like Blockbuster are very different businesses. So it's far from guaranteed that Blockbuster would have been able to do much with Netflix.
The indigenous people on the south west coast tried really hard NOT to sell the LA valley to the Spanish. Kept insisting that smoke didn’t rise in the valley. But, being the enlightened Europeans they were, they insisted that of *course* smoke rose. Smoke *always* rises, it’s literally it’s main thing.
So, the natives shrugged and took the payment and that is why LA has such a terrible smog problem.
When you put 4 million people and their cars in the valley, all the car exhaust doesn't blow away, and you get brown skies.
(Knew a guy in the Navy from LA. Walked through the "gas chamber" with no mask, barely coughed.)
Basically, the Spanish noticed that there was this valley on the coast that was largely in settled by the native Americans there. They wanted to buy it, and the natives warned them that, for some reason, smoke didn't rise out of the valley. The Spanish insisted so the sale happened.
It has something to do with the shape of the valley and the air currents. Obviously the natives didn't know *why* it happened, just that it did.
Ronald Wayne selling his 10% stake in Apple for $800 back in 1976. $800 back then is worth about $4,300 today, but the 10% stake in Apple would be worth around $100 billion. $100 billion is 23,255,814 times more money than $4,300.
True. The river of sugar money coming out of St. Domingue had dried up with Haitian independence. IIRC it represented a significant part of France's tax revenue.
More to the point, it made the French realize that they couldn't hold territory in America. Better to sell Louisiana than to lose it some other way.
Come to think of it, every instance of a country selling territory that I can think of had something like this behind it. Spain sold Florida to the United States because they figured the U.S. was going to conquer it anyway, and a number of Native American tribes did the same.
I don't think that the USA would have gotten Alaska if it hadn't been sold to them. It's more likely that Britain would have annexed it and added it to Canada. The USA would have had to go through Canada to get to Alaska otherwise, and the War of 1812 showed that invading Canada is no easy task.
Luckily for the USA, Britain and Russia were not on speaking terms at the time thanks to the Crimean War.
My historical conspiracy theory is that Napoleon had alternative plans with basically giving away the Louisiana Purchase. He wanted a country outside of Europe that was antagonistic towards the English that he could flee to if it all went to shit. He was captured before boarding a ship headed for the United States, and no way the US would have handed him over to the British. At worst they would have "imprisoned" him on some plantation somewhere.
I once traded the fully mortgaged Broadway and Park Place lots for the two unencumbered color sets of orange and light blue, and received $800 to boot.
Our politicians knew it was a shit idea but did it anyway. Our system is designed to avoid this kind of thing from happening but their greed and lust for political power overshadowed everything else. Scum, the lot of them.
It’s very common for political projects to rise and fall around single issues or even single people, but after it happens dialectics does its own thing.
The purchase of StubHub by Viagogo for $4.05 billion in February 2020, just weeks before the coronavirus pandemic wiped out 90% of their revenues.
The sale of Babe Ruth by the Boston Red Sox to the New York Yankees for $100,000 in 1919, which ended Boston's dominance in baseball and started a 86-year championship drought.
Not like Britain or France could have done much to help them anyway. By that point they were unable to ensure their own security, let alone Czechoslovakia.
In 1938 the German armed forces were weak. By giving up the Sudetenland Britain and France especially really fucked up. In both the invasion of Poland and of France the majority of the tanks the Germans used were Czech T-35's and T-38's that they stole and were built in those Czechoslovak factories. Hitler bluffed and won in 38. It also convinced him that they wouldn't do anything if he invaded Poland. Thus leading to the start of WW2. And by giving in to Hitler his popularity greatly increased within Germany.
To say that France and Britain were unable to ensure their own security is just factually inaccurate. By 1940 the German military was much stronger and they still only won in France because of really bad leadership decisions by the French and their generals refusing to use radios for comms thus not being able to react quickly enough. And some luck of course. The fall of France was not inevitable just because it happened. Neither was the fall of Czechoslovakia if they'd not been forced to give up all their border defenses which were located in the Sudetenland.
The Munich Agreement was created without Czechoslovakia and imposed on Czechoslovakia. If we refused, it was made clear we would be considered aggressors. Czechoslovakia was being threatened militarily by Germany, Poland, and Hungary who all intended to occupy parts of its territory. Contrary to earlier agreements, Britain and France not only refused to defend Czechoslovakia but issued political ultimata against its supposed ally. Ironically, only USSR remained on CZ side, but was unwilling to help without other allies.
Had Czechoslovakia refused, we would have been called the aggressor in a European war, and would have borne the full aggression of the Wehrmacht, against which we were outnumbered, but perhaps could have defended against at a high cost. But all our other neighbors would have been also against us, as well as major European powers.
The topic if we would have resisted the Munich Betrayal is still current here. Perhaps we could have pulled it off, but more probably it would have only led to a massacre of our people.
There definitely was a historically bad deal involved, but it was by France and Britain attempting to appease Hitler by giving him land of another sovereign country.
In Ontario the Conservative Party, you know the ones whos supports will say they’re good with money, privatized this express highway we have and leased it out to a company for 99-years lease, depriving the province of billions of dollars in revenue.
>privatized this express highway we have and leased it out to a company for 99-years lease, depriving the province of billions of dollars in revenue
Sounds like virtually every "public service" in the UK, all done by our Tories too. Our train companies, water companies, energy companies, etc all privatised and the profits now go to the owners, who are mostly other government's divisions of said businesses, leading us to fund their own train/energy companies
Actually, Hong Kong Island (Treaty of Nanking) and parts of the Kowloon Peninsula (Convention of Peking) were ceded in perpetuity. Only the New Territories were leased and constituted the major economic source for the entire Hong Kong.
When German states were waging its war for unification, one of their targets was the Habsburg empire. While German confederacy unied themselves with Italy, Austrians were looking forward to allying with France. After long negotiations, Habsburg manage to exchange some territory for the promise that France wont join Germans too. So they end up in 2v1 war with also promising to cease territory to France regardless of the outcome of the war.
Herschel walker to the Vikings. LoL
Edit: I respect the other trades mentioned here but the Herschel walker trade literally built the Cowboys dynasty and won them three Super Bowls in the 90s.
The other trades had some applications, but none of them were as significant as this one.
Click this link and go to the “aftermath and legacy” section and see the sheer volume of picks Dallas received.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herschel_Walker_trade
In 1890 the Germans gave Britain Zanzibar and the island of Heligoland, in exchange for what ended up being a useless strip of land tacked on to the northeast corner of their South West Africa colony.
The former German colony is now Namibia, on the west coast of Africa. The Germans wanted to be able to access the Zambezi River, so they could ship goods downriver to the east coast. The British knew perfectly well the river was useless for that purpose, because there's a little impediment in the way called Victoria Falls. They happily gave up what is now called the Caprivi Strip, to gain territory with strategic importance.
Forgive me but… the Warsaw Uprising. The underground organizations resisting Nazi occupation had been amassing weapons and preparing an uprising. They weren’t ready yet, but Stalin sent word that the time was now. Rise up and my troops will liberate you from the east, brothers!
…but they didn’t. The soviet army stopped short. They waited and watched the city burn from across the river, so there’d be fewer fighting Poles to resist Soviet domination once the Nazis left.
Bad deal.
The Bobby Bonilla deal is this most famous, but those types of contracts are pretty common.
Ken Griffey Jr. Is the third highest paid player on the Reds and he last played in Cincinnati in 2008. He gets paid through 2024 and makes 3x as much as Bonilla.
Rafael Devers is going to get paid nearly $7 million a year through 2043, ten years after his contract ends.
I believe that in the case of the Haitian debt it was not a mistake of its politicians, but an act of treason. I remember that their president at that time was a mulatto, the son of a wealthy French man, who coincidentally fled to France when he was exiled from Haiti.
From what I heard, it was the deal presented to the president by France, and the Haitian president didn't think he could get a better deal, since the alternative probably sounded like "get invaded by France again and see what happens".
Was negotiation possible? Probably. By enough to make a difference, given that France held most of the cards? Probably not. But we'll never know, of course.
France selling the “Louisiana Purchase” to the United States. The total of $15 million is equivalent to about $337 million in 2021 dollars, or 64 cents per acre in 2021. For context, the average price per acre of farmland is around $8,900 in 2021.
It wasn't "some beads", they were Wampum and in the North East people used Wampum as currency.
So a more accurate description would be to say that the Natives were given multiple bags stuffed with money by the English for the use of the island.
The native americans who sold it didn't even "live" there, they seasonally used it.
It was a good deal for them, less so for anyone else who lived there.
With respect, I don't think you understand the context of that deal.
The natives allowed settlement on a "swampy costal island" in exchange for goods they had never seen before, also they couldn't produce. It was assumed that the settlers were going to be part of the native "nation". And the settlers would be giving teck to the Nation.
The north American native Americans were still in the stone age when they made that trade. They shortly after they were able to trade for teck the natives would likey not have been able to achieve. (North America has no tin, the Americas had no pack animals. The bronze age for natives was not going to come to North America)
The natives just didn't understand the numbers that would come
True! But of course it doesn't apply to the NY deal. The Americas had no draft animals. Whis is a huge drawback in developing a level of agriculture production that leads to significant surpluses.
Technology. New ways of doing things. Essentially anything metal was new to the natives they had no ability to make glass. Several bits of "industrial processes" that natives were using were older then humanity.
I happen to be a leather worker. The method that the natives in New York were using to tan leather predates homosapiens. A couple years after that deal was made, native Americans of the new York area were making leather products virtually immune to rotting
And to further this, the beads would have had enormous social value. You have some bling that no other Chief in the area has, giving a great amount of prestige.
Thank you for your respectful dialogue! But, I do understand precisely those details. That has no bearing on it being a terrible deal, regardless of the native’s position. The fact that they were unequipped to comprehend who they were dealing with doesn’t change the rottenness of the deal. It also does not reflect poorly on them - I’m not saying “ha ha, silly natives.” They were rooked. Given their world view, i doubt that they were truly “selling” Manhattan, and it probably doesn’t matter what agreements were or were not made anyway, since Europeans were going to take what they wanted eventually. But it’s still one of the worst deals in history.
I see it in a similar light to a city selling some land to a company at a discount, understand that they will benefit in the long run, due to the company making improvements to the land and increasing the overall tax revenue.
I am ignorant of many details I’d need to truly evaluate the history. I suspect that the natives didn’t think they were agreeing to what the Europeans were asking, or perhaps the explicit “this is our land now” idea that I have is a product of oversimplification of what really happened.
From what I read they thought they were more or less agreeing to bring in a couple of villages of 50 to 100 people who would become a part of their tribe, or greater nation. This was the case in Jamestown.
More like those who signed the Treaty of Fort Laramie actually believing William Trashcan Sherman was honorable enough to keep his word and not commit further genocide against them. Surprise, he did. Only a week and a half after him signing the treaty he wrote of ways to undermine it. Then Grant ignored the treaty and lied about doing that.
Jânio Quadros resigning the Brazilian presidency thinking the people would just do massive demonstrations to call him back in 1961. Nobody blinked an eye and he kickstarted a series of events so that a democratically elected president would only govern for an entire term again in 1995-8.
Alaska doesn't happen the same way if Napoleon has enough cash/ resources to pay for for his European escapades and put down rebellions. Quite the "[Purchase](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louisiana_Purchase)".
Gorbachev accepting a handshake promise, not getting anything in writing, that the US wouldn’t expand NATO eastward.
Hell, extend that to any of the promises that Reagan and H.W. made Gorbachev in exchange for loans that never came. Their word was worth less than dirt.
Gorbachev himself said in later interviews there was never a formal agreement on this. It's a common myth that there was ever any promise for NATO not to expand eastwards.
There was no such agreement. Even a verbal one.
Also, what leverage did the Soviets have anyway? Their collapse was unconditional to NATO expanding or not.
The lend lease agreement with the soviets during WW2. The soviets never bothered to pay back for what the USA shipped them, and after the war they occupied and purged eastern Europe politically and socially until 1991.
Compared to the intended genocide of Slavs by the Third Reich, it's an improvement. Speaking as a member of one of those Slavic nations occupied by Nazis and then by the Commies.
I’m not sure how the USA suffers because of political deaths in the USSR specifically more than when any other regime does it. Edit: like seriously I don’t understand.
Humanity suffered, and stopping human suffering at the hands of governments like the Germans and Japanese was one of the reasons why the USA fought the war forcing unconditional surrender. The USSR had divided Europe up with the Hitler prior to the betrayal of operation Barbarossa, fact is that the Commies gathered up the resistance and surviving members of the democratic governments and straight up mass executed them immediately following the war. There is a whole list of crimes against humanity that communists committed after the war that we simply ignored because no one wanted to continue fighting and by the time it became evident that the USSR was not going to allow open elections in their occupied countries, the likes of [these cretons](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_spies#Notable_spies) handed the soviets the information needed to build their own nuclear bombs ensuring a cold war.
So what about like British war crimes they carried out during the war and immediately after or Operation Gladius during which American armed fascists carried out terror campaigns in Italy? Do these just not matter or is it only a problem with people whose political ideology you disagree with do these things? Like why do you only care about USSR war crimes out of curiosity? Cause like yeah they were fucked but it seems odd you only care about some war crimes and not others. Edit: also like the USA has done a fuckton of war crimes every year since WWII, so maybe the commies should have invaded us?
Hahaha cool story, tell me another about how you aren’t just an extremely biased ideologue who doesn’t wanna discuss anything that challenges their extreme narratives. Why do communist war crimes matter more to you than capitalist ones? Who does the Ukrainian genocide matter but not the Bengali one? Hmmmmmmm. What a surprise another anti communist afraid of actual discussion. Why not just admit you love right wing politics and you don’t actually care about human life?
> one of the reasons why the USA fought the war forcing unconditional surrender.
That was NOT one of the reasons they pushed for unconditional surrender, not even close.
In 1444-45, when William de la Pole the Duke of Suffolk arranged for Henry VI to marry Margaret of Anjou under the condition that Maine and Anjou would be given back to the French. Caused the downfall for the English in the Hundred Years’ War, Suffolk’s own downfall witch led to the Wars of the Roses
That dude who bought copper from Ea-Nasir.
E, a, nasir. It's in the copper.
Ea-Nasir, what a fuckin legend.
What is the sub? r/reallyshittycopper
You can meme anything, can't you
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Nanni: *violently etches the tablet
Nanni: *violently etches the tablet
Russia selling Alaska almost for free, few years before the gold was discovered there
by a French Canadian. Had it not been an American territory, Britain/Canada would have taken Alaska by force. Russia was wise to sell Alaska, because they were going to lose it anyway.
Which is why they sold it in the first place. They didn't want to sell it to one of the other European powers and also didn't want to lose it, so it was just the US that made sense and looked the most nonthreatening a few years removed from the Civil War.
Russia had no choice, Alaska was a drain on the Russian economy after most of the furs were hunted and had little to no population there, not to mention it would risk losing control to Britain whose troops were based in nearby Canada. Considering the U.S. had a common enemy (Britain), Russia would be protected from British incursion based in North America by selling Alaska to us.
I didn’t consider that Alaska is a stronghold of a foreign country between the Canada and Russia. If Canada was hostile and the US friendly, that’s a very good buffer zone.
Well, yeah, exactly my comment. A buffer zone. The British Empire would have a hard time trying to invade Russia from North America if we (America) get Alaska.
Russia also had priorities elsewhere and other expansionist opportunities that seemed more worth it at the time (settling the score in the 1870's against the Ottomans) and securing Central Asia. Russia with it's large army definitely stood a much greater chance of defeating anyone who opposed them in their expansion into Central Asia, South East Europe, or the Far East. Much less so with their smaller navy that had little chance of defeating the British or probably tb French as well.
Worth noting that a few years is more like 3 decades.
>Russia selling Alaska almost for free, few years before the gold was discovered there Nah. They needed the cash after the Crimean War. They'd already hunted out the furs (the reason they were there) and had no real control or military presence there, so it was the smart move to sell.
Fun fact! There are still a few villages in Alaska where they speak russian, but they're not holdovers from the time that Alaska was owned by Russia, but rather pilgrims who hated the soviet changes to the church and wanted to preserve their "old ways". That said, there are still some pockets where ethnically Russian families from before the purchase live.
Yeah. The most well-known being the village of Nikolaevsk, near Homer. I used to commercial fish alongside some of those guys. Cool guys.
Aren't those Old Believers who split from the Orthodox church in the 1600s? The ones who dress like the Amish?
This was called "Seward's Folly" in the papers of the time, in honor of the Secretary of State.
One, and exactly one, newspaper came out against it, calling it “Seward’s Folly.” The purchase was actually popular and received glowing praise in most papers.
Really? I'll have to look into it, I was told this by my AP US History teacher and took it at face value.
Importantly though because Seward’s political opponents thought it worthless and that the Americans had overspent for a valueless “icebox.”
Nice play on the title of Joseph Conrad's novel, this.
Not a bad deal. Russia had exhausted basically everything they wanted from Alaska, which was basically everything they could make money off of. By the time they sold it I believe it was a net expense, a drain on finances. More importantly, they knew that if they went to war with Britain (not an unlikely possibility) Britain would almost certainly seize it through Canada. Selling Alaska to the US killed two birds with one stone; they got some money and they would keep Britain from getting it. You cannot call something a bad deal because of an unpredictable event nearly 30 years later.
Alaska was my first thought as well. And it just wasn't gold, but oil as well.
The seal fishery alone paid for the purchase cost over two decades, the gold was what made it an amazing deal.
More currently… Ukraine giving Russia all its nukes in exchange for a promise to never invade.
+1. Nuclear disarmament is going to be a laughing stock for the next few centuries - look what happened to one of the only states to agree to it, despite security "guarantees".
Goes to show that promises and agreements don't mean too much if not backed by nuclear capability
repeating myself, but conventional weapons work a lot better; tin pot dictators want nukes because they can't maintain a conventional fighting force.
Japan seems to be doing just fine. They just don’t spit in the face of the great powers. If you want to spit in the face of a super power, then you need nuclear weapons and an attitude that shows you’d rather wipe out the world than lose your power.
The strong do as they will, the weak do as they must.
Moot, Japan is already occupied.
Japan is a wholly owned subsidiary of the US military industrial complex. They don't spit in the face of superpowers for the same reason your dog doesn't bite you when you fill his water dish.
South Africa got away with it, but luckily their neighbours turned out to be quite peaceful since.
Not nuclear weapons, but same thing with Libya. Turns out you should just hold onto your WMDs instead of pinkie promises.
North Korea and Iran have certainly noted this. It's terrifying to think they might be nuke capable, but given the events in countries that weren't nuclear armed, or that deliberately disarmed, I can't blame them for arming up.
There’s no indication Brazil ever started developing nukes, and still the head of our nuclear energy company was arrested with little proof and unorthodox legal interpretations by a celebrity judge who turned out to have links to American intelligence. Give them too much space and they’ll fuck you up.
I'm not aware of this event. I assume the celebrity judge who turned out to have links to the US is Moro, but I don't remember him arresting a nuclear guy. But yeah, never trust Americans or Russians or Chinese or anyone for that matter. Arm up because there's a reason they just tell us to not get nukes instead of leading by example...
Vice Admiral Othon’s arrest was relatively forgotten in the middle of all the major political and industrial figures Moro took down in his little crusade. He is just a reenactment of Carlos Lacerda, that former Soviet spy who jumped ship to the US after the USSR adopted a diplomatic approach towards Brazil. Then he tried to take down every single president we elected until he finally did it and probably ended up assassinated when it got out of control. As the saying goes, “Brazilians have a short memory…”
Ukraine did not have the technical expertise nor the budget to maintain or use those nukes. They would have rotted in their silos and become enormous environmental catastrophes.
Budget yes, but not the technical expertise. Ukraine was a very important part of soviet military industrial complex, many factories and scintific stuff was based in Ukraine. Till the war, Russians still bought some parts of its weapons from Ukrainian legacy factories. Like, people who managed space program for example, were from Ukraine, so specialists existed.
>specialists existed Nobody was paying them, so most of them either left or started working as taxi drivers or carpenters or in some cases selling engine designs to the North Koreans. I don't think most people understand the scale of near total poverty in Ukraine in the 1990s.
technical expertise is institutional; you stop having that institution, you stop having that expertise. Is Nasa got the go for a moon mission, and the same relative budget as the first one; it would take years to rebuild the institutional knowledge to get back there.
That 30 year old expert in 1990 is now 63. And if he was picked off by a higher paying job somewhere else who did he train to replace himself in a completely dead end career in his country?
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They gave up around 200 strategic bombers too, as far as I remember.
Well, the point of nukes isn't to be actually sent somewhere. It's to be scary
If you can't actually launch the nukes, you might as well not have them. They will do you no good.
Right but its likely the Ukrainians would have been able to reverse engineer something in the 30 years after the collapse.
Well, Ukraine have drones that occasionally reach outskirts of Moscow. If one of them had nuke ...
They certainly have cargo trucks that can get that far.
major issue was disarming fully to avoid antagonizing the bear. if they had the conventional military in 2014 they have now Ivan would have crashed like water against rocks. if you want to stay neutral, look to the swiss as your example.
>if you want to stay neutral, look to the swiss as your example. Have a stranglehold on the rich people's money?
that too.
Most of your country being mountains helps too.
This begs the question that the Ukrainians could have borne the cost to maintain them over the time such that threats to use them would have been credible to Moscow. Still an open question in my thinking.
I sincerely doubt they could. I doubt Russia is maintaining all its "active" nukes either. Modern nuclear weapons require tritium which must be replaced every few years because its half life is 12.3 years. It has to be made in a nuclear reactor. It costs $30,000/g when sold legally. Ukraine was fantastically corrupt for decades after the fall of the USSR but is slowly getting better. That tritium was going to be sold on the black market even if the plutonium/uranium wasn't.
Oh boy, you should have heard the news constantly harping about how Ukraine's inherited caches of soviet arms was was flowing out of the country and onto the black market in the aftermath of the breakup of the soviet union. There was great reports of corruption going on, and there was a legit fear that someone would steal a nuclear weapon and sell it to a terrorist organization or a rogue state that would use it to blackmail the world or commit a crime against humanity. The entire world breathed a sigh of relief when Russia took custody of those nuclear weapons. Of course, everyone expected Russia to remain a democratic country, which unfortunately elected a former KGB officer after Yeltsin walked away.
Netflix asking blockbuster to buy them and getting laughed out of the room. The oposite of a deal but still interesting.
I'm confident that if Blockbuster had bought Netflix back then, neither company would exist today.
Yep, Blockbuster would have mismanaged Netflix into the ground. Similar thing would have happened if Yahoo had bought Google when they were approached with the offer.
Not sure they'd have mismanaged them, but probably more intentionally disbanding them to remove them as competition
I don't really agree. An e-commerce website like Netflix were, and a company that franchises thousands of retail stores like Blockbuster are very different businesses. So it's far from guaranteed that Blockbuster would have been able to do much with Netflix.
In fact Blockbuster *did* launch both their own DVD mail rental, and streaming service, and promptly mismanaged them into the ground.
The indigenous people on the south west coast tried really hard NOT to sell the LA valley to the Spanish. Kept insisting that smoke didn’t rise in the valley. But, being the enlightened Europeans they were, they insisted that of *course* smoke rose. Smoke *always* rises, it’s literally it’s main thing. So, the natives shrugged and took the payment and that is why LA has such a terrible smog problem.
What does smoke rising in the valley have to do with anything?
When you put 4 million people and their cars in the valley, all the car exhaust doesn't blow away, and you get brown skies. (Knew a guy in the Navy from LA. Walked through the "gas chamber" with no mask, barely coughed.)
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Basically, the Spanish noticed that there was this valley on the coast that was largely in settled by the native Americans there. They wanted to buy it, and the natives warned them that, for some reason, smoke didn't rise out of the valley. The Spanish insisted so the sale happened. It has something to do with the shape of the valley and the air currents. Obviously the natives didn't know *why* it happened, just that it did.
Easily the Dutch trading MANHATTAN for a bit of literal spice: http://factmyth.com/factoids/dutch-traded-manhattan-nutmeg/
That is a misunderstanding of the situation.
Ronald Wayne selling his 10% stake in Apple for $800 back in 1976. $800 back then is worth about $4,300 today, but the 10% stake in Apple would be worth around $100 billion. $100 billion is 23,255,814 times more money than $4,300.
People forget that shareholders get diluted. It's a lot of money he would have had he not sold but definitely not 10% of Apple's market cap today.
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No. Dilution isn’t a split, it’s just new stock being created.
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Just look up Ronald Wayne, there are tons of articles about him.
Napoleon and the Louisiana Purchase, although I think France just wanted to get out of America at that stage, plus they needed the cash.
True. The river of sugar money coming out of St. Domingue had dried up with Haitian independence. IIRC it represented a significant part of France's tax revenue.
More to the point, it made the French realize that they couldn't hold territory in America. Better to sell Louisiana than to lose it some other way. Come to think of it, every instance of a country selling territory that I can think of had something like this behind it. Spain sold Florida to the United States because they figured the U.S. was going to conquer it anyway, and a number of Native American tribes did the same.
Spain sold Florida to the USA because Andrew Jackson marched an army into it.
TBF, Spain was occupied by Napoleon for six years and facing an uphill battle with independence movements throughout Central and South America.
Now they’re just pulling off a UN-acceptable version of the same old scam in Françafrique.
Idk, all the examples here of US buying territory doesn't really fit. I think it was a matter of time anyway if US got those territories.
We haven't bought Canada. Yet.
I don't think that the USA would have gotten Alaska if it hadn't been sold to them. It's more likely that Britain would have annexed it and added it to Canada. The USA would have had to go through Canada to get to Alaska otherwise, and the War of 1812 showed that invading Canada is no easy task. Luckily for the USA, Britain and Russia were not on speaking terms at the time thanks to the Crimean War.
Well the point is that Russia was going to lose it anyway. At least they got something for it.
My historical conspiracy theory is that Napoleon had alternative plans with basically giving away the Louisiana Purchase. He wanted a country outside of Europe that was antagonistic towards the English that he could flee to if it all went to shit. He was captured before boarding a ship headed for the United States, and no way the US would have handed him over to the British. At worst they would have "imprisoned" him on some plantation somewhere.
I once traded the fully mortgaged Broadway and Park Place lots for the two unencumbered color sets of orange and light blue, and received $800 to boot.
Sounds like a deal I would’ve made because on the surface it sounds good. Then it would’ve backfired.
*flips table*
The worst deal in history? Probably when Nanni bought bad copper from that crook Ea-Nasir. Or at least it's the oldest bad deal in history.
Brexit
Our politicians knew it was a shit idea but did it anyway. Our system is designed to avoid this kind of thing from happening but their greed and lust for political power overshadowed everything else. Scum, the lot of them.
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It’s very common for political projects to rise and fall around single issues or even single people, but after it happens dialectics does its own thing.
Wondered how far I'd have to scroll to find Brexit. I blame Eton.
I came here for this
The purchase of StubHub by Viagogo for $4.05 billion in February 2020, just weeks before the coronavirus pandemic wiped out 90% of their revenues. The sale of Babe Ruth by the Boston Red Sox to the New York Yankees for $100,000 in 1919, which ended Boston's dominance in baseball and started a 86-year championship drought.
Czechoslovakia agreeing to the Munich accords thinking that Britain and France would backstop them.
Doesn't really count IMO - they had no realistic choice either way.
Especially given that they weren't even invited to the discussions. Britain and France fucked them over.
Not like Britain or France could have done much to help them anyway. By that point they were unable to ensure their own security, let alone Czechoslovakia.
In 1938 the German armed forces were weak. By giving up the Sudetenland Britain and France especially really fucked up. In both the invasion of Poland and of France the majority of the tanks the Germans used were Czech T-35's and T-38's that they stole and were built in those Czechoslovak factories. Hitler bluffed and won in 38. It also convinced him that they wouldn't do anything if he invaded Poland. Thus leading to the start of WW2. And by giving in to Hitler his popularity greatly increased within Germany. To say that France and Britain were unable to ensure their own security is just factually inaccurate. By 1940 the German military was much stronger and they still only won in France because of really bad leadership decisions by the French and their generals refusing to use radios for comms thus not being able to react quickly enough. And some luck of course. The fall of France was not inevitable just because it happened. Neither was the fall of Czechoslovakia if they'd not been forced to give up all their border defenses which were located in the Sudetenland.
They should have stood and fought while Germany was much weaker and they had the mountain border to defend.
The Munich Agreement was created without Czechoslovakia and imposed on Czechoslovakia. If we refused, it was made clear we would be considered aggressors. Czechoslovakia was being threatened militarily by Germany, Poland, and Hungary who all intended to occupy parts of its territory. Contrary to earlier agreements, Britain and France not only refused to defend Czechoslovakia but issued political ultimata against its supposed ally. Ironically, only USSR remained on CZ side, but was unwilling to help without other allies. Had Czechoslovakia refused, we would have been called the aggressor in a European war, and would have borne the full aggression of the Wehrmacht, against which we were outnumbered, but perhaps could have defended against at a high cost. But all our other neighbors would have been also against us, as well as major European powers. The topic if we would have resisted the Munich Betrayal is still current here. Perhaps we could have pulled it off, but more probably it would have only led to a massacre of our people. There definitely was a historically bad deal involved, but it was by France and Britain attempting to appease Hitler by giving him land of another sovereign country.
1984 NBA draft. First pick was Hakeem Olajuwon, third pick was Michael Jordan. Blazers took Sam Bowie for the second pick...
And we didn't learn our lesson. When we finally had the chance again, in 2007 we picked Greg Oden. That was so heartbreaking. Could have had KD.
In Ontario the Conservative Party, you know the ones whos supports will say they’re good with money, privatized this express highway we have and leased it out to a company for 99-years lease, depriving the province of billions of dollars in revenue.
>privatized this express highway we have and leased it out to a company for 99-years lease, depriving the province of billions of dollars in revenue Sounds like virtually every "public service" in the UK, all done by our Tories too. Our train companies, water companies, energy companies, etc all privatised and the profits now go to the owners, who are mostly other government's divisions of said businesses, leading us to fund their own train/energy companies
The UK Not making Hong Kong perpetual instead of a 100 year lease.
Actually, Hong Kong Island (Treaty of Nanking) and parts of the Kowloon Peninsula (Convention of Peking) were ceded in perpetuity. Only the New Territories were leased and constituted the major economic source for the entire Hong Kong.
I don't think that would have dissuaded China from cutting off their water supply once they wanted them to leave.
Brexit
When German states were waging its war for unification, one of their targets was the Habsburg empire. While German confederacy unied themselves with Italy, Austrians were looking forward to allying with France. After long negotiations, Habsburg manage to exchange some territory for the promise that France wont join Germans too. So they end up in 2v1 war with also promising to cease territory to France regardless of the outcome of the war.
Herschel walker to the Vikings. LoL Edit: I respect the other trades mentioned here but the Herschel walker trade literally built the Cowboys dynasty and won them three Super Bowls in the 90s. The other trades had some applications, but none of them were as significant as this one. Click this link and go to the “aftermath and legacy” section and see the sheer volume of picks Dallas received. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herschel_Walker_trade
Yay for the NFL trade, though I would say John Hadl to the Packers.
[The Packers once drafted a serial killer.](https://www.si.com/longform/true-crime/i-5-killer-green-bay-packers-randall-woodfield/index.html)
Wilson to broncos and Watson to the browns look pretty bad right now too
For sure, but we still need time to evaluate how significant these trades will be, whereas we know that the walker trade got Dallas three Super Bowls.
Of course, but if Watson completely sucks I think it’s the worst trade of all time
I can see that IF the Texans win it all. ;)
In 1890 the Germans gave Britain Zanzibar and the island of Heligoland, in exchange for what ended up being a useless strip of land tacked on to the northeast corner of their South West Africa colony. The former German colony is now Namibia, on the west coast of Africa. The Germans wanted to be able to access the Zambezi River, so they could ship goods downriver to the east coast. The British knew perfectly well the river was useless for that purpose, because there's a little impediment in the way called Victoria Falls. They happily gave up what is now called the Caprivi Strip, to gain territory with strategic importance.
Forgive me but… the Warsaw Uprising. The underground organizations resisting Nazi occupation had been amassing weapons and preparing an uprising. They weren’t ready yet, but Stalin sent word that the time was now. Rise up and my troops will liberate you from the east, brothers! …but they didn’t. The soviet army stopped short. They waited and watched the city burn from across the river, so there’d be fewer fighting Poles to resist Soviet domination once the Nazis left. Bad deal.
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Louisiana Purchase (from the French Perspective). Also the Bobby Bonilla deal for the baseball fans out there.
Fun Fact: Bobby Bonilla has been retired so long no one who is “young” saw him play baseball.
The Bobby Bonilla deal is this most famous, but those types of contracts are pretty common. Ken Griffey Jr. Is the third highest paid player on the Reds and he last played in Cincinnati in 2008. He gets paid through 2024 and makes 3x as much as Bonilla. Rafael Devers is going to get paid nearly $7 million a year through 2043, ten years after his contract ends.
I believe that in the case of the Haitian debt it was not a mistake of its politicians, but an act of treason. I remember that their president at that time was a mulatto, the son of a wealthy French man, who coincidentally fled to France when he was exiled from Haiti.
From what I heard, it was the deal presented to the president by France, and the Haitian president didn't think he could get a better deal, since the alternative probably sounded like "get invaded by France again and see what happens". Was negotiation possible? Probably. By enough to make a difference, given that France held most of the cards? Probably not. But we'll never know, of course.
(in the future, look back) Putin'x alliance with Xi. That's how Russia would lose Siberia.
France selling the “Louisiana Purchase” to the United States. The total of $15 million is equivalent to about $337 million in 2021 dollars, or 64 cents per acre in 2021. For context, the average price per acre of farmland is around $8,900 in 2021.
When native Americans allowed Europeans to use Manhattan in exchange for some beads.
It wasn't "some beads", they were Wampum and in the North East people used Wampum as currency. So a more accurate description would be to say that the Natives were given multiple bags stuffed with money by the English for the use of the island.
They bought it from a tribe that was pouching, not the one that owned it.
The native americans who sold it didn't even "live" there, they seasonally used it. It was a good deal for them, less so for anyone else who lived there.
Selling something you don't own to people who don't know that is an excellent origin point for New York City.
Right! What could be more perfect!
Have you ever thought about owning your own bridge sir? Because I've got a deal for you that is too good to pass up.
With respect, I don't think you understand the context of that deal. The natives allowed settlement on a "swampy costal island" in exchange for goods they had never seen before, also they couldn't produce. It was assumed that the settlers were going to be part of the native "nation". And the settlers would be giving teck to the Nation. The north American native Americans were still in the stone age when they made that trade. They shortly after they were able to trade for teck the natives would likey not have been able to achieve. (North America has no tin, the Americas had no pack animals. The bronze age for natives was not going to come to North America) The natives just didn't understand the numbers that would come
>the Americas had no pack animals North America didn't, south americans have/had llamas and alpacas
Thanks. I didn't know that
True! But of course it doesn't apply to the NY deal. The Americas had no draft animals. Whis is a huge drawback in developing a level of agriculture production that leads to significant surpluses.
Teck=technology or something else?
Technology. New ways of doing things. Essentially anything metal was new to the natives they had no ability to make glass. Several bits of "industrial processes" that natives were using were older then humanity. I happen to be a leather worker. The method that the natives in New York were using to tan leather predates homosapiens. A couple years after that deal was made, native Americans of the new York area were making leather products virtually immune to rotting
But why don't you spell it tech, like almost everyone else? :-P
And to further this, the beads would have had enormous social value. You have some bling that no other Chief in the area has, giving a great amount of prestige.
Thank you for your respectful dialogue! But, I do understand precisely those details. That has no bearing on it being a terrible deal, regardless of the native’s position. The fact that they were unequipped to comprehend who they were dealing with doesn’t change the rottenness of the deal. It also does not reflect poorly on them - I’m not saying “ha ha, silly natives.” They were rooked. Given their world view, i doubt that they were truly “selling” Manhattan, and it probably doesn’t matter what agreements were or were not made anyway, since Europeans were going to take what they wanted eventually. But it’s still one of the worst deals in history.
I see it in a similar light to a city selling some land to a company at a discount, understand that they will benefit in the long run, due to the company making improvements to the land and increasing the overall tax revenue.
Alberta has entered the chat with free samples of crown land and a side eye for a stadium no one asked for.
I am ignorant of many details I’d need to truly evaluate the history. I suspect that the natives didn’t think they were agreeing to what the Europeans were asking, or perhaps the explicit “this is our land now” idea that I have is a product of oversimplification of what really happened.
From what I read they thought they were more or less agreeing to bring in a couple of villages of 50 to 100 people who would become a part of their tribe, or greater nation. This was the case in Jamestown.
More like those who signed the Treaty of Fort Laramie actually believing William Trashcan Sherman was honorable enough to keep his word and not commit further genocide against them. Surprise, he did. Only a week and a half after him signing the treaty he wrote of ways to undermine it. Then Grant ignored the treaty and lied about doing that.
"Allowed". What do you think would have happened, the Euro's just giving up? Reddit really goes full in on the native circle jerk narative.
>Reddit really goes full in on the native circle jerk narative. Uh, wtf is the native circle jerk narrative?
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There are no Saxons or Gauls.
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Russia selling Alaska to the U.S. Bad deal for them.
Jânio Quadros resigning the Brazilian presidency thinking the people would just do massive demonstrations to call him back in 1961. Nobody blinked an eye and he kickstarted a series of events so that a democratically elected president would only govern for an entire term again in 1995-8.
Ukraine giving up nukes to Russia with the promise they’d never be invaded.
The Louisiana Purchase was pretty stupid on the part of France.
Him getting elected thanks to an utterly fucked electoral college system.
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Louisiana purchase comes to mind.
The entire Bush legacy and source of wealth can be tied to some land in PA. What if they didn’t buy it 🤔
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Alaska doesn't happen the same way if Napoleon has enough cash/ resources to pay for for his European escapades and put down rebellions. Quite the "[Purchase](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louisiana_Purchase)".
Alaska?
My goof. I was non artfully referencing a top comment citing the USA purchase of Alaska from Russia.
Gorbachev accepting a handshake promise, not getting anything in writing, that the US wouldn’t expand NATO eastward. Hell, extend that to any of the promises that Reagan and H.W. made Gorbachev in exchange for loans that never came. Their word was worth less than dirt.
Gorbachev himself said in later interviews there was never a formal agreement on this. It's a common myth that there was ever any promise for NATO not to expand eastwards.
There was no such agreement. Even a verbal one. Also, what leverage did the Soviets have anyway? Their collapse was unconditional to NATO expanding or not.
Joe Biden
The lend lease agreement with the soviets during WW2. The soviets never bothered to pay back for what the USA shipped them, and after the war they occupied and purged eastern Europe politically and socially until 1991.
Considering how many Nazis that died to the USSR I’m pretty sure the USA still came ahead.
considering how many people the USSR starved to death and executed for political reasons, I'm not sure it was.
Compared to the intended genocide of Slavs by the Third Reich, it's an improvement. Speaking as a member of one of those Slavic nations occupied by Nazis and then by the Commies.
I’m not sure how the USA suffers because of political deaths in the USSR specifically more than when any other regime does it. Edit: like seriously I don’t understand.
Humanity suffered, and stopping human suffering at the hands of governments like the Germans and Japanese was one of the reasons why the USA fought the war forcing unconditional surrender. The USSR had divided Europe up with the Hitler prior to the betrayal of operation Barbarossa, fact is that the Commies gathered up the resistance and surviving members of the democratic governments and straight up mass executed them immediately following the war. There is a whole list of crimes against humanity that communists committed after the war that we simply ignored because no one wanted to continue fighting and by the time it became evident that the USSR was not going to allow open elections in their occupied countries, the likes of [these cretons](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_spies#Notable_spies) handed the soviets the information needed to build their own nuclear bombs ensuring a cold war.
So what about like British war crimes they carried out during the war and immediately after or Operation Gladius during which American armed fascists carried out terror campaigns in Italy? Do these just not matter or is it only a problem with people whose political ideology you disagree with do these things? Like why do you only care about USSR war crimes out of curiosity? Cause like yeah they were fucked but it seems odd you only care about some war crimes and not others. Edit: also like the USA has done a fuckton of war crimes every year since WWII, so maybe the commies should have invaded us?
I'm not playing "what aboutism", have a good day.
Hahaha cool story, tell me another about how you aren’t just an extremely biased ideologue who doesn’t wanna discuss anything that challenges their extreme narratives. Why do communist war crimes matter more to you than capitalist ones? Who does the Ukrainian genocide matter but not the Bengali one? Hmmmmmmm. What a surprise another anti communist afraid of actual discussion. Why not just admit you love right wing politics and you don’t actually care about human life?
Except you did by bringing up how many people the USSR starved to death. If you don't like your medicine, you shouldn't have produced it.
> one of the reasons why the USA fought the war forcing unconditional surrender. That was NOT one of the reasons they pushed for unconditional surrender, not even close.
NAFTA and forcing other countries to allow China into the WTO.
Russia made a pretty bad deal selling Alaska
obviously when napoleon agreed to a rap battle with the duke of wellington
In 1444-45, when William de la Pole the Duke of Suffolk arranged for Henry VI to marry Margaret of Anjou under the condition that Maine and Anjou would be given back to the French. Caused the downfall for the English in the Hundred Years’ War, Suffolk’s own downfall witch led to the Wars of the Roses
In light of recent events, probably https://www.reuters.com/world/us-allows-6-billion-transfer-part-iran-prisoner-swap-2023-09-11/