He got greedy and complacent. He forgot that corruption/crime is far more risky if you try to steal from well connected oligarch gangs.

Running away to China would have been a far smarter move. That’s one place were American entities can’t reach you no matter what (I believe China didn’t do anything about local Fentanyl precursor suppliers until the issue became high level).

You’re welcome to discount what I am saying. To be honest, it sounds like you’ve made up your mind on this issue, even though you’re getting a lot of basic things wrong about market research and sanctions processes and corporate attitudes.

Can’t really help you on this one.

That’s really too bad, even without any technical knowledge of the code sharing system, it’s clear that this approach is done in bad faith.

I would much rather European companies ported their applications and services to a non-Google/non-ASOP platform. Having native e-government and applications would be a solid addition to make something like Sailfish OS more usable.

This is one area where European and Asian countries are way ahead of the US, things like e-govermernt (parts of Europe), simple and no/very low fee mobile payment systems (parts of Europe, India’s UPI system).

I am not trolling you. If what I said is a mere statement of personal opinion (and not tied to reality), then it should be simple for you to show why what I am saying is BS.

Instead you’re just going with “I am right! You’re wrong!” and you claim to not see the irony in that? Don’t buy it!

Come, on! I don’t believe you don’t see why I used the term “irony” in my post.

Sorry. I don’t buy it. You might disagree with what I am saying, but you almost certainly know why I thought your “I said so” and “statement of personal opinion” pieces are ironic.

https://godblesstheusabible.com/

What the fuck this is?

I strongly disagree.

I explained my reasoning with some clear examples. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg, I am not going to write a 2,000 word wall of text unless I am having an interesting conversation.

There’s no such thing as common sense. Its just a way for people to claim their ideals as the standard because “I said so.”

I wonder if you see the irony in this statement and how it was presented “I said so”. :)

I believe 8K is the limit for home use in terms of physiological perception.

IMO, HDR is a bigger differentiation that resolution in our current environment (i.e. 4K being the high end). It sucks that HDR formats and monitor specs are such a mess.

I wish there were two universal standardized formats / specification. A cheaper, lite version and a high end expensive one.

Another poster mentioned “That’s a very European mindset.” It’s not exclusively a European mindset, I’ve lived for several years in Asia and have visited multiple regions. This “mindset” is arguably common even among those who are not particularly religious.

National religious institutions provide a sense of belonging to the populace, help maintain our national identity and culture and help our national liberation struggle. Even as an atheist, these are clearly good things.

And there is no discrimination in terms of religious identity. I support our Orthodox Church, Catholic Church (which is actually much more diverse than in many countries) and the Crimean Muslim leadership.

One can argue this is not a mindset, but common sense and that American attitudes are a mindset.

From my time living in the US (several years, with extensive travels), I got the impression that America nominally has “separation of church and state”, but it in reality this separation does not exist. A significant portion of American Christianity (perhaps not the majority, but it is a huge portion, far more than most Americans would admit) is de facto an arm of the oligarch regime, focused on enabling tax fraud, spreading crime and corruption and running political bribery systems. And you can’t even shut them down because of the alleged “separation of church and state”. It’s funny how that works. :)

There is one anecdote that perfectly demonstrates what I am talking about:

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/joel-osteen-megachurch-houston-beryl-response-b2576711.html

And the cherry on top was a comment that I found when doing a web search to find the link above:

If churches opened their doors, they’d be subject to the same criminal and legal risk that any other private business would be responsible for. The world is not a perfect utopia, and churches have to protect themselves as much as anyone else. Why don’t you open your doors?

This is extremely funny. 🤣

Hahaha, I totally forgot about this, but the reference is almost scary in a way. Life imitating art and pretty fantastical elements of science fiction becoming reality.

What a weird world we live in.

I am an atheist (albeit I support our national churches/religious entities and believe they should be state financed) and it is fascinating that I agree with Leo XIV on an ethical, moral and even theological/spiritual level.

P.S. While I don’t believe in a meta-physical, abrahamic tradition-style god, I do think there is a lot of wonder, beauty and even sacredness (divinity) to the cosmos. Something along the lines of this quote from a book by Alan Watts:

The universe is the Big Bang, the beginning of the universe. And you’re not something that is a result of it. You’re not something that is a sort of byproduct of it. You are it. It’s like when you take a bottle of ink and you throw it at a white wall. Smash! And all the ink spreads out. In the middle, it’s dense, isn’t it? And as it gets out on the edge, the little droplets get finer and finer and make more complicated patterns.

So in the same way, there was a big bang at the beginning of things and it spread. And you and I, sitting here in this room, as complicated human beings, are the little fringes on the edge of that bang. We are the way it’s going now.

I wish there was Raspberry Pi style RISV-V SBC (with at least some level of ecosystem support).

This is one area where I personally can relatively easily move to RISC-V.

I’m curious on what your solution to the Nvidia problem is? Just stop selling to the market whose sales increased? Then the next, and the next?

For one, you need to understand whether Nvidia is acting in good faith or not. If they are not, then one needs to create legal incentives for them to start acting in good faith.

A basic evaluation of sales dynamics is done irrespective of sanctions (remember how the example I described was tied to defining a functional bonus system). Nvidia has an understanding of their sales flow into Singapore. If you have a long standing partner that sees an increase in shipments that aligns with internal demand forecast (which are developed anyways), there is no red flag.

If you suddenly have an unknown entity placing orders larger than the total sales in Singapore for the last quarter. That is a clear red flag. You need to ask them who their end-customers are and whether they have validated that their own end-customers aren’t working on sanction workarounds. If they don’t cooperate, then you blacklist the entity and owners and don’t send them any more shipments.

If Nvidia (or a suspicious new distributor) isn’t doing, then they are acting in bad faith.

And it’s already been pointed out that the Ubiquiti hardware in question requires no activation at all. In fact I don’t believe any Ubiquiti hardware inherently needs internet, never mind activation.

That’s why my example referred to a competitor of Ubiquiti (i.e. you don’t actually need activation data to run the calculations as described in my reply to you).

What outlined is just one tool in a toolkit that is regularly used outside of any sanction compliance.

Sales (especially for high-margin high tech items) isn’t done an intuition basis since as far back as the 60s/70s. With modern tech you can very much track your sales flow and identify suspicious sources that are almost certainly working on sanctions work around.

It’s all a matter of motivation (and lack of incentives).

I curious, do you have any information to suggest Ubiquiti has been acting in good faith?

Here is a high-level discussion:

https://piefed.social/comment/9903594

But going beyond that, forgot about Ukraine for a second.

Let’s say you are a competitor of Ubiquiti and you want to develop a bonus structure for your regional teams. You want to know the return on your marketing spend, how well the regional sales teams are developing relationships with retailers, B2B and other source of revenues.

To do that you need to know your real market share. You know your own numbers, but if share is a component of your bonus structure, you need to have accurate numbers for your competition (your sales going up by 15% is a massive failure if the rest of the regional market truly grew by 30%, it means your teams are failing).

To do that, you have several source of data. Roughly speaking you have two basic measures ([1], [2]):

• [1] Shipments into a region/channel. Units that were sent to a geography (not sales, just shipments)
• [2] POS transactions (syndicated providers offer this albeit it’s less comprehensive on a global geography basis than [1])
• [3] You’re going to always have a delta between the two measures ([1], [2]) above, because you have things like B2B sales, government sales, shipments into the regional distributor channel and so on. These numbers are also available on a regional basis from market data providers.

That being said, you have situations where ([1] - [2]) clearly does not equal anything close to even the highest estimates of [3]. That’s when you know shipments into a region are actually being diverted into another country (other countries?).

If the difference between ([1] - [2]) and [3] for your competitor is huge, you want adjust this in your regional market share calculations and bonus payouts. Because otherwise your regional team might be busting ass like no tomorrow and their performance is being undercounted because your competitor is not actually selling a large part of [1] in the given region, the units are going elsewhere.

Believe it or not, this can be a very sensitive topic. People tend to get very pissed off if their bonuses are impacted (especially if they work hard to grow their regional business).

And that’s if you don’t have access to Ubiquiti datasets; our thought experiment positions us as a company that is trying understand shipment to POS/sales transactions for our competitor; Ubiquiti.

If you are Ubiquiti, I assume (this was true in tech product segments where I have worked) you also have the benefit of being able to track geographic activation of your products (I am assuming it’s possible to update Ubiquiti devices?) and potentially their serial numbers; so you can track which shipments are being diverted to which geography. With some more work and tracking, you can figure out what’s going.

There are some other approaches to triangulation that are used that I am not going to cover here (assuming you are a competitor of Ubiquiti).

Do you see why I said what I did?

That’s a fair question.

Look at say Nvidia and import controls of enterprise GPUs into China. A highly politically and PR sensitive topic. Something that is arguably a bigger deal (for Nvidia) than breaking sanctions/restrictions on russia.

And yet it turned out that Nvidia had knowledge that around the same time that export restrictions on China were implemented (with their “topline” China shipment numbers declining), there was a massive increase in shipments to Singapore (a trade focused polity with a long history a ethnic-Chinese presence in local business communities).

Did Nvidia act upon this or did just decided to assume that “goly gee, it just so happened that our Singapore shipments started massively increase at exactly the same time we had implement export restrictions into China”.

The people behind Nvidia might be cruel, corrupt and regressive, but they are not stupid.

And I have no reason to believe Ubiquiti is any better from a moral perspective.

EDIT: More details from a similar question to yours (but much more polite): https://piefed.social/comment/9904032

I understand. Nor am I naive enough to think it’s even possible to completely address money laundering or sanction workarounds.

It’s almost certain they have a lackadaisical (if not out right malicious) approach to limiting shipments that end up in russia. I am genuinely curious, is there a reason to believe otherwise?

They are an American tech company.

From what I remember, they did try to heavily raise fees and worsen the experience on their platform “my next trillion users … life changing blah blah … my ARPU”, but then backed off when they got public pushback. They will do it again when they think they can get away with it.

Better to use something like liberapay.

That’s what I use to donate to Piefed development and I’ve been meaning try and pitch this platform to my Patreon list.

There’s almost no way to control that

That’s not really true. If they wanted to, they could massively decrease the level of shipments that reach the russians. It’s not a priority for Ubiquiti.

It’s like with money laundering, it’s very difficult to control (I am talking in a general sense). Yet you’ll find that enabling money laundering for drug cartels is treated relatively seriously by major western financial institutions.

Considering the relatively niche form factor/spec, it is reasonable to assume that such a device will have higher prices. Economies of scale is king in electronics.