Why is that worse?

As a native English speaker I fully agree that your intuition makes sense and I’ve also always hated this phrase because it does sound backwards.

Haven’t heard this take yet. Any sources I could take a look at?

This is a good take but it disregards the realities of the financial recipients being unable to account for funds spent. I agree there are special circumstances but we need to have visibility to those realities as benefactors. Otherwise how can we allocate funds democratically.

Lol literally no way to find out because they don’t track it and have no reason to do it.

Or - and this is heavily documented - the US Military has never passed any audit since they began being audited. This is just part of that.

Doesn’t mean we don’t support Ukraine. Just means we need to hold the military accountable for the funds provided.

Idk why people are down voting you. Yes its a Hong Kong based publication but it’s been owned by Alibaba since 2016.

Absolutely calls into question the veracity of the claims and makes addressing the authors sources more important.

Lol - from the South China Morning Post sourced from the China Academy of Science. I have a hard time accepting this as anything beyond attempted good PR. I wonder how this squares with the demographic and real estate issues China is facing.

It’s looking like no one really knows - seeing mixed signals in the recent reporting. They are reporting higher GDP but the concern seems to be projected inflation increases and a possible housing bubble.

When diving into the reporting, I found some interesting nuggets referring to Putin directing his interior ministers toward manual economic controls since 2014. The thought is in mitigating crises (Crimea and now Ukraine). From looking at China, manual controls seem to work in the short term before mistakes set in long term. Curious to see how much longer Russia can hold out.

Yeah I did a bit of looking around recent headlines and see similar sentiments:

• https://www.ft.com/content/b3206a9f-e667-4e53-8a16-a8096188d4ae
• https://www.reuters.com/breakingviews/russias-economy-will-suffer-brawl-top-2023-12-18/

I guess we’ll see if they can dodge another bullet

“Russian economy is about to flip the fuck out”

Just curious, what’s your sourcing on that? I ask because this has been said since the sanctions were put in place but they’ve managed to limb along.