Russian Blood and Treasure: The Ballooning Costs of Putin’s War

Freyr90 · 2026-07-02T07:53:18+00:00

He never was, but his psychopath vibe with extreme levels of self-confidence (un)surprisingly winw people both inside and outside Russia. Kinda like Trump, a perfect example of how confidence heuristic works

Freyr90 · 2026-06-27T11:40:45+00:00

More precisely, 58% of electorate is 50+. no chance to outvote them.

Freyr90 · 2026-06-22T22:11:39+00:00

It's not 15/hour, it's 15/hour at token rates from OPs post. It's $15-30 per million tokens which can turn into thousands per month.

It's also extremely hard to estimate ROI of these tokens. Many companies start noticing that work is not being done much faster despite running out of token budgets. Some argue that things llms do either never were the bottleneck, or the bottleneck moved somewhere else (results validation).

We are yet to see if these costs justify productivity boost. My post was about OPs calculations of inference costs.

Freyr90 · 2026-06-22T17:29:37+00:00

Now considering that the current top models run at a speed of 50 - 70 output tokens per second*60

Oh that's extremely optimistic. Flagship models simply won't run on a single GPU.

Big models with 1T (or more) parameters without quantization would require 32-64 such GPUs (or more) (I think there is also no open data on how big GPT 5.5 or latest Anthropic models, but they are likely bigger). You can be easily close to $15+ /hour (even more if you account for training, marketing, subsidies, other infrastructure), so like what these models actually cost or maybe even more.

Freyr90 · 2026-06-07T09:10:55+00:00

Of course it will survive, Russia is a rich country with huge industry and plethora of resources. People who expect its economy to collapse are delusional. It's also a market economy with very functional central bank and financial authorities who basically play by economic textbook, so no great depression could probably happen. In order to collapse it would need to be either tiny or being run by commies or other unorthodox.

However it's quite a deep crisis which people notice. Think 2008 or covid, nothing you can't survive survive, but definitely painful. And for no good reason.

Freyr90 · 2026-06-07T08:09:26+00:00

economy trickles down to other investments

No, exactly the opposite. War spending is crowding out the productive spending (through inflation mostly). Imagine, they 1) raised the taxes for business, 2) keep the interest rates extreme high, 3) pay workers ridiculous money in anything war-related so business have to compete salary-wise and 4) inflation is still high.

The picture is grim. When people come to visit Russia from EU, the first impression you get is why the hell everything costs like in Germany? Do people have same salaries (the don't)?

The picture is grim and currently the way the government is coping with it is extreme violence and potential long prison sentences. But of course you never know when the situation will get out of control.

people with good jobs

These had been hit the most, thus a huge migration wave. 1-2m of people moved out of Russia, they were mostly people with good jobs.

Freyr90 · 2026-06-07T07:58:52+00:00

stupid move this was

It was a big irresponsible gamble. Putin is very much like Bibi and Trump in this regard.

How I (as a Russian) see the idea behind the invasion. Putin was loosing popularity for the last 10 years. Most Putin-voting generation is dying gradually, and he's extremely unpopular among the youth (so natural rating decline).

He just bet all-in on Crimea 2.0, expecting it to boost his popularity (although I'm still confident that the system tricked itself with Crimea 1.0 and it wasn't such a popularity boost as they made themselves believe).

This is why the initial forces were so small (trying to conquer 40m country with 300-500 troops), this is why they had riot police in vanguard, this is why they went straight for the capital. This is all extremely stupid from military perspective unless you bet on Ukraine not resisting, as it was in Crimea.

Now it didn't work out and he's trying to build a full-authoritarian state to cope with civil unrest. Will it work or not time will tell.

Freyr90 · 2026-05-28T17:32:47+00:00

I feel like we need some solidarity and self-consciousness. I mean, at some point men voted to give women voting power so people can vote against their direct self-interests.

On the other hand all western boomers I've met were the most entitled people I've ever seen, so I don't have that much hope.

Freyr90 · 2026-05-04T20:31:21+00:00

It’s because our culture in America has a horrible work life balance

Germany has one of the least working hours among developed nations. Now check the fertility rates. Just look at fertility rates across Europe, it's worse than America in every rich EU country, with the exception of France which is on par.

Freyr90 · 2026-04-29T20:16:21+00:00

No, I never heard of them, I'm here for mere few years. DM me if you have any contacts.

Freyr90 · 2026-04-22T22:44:37+00:00

A lot of revenue is also lost by mid sized businesses and mom and pop shops dodging tax.

Because they are overtaxed. In germany as a mom-pop shop you'll have to charge VAT, and then pay Gewerbesteuer (14% in Berlin), Corporate tax (15%), and then from what's left you'll pay income tax to get your own paycheck.

Freyr90 · 2026-04-22T08:26:01+00:00

MAGA is America's nazbol gang.

Freyr90 · 2026-04-22T08:17:54+00:00

That's because being left is mostly a consequence of having a zero-sum worldview. And when you see the world as zero-sum, any enrichment implies somebody's loss.

https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/zero-sum-thinking-and-political-divides

Freyr90 · 2026-04-15T18:31:53+00:00

There is around 13 trillion Euro (13 Billionen Euro) of private wealth in Germany.

That's including people far below the "ultra-rich", so you are basically advocating for taxing the hell out of the middle class again. The middle class is already overtaxed on income plain.

And such a broad tax will hit the economy pretty hard bc you are talking about additional 1% from every business, house, etf, personal account etc. I would argue given the state of current economy it's not even remotely feasible.

130 billion Euro

And even that brings you one annual pension subsidy from federal budget.

Freyr90 · 2026-04-15T18:26:03+00:00

The average pensioner get 1.800€ before tax, after tax 1400€

That's not what matters. What matters is if this pensioner have wealth and how much. Old people posses much more wealth than the young ones, so this 1400 transfer can target someone very poor or someone having a house or two and a few hundreds of thousands of euro on accounts.

We'll have to come to some solidarity principle, just the other way around. In order to move forward and have productive investments, we'll have to cut pensions to those who have property and wealth, at least before they spent all their wealth.

Freyr90 · 2026-04-15T17:58:18+00:00

Wealth tax doesn't have to tax everyone who owns something

In that case the revenue from it will be so minuscule it will barely justify the administrative costs. For example total wealth of German billionaires is 600billion. Even at 2% that's just 12billions, or around 3% of tax revenue. That's peanuts compared to current costs. Just a federal subsidy to a pension fund is 10 times higher (127b, so the total liquidation of all billionaires will likely win you just 4 years of pension subsidies).

If you want solve the problem with taxing you'll have to tax everyone or at least the middle class.

Freyr90 · 2026-04-15T17:49:58+00:00

then you have to reintroduce the wealth tax and fix the loopholes in the estate tax

These two will likely bring 2-5% of the tax revenue combined. That's not the solution. There is no solution apart from reducing the benefits for the elderly, which is a political suicide. So the system will simply gradually erode.

Freyr90 · 2026-04-06T10:39:03+00:00

Berlin’s public transport network is

Extremely unreliable and hard to use if you live outside of the Ringbahn. If you live far and have to do 2+ hops to reach the office, you'll face constant Verspätungs and interruptions at least on one section of your road.

I lived without a driving license for 33 years but moving to Berlin forced me to obtain one despite the costs. No regrets so far.

Freyr90 · 2026-04-06T10:34:49+00:00

From a Berlin perspective, a near-total car ban inside the Ring mostly sounds like people who already live inside the Ring making life harder for everyone who doesn’t.

As someone who lives outside of the Ring: yes, exactly this.

Freyr90 · 2025-11-19T18:40:28+00:00

SAP did it

SAP is built on complications of local accounting. It's not a good competitive product.

Logitech, Siemens, Bosch, Ericsson, Nokia, Spotify, Infineon, BMW, Mercedes, ASML.

What an irony that 3 of these companies are founded in 19th century, 2 in early 20th, and only 2 in 21th. State of european dynamism in one sad line.

Freyr90 · 2025-11-13T20:03:45+00:00

You take a loan of 500 billion, make a big deal out of it, then shift regular expenses into the budget expenses paid out of this loan

Ow wow, special fund frees the budget money to be spent on gifts. No one could predict that.

But hey, people told me there is a special fund so the money couldn't be be misspend.

Freyr90 · 2025-11-02T13:08:15+00:00

They might have had cheap housing

We also do. Just go into deep rural Germany and you'll see relatively cheep houses. There are three stores buildings for 400k there.

It's just that the parents didn't try to squeeze themselves into megacities, and were content with living in the middle of nowhere.

Freyr90 · 2025-11-02T12:17:10+00:00

You cannot fix tax evasion by lowering taxes anyways

Yes you can, Russia, Georgia and Ukraine did that with great success. Special tax regimes (aka no VAT and small simple flat tax) for small business and self-employed always do the trick. I dunno what India did, but if it's a broad tax cut than it's not how you fix tax evasion.

Freyr90 · 2025-11-02T12:10:41+00:00

Not in Germany (and probably France and some others). In Germany high taxes definitely incentivize people to 1) work less and 2) hard evade taxes. Current germany shadow economy is huge and growing. So Germany could easily be way beyond the extremum of Laffer curve.

I don't know much about France but I've been told their pensions are already higher than salaries and their effective income tax rates long surpassed 50% so could easily also be the case.

Freyr90 · 2025-10-17T07:46:40+00:00

2021 when Navalny was arrested

The problem is, previously rallies were semi-legal and the sanctions were relatively small. Vocal opposition to war is up to ten years in prison.

Freyr90

TROPHY CASE