Every govmint except USA....

[pbmus]

Link to tweet

[dalton99a]

1. Obama said it best:

"They are a smaller country, they are a weaker country, their economy doesn't produce anything that anybody wants to buy except oil and gas and arms. They don't innovate."

[A HERETIC I AM]

2. Back in the 90's I knew a couple guys that went there to install a large diesel engine....

in a mining truck. They were buying an American made diesels to replace the crap Russian made ones.

They had to go back a second time to install another, and they took with them a bunch of items requested by the workers that they could not find in their country or what they could find was of such shitty quality as to make them useless.

What did they request?

Batteries, like D cells and such. They shipped over a couple hundred pounds of Duracell batteries

Ink pens. Bic pens that cost $2 for ten. They couldn't buy a decent ball point pen in Russia

Flashlights.

Notepads. Yup, something as mundane as a spiral bound, small pocket notepad.

Now this was over 20 years ago, and they have since opened to Western products much more than they used to be, but the point made in your quote is I am betting, still relevant to a large degree.

[haele]

3. Don't forget toilet paper...

One of my "between active duty and a stable contract job" employers was UCSD building microwave transmitters for an international seismograph station project - three of the sites were in the former Soviet 'Stans.
We went to Costco and bought two entire pallets of Kirtland Toilet paper to pack the units in before we shipped them out on one of the station manager's request.
His rep came out with a roll of TP the consistency of those elementary-school bathroom brown paper-towel rolls - the ones that look like there's still bits of wood-chip in the pulp...

Haele

[A HERETIC I AM]

4. I was actually going to mention that.....

but I honestly don't remember if they took any or not, just because of the size restrictions.

I do remember a shit-ton of batteries and a couple dozen flashlights as well as 20 or 30 boxes of ink pens.