You are mistaken.
Just don't assume that diminishing support for Trump will result in increased support for the democratic party. I find both equally disgusting.
All the people who huffed about Kamala and Trump being sides of the same coin have brought us to this stage. You think Kamala's admin would be anywhere as venal, corrupt, blatantly unlawful as this?
Yes, and absolutely, yes.
I am old enough to realize that these are the sides of the same coin. They have different but overlapping sets of masters, but the end result is always the same. I don't see the point of losing time at the polls. Marx was right.
That was a very different situation. The USSR was still catching up in industrialisation, and despite its huge losses still had vast reserves of labour in the countryside to tap. It was much more like the process of industrialisation in China that’s seen huge growth there over the last generation. Russia has already industrialised so it doesn’t have a catch-up growth opportunity in the same way. They are much more labour and resource constrained these days.
This labor was, pre-war, a bunch of poor, uneducated serfs (basically slaves). But leading up to WWII, they were transformed into educated, literate, laborers. Also the USSR had invested leading up to WW2 in agriculture outside Ukraine (since the Nazis controlled it).
So while there was less labor, they were far more productive labor thanks to post-revolution, post-WWI measures
So one person says, USSR was still catching up in industrialisation, the other one says, they were far more productive... what is it? The whole argument still feels far-fetched at the very least.
> This labor was, pre-war, a bunch of poor, uneducated serfs (basically slaves).
This is incorrect. Serfdom in Russian empire was abolished in 1861, long before the revolution. Peasant literacy rates, while still poor, had been gradually improving after that.
> Also the USSR had invested leading up to WW2 in agriculture outside Ukraine (since the Nazis controlled it).
What? Not only Ukraine was controlled by Bolsheviks at the start of WW2 its territories have also been extended with parts of Poland and Romania annexed by Soviets between the start of WW2 and the so-called "Great Patriotic" phase of the war.
The USSR's (well, Russia's) growth had begun before WW2, and it was in response to pre-WW1 Russian being severely underdeveloped. There was a ton of room for growth that started before WWII, and it continued unabated.
Basically, Russia up to WW2 had economic growth because it was "catching up" to the West. Industrialization was one place. Literacy was another. There was a huge effort to improve literacy after the Tsar was killed.
Finally, because the Nazis occupied Ukraine during WW2, Russia/the USSR had to develop other places during WW2 just to feed its people, which accelerated growth post-war.
These conditions do not exist today, I don't think. But this isn't my area of expertise. I just know that Russia was a feudalistic shithole until the Tsar was overthrown, and then they worked hard to turn the serfs into educated and literate people, right as they were forced by invasion to economically develop previously overlooked lands.
If you want a very pro-1% take on this, check out Anna Karenina. The "good guy" main character of the novel is a large landowner with a lot of serfs (read: slaves) whom he visits and instructs, based on latest science, how to farm better.
Same thing happened in Japan about a generation or two earlier. There's ar eason tiny, flyover Japan beat Russia in the Russo-Japanese war. Russia was totally backwards, even by "barely industrialized Japan" standards.
I fully acknowledge that it doesn't take much courage to bully people anonymously on HN. I don't claim to have any deep well of courage in real life either - many of my friends were already radicalized against OpenAI for other reasons, I don't expect to face professional consequences for being angry about this, and I might not be so willing to go scorched earth if either of those weren't true. Just wanted to explain where the world is at and why people should expect to see further incivility about this.
I think most of what you said is incorrect.
You need to chat about this with high school teachers. From my personal experience and that of my friends who have teen kids right now --
Talking to kids about these issues is useless; they will say anything to keep the opium coming. They might be aware that spending a lot of time on social media and cell phones might result in slipping grades and homework not done, but they will spend hours on both, regardless of consequences. A lot of emotional anguish will come from social media, and kids on social media are generally a lot more nasty to each other than in person. There are so many tears because of what he/she said on discord... especially girls, being more emotional, cannot mitigate anything at all. These things suck them in like a drug, and parents' action is often the only way out.
A blocked social media and kids' cell phones on my desk until homework and chores are done was the most important factor that helped to turn their grades around, and I know a lot of other parents who gravitated towards the same thing.
That's what he says, but I very much doubt that. He was running an investment fund in Russia in the 90s. Back then such activity was impossible there without some connection to the organized crime, whether state-affiliated or otherwise. He likely lost the power struggle against other crooks and got Interpol used against him.
I know about this, but again, this does not mean that Browder himself was squeaky clean. My opinion is that he bit off more than he could chew, aligned with the wrong crew and lost the fight with the people more powerful than he was. Of course I don't know anything for sure, but it is highly unlikely that an investment fund in the 90s Russia was compliant with the law. At the very least, a lot of wheels had to be greased in order to be able to operate, and that opens the door for more shady stuff. It is a bad example of an innocent person being referred to Interpol.
By that logic Mark Carney (the PM of Canada) is a potential criminal as well because he did M&A and Sovereign Risk work for GS's Russian investments during Shock Therapy and the post-Apartheid government in ZA (most of whom ended up being associated with Zumagate) in the early-to-mid 1990s [0].
Alephnerd, I doubt Mark Carney was personally involved in anything shady, but it is entirely possible that GS operations in Russia proper were not entirely clean.
I am not even implying that GS was aware of anything. What I am saying is not a long stretch by any means, just look up the 1mdb scandal. And Browder was right there in Moscow in the middle of it.
Tell any Russian old enough to remember that Browder's operations in the 90s were in complete compliance with the law, they would laugh in your face.
> For the analysis, the researchers divided California into 1,692 neighborhoods, using a geographic unit similar to zip codes. They obtained publicly available data from the state’s Department of Motor Vehicles on the number of ZEVs registered in each neighborhood. ZEVs include full-battery electric cars, plug-in hybrids and fuel-cell cars, but not heavier duty vehicles like delivery trucks and semi trucks.
> Next, the research team obtained data from the Tropospheric Monitoring Instrument (TROPOMI), a high-resolution satellite sensor that provides daily, global measurements of NO₂ and other pollutants. They used this data to calculate annual average NO₂ levels in each California neighborhood from 2019 to 2023.
> Over the study period, a typical neighborhood gained 272 ZEVs, with most neighborhoods adding between 18 and 839. For every 200 new ZEVs registered, NO₂ levels dropped 1.1%, a measurable improvement in air quality.
Seems pretty clear to me that that's controlled for.
NYT says Russian AD in Venezuela wasn't even hooked to radar, with much of it kept in storage.
Indian AD (S-300 or S-400) performed very well during the recent conflict with Pakistan.
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