Didn't know about that side of his talent. Among broader Russian audience Stiver was known as a maintainer of the largest pirate library in Russian (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41634780).
ptero 172 days ago [-]
It is also broader than just Russian and bigger than just pirate. Flibusta has been my go-to source for books for many years.
myth_drannon 171 days ago [-]
Didn't realize that! His death sent shocks across the Russian speaking internet because he was the maintainer of Flibusta but noone spoke about his other passion.
rob74 171 days ago [-]
That might explain why the article is so light on personal details - either he asked them to keep them private, or maybe they're not aware of his real identity at all?
selivanovp 171 days ago [-]
They're aware, that's why they presented him as a "German programmer" and completely avoided his flibusta endeavour. The author from JetBrains is Russian himself.
Kwpolska 171 days ago [-]
Why does everyone have to share their real life identity on the Internet? Why do you care?
znpy 171 days ago [-]
Many people base their judgment of somebody on the person’s ideals rather than actual accomplishments. My gut feeling is that gp wanted to evaluate Stiver on something else rather than personal accomplishments.
It’s another sign of the performative society we live into, where work and accomplishments don’t matter but virtue signalling does.
rob74 171 days ago [-]
Funny that you're judging me by assuming that I want to judge him. It just struck me as unusual (and a bit sad) to see this obituary without anything personal. But I don't feel in any way "entitled" to get any personal details, far from it...
> If you defiantly refuse to say who you are, it can make people angry that you’re upsetting social reciprocity. You know who they are, but they don’t know who you are. It feels rude. An obsessive personality might make it their damn mission to figure out who you are!
To be frank, fuck them. I’m not inventing an entire persona and stuff just to make some weirdos happy.
immibis 170 days ago [-]
If you were running an online criminal empire like this guy, you might want to
hnisoss 167 days ago [-]
online criminal empire?
jrpelkonen 172 days ago [-]
Back in the day, I had to deal with some poorly documented closed source Java applications (e.g. IBM WebSphere). Tools like Fernflower and its precursors were invaluable to fill the gaps.
Thank you, Stiver, and R.I.P.
patwolf 172 days ago [-]
I worked on WebSphere back in the day. There were a lot of pre-compiled libraries provided by other IBM teams. I too made good use of decompilers (probably jad at the time) as it was often easier than trying to track down the source.
AstroJetson 172 days ago [-]
I also had a huge library of decompiled Websphere libraries. IBM was always sending patches and we would go "ok, what does this do?" "Fixes your problem?""How""Really well." So it got decompiled to see what it did.
There were lots of "We think your patch is doing XYZZY, we see where our code should be doing that. We've updated our code and the problem went away."
Fernflower was awesome. RIP Stiver, glioblastoma can be an ugly way to die.
Here's a man who lived for much of the same ideals as Aaron Swartz, and was able to make a tremendous impact on the Russian internet universe while also laying low and quiet.
I'm awfully sad Stiver passed away before old age, but happy that at least it was not due to adversity.
dvektor 172 days ago [-]
Really appreciated the time someone spent putting that together, good article.
R.I.P Stiver
indrora 171 days ago [-]
Fernflower is one of the few really powerful java decompilers out there that had good support for the bad bytecode that dex2jar would produce.
I've spent many hours pouring through the output of Fernflower looking for what some obfuscation algorithm has come up with.
Dogspeed, Stiver. Your work, "legitimate" or not, has benefitted the world. o7
lopcode 170 days ago [-]
I recall fernflower being an important part of the Minecraft decompilation process, a necessary part of creating the Minecraft Forge modding framework, which was hugely popular a while back. Another thing to be grateful of his (indirect) contributions towards.
petesergeant 172 days ago [-]
> a German programmer of Russian origin
I wonder how much of a boom Russia will see from émigrés returning home if the political environment lets up a little
danielodievich 171 days ago [-]
Nobody will go back.
One of more interesting experiences from early 2000s in Microsoft was when Microsoft Russia finally crossed 1B in revenue by finally having Gazprom/Sberbank buy all the sh*t that they were pirating before. By doing so, the country was eligible to do the yearly business review in person, instead of over whatever passed for Zoom back then, I don't remember anymore. Olga D...can't remember her last name was the country manager, one of the few women in such position at the time. She invited everyone in russian community (hello rodina email list) to come to the Microsoft conference center in building 34 to listen to repeat of what she did earlier that week to Ballmer. This was the only microsoft event with catered vodka and caviar I've been to, but anyhow, after presentation of the financial stuff it turned a bit into a recruiting event - hey, come back to the motherland, the water is nice, look they are buying software licenses like civilized people, here is the pay scale from levels 61 and up, etc etc. There were ~400 people in the room, and the uptake was 0 (zero). All of us who were there in the room were not there in motherland for a reason.
throw-the-towel 171 days ago [-]
You and your peers remember the Russia of the 1990s, dirt poor, barely avoiding famine, with a completely collapsed society and state. The new emigrants remember the Russia of the 2010s, with classy restaurants, developing infrastructure, cheap housing and whatever consumer goods money can buy, and that's very different. Your experience from 20 years ago does not apply anymore.
usrnm 171 days ago [-]
To be fair, your experience from 5 years ago is just as irrelevant. Russia under sanctions is very different.
protomolecule 171 days ago [-]
[flagged]
aix1 171 days ago [-]
I assume when you say "politically" you include the ongoing war in Ukraine. I think it's a huge factor in this context, given its impact and the risks it presents to folks (especially young men) who choose to remain in Russia.
By some estimates, 900K people have left Russia since the invasion [1], of whom 100K were IT specialists leaving in 2022 alone [2] (I haven't looked at the figures since then). I think that's a pretty strong indication of the sentiment.
And wrt the economy, didn't the Central Bank just increase the benchmark rate to 21% [3] (with another 2% hike widely expected in December)?
In Russia programmers working at accredited IT-companies are safe from mobilization [0]
> I think that's a pretty strong indication of the sentiment.
Some left following their western employers, some fled from the mobilization in 2022.
>And wrt the economy, didn't the Central Bank just increase the benchmark rate to 21%
It did, that's why I said 'mostly'. Kremlin is pumping money into defense industry and into payments to contract soldiers, the Central Bank is doing what it can to curb the inflation. Overall it hasn't affected the life much.
I'm Russian, I used to be a programmer at an accredited company, and I still wouldn't be safe from the draft because I have no university education. (For me personally this is a moot point because I left Russia, but still.)
protomolecule 167 days ago [-]
Good point, be safe.
170 days ago [-]
oytis 171 days ago [-]
> Kremlin is pumping money into defense industry and into payments to contract soldiers, the Central Bank is doing what it can to curb the inflation.
Well, yes, and what do you think the impact of it is going to be on the economy?
protomolecule 171 days ago [-]
The lowest unemployment ever, some redistribution of wealth in favor of workers in the military industry and soldiers.
oytis 171 days ago [-]
That's the immediate result. But what about later, when the war is over? Military expense is non-productive, economically it's the same as just giving people money for free while they are sitting on the couch (nobody is killed in the latter case though).
Military overspending literally killed Soviet Union, and people returning from Afghanistan war made guaranteed the unforgettable social climate after that. I don't see any reason to be bullish on Russia, even if Trump now gives up Ukraine for Putin.
throw-the-towel 170 days ago [-]
To give a bit more context to protomolecule's replies: back in 2022 every analyst was predicting total collapse of the Russian economy within a year or thereabouts. This didn't happen. So, we now tend not to believe the doomsayers at all. (And I'm not saying we're right! Just trying to explain the biases in play right now.)
_djo_ 170 days ago [-]
Which analysts were those?
The ones I was reading emphasised the need for a strong sanctions regime with penalties for third party workarounds, with the reasoning given that Russia had prepared its economy for war and already isolated it to some extent.
Maybe your typical cable TV talking head pundit might’ve been confident about Russia’s economy collapsing, but the actual professional analysts and civil servants who advise governments were much more cautious.
protomolecule 171 days ago [-]
Yes, Russian economy will crash after the war, just like American after the end of WW2.
AlexeyBelov 170 days ago [-]
Why this comparison instead of USSR and Afghanistan?
protomolecule 170 days ago [-]
Because it shows the weakness of the argument.
pkd 171 days ago [-]
I know somebody who relocated his entire family after 20+ years in the U.S and is loving it. People are not as monolithic as we are likely to believe sometimes.
wojciii 170 days ago [-]
I would really love to know more.
You know .. those bastard Ukrainians are trying to make us think that everything sucks in Russia because of the war.
But I guess that it doesn't matter much if you have money and connections.
zczc 171 days ago [-]
Head of Microsoft Russia was Olga Dergunova.
As for "nobody will go back" - agree in general, but at least Anton Nossik did go back.
centur 171 days ago [-]
I don't think it will see any, people moved from Russia not because a single person in power, but because of systemic problems on all levels - kindergartens, schools, police and safety, rights to do a legit business. It's never a head person, it's always a system that been enabled and groomed by a head person or party
protomolecule 172 days ago [-]
Most likely Stiver emigrated in the 90s for economic reasons -- Russia was in shambles. There are about 11 millions of emigrants of Russian origin [0], but I highly doubt that many will come back even if tomorrow we get a new liberal president.
How do you change the political environment in a dictatorship where ruling class has all the power and majority of the money and controls what you should read, watch or talk about?
rob74 171 days ago [-]
Well, the Russians already tried it once, more than 100 years ago, with limited success unfortunately...
082349872349872 171 days ago [-]
A while ago on HN I said the Cheka learned all their techniques from the Okhrana and people took me literally, even replying to the effect that there was no personnel continuity.
What I'd meant is that, having been on the receiving end of all the Okhrana's dirty tricks, and having learned the hard way, the Cheka knew very well indeed how to play those games by the time they were on top.
pk-protect-ai 170 days ago [-]
To repeat this, there has to be a condition: "the oppressed can't bear it anymore." Economically, they are totally fine. They are just cattle who are fed and expected to behave as the owner requires. Ninety percent of Russians who didn't leave the country after 2021 have no incentive to be in any struggle; they are fed, they have work, they have a roof. The conditions that helped in 1917 were related to an economic disaster that the majority of the population experienced, and this was influenced by the 1st WW as well (which took a huge financial toll on the elites as well).
082349872349872 170 days ago [-]
The ca. 1924 Thermidorian limitations of the 1917 success were explained by Trotsky, whose subsequent literary career was thereupon cancelled, via an ice axe to the head.
(I don't know to what degree Eric Blair worried about a similar fate, but we do see that after Animal Farm he moves to a remote island in Scotland, where presumably strangers would draw much greater attention to themselves than in London — and before returning to London for hospital marries a much younger spook*)
* compare a line from Trotsky: "Rakovsky cites a curious remark of Babeuf to the
effect that the degeneration of the new ruling stratum was helped along not a little by the former young
ladies of the aristocracy toward whom the Jacobins were very friendly. ... A census of the wives of the ruling stratum in the Soviet Union would show a similar picture."
Regardless, under current conditions there is no slim chance of rebellion in Russia. Massive conscription, on the other hand, and of course massive losses of the conscripted may cause an effect similar to 1917. However, the next government will be the same dictatorship as it always was in Russia, just slightly less aggressive toward neighbors.
082349872349872 170 days ago [-]
Do you think there might have been an opportunity during the 90-x to find a different ("Пеpемен, мы ждём пеpемен") attraction basin?
(as it is, at least the Yeltsin jokes can, like Brezhnev jokes, be repurposed for US use 2025-2028...)
gradschoolfail 169 days ago [-]
Slightly ot or maybe not, the educational inflection point was deep in the mid of the Cultural Revolution, which suggests that mass rustications are indeed situations to look into..
(The mechanism is probably that STEMish rusticants began to selforganize learning centres)
COVID might have already started the process of Montanacation — elite diffusion to the hills —for the US (tho 2024 might actually reverse it)
For russians so far, the conscripts are so far drawn disprop from the lows; the tops prefer to emigrate/stay out of the country, so wait a bit.
082349872349872 169 days ago [-]
> the conscripts are so far drawn disprop from the lows
Is it still true that bit-wranglers are exempt from conscription?
(in any event, one would hope that bitwrangling would pay well enough to provide anti-conscription cabbage?)
[hokusai said? But painted a few lone wranglers in 甲斐 province]
::::::
Re: Leningrad MTV & Russians
1) Intentionally not hiring locals for NPC role, out of respect for hosts or irony? Drink is Hainanese coconut? Visually refined + verbally profane, such Pansclavonia!
2)nomenklatura/engineers, could keep their kids away from lows as far back as 1950s, or even earlier. Military still more effective diffusive optimizer in AG’s time? Or further back, the Minimes.
I should pay more attention to the credits. There's a lot of soft-power country-checking in RU clips, eg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ps_Kqeo_tvU#t=180s , or the entire Masha i Medved series, in which it's pretty easy to guess who the panda, tiger, etc. refer to (although the "asiatic" black bear is a little indirect). At this point I've collected BR, IN, & CN refs, just missing ZA. (or maybe I've just missed it, because my Boer-fu is also nonexistent)
EDIT: and I have to give props to HONK FU! The hand-drawn motion blur is a nice touch; who has the time for that these days?
gradschoolfail 166 days ago [-]
>Given the above signs of signaling, Caplan argues in ch. 5–6[1] that the selfish return to education is greater than the social return to education, suggesting that greater educational attainment creates a negative externality (p. 198[1]). In other words, status is zero-sum; skill is not (p. 229[1]).
There ought to be a way to cross Gogol's Dead Souls with Pauli–Villars ghosts, but both my po*-russki-fu and my unitarity-fu are too weak.
(unitarity keeps things group-like; semigroups/monoids have an "arrow" in that they make irreversible transitions between J-classes; could it be easier to generalise to the latter than to add ghosts?)
* TIL the waste material from copra harvests gets sold for hydroponic use. Is the appearance of the 水耕龍 an auspicious portent for grow rooms?
EDIT: two important differences education-wise here: (a) kids can signal reasonable intelligence and high conscientiousness through vocational school (although a son of my former landlords started on this route, then swapped to the university track after encouragement by his coworkers), and (b) it's way more difficult to set up a degree mill, because kids have to test into becoming eligible for university and the resulting support.
(Upon reflection: I had a career advantage due to my sheepskin's branding being high intelligence, meh conscientiousness, and low conformity; somehow here I am at the other end of my career still faithfully signalling those same weights on HN)
gradschoolfail 166 days ago [-]
EDIT: The Minims: i saw somewhere that Brienne was run by monks..
ive unfortunately (ego quoque!) degenerated to link/comment taiji for now,
are these triangles determinate, or is there a search process involved?
(maybe I ought to be looking for "ghost faces" that'd simplify my existing edge & vertex model of computation?)
gradschoolfail 166 days ago [-]
Uh (first off) its the german sense of vertex, not the anglo sense lol
(Image Search for “3-gluon vertex” to get a language independent sense)
On (regrettably still halfass’d) reflection,there are necessary subtleties which your question is stalking but it will take me a few days or weeks to page in
082349872349872 166 days ago [-]
Aha, I'm an idiot, sorry.
(but now I'm reminded —physics envy, mind you— of a "renormalisation" in regex engines. Recall the definition of A*:
A* == ϵ | A | A*A*
Mathematically, it doesn't make any difference if A also matches epsilon. However, when generating code, if it does, it's very useful to treat the above
as asking for:
A* == ϵ ⨁ A† ⨁ (A*A*)†
where A† recognises only the nondegenerate, "squarefree", portion of A.
Otherwise one risks getting stuck recognising ϵ an infinite number of times (leaving squares in is harmless); anyway the presence of the ϵ means that during* recognition of A*, there is one incoming edge but two outgoing.)
* speaking in terms of left to right traversal, but we can also go right to left, which (by a folk theorem) means we can also calculate bottom up. I'll have to reflect upon what A* might produce, edgewise, in that last case.
gradschoolfail 165 days ago [-]
Mutual envy hits the sweet spot imho.. to me the (median) Informatiker has superior naming/notation/training. Recall that bit with Moitra et al cutting the Gordian knot of thermalization vs entanglement. (That dude couldnt touch-type to save his bacon, pls forgive the (reverent) gossip)
Here: how far is this regex from non-associativity.
[& this connection is exactly what i was hoping for! I’d hoped the regular in regularity structs would trigger smth, & save us both weeks (of procrastination, in my case)]
Was i born decades earlier, i might have wandered into a VC “human capital destruction” job, since i have a roughly equivalent mix of traits..
082349872349872 165 days ago [-]
> how far is this regex from non-associativity
The binary ops, sequencing and alternation are associative (monoidal).
The unary op, kleene star, blocks reassociation.
However, it is occasionally useful to use the associative-adjacent identity A;A* == A*;A (and more generally, A^n;A* == A*;A^n;A* == A*;A^n == ...)
A Chirurg, an Architekt, and an Informatiker are discussing whose profession has the most patina. The Chirurg points out that when God removed Adam's rib to form Eve, He was doing surgery. The Architekt points out that when God made Heaven and Earth out of the Chaos, He was doing architecture. The Informatiker just smiles broadly and then asks, "Und? where then think you the Chaos came from? a cereal Gimmick?"
082349872349872 166 days ago [-]
What about a self-organised criticality mobile of threads and swords with smaller swords hanging from them by (beams and) threads; usually just the daggers are dropping on the poors, but every once in a while one of the top threads fails and entire polearms or scythes descend upon a populace?
Mostly figured out the deal with the Leningrad (just noticed the logo animation..)
Shnurov runs a restaurant in Peterburg, “Cococo”, those are prob his employees, and the drink could well be his fave counterseasonal laptop class drink
(Who is his man in Hainan i wonder)
Update:
Lions for ZA?
082349872349872 165 days ago [-]
Ah, I had the wrong clip.
Closest I found so far to that blue and white package was in Singapore, and the site kept trying to FOMO me: "Jessie Ni just bought ${PRODUCT}" etc.
Next thing you know, the websites will be wanting me to 讨价还价?
Then again, spout pouches are easy enough to get in your own livery, and filling stations run anywhere from USD 1'500 to USD 45'000 depending upon how many pouches you plan on filling per setup op. I'll have to see if Shnur has any CoCoCo house branded goods.
> Shnurova had faced challenges before. She had studied biochemistry but [that was] incompatible with being half of one of Russia’s most glamorous couples. And so she ... became a restaurant entrepreneur.
I suppose this way Shnur will always have a place to play on weekends, even if his style is not so compatible with the CoCoCouture concept?
PS. meanwhile, in past-orientation, Zhihu shows me ads for water from "ancient aquifers". Hard to argue with geologic patina!
gradschoolfail 164 days ago [-]
the offerings at kokoko.spb.ru, how they triage the (upper mid to top) market!
1. Slavophile, past (god save the tsar!)
2. Laptop class, cosmopolitan future (tomorrow the universe!) Here be tropical dragons..
3. “Car dealer” class gastropub, present (dont worry abt that hangover)
In liberal democracies there tends to be no gap between 1,2,..(or 1,3) thank Bibendum??
I think i’ve a reasonably good handle on other-people’s-ikigai.. a shared meal or 2 can lead to some confidence intervals on their future returns — measured in ikigai!
Ikigai trading, otoh, a very delicate matter..
Edit: possible to trisect hn based on how adversarial the relationship to those who pay is ( no tops, but plenty of semiretirees in the uppest house)
082349872349872 169 days ago [-]
> (The mechanism is probably that STEMish rusticants began to selforganize learning centres)
One would think widespread smartphones would help with this? Stuff that in my childhood was only available in university towns is now accessible to almost anyone with an aptitude and an interest...
EDIT: Did Pioneer Houses ever do STEM? "What you've learned, teach a buddy" was a nice slogan...
protomolecule 171 days ago [-]
[flagged]
riehwvfbk 171 days ago [-]
The ruling class is not a monolith, it's made of people with their own idea who are constantly vying for a better position.
Just this week some part of the US ruling class got some better seats in the game of musical chairs. The game's not much different anywhere in the world, other than the window dressing.
082349872349872 171 days ago [-]
Goldstein, The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism (1948) has a description of the game which agrees with Veblen, Luttwak, Bueno de Mesquita & Smith, and probably a few others over the last five thousand years.
If the mid wishes a circulation of elites, they must ally with the low against the high; if the high wishes to prevent this, they can ally with the low against the mid.
A crucial point on which Goldstein, Squealer, and the 2 Ronnies, agree is that no matter which way these alliances are sorted in theory, somehow in practice the low always wind up more or less where they started.
> Oh, it's the meek! Blessed are the meek! Oh, that's nice, isn't it? I'm glad they're getting something, 'cause they have a hell of a time. —Mrs. BN
172 days ago [-]
selivanovp 171 days ago [-]
It's happening already. Like significant part of recent JetBrains struggles with lower quality of their products is due to they had to relocate people out of Russia, and some people just don't like to live abroad. Their Kotlin lead returned to Russia and works in Yandex now. About half the people that relocated during 2022 returned already, and if the war in Ukraine will finally end in 2025 a lot more will return back home.
oytis 171 days ago [-]
It's a different case. People who didn't want to move anywhere were virtually forced to, and after realising the struggles of being an immigrant decided to return.
People who made the decision themselves and have already settled in the new place seldom come back.
9dev 171 days ago [-]
> if the war in Ukraine will finally end in 2025 a lot more will return back home.
And how do you suppose this will happen? By Trump cutting a deal with Putin leaving Ukraine out to die, or what?
The Russian soldiers might return home. The Ukrainians won’t. There won’t be a home to return to, and in many cases, there won’t be anyone left to return.
riehwvfbk 171 days ago [-]
Generally speaking, wars tend to end.
9dev 171 days ago [-]
Specifically speaking, however, we are talking about Russia illegally invading and occupying Ukraine, a sovereign state both Russia and the USA have explicitly declared to keep its territorial integrity intact in exchange for its nuclear weapons. We are talking about this because the president-elect of the USA has curiously exclaimed to be able to ”end the war“ in a single day, and the only way that is possible is by simply sacrificing the country to Russias imperialist urges; that specifically implies millions of people loosing their lives, their home, their language, their history, their families, and their belongings.
Wars end, true. Exactly how this war ends is crucial.
selivanovp 171 days ago [-]
Russia is not imperialistic, Russia was fine with Ukraine as a sovereign state. More of it, due to current geopolitical shift, Russia is even more interested in Ukraine being a sovereign state, a buffer between Russia and NATO.
The problem is that USA twice messed with Ukraine sovereignty, first in 2004, and then in 2014 turned this country to a proxy, puppet state, bulwark against Russia. And that's why this war started, because Russia can not allow Ukraine to be turned into a hostile state, ideologically driven by hatred towards Russia and Russians and manipulated by NATO, with bases on its territory.
Russia is fine with Ukrainians, if you're unaware, Russia accepted the largest number of Ukrainian refugees of all countries. Most of these people got Russian citizenship. It's actually Ukraine, that turned Zelensky into a king with absolute power, dismantled all the opposition party, oppressed Russian language, culture, religion, wiping history, and basically brainwashing population with targeted hatred. The reality is: Ukrainian dystopian regime is hanging on Western support. Without money and weapons they can't even feed their people anymore, but already turning women to cannon fodder, and no doubt, that in a few month they'll force their kids to go to tranches also. Because Ukrainian leaders don't care about Ukraine or Ukrainians, all they care is their pockets, that are filled by the war, and their goal is to prolong this war for as much as possible.
wojciii 170 days ago [-]
> Russia was fine with Ukraine as a sovereign state. More of it, due to current geopolitical shift, Russia is even more interested in Ukraine being a sovereign state, a buffer between Russia and NATO.
This is a lie.
Russia is trying to eradicate the Ukrainian culture. It failed with corruption and tried with military muscle during the invasion. This also failed.
So now they try to freeze people to death, kill civilians and do human wave attacks to gain territories.
People living in the occupied territories are killed for showing any Ukrainian culture. Torture is common. This is the russian Mir.
selivanovp 167 days ago [-]
>Russia is trying to eradicate the Ukrainian culture.
You're lying yourself. It's Russian culture that's getting eradicated in Ukraine by renaming cities, streets, destroying monuments, burning books, prohibiting Russian language usage which is mother tongue for majority of population of Ukraine etc. In Russia nothing like this happens. Ukrainian language is being taught in schools that has significant Ukrainian population, nobody renames anything related to Ukraine.
>So now they try to freeze people to death, kill civilians and do human wave attacks to gain territories.
You're watching too much of your local propaganda.
>People living in the occupied territories are killed for showing any Ukrainian culture. Torture is common. This is the russian Mir.
Yeah, yeah, that's why Russia has the largest population of Ukrainians outside of Ukraine, absorbed the most number of refugees from Ukraine, and people from "occupied territories" are getting Russian citizenship. Brainwashing is real.
aguaviva 167 days ago [-]
Prohibiting Russian language usage which is mother tongue for majority of population of Ukraine etc.
The Russian language is not prohibited in Ukraine, and it is not, by any stretch, "the mother tongue for [the] majority population of Ukraine."
wojciii 167 days ago [-]
Refugees?
I think that getting through a russian concentration camp will make people do anything and say anything to save themselves and their children.
There is no prohibition against speaking Ukrainian. I think you should learn about why people reject your culture while speaking the same language as you. This is somewhat amusing to me. That you can speak a language while rejecting the culture that comes with the language.
About smashing Russian monuments and renaming streets?
This is happening all over the previous Russian sphere of influence. People don't want you there. Let the people decide their own fate instead of invading them and telling them what to think.
aguaviva 171 days ago [-]
The problem is that USA twice messed with Ukraine sovereignty, first in 2004, and then in 2014 turned this country to a proxy, puppet state, bulwark against Russia. And that's why this war started, because Russia can not allow Ukraine to be turned into a hostile state, ideologically driven by hatred towards Russia and Russians and manipulated by NATO, with bases on its territory.
It seems you may not appreciate the extent to which the sources you're getting these narratives from may be woefully uninformed, and/or simply lying to you.
None of this "puppet state" stuff, or the descriptions of events in 2004/2014 that you're echoing here has any connection to reality. If the Ukrainian government were simply a "puppet" of the United States, then it would have evacuated from Kyiv after the 2022 invasion just like the former was advising it to do. But it did the complete opposite, instead.
riehwvfbk 170 days ago [-]
You are very sure that your sources aren't lying to you. If you are interested in going down a rabbit hole, here's a good starting point.
The year is 1997, but the conflict started much earlier than that, during the fall of the Soviet Union.
For all the brainwashed and self-righteous: feel free to hit the downvote button. I won't respond to stupid questions along the lines of "how is this relevant", "whataboutism", and so on. You can read.
aguaviva 169 days ago [-]
I won't respond to stupid questions along the lines of "how is this relevant",
Which is a pretty strong indication that it most likely isn't.
selivanovp 167 days ago [-]
You can go to youtube and search for "prof.Mearsheimer about history of Ukraine conflict" or something like this.
This guy is a USA professor that specializes in international relations. He was warning for years that USA course of actions will result in Russia Ukraine war. And he has multiple videos explaining in details the history and how step by step we ended with this war, what could've been done to prevent it, and what steps actually made it inevitable.
The main thing is that what he tells is true, well known to Russians, but it's that other side of the story, that is wiped and generally not allowed in Western mass media, so most of USA and other NATO countries citizens are totally unaware of it.
aguaviva 167 days ago [-]
One could, but Mearsheimer is a crank, and Youtube is notoriously full of disinformation of all sorts.
So most of USA and other NATO countries citizens are totally unaware of it.
They're perfectly aware of it, because the Russian narrative has been echoed and propagated incessantly by left- and right-wing news outlets and social media commenters ever since 2014.
allarm 166 days ago [-]
No, it is not.
aguaviva 170 days ago [-]
Oh I'm quite certain that many of them are. But I appreciate the thought.
9dev 171 days ago [-]
Most of what you’ve written is just plain wrong, but I’m not responsible for clearing up the propaganda.
Let me just say this: No political fear of any foreign influence on a bordering country ever justifies invading this country, killing its citizens, and destroying its infrastructure. No matter how you try to frame it, Russia committed crimes in Ukraine, which it is completely responsible for. You may try to blame the victim here, but that will never become the truth.
selivanovp 167 days ago [-]
Justifies? Of course not. But it's what governments did for centuries and do up to this day.
We can forget about history for a second, but just look at what's going on with China, for example. They've never attacked USA or any Western nation, they're restoring their country after centuries of foreign occupation, making their people life better, expanding markets with their goods, and USA is intended to destroy them. Why? Because they're an economic threat absorbing world markets and pushing USA out, so USA needs to act fast to preserve own dominance over the globe, because China's also building their military, so window of opportunity for military aggression is getting narrower.
To make it clear: international politics is never about justice, it's about interests. Those who're relatively strong trying to force weaker powers to submit to their demands. USA is the current King of the Hill, and they're trying their best to not allow anyone to topple them, by invading other countries directly, toppling governments, provoking wars by proxies etc.
riehwvfbk 170 days ago [-]
[flagged]
9dev 170 days ago [-]
No, no, I’m with you on that issue. But it doesn’t do anything for Ukrainian people to talk about the Iraq war now.
Let’s leave it at that, I don’t think we’re going to get together.
immibis 170 days ago [-]
I see the light now: because one evil country did evil stuff that means it's okay and not evil when my favourite country does it.
selivanovp 171 days ago [-]
[flagged]
cyberax 171 days ago [-]
Russia has plenty of resources, and is severely under-populated. So yep, it has a huge growth potential.
But the political system will have to be reformed first.
jojobas 171 days ago [-]
And by "reformed", you mean "burnt to the ground, for real this time".
cyberax 171 days ago [-]
Burning systems to the ground does not work. The end result is almost always worse than before.
Russia actually has a rather functional bureaucracy that is holding the country together. All it really needs is decentralization of power, probably similar to the German's model.
jojobas 170 days ago [-]
This functional bureaucracy is 100% compromised by the parallel power structure, "Putin's Vertical".
Pretty much everyone employed by the state, from school teachers who en masse rig elections to the judges who do FSB's/president office bidding, have to be assumed irredeemable.
Russia didn't to the "lustrations" that Poland, Czechia, East Germany and some other countries did, and the Hydra survived.
cyberax 170 days ago [-]
> This functional bureaucracy is 100% compromised by the parallel power structure, "Putin's Vertical".
Nope, it actually works well within it. I'm talking about the bureaucracy that ensures that the water is running, people can get driving licenses, register real estate deals, etc. All the "boring" stuff that keeps the country working.
> Russia didn't to the "lustrations" that Poland, Czechia, East Germany and some other countries did, and the Hydra survived.
Lustrations ("purges") are a bad idea in general, especially for larger countries that don't have a history of democracy.
Want an example? Iraq. The US Army purged all the BAATH members from the new government, replacing them with new people who were inexperienced in day-to-day administration. And then all those exceedingly nice and newly-jobless ex-BAATH-ists went and formed the core of ISIS.
Historically, lustrations worked well only in smaller countries where everyone knew everyone through one or two handshakes, and that still had people who remembered living in a functional democracy.
aguaviva 169 days ago [-]
Lustrations ("purges") are a bad idea in general, especially for larger countries that don't have a history of democracy.
I don't see one can look at recent history and come to support this view.
The lustrations in the former Warsaw Pact countries, and denazification (such as it was) in Germany after WW2 seem to have worked well enough, and to have been crucial enablers of the process of democratic transition in these countries (having had very little history of democracy as such until that point). If anything West Germany suffered from not being sufficiently robust in its denazification process until far too late.
Of course, such purges should never be simply imposed from the outside, on the heals of an invasion which should have never happened anyway, which is the key reason why de-Ba'athification failed so miserably in Iraq.
jojobas 170 days ago [-]
>I'm talking about the bureaucracy that ensures that the water is running, people can get driving licenses, register real estate deals, etc.
Maybe utilities and some other functions that are not related to how Putin enacts his political control can be spared. Not gutting the machine that does - and that's courts, the entire FSB, whole departments of the MVD, large swaths of the education system and regional governments, really need to be gutted and replaced by new people, old ones only allowed back after thorough examination of their track record.
>Lustrations ("purges") are a bad idea in general, especially for larger countries that don't have a history of democracy.
This is an opinion, and it's not supported by facts. Poland is not that small, more than 1/4 the population of Russia, and their lustrations worked very well. No living person there had any memory of democracy at the time they happened.
>Want an example? Iraq. The US Army purged all the BAATH members from the new government, replacing them with new people who were inexperienced in day-to-day administration. And then all those exceedingly nice and newly-jobless ex-BAATH-ists went and formed the core of ISIS.
Way to conflate civic lustrations with a war, and by total destruction by a superpower onslaught at that.
cyberax 169 days ago [-]
> Not gutting the machine that does - and that's courts, the entire FSB, whole departments of the MVD
The FSB _itself_ needs to be split and de-powered. There should never be a state organization with this amount of power.
However, people who were working there should not just be blindly purged. This way you end up with the Iraq scenario. From the practical standpoint, FSB also contains border guards, law enforcement departments, counter-terrorism, etc. They are all needed in a normal state.
Instead, there should be _personal_ prosecutions of people responsible for political persecution and for the illegal foreign operations that started the war. This is probably far less than 10000 people.
> Poland is not that small, more than 1/4 the population of Russia, and their lustrations worked very well.
Their version was pretty mild, and even then had problems with false documents used to libel even Lech Walesa.
> No living person there had any memory of democracy at the time they happened.
Poland was occupied in 1939, so people who were 20 at that time were 70 by 1990.
> Way to conflate civic lustrations with a war, and by total destruction by a superpower onslaught at that.
That's another argument: you probably won't even _have_ a chance to do a massive purge (never mind if it's a good idea or not). But reforms are a possibility.
jojobas 168 days ago [-]
Yeah, cause de-powering and splitting the OG KGB totally worked.
Personal prosecutions by the compromised prosecutors and courts won't work either. The war is only the tip of the iceberg, an external manifestation of absolute corruption.
protomolecule 171 days ago [-]
[flagged]
jojobas 171 days ago [-]
We had the evil establish in the 1917, and pretend-removed in 1991. It was in hiding for a decade and a bit, and it will only get worse from there.
protomolecule 171 days ago [-]
[flagged]
riehwvfbk 171 days ago [-]
The ones who think of themselves as "not evil" of course.
trhway 172 days ago [-]
Not much. Russia is a country of just 140M people. With wider availability of education/etc. size of population matters more and more.
So let's see, Russia's population is 1/2 that of the US and it's irrelevant. But the US population is 1/5 of China's. When do you expect to see irrelevance of the United States as a world power?
trhway 171 days ago [-]
Right now US has 156M college educated people, China - has been quickly increasing that number during last 10-20 years and currently reached 218M. Thus we see emergence of China as rivaling superpower. You can look at China's rate of new college admissions and make a reasonable projection when a number of senior (10-15 years of experience) professionals in China will dwarf that in US.
>Russia's population is 1/2 that of the US and it's irrelevant.
not yet. Quickly moving that direction though. No yet there mostly because of USSR built resources like nuclear weapons, space program, educational and scientific foundations from that time (USSR was an empire of 250M population of proper USSR plus the Eastern Block which in particular produced technology - Bulgarian computers, Hungarian buses, Polish built ships, including Navy ones, etc.) All that in Russia is falling behind and apart.
ekianjo 171 days ago [-]
Collège education is not a super good proxy for superpower status... Even more so nowadays.
082349872349872 171 days ago [-]
A « collège » being what in the States would be called a "Jr High", probably not.
(that said, china seems to have done much better with broad secondary education than india did with targeted tertiary education)
riehwvfbk 171 days ago [-]
156M out of a total ~300M population are college educated?
trhway 171 days ago [-]
My mistake - i used 46% out of 340M from the quick Google search. Actually it is
"The percentage of adults in the U. S. between the ages of 25 to 64 with college degrees, certificates or industry-recognized certifications has increased from 38.1% in 2009 to 54.3% in 2021"
I’m not an expert, but demographic trends are bleak for Russia, not particularly good for China, and only a bit better for the US. Only time will tell what it all means. The world has never seen demographic collapse on the scale we’re witnessing, so people who confidently predict the consequences are speculating. That said, losing super power status seems like a reasonable bit of speculation. I don’t see a path to maintaining it while in demographic collapse.
cgh 171 days ago [-]
Maybe read the article, Ivan.
FpUser 171 days ago [-]
Maybe learn to be civil Joe.
riehwvfbk 171 days ago [-]
Hey, it's OK, I'm just a bot after all.
AlexeyBelov 170 days ago [-]
Are you not? Relatively fresh account that's obviously not "real" (a throwaway), and also discussing Russia in a positive light pretty frequently of all the topics on this site.
lofaszvanitt 169 days ago [-]
A lot of talented people die young... why is that? Are these people being targeted and killed in some covert way?
noman-land 169 days ago [-]
Don't forget all the non-talented people who die young. They rarely get a public obitiary.
lofaszvanitt 168 days ago [-]
Yeah, yeah, but still.
ssousa666 171 days ago [-]
Interesting to learn the human side of a tool I use almost every day. RIP Stiver
It’s another sign of the performative society we live into, where work and accomplishments don’t matter but virtue signalling does.
To be frank, fuck them. I’m not inventing an entire persona and stuff just to make some weirdos happy.
Thank you, Stiver, and R.I.P.
There were lots of "We think your patch is doing XYZZY, we see where our code should be doing that. We've updated our code and the problem went away."
Fernflower was awesome. RIP Stiver, glioblastoma can be an ugly way to die.
He opted for an assisted suicide: https://flibusta.is/node/684900.
Probably only a decade away from curing it. Unfortunately, medicine can evolve slowly.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-69006713.amp
I'm awfully sad Stiver passed away before old age, but happy that at least it was not due to adversity.
R.I.P Stiver
I've spent many hours pouring through the output of Fernflower looking for what some obfuscation algorithm has come up with.
Dogspeed, Stiver. Your work, "legitimate" or not, has benefitted the world. o7
I wonder how much of a boom Russia will see from émigrés returning home if the political environment lets up a little
One of more interesting experiences from early 2000s in Microsoft was when Microsoft Russia finally crossed 1B in revenue by finally having Gazprom/Sberbank buy all the sh*t that they were pirating before. By doing so, the country was eligible to do the yearly business review in person, instead of over whatever passed for Zoom back then, I don't remember anymore. Olga D...can't remember her last name was the country manager, one of the few women in such position at the time. She invited everyone in russian community (hello rodina email list) to come to the Microsoft conference center in building 34 to listen to repeat of what she did earlier that week to Ballmer. This was the only microsoft event with catered vodka and caviar I've been to, but anyhow, after presentation of the financial stuff it turned a bit into a recruiting event - hey, come back to the motherland, the water is nice, look they are buying software licenses like civilized people, here is the pay scale from levels 61 and up, etc etc. There were ~400 people in the room, and the uptake was 0 (zero). All of us who were there in the room were not there in motherland for a reason.
By some estimates, 900K people have left Russia since the invasion [1], of whom 100K were IT specialists leaving in 2022 alone [2] (I haven't looked at the figures since then). I think that's a pretty strong indication of the sentiment.
And wrt the economy, didn't the Central Bank just increase the benchmark rate to 21% [3] (with another 2% hike widely expected in December)?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_emigration_during_the_...
https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/04/04/1070352/ukraine-...
https://meduza.io/en/feature/2024/10/29/russia-s-key-interes...
> I think that's a pretty strong indication of the sentiment.
Some left following their western employers, some fled from the mobilization in 2022.
>And wrt the economy, didn't the Central Bank just increase the benchmark rate to 21%
It did, that's why I said 'mostly'. Kremlin is pumping money into defense industry and into payments to contract soldiers, the Central Bank is doing what it can to curb the inflation. Overall it hasn't affected the life much.
[0] https://www.gosuslugi.ru/armydelay
Well, yes, and what do you think the impact of it is going to be on the economy?
Military overspending literally killed Soviet Union, and people returning from Afghanistan war made guaranteed the unforgettable social climate after that. I don't see any reason to be bullish on Russia, even if Trump now gives up Ukraine for Putin.
The ones I was reading emphasised the need for a strong sanctions regime with penalties for third party workarounds, with the reasoning given that Russia had prepared its economy for war and already isolated it to some extent.
Maybe your typical cable TV talking head pundit might’ve been confident about Russia’s economy collapsing, but the actual professional analysts and civil servants who advise governments were much more cautious.
You know .. those bastard Ukrainians are trying to make us think that everything sucks in Russia because of the war.
But I guess that it doesn't matter much if you have money and connections.
As for "nobody will go back" - agree in general, but at least Anton Nossik did go back.
[0] https://publications.iom.int/system/files/pdf/WMR-2022.pdf
What I'd meant is that, having been on the receiving end of all the Okhrana's dirty tricks, and having learned the hard way, the Cheka knew very well indeed how to play those games by the time they were on top.
(I don't know to what degree Eric Blair worried about a similar fate, but we do see that after Animal Farm he moves to a remote island in Scotland, where presumably strangers would draw much greater attention to themselves than in London — and before returning to London for hospital marries a much younger spook*)
* compare a line from Trotsky: "Rakovsky cites a curious remark of Babeuf to the effect that the degeneration of the new ruling stratum was helped along not a little by the former young ladies of the aristocracy toward whom the Jacobins were very friendly. ... A census of the wives of the ruling stratum in the Soviet Union would show a similar picture."
https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.74858/page/n11...
(as it is, at least the Yeltsin jokes can, like Brezhnev jokes, be repurposed for US use 2025-2028...)
(The mechanism is probably that STEMish rusticants began to selforganize learning centres)
COVID might have already started the process of Montanacation — elite diffusion to the hills —for the US (tho 2024 might actually reverse it)
For russians so far, the conscripts are so far drawn disprop from the lows; the tops prefer to emigrate/stay out of the country, so wait a bit.
Is it still true that bit-wranglers are exempt from conscription?
(in any event, one would hope that bitwrangling would pay well enough to provide anti-conscription cabbage?)
> the tops prefer to emigrate
Is that what Proshay elita![0] is about?
In the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inner_emigration#Controversy department, I was impressed that Urgant[1] preferred losing his show over retraction.
Lagniappe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SfhV0Sew0j4
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2WQIW7aK5Bk
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=njHNHbK9jDI#t=75s
(TIL, while trying to answer in my own words)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regularity_structure
:::::
Re: ikigai & magic/yuurei & contraints
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faddeev–Popov_ghost#Footnotes
[hokusai said? But painted a few lone wranglers in 甲斐 province]
::::::
Re: Leningrad MTV & Russians
1) Intentionally not hiring locals for NPC role, out of respect for hosts or irony? Drink is Hainanese coconut? Visually refined + verbally profane, such Pansclavonia!
2)nomenklatura/engineers, could keep their kids away from lows as far back as 1950s, or even earlier. Military still more effective diffusive optimizer in AG’s time? Or further back, the Minimes.
::::::: Edit
Proto response to econ rot
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42116704
EDIT: and I have to give props to HONK FU! The hand-drawn motion blur is a nice touch; who has the time for that these days?
There ought to be a way to cross Gogol's Dead Souls with Pauli–Villars ghosts, but both my po*-russki-fu and my unitarity-fu are too weak.
(unitarity keeps things group-like; semigroups/monoids have an "arrow" in that they make irreversible transitions between J-classes; could it be easier to generalise to the latter than to add ghosts?)
* TIL the waste material from copra harvests gets sold for hydroponic use. Is the appearance of the 水耕龍 an auspicious portent for grow rooms?
EDIT: two important differences education-wise here: (a) kids can signal reasonable intelligence and high conscientiousness through vocational school (although a son of my former landlords started on this route, then swapped to the university track after encouragement by his coworkers), and (b) it's way more difficult to set up a degree mill, because kids have to test into becoming eligible for university and the resulting support.
(Upon reflection: I had a career advantage due to my sheepskin's branding being high intelligence, meh conscientiousness, and low conformity; somehow here I am at the other end of my career still faithfully signalling those same weights on HN)
ive unfortunately (ego quoque!) degenerated to link/comment taiji for now,
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42134920
A way to resolve the elite defo conundrum by separating out the laptop class (but merging car dealers into the working class?)
>as a dean i was … sitting under … swords while being perceived as the sword…
are these triangles determinate, or is there a search process involved?
(maybe I ought to be looking for "ghost faces" that'd simplify my existing edge & vertex model of computation?)
(Image Search for “3-gluon vertex” to get a language independent sense)
On (regrettably still halfass’d) reflection,there are necessary subtleties which your question is stalking but it will take me a few days or weeks to page in
(but now I'm reminded —physics envy, mind you— of a "renormalisation" in regex engines. Recall the definition of A*:
Mathematically, it doesn't make any difference if A also matches epsilon. However, when generating code, if it does, it's very useful to treat the above as asking for: where A† recognises only the nondegenerate, "squarefree", portion of A.Otherwise one risks getting stuck recognising ϵ an infinite number of times (leaving squares in is harmless); anyway the presence of the ϵ means that during* recognition of A*, there is one incoming edge but two outgoing.)
* speaking in terms of left to right traversal, but we can also go right to left, which (by a folk theorem) means we can also calculate bottom up. I'll have to reflect upon what A* might produce, edgewise, in that last case.
Here: how far is this regex from non-associativity.
[& this connection is exactly what i was hoping for! I’d hoped the regular in regularity structs would trigger smth, & save us both weeks (of procrastination, in my case)]
Was i born decades earlier, i might have wandered into a VC “human capital destruction” job, since i have a roughly equivalent mix of traits..
The binary ops, sequencing and alternation are associative (monoidal).
The unary op, kleene star, blocks reassociation.
However, it is occasionally useful to use the associative-adjacent identity A;A* == A*;A (and more generally, A^n;A* == A*;A^n;A* == A*;A^n == ...)
A Chirurg, an Architekt, and an Informatiker are discussing whose profession has the most patina. The Chirurg points out that when God removed Adam's rib to form Eve, He was doing surgery. The Architekt points out that when God made Heaven and Earth out of the Chaos, He was doing architecture. The Informatiker just smiles broadly and then asks, "Und? where then think you the Chaos came from? a cereal Gimmick?"
Compare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_Fry_Richardson#:~:text=h...
(had Lenin been less confident in world revolution, could he have asked creditors to take a haircut on their Imperial Russian bonds?)
Lagniappe: https://gagosian.com/media/images/exhibitions/2009/alexander...
Mostly figured out the deal with the Leningrad (just noticed the logo animation..)
Shnurov runs a restaurant in Peterburg, “Cococo”, those are prob his employees, and the drink could well be his fave counterseasonal laptop class drink
(Who is his man in Hainan i wonder)
Update:
Lions for ZA?
Closest I found so far to that blue and white package was in Singapore, and the site kept trying to FOMO me: "Jessie Ni just bought ${PRODUCT}" etc.
Next thing you know, the websites will be wanting me to 讨价还价?
Then again, spout pouches are easy enough to get in your own livery, and filling stations run anywhere from USD 1'500 to USD 45'000 depending upon how many pouches you plan on filling per setup op. I'll have to see if Shnur has any CoCoCo house branded goods.
Or is it Matilda getting the Hainan goods? https://www.forbes.com/sites/annabel/2020/11/16/how-russian-...
> Shnurova had faced challenges before. She had studied biochemistry but [that was] incompatible with being half of one of Russia’s most glamorous couples. And so she ... became a restaurant entrepreneur.
I suppose this way Shnur will always have a place to play on weekends, even if his style is not so compatible with the CoCoCouture concept?
Lagniappe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xRlYp6IZsV4
PS. meanwhile, in past-orientation, Zhihu shows me ads for water from "ancient aquifers". Hard to argue with geologic patina!
1. Slavophile, past (god save the tsar!)
2. Laptop class, cosmopolitan future (tomorrow the universe!) Here be tropical dragons..
3. “Car dealer” class gastropub, present (dont worry abt that hangover)
In liberal democracies there tends to be no gap between 1,2,..(or 1,3) thank Bibendum??
I think i’ve a reasonably good handle on other-people’s-ikigai.. a shared meal or 2 can lead to some confidence intervals on their future returns — measured in ikigai!
Ikigai trading, otoh, a very delicate matter..
Edit: possible to trisect hn based on how adversarial the relationship to those who pay is ( no tops, but plenty of semiretirees in the uppest house)
One would think widespread smartphones would help with this? Stuff that in my childhood was only available in university towns is now accessible to almost anyone with an aptitude and an interest...
EDIT: Did Pioneer Houses ever do STEM? "What you've learned, teach a buddy" was a nice slogan...
Just this week some part of the US ruling class got some better seats in the game of musical chairs. The game's not much different anywhere in the world, other than the window dressing.
If the mid wishes a circulation of elites, they must ally with the low against the high; if the high wishes to prevent this, they can ally with the low against the mid.
A crucial point on which Goldstein, Squealer, and the 2 Ronnies, agree is that no matter which way these alliances are sorted in theory, somehow in practice the low always wind up more or less where they started.
> Oh, it's the meek! Blessed are the meek! Oh, that's nice, isn't it? I'm glad they're getting something, 'cause they have a hell of a time. —Mrs. BN
People who made the decision themselves and have already settled in the new place seldom come back.
And how do you suppose this will happen? By Trump cutting a deal with Putin leaving Ukraine out to die, or what?
The Russian soldiers might return home. The Ukrainians won’t. There won’t be a home to return to, and in many cases, there won’t be anyone left to return.
Wars end, true. Exactly how this war ends is crucial.
The problem is that USA twice messed with Ukraine sovereignty, first in 2004, and then in 2014 turned this country to a proxy, puppet state, bulwark against Russia. And that's why this war started, because Russia can not allow Ukraine to be turned into a hostile state, ideologically driven by hatred towards Russia and Russians and manipulated by NATO, with bases on its territory.
Russia is fine with Ukrainians, if you're unaware, Russia accepted the largest number of Ukrainian refugees of all countries. Most of these people got Russian citizenship. It's actually Ukraine, that turned Zelensky into a king with absolute power, dismantled all the opposition party, oppressed Russian language, culture, religion, wiping history, and basically brainwashing population with targeted hatred. The reality is: Ukrainian dystopian regime is hanging on Western support. Without money and weapons they can't even feed their people anymore, but already turning women to cannon fodder, and no doubt, that in a few month they'll force their kids to go to tranches also. Because Ukrainian leaders don't care about Ukraine or Ukrainians, all they care is their pockets, that are filled by the war, and their goal is to prolong this war for as much as possible.
This is a lie.
Russia is trying to eradicate the Ukrainian culture. It failed with corruption and tried with military muscle during the invasion. This also failed.
So now they try to freeze people to death, kill civilians and do human wave attacks to gain territories.
People living in the occupied territories are killed for showing any Ukrainian culture. Torture is common. This is the russian Mir.
You're lying yourself. It's Russian culture that's getting eradicated in Ukraine by renaming cities, streets, destroying monuments, burning books, prohibiting Russian language usage which is mother tongue for majority of population of Ukraine etc. In Russia nothing like this happens. Ukrainian language is being taught in schools that has significant Ukrainian population, nobody renames anything related to Ukraine.
>So now they try to freeze people to death, kill civilians and do human wave attacks to gain territories.
You're watching too much of your local propaganda.
>People living in the occupied territories are killed for showing any Ukrainian culture. Torture is common. This is the russian Mir.
Yeah, yeah, that's why Russia has the largest population of Ukrainians outside of Ukraine, absorbed the most number of refugees from Ukraine, and people from "occupied territories" are getting Russian citizenship. Brainwashing is real.
The Russian language is not prohibited in Ukraine, and it is not, by any stretch, "the mother tongue for [the] majority population of Ukraine."
I think that getting through a russian concentration camp will make people do anything and say anything to save themselves and their children.
There is no prohibition against speaking Ukrainian. I think you should learn about why people reject your culture while speaking the same language as you. This is somewhat amusing to me. That you can speak a language while rejecting the culture that comes with the language.
About smashing Russian monuments and renaming streets?
This is happening all over the previous Russian sphere of influence. People don't want you there. Let the people decide their own fate instead of invading them and telling them what to think.
It seems you may not appreciate the extent to which the sources you're getting these narratives from may be woefully uninformed, and/or simply lying to you.
None of this "puppet state" stuff, or the descriptions of events in 2004/2014 that you're echoing here has any connection to reality. If the Ukrainian government were simply a "puppet" of the United States, then it would have evacuated from Kyiv after the 2022 invasion just like the former was advising it to do. But it did the complete opposite, instead.
https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/nato-75-russia-progr...
The year is 1997, but the conflict started much earlier than that, during the fall of the Soviet Union.
For all the brainwashed and self-righteous: feel free to hit the downvote button. I won't respond to stupid questions along the lines of "how is this relevant", "whataboutism", and so on. You can read.
Which is a pretty strong indication that it most likely isn't.
This guy is a USA professor that specializes in international relations. He was warning for years that USA course of actions will result in Russia Ukraine war. And he has multiple videos explaining in details the history and how step by step we ended with this war, what could've been done to prevent it, and what steps actually made it inevitable.
The main thing is that what he tells is true, well known to Russians, but it's that other side of the story, that is wiped and generally not allowed in Western mass media, so most of USA and other NATO countries citizens are totally unaware of it.
So most of USA and other NATO countries citizens are totally unaware of it.
They're perfectly aware of it, because the Russian narrative has been echoed and propagated incessantly by left- and right-wing news outlets and social media commenters ever since 2014.
Let me just say this: No political fear of any foreign influence on a bordering country ever justifies invading this country, killing its citizens, and destroying its infrastructure. No matter how you try to frame it, Russia committed crimes in Ukraine, which it is completely responsible for. You may try to blame the victim here, but that will never become the truth.
We can forget about history for a second, but just look at what's going on with China, for example. They've never attacked USA or any Western nation, they're restoring their country after centuries of foreign occupation, making their people life better, expanding markets with their goods, and USA is intended to destroy them. Why? Because they're an economic threat absorbing world markets and pushing USA out, so USA needs to act fast to preserve own dominance over the globe, because China's also building their military, so window of opportunity for military aggression is getting narrower.
To make it clear: international politics is never about justice, it's about interests. Those who're relatively strong trying to force weaker powers to submit to their demands. USA is the current King of the Hill, and they're trying their best to not allow anyone to topple them, by invading other countries directly, toppling governments, provoking wars by proxies etc.
Let’s leave it at that, I don’t think we’re going to get together.
But the political system will have to be reformed first.
Russia actually has a rather functional bureaucracy that is holding the country together. All it really needs is decentralization of power, probably similar to the German's model.
Pretty much everyone employed by the state, from school teachers who en masse rig elections to the judges who do FSB's/president office bidding, have to be assumed irredeemable.
Russia didn't to the "lustrations" that Poland, Czechia, East Germany and some other countries did, and the Hydra survived.
Nope, it actually works well within it. I'm talking about the bureaucracy that ensures that the water is running, people can get driving licenses, register real estate deals, etc. All the "boring" stuff that keeps the country working.
> Russia didn't to the "lustrations" that Poland, Czechia, East Germany and some other countries did, and the Hydra survived.
Lustrations ("purges") are a bad idea in general, especially for larger countries that don't have a history of democracy.
Want an example? Iraq. The US Army purged all the BAATH members from the new government, replacing them with new people who were inexperienced in day-to-day administration. And then all those exceedingly nice and newly-jobless ex-BAATH-ists went and formed the core of ISIS.
Historically, lustrations worked well only in smaller countries where everyone knew everyone through one or two handshakes, and that still had people who remembered living in a functional democracy.
I don't see one can look at recent history and come to support this view.
The lustrations in the former Warsaw Pact countries, and denazification (such as it was) in Germany after WW2 seem to have worked well enough, and to have been crucial enablers of the process of democratic transition in these countries (having had very little history of democracy as such until that point). If anything West Germany suffered from not being sufficiently robust in its denazification process until far too late.
Of course, such purges should never be simply imposed from the outside, on the heals of an invasion which should have never happened anyway, which is the key reason why de-Ba'athification failed so miserably in Iraq.
Maybe utilities and some other functions that are not related to how Putin enacts his political control can be spared. Not gutting the machine that does - and that's courts, the entire FSB, whole departments of the MVD, large swaths of the education system and regional governments, really need to be gutted and replaced by new people, old ones only allowed back after thorough examination of their track record.
>Lustrations ("purges") are a bad idea in general, especially for larger countries that don't have a history of democracy.
This is an opinion, and it's not supported by facts. Poland is not that small, more than 1/4 the population of Russia, and their lustrations worked very well. No living person there had any memory of democracy at the time they happened.
>Want an example? Iraq. The US Army purged all the BAATH members from the new government, replacing them with new people who were inexperienced in day-to-day administration. And then all those exceedingly nice and newly-jobless ex-BAATH-ists went and formed the core of ISIS.
Way to conflate civic lustrations with a war, and by total destruction by a superpower onslaught at that.
The FSB _itself_ needs to be split and de-powered. There should never be a state organization with this amount of power.
However, people who were working there should not just be blindly purged. This way you end up with the Iraq scenario. From the practical standpoint, FSB also contains border guards, law enforcement departments, counter-terrorism, etc. They are all needed in a normal state.
Instead, there should be _personal_ prosecutions of people responsible for political persecution and for the illegal foreign operations that started the war. This is probably far less than 10000 people.
> Poland is not that small, more than 1/4 the population of Russia, and their lustrations worked very well.
Their version was pretty mild, and even then had problems with false documents used to libel even Lech Walesa.
> No living person there had any memory of democracy at the time they happened.
Poland was occupied in 1939, so people who were 20 at that time were 70 by 1990.
> Way to conflate civic lustrations with a war, and by total destruction by a superpower onslaught at that.
That's another argument: you probably won't even _have_ a chance to do a massive purge (never mind if it's a good idea or not). But reforms are a possibility.
Personal prosecutions by the compromised prosecutors and courts won't work either. The war is only the tip of the iceberg, an external manifestation of absolute corruption.
>Russia's population is 1/2 that of the US and it's irrelevant.
not yet. Quickly moving that direction though. No yet there mostly because of USSR built resources like nuclear weapons, space program, educational and scientific foundations from that time (USSR was an empire of 250M population of proper USSR plus the Eastern Block which in particular produced technology - Bulgarian computers, Hungarian buses, Polish built ships, including Navy ones, etc.) All that in Russia is falling behind and apart.
(that said, china seems to have done much better with broad secondary education than india did with targeted tertiary education)
https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaeltnietzel/2024/02/01/perc...
"The percentage of adults in the U. S. between the ages of 25 to 64 with college degrees, certificates or industry-recognized certifications has increased from 38.1% in 2009 to 54.3% in 2021"
so something like 100M.
And if we look here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Educational_attainment_in_the_... it is more like 70M.