> For me it is "here". The fact that for you it is "there"
Sure, and I know some people for whom it was also "here" and now it's "there" because they can't live any more in their hometown because of war. For you guys "here" in Kiev Donbas is also "there".
> Besides, it might be a novel concept for you, but here we have an actual elections. People can always vote for some Russian puppet (Medvedchuk, for example) and "join" Russia. I guess majority thinks that "fucking war" is better alternative in this situation.
And that's why Ukraine will never be a prosperous country, as long as you consider a "fucking war" a better alternative to anything.
The majority has been brainwashed by "western" propaganda to hate everything Russian, to the point it would rather have "fucking war" against their ex citizen in Donbas and Crimea instead of letting them choose where and how they want to live. Those guys in Donbas and Crimea also had elections and referendums, not worse than those in Ukraine, and they decided they don't want to live with someone who is denying them basic human rights based on the wrong ethnicity. Would you rather kill them all than let them go? And since you want to kill all the ethnic Russians why are you surprised that Russia won't let you do it?
NATO is happy to have war against Russia or Russian allies to the last Ukrainian solder and civilian.
All those countries were devastated by the "democratization". I would like to see one example where that went good for the local population in general and where that brought progress and prosperity.
You don't need any of that, but not because Windows is somehow "better" but because it's Windows "culture" to package almost all dependencies with the application, while on Linux application use a bunch of libraries that are part of the distribution.
> It does appear as if this government really does not want freelancing to be a viable option.
This is the key. Freelancers earning their living on the internet are not inherently dependent on government and are much more likely to support opposition and fight back against the corrupt government.
It's easy to control people working in overblown administration or public/government sector, or in companies working for them, but controlling free financially independent people not afraid of dying of hunger if they oppose is not that easy.
Sorry but Signal is just not a "better app". Yes, it has privacy and such, but the app itself is worse. I'm not even talking about missing features like not having chat backups, but the UI itself is slow and unpolished.
- scrolling contact list is slow and stutters
- opening Signal displays empty frame far too long
- it's not possible to add/invite a person during the call, you need to define groups for group calls
- forwarding message from chat to chat is not working
- messages in a chat take too much space. If a person sent three consecutive messages, don't display his name on all of them, just on first one.
And the worst thing is those polish fixes don't have to do anything with crypto and privacy. It's purely client side issue, but Moxie & Co. decided their priority is adding MobileCoint inside a chat app instead of polishing existing clients.
Depends on what you consider "real work". I would say 99% of business analysts in any enterprise level company do real work 1% of the time. The rest is filled with bulshitting, talking, harassing others or actively looking through the office windows while waiting for someone to do something.
This whole machine learning, optimization etc, story, but the end goal is that Google can easily transcribe your voice calls and store it as text. Then it can apply all shady practices that it previously was too expensive to do because storing voice and extracting information from it required huge storage costs and actual human labour.
Or worst, just imagine what some government you don't trust could do with all those voice call transcripts.
The reason cultural difference was an issue is one dominant culture enforced by presence culture. Without presence culture there would be no dominant company culture, it would be more distributed around the world. Also, timezones don't make it hard to have meetings, it's the same culture preventing it to happen. In my current company I sit in Europe, and it's easier for me to find a time slot for a meeting with my US and India-based colleagues than with people sitting in the same building with me.
> Absolutely - in knowledge economy, insisting on physical presence is darn damn stupid.
Insisting on presence is the only reason knowledge workers in western countries can claim income they have right now. Because in knowledge economy without insisting on presence, there is absolutely no reason to pay a westerner more for the same job that can be done by someone in India, China, East Europe or Africa.
Unless you can claim with a straight face that westerners are more knowledgable.
> I can understand in the abstract that of course you could rap in German, but it's quite another to encounter evidence of this in the wild so to speak.
Depending on what you consider "in the wild" but German rap is very popular in Germany and other German-speaking countries. People from Germany usually don't rap in English or French. Smudo is an old school, but are quite a bit of rapper that are popular right now, like Capital Bra, Apache 207, Samra, Lea, Mero, Loredana, Bushido, Sido, Olexesh, Kollegah, Farid Bang, RAF Camora, ... just on top of my head.
Who says AZ works around the world? It's the vaccine of the last resort, people will get it only if they can't get anything else because it's still better than nothing, at least for now.
And "better than nothing" is just temporary because AZ is very to completely ineffective against all virus mutations that are currently spreading.
If Russian and Chinese Sputnik and Sinovac vaccines were approved in the EU, we could save so many lives, but politics will rather try to force AZ than accept that they failed.
Of course, in the USA exporting vaccines to other countries is simply not allowed, and if they want to sell, they need to sell it to the US government. The same applies to UK.
The fact that EU is the only western entity that produces vaccines and where export is allowed makes it much more complicated.
AZ ban game in EU has more to do with the internal politics than with the medical argumentation.
For many of the corrupt governments it's easier to say "we don't vaccinate because AZ is not safe" that the cold truth "we don't vaccinate because we were not able to order enough vaccines on time."
The reason why we don't have enough vaccines in the EU is:
- Can't get Moderna, Pfizer/Biontech because "America first"
- Can't get enough AZ because UK was faster with ordering
- Can't get Sputnik, Sinovac because US doesn't want that their vassals buy from their enemies
> Same goes for South Ossetia and Transnistria: these conflicts would long be history without Russian military footholds.
You mean "history" in a sense that the local population would be ethnically cleansed from the Georgian majority and the ones that survive relocated to Russia? And then they would be marked as aggressors because they dared to try protecting themselves with arms, and refused to just disappear from the territory where they have been living for centuries.
Yeah, we saw that many times, and the only criteria that leads to the "correct" conclusion who is right and who is wrong, who is aggressor and who defends himself, who is the victim and who is villain is whether US/NATO or Russian/Other troops are involved on one of the sides.