nopie
10mo ago
Ukraine is different. It is a European country that is being fast-tracked into the EU. Those who try to attack my friends, will get harshly punished.
The rules are clear. Just because someone somewhere broke them and didn't get punished is not an excuse.
nopie
10mo ago
Yes, Putin is a liar, an imperialist and a murdering conqueror. People have characterized him fairly.
Putin is a war criminal.
What is absurd in the statement that Ukraine successfully pushed away Russian attack to most of their country?
As I said Ukraine might or might not recover Donbas and/or the Crimea but they successfully defended their capital from falling into Russia's hands. Now with the western help their army has only gotten stronger and I expect that they will liberate at least some of the territories currently occupied by Russians.
Why do you care about those people on internet?
Any reasonable person understands that it is morally wrong for one country to attack another that has never threatened you.
Then one can say – forget about morals, the power decides the outcome. Turns out Russia is not as powerful as we thought and they got stuck in Ukraine and are losing positions every day, thanks for western support.
A lot of people just suffer from denialism. The fog of war doesn't allow us to see clearly what is going on in every detail but in a nutshell the reality is clear. Russians might or might not manage to keep Donbas and/or the Crimea but the rest of Ukraine has remained an independent country and that is not going to change.
People in the western countries have free access to all the information and most of us see it clearly.
For a lot of Russians it is harder to see in this way because they suffer from collective delusions that Ukraine is a bad country (nazis or not) that does not deserve to remain independent and Russia is going to take over Ukraine and make it a glorious part of Russia.
nopie
10mo ago
The wall street does not rule the world or countries. They certainly do lobbying but it is not a dictatorship and many smart people constantly suggest ways how to improve the global financial system.
Noah Smith have made very good comparisons about the economy of the post-soviet countries – the countries which have joined the EU have developed faster than those which didn't. If you look from the point of view of freedoms, you will see the same results.
Ukraine has lost a lot of potential by failing to join the EU sooner. Better late than never.
I would say that about 30-35 million people that can be added to the global community that is engaged in improving human society is a big deal. It is not only about advancement of technologies because this can be done also in dictatorships like China but about the fabric of the society that is beneficial for all of us. The society is constantly facing different problems (social networks, lockdowns, lack of democracy etc.) that we need more people to deal with these problems in a positively progressive way instead of heavy-handed manner.
The biggest problem with dictatorship is that it is less effective. Putin started a senseless war that hurt Russia a lot. In Western democracies people can also make wrong choices but it is self correcting and it is better in long term development.
nopie
10mo ago
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Russia is bad for attacking Ukraine unprovoked.
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Even the war criminal Prigozhin who recently gained a lot of popularity in Russia said that it was a lie. Ukrainians were fighting clandestine Russian forces in Donbas.
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Threatening “Russia's interests” or threatening Russia? Very different things.
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Russian attack on Ukraine was a mistake even from the point of view of Russian supremacy because it was destined to fail. It has weakened Russia considerably and they are only themselves to blame for it. Now the question is why so many seemingly smart people don't see this? Even the baddies like Prigozhin have realized this. I can kind of understand why so many people in Russia have this delusion. The human nature of conformity forces them to adapt to follow even misguided leaders. But why many people in the west believe this nonsense that somehow Russia is going to win in Ukraine?
nopie
10mo ago
I didn't understand your comparisons either. So, I just emphasized the basic truth.
nopie
10mo ago
You can never predict the future...
And you all are probably better historians than me anyway.
nopie
10mo ago
That's not really true. At some point Russia's GDP was even higher than Latvia's. Belarus is also relatively stable and more prosperous than Ukraine.
The EU membership boosted the growth of their members quite considerably.
Of course, you could say that readiness to join the EU was also a big impetus for necessary reforms. Turkey was going that way too. But since they clearly decided not to join the EU, their growth stalled.
nopie
11mo ago
That still is not utilization. My sources are the BMJ. I am too lazy now to search for the article I had read before but the quick search sent me an article that it had decreased by a third, so I am not sure which data is more trustable.
The rebounding after 1-2 months of depression is simply not believable. We had unexplained excess mortality of 10-15% in December 2022 which was neither due to vaccines, nor covid (despite panicking voices on both sides). In medicine we don't just look at test results to make diagnosis. We have to corelate to what we observe in patient, all manifestations and functions. And we have to admit what we don't know.
It may be fully possible that the measures introduced to limit covid exposure increased actual spending while utilization remained below the normal.
I can now better understand why 2008 crisis caught so many unprepared. That was the belief in reported numbers that everything is fine. It took a doctor to actually look behind those numbers and see what is going on in the field.
nopie
26d ago
It is hard to believe that US intelligence is becoming worse. The recent events (Ruso-Ukrainian war, Crocus City Hall shooting) show that is has become better.
It appears that CIA has wide access to online communication worldwide and combined with modern AI technologies that allows to sieve vast amounts of information and find a needle in the haystack. A translator I had known got hired by a US agency couple of years ago. She has never spoken what she does but I suspect that she works on automated translation models for US intelligence. Currently we should assume that communication in any language is equally monitored and analysed.
Also, it hard to believe that if Russians really possessed such technology that many describe as improbable it wouldn't have leaked by now. Even best agents eventually make mistakes.
Russians have been involved in assassination in other countries, like in the UK. But we know that because eventually we found some evidence. It is likely that it could have happened in this case too, especially after repeated attacks in several countries. Unless, of course, CIA knows more about these cases but keep silent.
And third, why would Russians use this technology against targets of low importance instead of someone who really matters?
I mean, this is going into circles. Your write something very unclear based on some references or comparisons that I am not familiar with, I don't understand them. You then say – what comparisons?
Maybe you should reflect on what DuplexFields wrote and try to rewrite it so that it makes sense. I cannot provide reasonings of things that I cannot understand.
nopie
10mo ago
There was not much of a pie to divide at the start. All countries started being very poor but some countries received new investments and others not.
Specifically in Ukraine oligarhs resisted establishing links with the EU exactly because they feared that new investments will make their wealth to become proportionally much smaller (hence, losing power). If Ukraine had joined the EU despite inefficient privatization, it would have been much more developed today.
On the other hand, the countries that remained economically related to Russia, the risk of western investments was too high and they remained poor.
nopie
10mo ago
Lockdowns were like imprisonment for me. Like a prolonged home arrest for no reason. Somehow it was very clear that they will be useless and the policies didn't even make sense.
Yes, they were the worst human rights violations in the western world since the war ended or something like that.
Only when you widen your comparison to places where wars and genocide still happens (Ukraine, other wars, Uigurs etc.), we can find examples with even worse violations.
nopie
10mo ago
Sorry, I have hard time to understand you. English is not my native language and words like “belies” and “wasn't a shit show” are hard to grasp.
I would say that all countries in the Former Soviet Union and some even beyond that were doing equally poorly.
nopie
11mo ago
What do you mean by Down syndrome is tolerated? We do screen all pregnancies for Down syndrome and terminate pregnancy in case of positive test. Sometimes the screening test is not done or the test fails but those are exceptions and not the norm.
nopie
11mo ago
They wouldn't do that because it would be so obvious conflict of interest that the outrage would follow and the government would simply shut the company or fined them billions.
We have done this to companies for much smaller conflicts of interests. For example, the company that misleadingly advertised opioids as non-addictive got liquidated (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purdue_Pharma).
Approved vaccines are effective, they stop infections at least in 95% of cases on average for 10 years. Covid vaccine was tested in clinical trials which showed strong efficiency preventing infections.
That means that covid vaccines should be mandated to everyone, young and old and they will help to almost eliminate covid via heard immunity, right?
What went wrong with this reasoning? Despite vaccination most people got infected with covid anyway. The protection was short lasting (3-4 months at most). It reduced severity and hospitalizations in elderly though. Other people especially children were not that much affected anyway.
Biology is more complicated than we could infer from a simple graph.
I have no strong opinion about global warming but I am against trivialization of this science. Too many unknowns for me. How believable are the models? How warmer temperatures will affect us? I can see both negative and positive aspects. How much would it cost to prevent that versus to adapt to the change?
nopie
10mo ago
I don't think that the government knows what caused the brain damage. Was it even “caused” apart from natural progression of certain disorders?
Here is very important thing – people hate uncertainty. That's why they are more likely to believe far-fetched theory about sonic weapons than reject this theory and be left with no explanation.
nopie
10mo ago
On 4) I haven't delved deeper into this but the claim that medical mistakes is one of the leading causes of death requires proper context. My intuitive understanding is that technically it could be true. And yet it is only because people live much longer with the help of the modern medical system. Everyone should read Scott's article “By very slow decay...”. People who are barely alive survive only because of constant medical care, requiring 10 or more concomitant medications, constant care and procedures etc. The likelihood that overworked staff makes a fatal mistake increases exponentially and then that mistake kills the patient who was already literary on the death-bed.
Without that medical care and 10 different medications he would be already dead from natural causes but now he is dead because a nurse overdosed his insulin or pushed too much morphine into his vein or whatever. This doesn't mean much, only that medicines helps to live longer albeit with a poor quality of life and with a better care that minimises medical errors we could extend their lives even more while seriously questioning whether such efforts are worth it.
nopie
11mo ago
It always should be. But the idea is that almost always the decision is made to terminate the pregnancy. That's the point of making the test. Maybe in some countries that percentage is still not sufficiently high due to poorly understood information and we should think how to improve that.
nopie
11mo ago
It's part of the risk.
The point is that he was right that things are going to get ugly and was not just lucky. Whether he succeeded to make money on that or not, is immaterial.
The whole discussion I started is also not about how one can become rich. It is about the maximum benefit for the society. I believe stock market is very beneficial for all of us but sometimes it fails and we should make a system that reduces failures.
The rule that you are not allowed to occupy other countries without a good reason.
The rule is enforced by most powerful countries on this planet, namely, NATO countries who supply Ukraine sufficient weapons so that they can fight against Russian occupying forces.
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