It's true that it is unique. Russians themselves say that St. Petersburg is half russian and half european. But I've also got russian friends I talk to, who are from Moscow, from small villages near the Ural mountains and other places within Russia.
It sounds like you've been won over by the facade of corrupt spending and wealth in touristy areas
You assume I was a tourist. I wasn't.
Russia is a huge country - the biggest on earth, in fact - and of course there are large differences between the various areas. I was in St. Petersburg as I said. It's probably one of the richer areas.
People don't love Putin because he's improved the country, they love him because like all dictators he's a master of propaganda and populism, or did you think all those photoshoots and the massive military parades each year and the nationalist rhetoric over Crimea were all just for his own personal scrapbook?
Russians don't care as much as we do. They separate private and business life a lot more strongly, from what I gather. Of course there's a lot of propaganda involved as well.
But you totally ignored that main argument I made. That no matter what you see Russia as today, compared to the very recent past it has improved dramatically, and those improvements started with Putin taking office. Whether its true or not, a lot of people see a connection.
You see, the scenario you outline isn't all that different from what happened at the beginning of the 20th century.
Except for two world wars, a totally changed global economical and political environment and, oh yes, the EU itself.
At the beginning of the 20th century, Europe was a mess of countries all out for blood, with century-old hatreds and politicians just waiting for an opportunity to start a war. Which is kind of exactly what happened just a few years into the 20th century.
Yeah... it would be absolutely the same... keep dreaming.
True enough. I've never smoked, but I am overweight, and realize it is a form of suicide- if a very tasty and slow one. But I'd point out that if we had more localized solutions for food (eliminating the need to ship and store food except for famine protection) we'd eliminate much of that.
I was talking more about the Declaration of Independence with its enumeration of "self evident" rights in a specific order, and using those to interpret the Constitution. Roosevelt's Second Bill of Rights is a more specific application of this; but is a federalist, central government solution to a basic problem that I believe would be FAR better handled locally.
Keep everything ready, so you can switch back when the cloud services fail and/or your management team changes.
Indeed. The cloud fad is already starting to pop as executives find out "Holy fuck, you mean when something goes wrong there's no amount of screaming I can do to make them prioritize our service?" and other things that weren't in the brochure. "You mean we're on a shared infrastructure so when one of the other tenants gets DDOSed we're down too? "
Or (my favorite) "You mean to actually have high availability we have to spend almost double the quoted price to run identical machines in another geographic-zone"?
I agree with your main point, btw.
However, both on paper and from real-world experience, I dare to say that the judicative is the least troubled arm.
In most of Europe, the legislative and executive are pretty much identical and that bothers me to no end. Parliament passes laws and parliament elects the executive, and all the executives (ministers, etc.) are also members of parliament. These two arms are not seperated at all. The USA has the better system there, even though it is still imperfect in that the same parties exist in both.
If I were to re-write the political rules, I'd seperate the arms completely and make a law that political parties can be active in either the executive or the legistlative election processes, but not in both and any attempt to do so leads to immediate dissolution of the party in question with all assets seized and distributed to the poor.
Let me repeat that: It is absolutely technically possible to filter based on source IP address country.
Yes, you can also do various trickery to cloak your real source behind another source. That doesn't invalidate the point.
If Putin were to back down and support a peaceful resolution whose outcome might not satisfy Russian nationalists, he could find himself out of power.
Highly unlikely. Putin is beloved by the majority of russians, because under his government economy and internal security have improved dramatically. Most russians remember the 1990s when people were shot in the streets regularily, the way you only see in some old movies about when the Mafia ruled in some US cities. Compared to that time, they live in paradise now, and many attribute this change to Putin. Don't expect him to be out of power anytime soon. As for the russian elite, a lot of them own their fortune to this change. Never mistake criticism for opposition. Especially among politicians and the rich, it is fairly common to complain loudly about someone and still support them when it matters, because all the complaining and seeming hostility is simply an attempt to move them on certain topics.
The last thing Putin wants is a country with a lot of relatives of Russians getting the EU treatment and finding out how nice it is to be out of their largely lawless, virtual dictatorship of a state.
You should update your propaganda-driven beliefs. I've got a russian girlfriend and I've been to Russia myself. At least for where I was (St. Petersburg), it looks much like any european city, except more beautiful (but that's a St. Petersburg special, they made very sure to keep all the old palaces and buildings in shape).
Crime was horrible in the 1990s, my girlfriend says, but here's why most russians actually love Putin: Since he became the top dog, things have been continuously improving. Crime is low, economy is good, of course nothing is perfect, but compared to previous times, they're pretty great.
From what I've seen in daily life, I don't see anything that would make them jealous of a random EU member country. Supermarkets are full of basically the same products I can buy here, everyone has a car, public transport is better than in some european cities, the streets are in good condition and clean, I felt safe both at day and at night.
Of course Putin doesn't want Ukraine to join the EU. But that they will all be able to suddenly buy bananas and thus run away from communism is 1990s stuff and long since outdated.
Software on Internet-connected devices is a bit different from your examples though. No matter how insecure cars are, it would be really hard for me to steal a million cars in one night, let alone without being caught. Yet, it's common to see millions of computers/phones being hacked in a very short period of time. And the risk to the person responsible is much lower.
If you get the real thing, get rock salt load. Stings like the dickens- has a usually non lethal but the stopping power of a
BTW, with any pump action shotgun (even a BB one) their only warning should be "Ker Chunk". Everybody knows that sound, and they know what comes next is pain.
p.s. And I would never defend property with a firearm. Even if I lived in a state that allowed it, which I'm almost sure of that I don't. I'd only risk an aggressor's life to defend my own. Because I really do want to be able to get through my whole life without killing or harming anyone. It just sucks that it's really the responsible thing to do to look into acquiring some means of deadly force, because of the remote but real threat of violence by uncivilized people.
(Took a chance seeing who's post this third one was, hoping that since mine wasn't a political JE it might not be toxic.)
As I had been wondering that if this person was trying to get in, why not really try and get in, so thanks for posting this as a possible explanation. Still uncomfortably brazen of this person. I'll always be locking it now even if just stepping out to another side of the building for a minute. I suppose with the blinds flapping so wildly, this person could've looked in and saw the back of someone sitting in a recliner and could've decided to take the chance that I had fallen asleep and that maybe it was potentially a grab-and-go opportunity.
I should probably get the real thing, just in case. What's extra bothersome about this is that the intruder could not be expecting to be a mere burglar in this case, but instead must've been okay with being a robber.
Home invasion robberies (by two or three perps) in my larger region have been in the news, and women sleeping with a window open have gotten raped (by lone pervs).
I've never been robbed or assaulted in 48 years of life so far, but I might not always be so lucky, and should think about that. I've thought about getting a shotgun, and holding my ground upstairs (assuming I'm awake) and being prepared to blast someone for coming up the stairwell after being warned. It would be firing towards my own garage and not into any of my neighbors' directions.
But there's other complications, I hear, in Soviet California, and it would be taking up and keeping up a new hobby. And it kind of sucks when bad people cause you to make demands on your own time, on account of them.
Work is the crab grass in the lawn of life. -- Schulz
