The sanctions hurt Putin in way more ways than you can imagine. First, Russia has a fairly one-dimensional economy. Almost all its exports are oil and gas . Over 60% of their exports are primary energy forms (i.e. Oil, gas, coal), mostly unprocessed, some processed. The rest is mostly mining products and then, well, that's pretty much it. Until 2022, most of that went to the West for pretty good money.
Russia is still exporting oil and a bit of LNG for about 80% of the pre-war dollar amount in total. That 20% was a blow to the economy, but Russia has enough reserves to last for 1-2 more years without significant cuts in internal spending.
But that's not all. The main issue is that the life inside Russia is... mostly normal. Sure, some Western companies moved out, but they left behind people with all the expertise in running them. So these people quickly organized themselves and replicated the business models of these companies. There's no more McDonalds in Russia, but there's "Tasty and that's it". It took them a while to get going, but they're now basically as good (bad) as the old McD's.
Russia also has a very robust internal software market. There's Yandex that is as good as Google in search (and mapping), it also has a taxi business that is every bit as good as Uber. All the government and state companies switched from Windows to Linux (the year of Linux on the desktop, but just in Nazi Russia). And so on.
All of this was possible because the _people_ who made it possible are still in Russia. And they are going to stay there because Europe made it so hard to leave Russia.
And yes, I'm super bitter about it. I'm a native Russian who also used to live and work in Ukraine. I donated six figure dollar amounts of my personal savings to help Ukraine in the first weeks of the invasion, I'm housing Ukrainian refugees, I'm volunteering as an English teacher. Yet the EU thinks that the best way to punish Putin is to make it impossible for me to visit Europe. Great policy.
This doesn't mean anyone seriously regarded the name "Russia" as meaning anything other than Ukraine before 1721.
This is pure nonsense. Russia had multiple treaties with Western and Eastern countries way before 1721. And it was referred to in these treaties as "Russia". Heck, England established a joint enterprise with Russia in 1555 (see: "Muscovy Company"). You can read about its founding in the book "Of the Russe Commonwealth" by Fletcher Giles, written in 1591.
They did covet the name, though, and Peter I renamed his country thus in 1721, after conquering a swatch of Ukrainian lands.
Gah. That's about as incorrect as it can be. Russia referred to itself as "Russia" since around mid-15-th century. For example, the official title of Ivan III (the predecessor of Ivan The Terrible) started with "By the Grace of God, the Tsar and Sovereign of all Russia and the Grand Prince of Vladimir, Moscow, Novgorod....".
Some documents, especially in Latin, kept referring to Russia as "Moscovia" until the end of Latin language in diplomacy. But that's it.
Help Ukraine? If Europe hadn't stepped up there wouldn't be a Ukraine right now.
WTF? I'm not saying that Europe and the US are doing nothing. I'm saying that EU's policy towards Russian sanctions has been an utter failure. It _strenghtened_ Putin instead of hindering him.
As for staying with Putin, there seems to be an epidemic of people who stuck with him falling out of windows.
Exactly. People in Russia can't oppose Putin because most people are stuck there. There are no easy ways to get out of Putin's reach, so they grudgingly continue working for the regime.
You're missing the point. Those test prep resources are more available to non-minority privileged families. Both because they have the extra money to spend on test prep, but also because they have the personal (and community) knowledge of how to do it.
Bullshit. Prep books are free and easily accessible in all public libraries. Most (all?) schools will also have at least _some_ test prep classes.
Should I go away while you finish arguing with that straw man you conjured up?
Where's the strawman? We have plenty of examples that it's not at all some kind of nebulous racism that holds minorities back. It's just the lack of the will to study.
And you start risking mass absenteeism.
Easy: truant courts and juvenile prison.
I'm not sure what the solution to improving those schools is (aside from more cash) but I'm sure most of the easy solutions have be tried and failed for a reason.
The aforementioned Baltimore schools spend $18k per year per student, that's 50% more than the US average.
My position is that the bias is there, but many of the systemic factors persist into post-secondary.
Unlike the secondary school, the post-secondary education in top universities is a scarce resource. And I very much don't want to allocate it based on skin color.
Even just the style of question. Years ago I took a few online IQ tests, I did better on the subsequent ones, not because I got smarter, but because I was more familiar with the style of question.
Newsflash: training for a test makes you better at the test. Alas, minorities are not physically able to take mock tests to prepare for the real ones. If a Person Of Color as much as touches a prep book, they immediately erupt in flames. It's a tragedy.
- Educated communities who have higher quality students.
- Nice safe schools that kids enjoy going to, etc.
Yes, exactly. It's not teachers that make great schools, but students. And when half of your minority students just ignore the classes and/or actively try to disrupt them with zero repercussions, you get what you get.
I'm not exaggerating, that's what happens in places like Baltimore where half of the schools have _zero_ students passing math tests. Should ALL of them be admitted to college on an off-chance that several of them will succeed?
You can try, and I'm sure they do, but it's hard to match the benefit of parents who are both engaged and well-informed.
Schools with at least some discipline and real consequences. Otherwise, it's going to be a failure upon failure. With much hand-wringing about "systemic racism".
As kids get older, they have the ability to "leap ahead". Remember, they're intelligent. Colleges found this out.
And what if they don't? Why are you taking scarce college placements from people who actually worked hard to get them? It's simply abhorrent.
1) Minorities come from cultural (and in some cases linguistic) backgrounds that differ from the test writers, this puts them at a disadvantage when comprehending the questions and giving the expected answers.
English is not my native language, but I got pretty high scores on mock SATs. I haven't bothered with ACTs for English. I haven't seen _any_ questions that required any kind of deep cultural knowledge inaccessible to other ethnicities.
For math and science SAT/ACT tests, it's not even a joke. These tests are as culturally bland as they can get. An alien from Alpha Centauri would be able to get perfect scores.
2) Minorities often go to worse schools (with massive internal variation), these schools are less equipped to prepare people for the test.
And what makes schools worse or better?
3) Parents in the majority have a good understanding of what the SAT means, how important it is, how to study for it, when to get tutoring, etc, etc. And they pass on this knowledge to their kids. Kids from less privileged backgrounds don't have this advantage.
So... perhaps fix _that_ problem?
A morsel of genuine history is a thing so rare as to be always valuable. -- Thomas Jefferson
