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Comment by rdtsc | Hacker News Reader

I am out. I have been gone for many years and just keep watching it from a distance. I am not touching that country with a 10 foot pole. I don't want to go near it. I recently payed a higher price for a plane ticket just not to have to connect through Moscow.

Capitalist economy + corrupt judicial system + corrupt government officials at all level = hell for businesses.

You cannot do anything unless you bribe or do something illegal. Then if you become successful, both the mafia and the corrupt govt officials come after you. The police threaten to press charges, the mafia offer protection from the charges. You are fucked either way.

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Chill out comrade. The country you left and despise so much doesn't exist anymore and I've learned to treat these sentiments as a mental reinforcement for your decades-long decision to leave.

The country I left and frequently keep visiting is great: I love the people, the food and the culture. I love what I hear from young graduates, I like seeing people smile more and new businesses pop up everywhere. I like doing business there myself. And by the way we are growing. The quality of tech. talent is impeccable, easily on par with US schools and the latest waves of graduates have good English as well.

Not everything is rosy yet, but the risks are manageable, especially when you "zoom out" and face the entire spectrum of possibilities of why your business may fail. Lack of customer interest/traction is orders of magnitude scarier problem that issues with authorities.

Be my guest and stay out, it only makes me easier to compete because I'm in.

> risks are manageable

Not really. I live a hundred meters away from the future Skolkovo site and if they decide they want my land, it will not be manageable for me, even though they have no rights for it.

You're right though that not everything is so bad. But I don't see it getting better at macro-scale. If anything, the economic growth of the last X years was despite, not because of government actions.

... if they decide they want my land, it will not be manageable for me ...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eminent_domain

Give me a break! If the US government decides to take your property through Eminent Domain you will be properly compensated and you can appeal all the way to the Supreme Court without fear of being thrown in jail.

Perhaps you should give me a break with you screaming about jails. My wife's parents lived in an older house in historic district of downtown Kazan. When the government "took their property" to rebuild the area they compensated them by a much nicer and bigger apartment in a great neighborhood. I am just pointing out this is not uncommon to relocate folks for the common good in many countries.

Presumably you're expecting to be mistreated automatically just because you're in Russia and this happens to you. I don't believe there are any grounds for that assumption. Granted, chances of that happening in Russia are higher but as I mentioned earlier, on the grand scheme of things I (and most entrepreneurs I know) find those risks to be insignificant.

There's room for you both to be right. People tend not to have problems with a government or laws until they find themselves on the wrong end of them.

One example doesn't prove the rule.

Kazan is the eighth largest city in Russia, for those (like me) who didn't know what country it was in.

The US may be gentler, but I take issue with "properly compensated".

My grandfather owned a grocery store on the path of a new highway in Texas. The government bought every house in the neighborhood first, depriving him of customers, then made him an extremely low offer based on his now extremely-reduced revenues. Better than arson or threats, but not exactly nice or fair.

...and lose, even if your property is being taken to benefit someone building a shopping mall. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelo_v._City_of_New_London)

Offers of compensation are small comfort to people that are being forced out of a home they care about, especially when they have no choice, recourse, or influence in the matter.

Being forced to accept a fair(ish) compensation is way better than just getting disappeared by the government and/or mafia.

I dub this Rob's Law: For any arbitrarily bad situation, someone can always imagine a worse situation.

And the corollary: the second situation does not, by comparison, improve the first.

Although a special eminent domain for Skolkovo-like projects is most likely to be passed this autumn, it is not really required. And you will be compensated for land only, not for buildings. And how fair do you think the applied "fair market rate" will be?

> I love the people, the food and the culture. I love what I hear from young graduates, I like seeing people smile more and new businesses pop up everywhere.

I am sure I would love the people and the food. However the culture and the business environment is rotten.

> ...but the risks are manageable, especially when you "zoom out" and face the entire spectrum of possibilities of why your business may fail.

When my business fails there I want it to be because I screwed up in my execution, marketing, finance, but not because I didn't bribe the right official enough. If that is the risk, then screw it, I don't want to deal with it there. I am not that kind of a person.

And culture. Well, folklore and such, is great. If by culture you mean a culture of alcoholism, bribery and corruption -- then I don't want anything to do with it.

> Be my guest and stay out, it only makes me easier to compete because I'm in.

Agreed. Will do.

It is kind of ridiculous to hear people freely mixing "people, food and culture" and "government". What could me MORE idiotic?

You sound exactly like an official propaganda.

You know, my Russian friends are learning history of their own country from history books written in Poland. Even with recurring anti-russian bias in these books there are actually different points of view and you can build a picture of events by reading different authors, there's some diversity. Contrary to the official historical doctrine taught in Russia which has only one point of view, totally made up and a ridiculous bullshit.

Russia is a seriously sick. Think cancer and viruses flooded whole organism. There is almost no healthy cells. Although whole system tries to act_as_gov, there is already no gov as such. No such country as Russia. No laws, no justice, no safety, nothing. Every Russian feels perfectly ok to pay road police officer money when speeding. Policeman bought that job for like $10k and have to pay to his chief. Just one example but shows how deeply it is.

Its kinda stupid to deny such problems although that something that government puts most of its efforts to. Still Russia is a promising market for you(think no taxes, lots of customers with dirty money..) if you are willing to play that rules. I am out. Pretty much snow Nigeria.

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