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Comment by nopriorarrests | Hacker News Reader

Russia totally recovered by any metric you can pick, from household income to average life expectancy. Heck, moscow in 80's looked like dumpster fire. Now it looks like a proper european capital city.

EDIT: to prove my point, russian life expectancy from fed -- https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=qTgj

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Russia isn't the Soviet Union. And Moscow isn't the provinces.

I'm not dumping on Russia, but it's easy to look at the shiny place and forget about the other parts. If you were a time traveller from 1985, NYC looks like a magical fairy-land (at least on the surface). But Syracuse, NY or Utica, NY... not so much.

Well yes. USSR had plenty of different -stans included, they are independent countries now. They are getting back to middle ages since they got independance 30 years ago, thats true.

But you can take stats for russia proper from soviet times and compare it to 2019. Hell, you can take stats from 1993 when russia was not USSR already but was still collapsing.

Freedom? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_freedom_indices

In space industry prowess, it continues a slow decline (although they had a more robust system to begin with, so it has been managed fairly well).

I see it as a good thing. Russia waste less capital and valuable human resources on vanity projects. I know that HN crowd will dislike my view, since space is hot topic, but well, I would rather focus on something more tangible.

Germany has nothing to show in space industry prowess, but it is nice, wealthy country which focuses on problems at hand.

The space industry is about $400 billion. It’s not “vanity.” Did you think I was just talking about human spaceflight or planetary exploration? Those are only about 5% of the global space industry. Russia has been locked out of modern satellite development and their lead in launch capability continues to decay. This is bad for Russia in terms of export revenue and also overal national defense.

Corruption? That one seems pretttty important. https://www.forbes.com/sites/arielcohen/2019/05/31/russias-o...

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