The Russia Left Behind

If I can hazard to interpret what you mean - I think you are saying for NYT to compare the net benefit (how people in cities are better off).

However, I'd call in to question whether we should focus on the net benefit vs. the very fact that Russia has fundamentally discarded its rural regions and the like.

It seems with Snowden's leaks. Every week or so there is new punch thrown into America's eye. Snowden just got some kind of award. He got some time in limelight. American government is shut down. Common, how long till we hear about how horrible some other political rivals are "Russia's poverty problem" sure makes me feel a little better about NSA spying and idiots in Congress fucking around with the budget. I wouldn't mind maybe a few more "China is a terrible place" stories too for completeness.

Well, this is the NYT, so I wouldn't expect much of that, or from any major news publication that is heavily influenced by the government of where it calls home. I think one can reasonably get balanced coverage by sourcing from different places with the biases of the host nation in mind.

Very well executed though. Great photography and web layout.

As for Detroit, come on, we have thousands cites like that, actually, all except Moscow, Spb and Novosib.)

Frankly I'm a bit tired of all the negative comments about the NYT, The Economist and other respected establishments by simple reflex. I can scroll through comment threads or posts in the archives and describe an HN where "middlebrow dismissals" rule the roost — but we all know that those do not (or should not) represent Hacker News as a whole.

Edit: HN top comments have problems everyone knows that, I would just like to see more relevant thought coming out on top. Talk about the specific technology and techniques being used, a response to the article that demonstrates you actually read it, or compare these "new news" approaches to attempts that were made in the '00s.

;)

But... This is not about a cherry-picked stagnant area, this is about a main highway between Russia's two largest cities. It seems to be woefully neglected, while facilities used by Putin are done up to @#$%-the-expense standard. This is about the leadership of the country gone morally astray, and not caring about who sees it.

> Russia has problems everyone knows that, ...

Oh well, that's allright then. No point actually doing something.

When I read the negative comments, I personally thought of many places I've been in the US (where I'm from) which reminded me of what I was reading. The comments about the Russian villages both seemed like they could be true and like they were a little hypocritical.

I'd love to have you show me where there are towns without electricity, ambulance access, running water, easily accessible paved roads, hospitals within easy driving distance, broadband access, etc.

Even the smallest of towns I can name in Appalachia, have such things.

In fact, I grew up in an exceptionally poor part of Appalachia, with 15% to 20% unemployment at a time when the nation had 5% unemployment. Technically I grew up quite poor, and we had all the modern conveniences everybody else in America took for granted in the 1970s or 1980s.

Incomes have doubled since then, and are roughly three times that of the average wage in Russia, much less the average wage in the dilapidated Russia (probably 8 to 10 times higher than that).

I don't think you've actually spent much time in Appalachia. It's not a bustling and booming metro, obviously, but it's not even remotely comparable to what this article describes in Russia.

I think this article went to some extreme places and made it look like Russia outside Moscow/StPtbg is just dying. Disingenuous at least.

You aren't expected to read this and thing "omfg, Russia is so bad". No one in the US is thinking this - all they are thinking is "omfg, if inequality keeps growing, the US will be like this". This is of course nonsense for various reasons (we don't have gypsies and therefore the bottom 50% will not adopt gypsy cultural indicators, and our inequality seems to be merely differing rates of positive growth).

Note that many of the Americans on this thread are posting about Detroit, Appalachia and even Oakland (!?!?).

Exactly. I'm Romanian and when I saw the photo with the young gypsy couple I said to myself: "Hey! These people look exactly like the gipsies I used to grow up with". At least I learned that there are gipsies in Russia, also.

Are any of the facts mentioned false? Is the author implying that all of Russia is like this?

As a journalist I find it very surprising when people react to specific articles (often "negative" to their own beliefs) by imagining a grand conspiracy.

There are numerous realities in every country and every company. A skilled journalist can tell any one of those in an interesting manner. But that doesn't imply there aren't other stories.

For instance, the USA is currently (a) leading the "software disruption" war (b) shut down and about to default because of partisan politics (c) spying indiscriminately on almost everyone in the world (d) incarcerating the largest proportion of its citizens (e) meddling in the affairs of numerous countries (f) reshoring manufacturing that had been outsourced (g) saddled with a fighter jet program that is outrageously expensive and possibly average (h) trying to reform one of the most convoluted & corrupt healthcare systems in the world

Which of these are reality? Which are propaganda?

The poor parts of Eastern Kentucky, West Virginia, as are well as parts of the Ozarks are 'The America Left Behind'. Recently they have been seized upon by the artistic elite and made hip by music like Mumford and Sons and movies like The Hunger Games.

The phrase means a subgroup that is not enjoying the prosperity that the rest of the group enjoys. To use the phrase, the author must believe the opposite of what you read.

Russia has many symptoms of an industrial nation turning into a resource-extraction oligopoly, but it would be a very risky mistake to think Russia headed toward collapse. Russia may have many problems, but it will be a strong and rich nation. Allowing that fact to surprise us will lead to bad policy decisions.

They never 'picked' gypsy settlement, it was one of the many places they visited. It was you DominikR who 'picked' the gypsy part out of the long article.

Yes of course Roma are special. And they are nearly like that everywhere (possibly in places where they are living more permanently, like Romania, they are better off than in others, but more or less the same). This is part of Russian and European life. Native Americans are living about like that in the USA and nobody is trying to conceal that fact, or present things in a way that all of the USA is like that, neither does this article try to present all Russian to be gypsies and marry at 13.

But looking at the article overally yes, this is how Russia actually lives. And, further away from large railways (railways, not highways, are the bloodlines of the economy in Russia, like in XIX century America) - and the places visited are closest to most important railway - things are much, much worse. In many places you will need AWD vehicle to move around, and even that possible only in dry summer, and find little more than rotten huts and peasants who look like zombies, and illiterate children who drink at the age of 10. These places were too scary to travel too (you can be killed just for wearing suit and tie and not looking like zombie), but THAT is also how about 20-30% of Russian live.

>in Russia, the white faces ARE the aboriginals

Also in Germany, France and Norway.

>the government cannot afford to spend its money everywhere and anywhere

Of course not, they have to focus spending on facilities exclusively used by the elite... right?

>there are lots of people who like it that way because they want to live in the forest, breathe fresh air, collect mushrooms and berries, etc.

And not have hot water, electricity or access to ambulances. 'Cos to have that, plus fresh air and berries is just wrong.

Is that how you justify pumping 50 billion in olympics that they shouldn't have in the first place?

Really impressed either way.

One of the things I worked on was a generic framework for "composite" stories -- that is, a collection of not just text and photos, but integrated presentations of text, audio/video, photos and data visualizations, with customizable templating to lay it all out and organize for the web.

Time and link rot have not been kind to the things that were done with that. For example, the data bits of this:

http://www2.ljworld.com/news/mining/

no longer function, and it certainly shows its age, design-wise. But that was where we were in early 2007, technology-wise, and it was built with a hacked-together-in-a-week proof of concept of the underlying framework.

What we had at the time shipped with some standard out-of-the-box templates for presenting a story, and for one-off stories we could also task someone to work on creating new ones which could be slotted in for use. When new templating work wasn't required, they could put together a composite story presentation in a matter of hours, once they had all the materials they wanted.

The next evolution of that, which I was pushing for toward the end of my tenure there but never got to complete, would have been integrated data processing and visualization tools, allowing journalists to toss various sources (my rough draft worked with spreadsheets, since those were a pretty common source) into a denormalized data store, scrub a bit, and generate useful presentations from them.

While I can't be sure, I strongly suspect that the NYT has done something similar, developing the underlying framework for tying together a bunch of content in an attractive way, and probably building some tools to simplify and speed up the generation of the data presentations. What they're doing here, and have done a couple other times, seems well within reach for someone who knows what they're doing and has access to six years' worth of advances in technology.

(anecdotally, I've heard that the NYT special projects are done in Rails; ours were done in Django since it was originally our in-house web framework, but in either case it's a strong argument for the productivity gains of those web frameworks)

Edit: FWIW, here are slides from a lightning talk I gave at PyCon in 2008, about a data-driven project and the timeline involved in it:

http://media.b-list.org/presentations/2008/pycon/lightning.p...

Sadly, the story itself is no longer functioning.

Here's one that's actually miraculously still online, from the fall/winter a few years back when everyone was worried about swine flu:

http://www2.ljworld.com/data/flu/

The core of that was put together very quickly, and then it was about an hour's work each week to update with the latest data coming in.

I heard that that was not because the communists did not like or did not trust the serfs, but rather because factory workers knew how to show up at a particular time and place, e.g., the location of a demonstration.

But I got to admit, the curve is impressive http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=population+lithuania

PS I live here, moreover between Moscow and Spb. In the nice and largest city on this path (Tver'), but they skipped it accidentally. Why you should know something good about Russia? Look, they're savages.

As in the case of Brazil, this has been a problem for generations, like our authorities do not live in Brazil or only come for the world cup and carnaval.

The picture is much dire, its part of the culture, we are raised to think this way. Someone applies for a job in the police not because they seek order but because they know the corruption behind it can put their family in a better spot.

You can find examples of this in any 'developing' country.

"richness of local ecosystem" doesn't do anything for people.

Более того, наблюдается обратная тенденция -- люди бегут из Москвы в свои родные города и живут там. Почему? Все просто: ты зарабатываешь в Москве 50 тысяч рублей и снимаешь квартиру за 30. Так зачем там жить, когда в родном городе ты сможешь зарабатывать столько же, только жизнь будет спокойнее?

Моя мама, кстати, жила под Москвой (Солнечногорск). Переехала с мужем в поселок рядом с Ульяновском. Продали квартиру и купили там дом. Очень им там нравится, много ягод, грибов и т.д. Спокойная жизнь.

Так что это палка о двух концах, не все так однозначно ИМХО.