> Poland and Hungary, two countries which should never have been allowed to join and are currently causing the union a lot of issues
May I know why exactly these two countries should not be allowed to join EU? Because they cause issues? I mean, every country causes some issues. In the current context Germany and its former government lobbying for Russian gas causes issues of perhaps much larger scale. Tell me about corruption.
We live in a countryside and our house has quite large windows which caused a lot of bird deaths in the first year after the house was built. My wife came up with an idea to put plush toys on the window sills to try to scare/warn the birds away. That actually works surprisingly well - I have not seen any dead birds around the house anymore.
> imagine most of the desert in California converted to solar
What is an average life time of a solar panel? What happens after it ended its service? Can you recycle them or they will just end up in a massive landfill?
I am from eastern Europe and right now Russia is invading a democratic country to install its own government, tortures and massacres everyone left and right.
Many EU countries (especially those on the North) mandate them to be ON at all times when car is moving. The cars sold in those regions have light switch on Auto by default, which you can manually override in both directions.
> I’m slightly concerned about the fact that some of the products use electrolytic capacitors. Those hubs get pretty warm, even if you’re not routing your laptop’s power through the hub, and electrolytic capacitors don’t like warm environments, and that’ll significantly shorten their life. However, that’s probably negligible, since lots of resistors are also designed just barely around their load ratings, all the chips run amazingly hot, … it just feels like another product family intended to be used barely one year until it dies, just to end up in the landfill.
Drying out of electrolytic capacitors is a single largest cause of failure of electronic devices these days (apart from physical damage). My friend is in the business of restoring vintage tape recorders and audio amplifiers (from 80s and 90s) and what he does is he just replaces all electrolytes without even looking at them. This usually brings these machines back to life immediately. Resistors usually can handle the heat for extended periods of time: even if some of them bear marks of overheating, they are mostly fine.
The disturbing thing is that there is direct correlation between those people glorifying Soviets during WW2 and justifying Russian actions in Ukraine today.
> Everywhere you mention had been within the Russian Empire 20 years earlier.
That is not really an argument. I can select an arbitrary time period (other than 20 years) and show that none of these were part of Russian empire at that time.
> Don't worry, this has been already happening for years. Nazis are being normalized constantly.
No need to twist my words here. You know very well what I meant with it.
> Believe me, there are plenty of surprises for you once you decide to study history instead of being feed by mass media. You'll enjoy it.
I’ve lived in different political and economical systems and on both sides of the iron curtain which makes me think I have developed good immunity against all kinds of propaganda.
My hope is that in the light of Russian actions in Ukraine, the western world will review its attitude towards Russian/Soviet role in the context of WW2. So far the blame on starting WW2 was put almost solely on Nazi Germany, and painting Soviets almost as victims only. That is understandable, since they happened to be on the winners side, and therefore could write the history as they seem to fit for them. It is often forgotten that Soviets and Nazis agreed to divide Europe when they signed Molotov-Ribbentrop pact on August 23, 1939 [1], after which Nazis promptly invaded Poland a week later [2] and Soviets did so just weeks weeks after that. [3]. And while Germany was busy waging war on its western front [4], Soviets went on attacking Finland [5] and occupying Baltics [6].
I wouldn't be so optimistic to think Russian tanks are full of computers. I know many things have changed since last time I sat in T-72/T-80 tank but back then the electronics were quite primitive. You would see massive boxes full of cards with rows and rows of low-density chips. Gyroscopes mentioned in the article were mostly mechanical.
If they are now being retrofitted with newer electronics nowadays I do not know.
True. But the lack of political will and corruption at all levels is what hampers the process. In my country which lies slightly north of Lithuania, that is huge problem. There, similarly as in Germany former heads of government have lucrative positions in Russia-connected gas companies still.
Unfortunately they are able to replace quality by quantity. Their tech in Ukraine is from 50s and 60s (I know by first hand experience) but they are just too many...
I would like to add here that Baltics (along with others) have served their fair share as a buffer against Russian expansion into west for good part of the 20th century by being occupied by Soviets and incorporated into USSR. Who knows how far to the west the Iron Curtain would divide Europe if not for these countries. And they paid with tens of thousands deported to prison camps [1] and decades long crippling of societies and economy under soviets.
So I think there is also a little bit of moral obligation of West (incl. US) to support them today.
> It's actually an existential threat for a lot of people.
I am sorry but you have your priorities wrong. The existential threat to all of us is sitting in Kremlin and we must stop him now. I am in Europe, winters in my country are cold with lows to -30 celsius and our the government has been shortsighted/corrupt for decades that we depend on Russian gas for heating for full 100%. But I will support cutting off that pipeline without thinking a second even if it costs me triple or whatever, or will be installing a wood stove. I have been of the other side of the Iron curtain for good part of my life, and believe me, energy bill will be your least worry.
To avoid misunderstandings: Borne Sulinowo - town in Poland which during the Cold War housed large Soviet/Russian military base and therefore was erased from maps [0].
"I am American, I live in a free country: I can go to a main square and call president (Reagan/Nixon/whatever) an idiot and nothing will happen to me!" - "Well, I am Soviet citizen, I also live in a free country: I can go to a main square and call president (Reagan/Nixon/whatever) an idiot and nothing will happen to me!"
Not necessarily. They were transported there by rail. Sure, you need to get them to the point where the trucks could be loaded onto rail cars, but that's whole different story than to be on the hundreds of kilometers long march which is happening now in Ukraine.
I can only add my own experience with Russian/Soviet army which dates 30+ years back to mandatory military service. It was always the same. Widespread theft meant that not all trucks and tracked vehicles had batteries in them, so the starting them was always either by towing or jumper cables. Oil was so thick that to start in winter you would use blowtorches to heat engine oil sumps from beneath the trucks the night before. During the drills good part of the vehicles could not leave their dislocation areas, and longer marches meant that most part was lost along the way due to breakdowns, disorientation, miscommunications etc. I participated in the drill which required a relatively large unit (approx 10,000 troops in total) to arrive in area some 300 km away from the main base. Later I overheard officers talking that only 25% of the units arrived there on time. Mind you, those were not reserve units, they were supposed to be ready to repel NATO attack on the short notice, hence we had full staff on site and ammunition loaded. Sure later heads of the higher command rolled, but nothing really changed on the ground level.
So this does not surprise me at all.
Seeing the videos of destroyed Russian equipment I am a bit surprised how familiar it looks to what it was when I was forcefully drafted into soviet military some 30+ years ago. There are maybe few new types of personnel carrier vehicles which I do not recognize but everything else is decades old, and even back then in 80s it was not any high tech (except for T-80 maybe). As an example, to coordinate artillery fire we used paper maps and mechanical rulers to convert target coordinates into azimuth and elevation angles. Officers would carry secret reference table books with them which were used to apply a ton of corrections: ambient temperature, wind direction, mass of the charge and the projectile and drift due to rotation of the projectile etc. All that was manual, calculated on paper, slow and error prone. I remember myself back then wondering why we couldn't use simple calculators to do this math quickly. The dead reckoning equipment (which was based on mechanical gyroscope) had such high error that after few tries we decided to never turn it on again - after few kilometers of drive it would place us some 500m off the actual position.
Sure, maybe some electronics are upgraded nowadays, it is hard to tell from those videos. But the stories of Russians being lost on their way, it rather looks that nothing much has changed.
I think this is not what parent asked. The question was why circles are arranged in square grids but not in haxagons.
Which is great question, and I would like to know the answer too.
+1 for Home Assistant. Have it running on RPi4 for almost two years already without single glitch. It has tons of integrations, and besides that you can always build your own Arduino modules to connect with it over MQTT if you have your special use case. Web UI is really nice, you can even access and edit config files with it without going ssh. Android/IOS app also works pretty well.