I never said it was close. You seemed to put the demarcation date for the discussion of it joining at 2014 but it started before that. I simply wanted to add more information to the discussion.
1,071 karma · joined April 27, 2016
No, but they were willing to go to war to prevent the missiles from getting there. Waiting until after would have been too late.
>NATO never deployed nukes in any of the ex-USSR countries, did not build extensive permanent bases, signed the Russia/NATO founding act and in general tried to accommodate Moscow.
There are NATO missile bases in ex-Warsaw Pact countries though (Poland and Romania). Yes they are ostensibly to defend against an Iranian missile attack but the US has a poor record for honesty in its international dealings so I can understand that a potential missile base in Ukraine would cross a lot of red lines for the Russians.
>There's a world of difference between deploying offensive nukes in a neighboring country and allowing countries to join a defensive alliance. That's not to say I am a huge fan of US politics of the 1960's, but the comparison is simply lopsided.
It's easy to argue that the potential nukes in Cuba were defensive to deter any further US invasion attempts. At any rate balance of power I think is a better lens through which to examine these things rather than the ethics of offence and defense because that's actually what drives the decision making.
Likewise calling NATO a defensive alliance is a bit tenuous I think (at least from the American perspective). NATO is controlled by the US and the US is quite aggressive about pursuing its perceived interests.
Over the last 20 years there has been lots of chatter regarding US long term ambitions towards Russia and those ambitions are now being discussed more openly even in mainstream press. For example this article is from yesterday.
https://www.msn.com/en-in/news/world/nato-versus-russia-in-u...
>A much more truly ambitious apparent long-term US ambition seems to have been to instigate the breakup of Russia into smaller manageable countries, paralleling the emergence of nations in eastern Europe after 1989. It could then deal with a reconstructed historical Russia of smaller emerging statelets run by competitive elites at odds with each other. These new polities, anxious for revenues, will then, presumably, be eager to sign lucrative commercial deals with US corporations since the entire region is extraordinarily wealthy in raw material resources.
So while I agree that Russia has acted in a paranoid manner vis-à-vis Ukraine/NATO I also think that the paranoia is understandable. Russia has after all been invaded by Western European countries three times in the previous 180 years (I'm not suggesting a military invasion of Russia is on the cards but certainly an economic and cultural one).
From an American perspective I think the US has played their hand very well. By manufacturing this conflict they created a situation where Russia had to choose between allowing further NATO expansion or starting a war which 30 years ago would have been considered a civil war. This results in all sorts of benefits for the US.
- Potential collapse of the Russian Federation and the economic benefits this would bring (for the West)
- Solidifying EU support of NATO
- Increased energy sales to Europe at higher prices
- Increased military sales to NATO countries due to new threat
- Increased budget for "the military industrial complex"
- Further the long term goal of preventing a peer competitor from appearing by both weakening Russia and making the EU more dependant on the US both economically and militarily.
- Mutually beneficial German/Russian cooperation is pretty much dead now so no threat of such an alliance appearing in the future.
Russia it seems only had two bad choices to pick from strategically speaking; a "Kobayashi Maru". We'll never know what would have happened if they had made a different choice but its fascinating to watch all this play out. History is happening in real time!
edit: I'm not the one downvoting you.
>US and Russia simply can not agree between themselves what should be Ukraine's place in the world.
I’ll argue the opposite. The Ukraine has no inherent right to join NATO. Ukraine isn’t going to join NATO unless the US wants it to join and this is morally correct in every way considering the obligations of article 5. Additionally every other NATO member has the right to veto expanding the alliance (this is fact btw not opinion).
Additionally the US has every right to negotiate with Russia over Ukraine joining should the US wish to.
Thankfully for the world saner minds prevailed and a settlement was reached. The soviets turned their ships around and the US removed their missiles from Turkey.
Such a settlement unfortunately is no longer possible with the current situation.
I can’t understand what you mean by this at all and it sounds like an absurd thing to say. Can you please explain?
Emotionally invested fans of these stories clearly exist and describing them as the core audience isn’t a dishonest claim. Neither is it dishonest to claim that some of these fans feel alienated by the new versions of these stories.
You can debate both claims, and my views don’t align perfectly with OP’s either but there is no intellectually dishonesty on the the part of the OP in making the claims.
https://www.chicagotribune.com/redeye/redeye-the-nba-is-way-...
- Usage based pricing rather than per seat
- As cheap as $19 per year
- No deliverability issues
- Good instructions on how to set your DNS settings.
https://news.berkeley.edu/2014/07/01/drunken-monkeys-and-our...
You’re probably a lot more creative then you think you are you just need to nurture it a bit.
https://www.gov.uk/order-coronavirus-rapid-lateral-flow-test...
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
I’d dive right in and just go for it. And don’t forget to check out the free Stanford course (cs193p) on YouTube.
I’m open to the possibility that a small team can produce a great product but have bad marketing, but there doesn’t appear to be a free trial to test it out. It’s not so much about the $5 but more about the friction of the sign up process. Even a live demo page would be good enough. Just something that serves as quick test drive.
I've been in this situation too and I gave up on trying to change the habits of the group.
https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/ch04-00-understanding-ownersh...
This link explains it pretty clearly with example code (which is easy enough to understand even if you've never seen rust code before).
That’s not actually true anymore since v0.5 came out in June.
I’m intending on using it for a small project that will handle real money soon but I’m not there yet so can’t answer your question.
All joking aside I can only comment very generally obviously, but just because people will tolerate a particular aspect of someones personality doesn't mean they actually enjoy it.
Remember that 30 years ago in the Western world lots of women got patted on the ass at work and the normal response was to nod and smile because that's just how the world was.
I once met someone in Australia whose best friends all called him some racial slur as a nickname (I forget which one now). In a short moment alone I asked him if that was actually okay for him and he answered "No, but that's just the way people are around here."
I obviously have no way of knowing how close you are to these women but you should probably at least be open to the possibility that there is a similar dynamic at play here.
Personally, I have a unique physical characteristic that causes even strangers to approach to comment or joke about. I've got a pretty good catalogue of witty retorts by now and one of them in particular is so spectacular that I quite enjoy the opportunity to use it. I still think the people who make the jokes are boring idiots though.
Imagine for a moment that your name was Seymour Butts and then imagine how bored you'd feel by the people that continued to make the same lame jokes about your name, as adults in a professional environment.
For example if 3rd party digital app stores are forced on Apple, then they should be forced on everyone including Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft as well. Additionally they should be forced on Epic too, which has a monopoly on selling cosmetic items in Fortnite.
So if you're a programmer then you're in the business of building software solutions which are generally built via writing code or script of some sort.
If the problem is best solved via a method other than writing software, then that's great. Not every problem needs software. Not every problem even needs solving either.
If however the problem does need a software solution then it's obvious that you should make sure you actually understand the problem so that you actually solve it.
I guess I just don't see how coding isn't equivalent to solution building unless what you call coding I call typing. For me thinking, researching, investigating, designing, engineering, planning, and even just "sleeping on it" are all part of the coding process.
I suppose that if the purpose of your coding is to learn or play then you might not be building a solution.
Is this just semantics or am I missing something?
I do have private health insurance now with Bupa but it's less than $100 per month.
Additionally, media, both mainstream and alternative, are adding fuel to the fire because it means more clicks.
Normally in a situation where people can't agree I would suggest that you first try to find common ground and build from there. What I did was to find an occurrence where "my side" has been wrong and "theirs" has been right; then we did the opposite.
This was a great starting point for future conversations. And by conversations I mean dialectical ones rather than rhetorical.