doombolt

Definitely. I am more concerned with Russian people and our culture, though, than with loyality to a country as a regime plus set of borders.

If there was other Russian state, like Taiwan is for China, I think I'd jump ship and go for it. There isn't.

Upd: HN throttles me so have to answer here:

Even before 2014, Ukraine put their bet on propelling Ukrainian language and culture. Which from my perspective put them in the same ballpark as Czechia or Croatia. Surely, most people in Ukraine still speak Russian but their culture is 2nd class citizen.

Belarus is a small and boring dictatorship. They're either going the way of Ukraine or, as rumors go, get annexed by Russia. Back to square one. But otherwise it could be an option.

As for placing interests of Russia above my own: aren't we all do it sometimes in any country? Actually this is a trick question since Russians as a nation way overspent on loyalty to regimes in XX century.

1. I have a family and I enjoy living in a place where Russian is spoken primarily and Russian culture is dominant.

2. Maybe I was like that before 2008 or so. Didn't make a difference either way.

The atmosphere is totally unhealthy, wages stagnate or fall for most of workers, and there is no optimism for the future.

In some areas Russia still becomes a better place to live, but if you compare it to Europe proper it still lacks in so many ways and the gap is not closing anytime soon, if not getting wider.

And the only news which come is about new restrictions on public life and political free speech.

As my colleague said to me 5 years back, "all of my canaries are now dead"

I don't really know any LGBT in person so it's hard to say. I think nobody will bother you if you stay clandestine. I guess the public opinion in this area is shitty but it is universal quality of public opinion in Russia.

I was on internet before my first job so ot is hard to say. It's a mixed bag. There are jobs which are bureaucratic hell (especially in large Soviet-survivor companies outside large cities), there are jobs which pay peanuts and productivity is non-existent (government sector), but then there's modern economy with nice offices, passable atmosphere and fine work-life balance. If you're not in IT and not splurging on natural resources wealth somehow, the pay is low.

I'm not planning to leave Russia just yet, due to being a Russian nationalist with a family, but I can sure answer any questions. The trend (or rather, reversal of previous trend) surely exists.

Upd: HN, the place where you get downvotes by agreeing to answer some questions. That's why I stopped coming.

> prevented Spain from becoming a Stalinist totalitarian country,

Or maybe it would be a flop and something closer to present euro-socialism which Spain ended up implementing anyway.

One should avoid being a brutal dictator since you never know at which rate you exchange real blood to imaginary one.

When you write "places the gulag system in a different light" I can't read it as anything but genocide denial.

Yes it does look nice-ish, but this is stage when human-scale disappears. It would look much less bland if it was ten story high and not twenty.

Having that coffin to the left does not help. It wants to dominate the landscape but it's dwarfed by a messy box.

It looks passable, but as I have said any Art Noveau building would give more eye candy, and there's a huge number of such building around the world, it's not we praise each and every of their architects.

It also looks like a side of any cruise ship. Last time I have checked cruise ships were not considered masterpieces of architecture, and they also float.

Yes, her works may be nice when compared to 80s.

But if you compare them to the turn of XX century, they don't look so nice. People may smile when zipping along her creations, but you can walk along some of Art Nouveau buildings every day for years and never stop smiling. E.g. https://yandex.ru/maps/-/CBF84WbZ8D

This is architecture for car drivers who zoom past while burning carbon. Spend more than 10 seconds, it stops looking cool and becomes boring. Yet another example how car destroys our cities.

It is not walkable, it is not human-scale, it does not integrate with surroundings. I love how they do advertisement renders where their buildings stand in an empty field. As if the rest of the city never existed and should not be cared for!

You can't walk past these buildings every day and enjoy it. First of all, they are too large and far apart. It will be boring and long not to mention wind, rain and snow to which it offers no protection.

Moreover, it's a legitimization of awful 70s architecture with slightly more effort. Even her New York building looks like something people from 70s would build when they dismantle some beautiful neoclassical or moderne building.

You could probably start from The Moscow Times, though they are rather softcore.

https://themoscowtimes.com/articles/krasnodar-judge-throws-2...

Then nobody was sure that this judge had ever study law. She said she went to some college in Georgia (the country) which said she's not on their records.

It's from the Soviet Union, but basically yes.

Apache Ignite is an ACID key-value CP database that does not depend on clock.

At least they do not seem to have oppression by minorities. One important ultra-unreal piece they don't have.

The difference is that you don't just know that it has actually happened, but also you are footing the bill for it.

As a Russian I find chinese ultra-unrealism pretty wimpy. We've got cooler, more fierce stuff.

I didn't know you could just skip this bullet point, get away with it.

Makes me wonder why we ever did it. After all, "Intellectual Property" is just a way to siphon money from my country while making our lives miserable. It's not like we ever got anything useful in the return.

Maybe it's mobile view or something? No banners in text block on my laptop. Some in the right pane, some down below.

It is also an eye-opener that food is so cheap these days you can make more from selling Diamonds mined at 2-3 locations than from selling Wheat grown all over the map.

Nobody knows for sure. Maybe a Syria-style (but ten times stronger) migration from Russia westwards?

It is assumed that Syrian crisis started happening when its Oil exports dipped in red, as in existing Syrian economy would consume more Oil than they were capable to extract. Worsening climate did not help of course.

Oil and gas are the only reliable Russian exports.

Economic pressure on Russia leads to increase of importance of oil and gas sector as other sectors plunge. This leads to more capacity, more offering. Which leads to price correction, even more offering as prices fall and have to be made for. Which in total leads to massive use of cheap gas.

If there was someone committed to decrease in fossil fuel usage they will be making sure that Russia turns into Norway economically and politically. Meaning much fewer extraction of much more expensive fuels and more effort to not knock the ecology in the process.

You can't undo colonialism by suffering communism after gaining independence.

You just get 2x of famines, mass executions and freedom impairment.

Or maybe 3x since communist regimes tend to be more violent than colonial regimes.

You also can't colonize yourself but you can install communism and suffer famines, mass executions and no freedom.

You can say that Eastern Europe didn't have famines or mass executions after WW2. But hey, Russians still did!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_famine_of_1946%E2%80%93...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novocherkassk_massacre

How do you disallow ownership of means of production without totalitarianism? Imagine a person has a small auto repair or sewing shop. They will not give up on profit unless you raid them, rinse, repeat.

That's what communism is about and you have to confiscate a lot of pre-existing stuff. Yes you can have hybrid model where you leave a lot of small business around, which is no longer communism as we know it since there's a lot of bourgeois people feeling great compared to workers.

Communists also tend to start hating people in countries where they rule, put bad tags on them. That's how they deal with the shortcomings of their policy. This is both for internal communist rulers and overseas communistic wannabees.

They blamed a million of different things on Russians, like being lazy drunkards; and shifting the hunger genocide blame from communists to ethnic Russians (for some reason).

Now they sure blame Chinese for... Being sheeple? Being hungry? I don't even know.

They don't blame Koreans for DPRK's hunger genocide, tho. That's Kims. Still not the communism.

Communism is so good, that it always end up in wrong people's hands who are just incapable.

Stop praising any non-true communists then, which is basically everyone who tried to practice it.

Bad parts: Yes, there is disrepair since the owners do not care about any common property. Everything outside their doorstep is not their concern. They expect "city" or "state" to take care of it. They care even less about the area surrounding their compound.

Good parts: People do not mind gentrification. All those people who would be pushed out of their rented homes instead happy and gay that their property rise in price and worth more if they decide to rent it out. Note: avoid telling those people that they are gay

Weird parts: In Moscow, renting an one bedroom is ~$400/mo. There are a lot of jobs in public sector or small business which pay around $400/mo. How do people manage on that kind of salary? You guessed it right, they're homeowners, so they pay $50 in utilities and they're all set. So you can say that a lot of jobs are still subsidized by late USSR's construction boom.

After the USSR fell apart, in Russia you could turn state-owned apartment that you occupied into your own ownership. Once per person, but basically for free. This means people who "rented" apartments will now own them.

Fast forward 25 years, and that gave enormous amount of apartment ownership. Yes, rent market is chaotic since you almost always rent from a private person. And yes, there's enormous divide between people who inherited an apartment in a large city and people who for some reason do not have an apartment of their own and have to rent.

That's why we need tools to permanently ban politicians from law making if their proposal is awful enough.

Kind of "[X] No and don't ask again", democracy version.

Having thought of it, the main problem here it's no longer "Political party versus political party" when speaking about law making, but "Parliament versus public". For some reason they have shared agenda instead of competing on it. They all unanimously want to sell us to copyright holders and secret services so bad, it's only our stupid resistance is what's holding them. Hence, proposal adjustments tricks.

> It's about the interests of this or that group (e.g. given population vs people coming from outside). Arguments can be made for either, but if a given population is not protected, then those coming from outside wont be protected (from people coming from outside later on) either.

> People build cities to be protected and prosper long time in them, not to give opportunities to third parties to come and displace them from the places they've built and helped grow.

Well you're basically repeating Donald Trump's words when he explains why he wants to build a wall, and last time I have checked nobody calls him progressive.

Just do s/cities/countries/ and you're all set.

Yes, it is an ideological preference. Rent control is conservative, market distribution is liberal. I just point that people really really want to be called progressive without being one.

You can't be progressive and conservative at the same time! You can barely be progressive if you hold conservative view on one of the most important issues. You can only be centrist that way.