guard-of-terra

Russia only became member of WTO very late, the process was hindered without end.

Russia briefly explored possibility of joining NATO but was met with cold stares and disengaged.

Russia opted for e.g. visa waiver with Schengen area (EU), but that got nowhere in ten years.

Regarding win-win guys, after a few years in early 90s it became impossible for a Russian to be one. It was vividly shown that "the night is dark and full of terrors".

WRT win-lose approach:

It's what recent history teaches to Russia. People kind of expected that peaceful end of the cold war is a good thing, but it turned out that USA & Western Europe won and Russia lost. And now US politics has audacity to poke in russians' faces with this "fact". It was win-lose.

After that, on 2000-s, Russia sought to enter WTO, even join NATO, and streighten ties with EU. But it mostly got humiliation and shown the door. It wasn't win-win.

Now, it's quire easy to learn that win-win scenarios don't work and win-lose do, and you want to be on a right side of win-lose.

And I wold argue that win-win fails to perform in modern world. It's now more like lose-lose. Iraq? Syria (for all parties including Russia)? Lose-lose. Even international trade starts to show this character.

But after all that said, speculating on peoples' beliefs instead of facts is always opinionated.

Disclosure: I'm a Russian nationalist and I'm biased but honest.

Putin had a chance to take most of Ukraine back or at least try to do it. This is late '14, Ukrainians taking hold on separatist "people's republics" of Donetsk and Lugansk. They use artillery against populated areas, lots of civian casualties. The memory of Odessa massacre is still vivid. He has broad support back home to end it all. He has grassroot support in Kharkov and Odessa regions (connect them on the map and see how much of Ukraine is left). He's still holding arguably legitimate Ukrainian president for god's sake!

Ukraine army was still weak and disoriented, he had a chance of dealing a massive blow and overrunning most of the country, and he blew it!

Now, fast forward two years. Can we seriously talk about Putin expanding into Eastern Europe proper if he's unable to take Russian-speaking parts of Ukraine? How he would ever do that? Belarus wipes its feet with Putin, EU sanctions against it are all lifted. Kazakhstan improves ties with China and gets wary of Putin too. In the end he sublimates the inability to tackle Ukraine in his petty TV war in Syria.

Yes, he does use military threats, sending in military forces, trying to undermine democratic governments through supporting extreme left and right wing parties, and a massive internet trolling campaign. No, that won't get him very far, considering he's old and didn't have balls to take a bite at Ukraine. Perhaps he never wanted to. Of course he's bitter about Russia's decline, but he likes his little throne and oligarch friends and doesn't want to risk all that.

Summary: We can only talk about Putin expanding into Eastern Europe when he figures out Ukraine. Not earlier.

I have several devices and enjoy being sometimes login on stray device I don't own.

It's a judging opinion, there's not much to rebute there.

New passwords must:

    Be at least six characters long
    Contain one or more numbers
    Include at least one of the following special characters: !"#$%&'()*+,-./:;<=>?@[\]^_`{|}~, or a space

There's no way I'll remember a last.fm password like that! :(

Maybe they co-evolve, with cancer becoming less deadly as it means that it can spread faster by using its host indefinitely.

Most people already eat much more than they need, might as well make use of those calories.

Of course there should be a "floor", we don't want to grow into blobs of slithering muscles and veins, just well-built.

Where I studied, there were indeed groups of choices, but they had to take you for some reason (either be fast to apply or have good fit already). Most people were raked into general class, where it was as bad as in school, under the fear of dropping you out, since it was a required course.

Seriously makes me want to bulldoze the stadium (bonus points for frags) and set a few extra dorms on top.

Can we just turn off those "lazy/slacking" mechanisms on genome/cell level? A pill will be nice.

Make your organism always maintain optimal muscles and circulation system while burning a lot of calories? Seems like a win/win to me.

Some people are strong and healthy without excersice, I think we are all entitled to same package?

I had PE in University (and before that school), hated it and now I'm turned off from any excercise.

No. I expect people to only vote on issues that they find pressing. By perhaps spending a replenishable "voting score".

Switz and Icelanders were able to pull it, did not they?

Of course this is a skill and it will be acquired for some time. After that, we don't even need politicians that much.

I'll try constant populism because today we live in the era of constant oppression.

I think that the future should lie in digital democracy, where elections and referendums will be held constantly and this will require a well-working electronic system.

I have no faith in current crowd-validation elections.

I don't see that I ever get any compromises. What I see is that decision-making is usurped.

I don't see many people in society particularly happy.

I don't criticize Stallman, doesn't mean it's the only way to go.

I don't want to do just "something". It's too little, too late. I want to have what's mine, all of it.

Getting my voice heard out loud, my interests acknowledged.

Let's have a talk about copyright, at least, in our societies, instead of having laws and persecutions just pushed on us from the top, in batches?

I don't see any democracy in observing how this system works, only sense of entitlement of the minority.

On Earth, the distances are similarly huge but still manageable.

For example, from me to Latin America 7000 times of what I walk every day from and to work. So in my daily walks that's 20 years worth of walking! Or 40 years for both-ways trip! And yet I've been there.

"Terrorists that we brought to country hurt you so we have to hurt you back to compensate"

That's how it goes with politicans for the last 15 years.

I used to be wanting interplanetary travel, now my bar is much lower, I'll be happy enough extracting my revenge.

I'm pretty sure it's possible to configure fish, but I don't feel any need to. That's the good part - works out of box.

However I don't like their new shell syntax, especially env vars handling. Doubt it's configurable.

It has really good completion, including path completion. It has virtually infinite shared history. You can do some powerful customizations.

bash is trying to catch up in many areas but not quite there.

Having said that, I've now switched to fish which I don't like but it doesn't need configuring.

How to be reasonably good and productive while having a life and not cannibalizing your time with work? (or anything else for that matter)

That's what should have been asked.

It's not hard to do a lousy job, doesn't mean it's the only possibility.

They could hide it in a deep potential well, where such mutation will be virtually impossible to happen before the lifetime of the universe.

> with enough money, pretty much every city is very livable

Unless your idea of fun is sitting all day behind tall fence, this might be false for a huge number of cities in Eastern Europe and perhaps Africa.

Imagine that there's basically no roads. That every road in the city looks like this: http://izhevsk.ru/forums/icons/forum_pictures/005326/5326795... Imagine a thick cover of mud on said streets also, Deadwood-style.

You can surely buy a huge expensive car but you can't buy roads, and not only that.

Most of your heart disease risk is after the age of 65 (if you live in a developed country).

However, most of your terrorism risk and car accident risk is before the age of 65. This is where they dominate.

Do you think that car accident risk is real? How much fatalities from car accidents were there in Belgium this year?

"Lifetime risk" is stupid metric, borderline fradulent. I don't care about dying at the age of 85, would welcome it after all. I'll care a great deal if my relative dies at the age of 30 or 40.

"your likelihood of being a victim of a terrorist attack is 0.019%. It's just not a real risk"

If you do that for 50 years, your risk is now almost 1%!

I am sorry, but the risk of dying from cancer, heart problems or car accident in the working life period of ages 20-65 lifespan is comparable to that 0,95% "composite subway terrorism" risk.

So if the security problems in Belgium continue, you should totally worry about it.

It's that bad comments sink down but the amount of downvoting is not shown, so downvoting behavior is not reinforced.

HN used to have far better comments, now it feels like a battlefield.

Told him that, maybe he'll fix.

My good friend makes awesome Glonass clocks out of Nixies:

https://aivelectronics.ru/aivnixie_eng/

I did not know that you can get time from GPS/Glonass before that.

Politics is interesting if you ask me, because it have the property of ruining every other interesting thing.

We live online.