nopriorarrests

Well yes. USSR had plenty of different -stans included, they are independent countries now. They are getting back to middle ages since they got independance 30 years ago, thats true.

But you can take stats for russia proper from soviet times and compare it to 2019. Hell, you can take stats from 1993 when russia was not USSR already but was still collapsing.

Russia totally recovered by any metric you can pick, from household income to average life expectancy. Heck, moscow in 80's looked like dumpster fire. Now it looks like a proper european capital city.

EDIT: to prove my point, russian life expectancy from fed -- https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=qTgj

Well, I think that what basically happens now? Half of the nation angry at president rhetoric, and half of the country angry at press bias.

Just different halves, but being angry at many things at once is hard, mentally. But you have your wish granted, more or less. Everyone is angry :)

OK, it's not just work from home, it's the whole lockdown hysteria. I barely left my home for last 5 weeks. No live music, no bars, no meetings with friends, no long walks. I don't know about covid, but my mental well being and my productivity are clearly taking a hit. I'm especially annoyed by the fact that weekends are not, in fact, weekends. It is two days of solitary confinement without work.

Why is it double speak? Yes, I think that healthy 29 y.o. male with wife, kid and mortgage should have the ability to make a decision between going to work or losing his home.

To make this decision for him looks unethical to me. And why exactly poor? It might be solidly middle class person.

EDIT: I'm pushing forties, can sustain myself for 1.5 years without working maintaining the same lifestyle, and I would go to work if I could. I'm damn tired working from home.

>Wait, are you talking about the people who want to send everyone back to work now

This is an argument made in a bad faith. You can't send "everyone to work now", if you are not running a gulag. People who are financially secure can stay at home till 2021, nobody can force them to go to work, this is obvious.

It's a question of being able to make a personal decision between staying at home or going to work.

>it should be pretty obvious that doing no or late lockdown ends up in situations where there are large numbers of deaths.

Even this is debatable.

I have no skin in this game and no strong opinion, but let's be honest -- lots of people were expecting total disaster in Sweden since they decided not to implement lockdown, but so far their daily cases chart looks not that different from other nordic countries.

>situation where most medical experts would agree that the quarantine is necessary for saving lives

The same experts (like WHO) told everyone 3 month ago that masks don't work, that no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission was found, etc. If they made such obvious mistakes and we still have to obey their orders now, what's the point of having government at all? Let's just accept the rule by the experts and get rid of elections and stuff.

If some machine takes your money and produces 98% war and 2% science, maybe - just maybe - the only true solution to fund more science is not to put more money into said machine, but change configuration first.

China begs to differ.

I still do not understand the logic. Let me put it straight.

1. US Government has unlimited funding, heck, it came up with 2 trillions _during last month alone_ with some financial alchemy which I don't fully understand. But clearly it's not starving.

2. US Government has kinda poor record producing tangible results during last 30 years, in terms of advancing science, housing, whatever. I mean, can CDC quickly figure out in 2020, are the pieces of cloth on my face help to fight the virus or not? Seems it's still up for discussion.

3. Private capital, during the same time frame, gave us google search and maps, smartphones, movies on demand and god knows how much other stuff.

So, based on these 3 observable points, we should "Tax the living hell out of capital"? I still not getting it.

You might be right, I honestly don't know. But if this is the case, maybe first you need to reform the government (in what exact way? and how the reform should be done, politically?) and after first task is accomplished you can feed it with some trillions of dollars?

Otherwise, "tax the living hell out of capital" will just cause some more big BOOM sounds somewhere in middle east, and deplete private capital from making more investments at the same time.

Honest, no snark question -- what exactly US government did in last 30 years that should warrant providing more money to it? Is there any guarantee that another trillion dollars will be used more efficiently than blowing up another Middle East country?

It is interesting to see Marc Andreessen in 2020 to quote Mencius Moldbug from 2013 almost word to word.

To quote Mencius directly -- " One pathology of our age is a childlike credulity in the magical efficacy of complaint. Don’t complain, build. We have done well at complaining; so what? What have we built?", which is basically tl;dr of Marc's article.

Are you sure that WHO is run by reputed experts and not by career bureaucrats whose motivation is mostly political, not medical? Because after the whole thing unfolded, it seems to be exactly the case.

I don't get it. It's not like all other food ordering apps a very complicated, they are quite simple in fact -- and they are still operating at loss, as a businesses, not even able to "keep the lights on", as you propose. It's not like they are scrooge mcducks swimming in millions of profits. From what I understand, they still depend on VC money, mostly.

If there is a way to simplify app without serious UX damage, and dramatically lower costs, why it wasn't done already by the same players?

well, yes you are? This is why people measure in percentages, as opposed to absolute numbers, such as dollars of GDP.

>What do you mean by "privatize the profits" here?

CEO's we getting their fat bonuses (tied to share prices) for years, inflating said prices with buybacks, and now, when shit hit the fan, they are dumping half-bankrupt companies to the public?

>Why does the Fed create and spend 1.5T dollars to purchase worthless and arcane financial instruments, but never spend on public goods like housing, student education, public infrastructure

Because Fed is not Government, plain and simple, and has no mandate to do so. If you want spend on public goods, you need to elect people who will spend on public goods.

> It doesn't prevent the coming collapse of the prosperity we have enjoyed these last 100 years

lots of people are tweeting that they are 3-4 weeks from disaster. that's some very special definintion of prosperity. These are numbers that come to mind when you think about middle age peasant.

>the virus will go away probably between 3 to 6 months

It took 3 weeks to fuck up Italy in a royal way, so "3 to 6 month" does not instill confidence, tbh

>I don't think FB or Apple can win a bidding war with state actors, and especially not a wealthy monarch.

Depends on your personal risk profile, I guess. If I was a highly professional security researcher (one can dream!), the one can find 0 day RCE in whatsapp, well, I would happily accept 10-20M bounty from FB and retire for life, instead of bargaining with wealthy monarch and accepting non-trivial risk of being dismembered with some blunt tools in embassy of Turkey or somewhere else.

Actually, this is my second question. How much money FB/AAPL are ready to pay for a security researcher who can find 0 day in their software to work full-time for them? Is Nefarius Inc. really competitive with them, salary-wise? I just can't grasp the economics here. Back in 90's, being a bad guy was probably more lucrative, but now, when established IT companies have market cap in trillion zone... what makes people work for nefarius inc?

Honest question. Given that RCE's are extremely rare, can't FB and AAPL announce 100M USD bounty to get them first and patch them, avoiding bad PR and brand impact? Damn, make it 200M?! Or bad actors can easily pay 5x more to exploit said 0 day on a few targets, so hackers will sell to them instead?

first paragraph: The Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos had his mobile phone “hacked” in 2018 after receiving a WhatsApp message that had apparently been sent from the personal account of the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, sources have told the Guardian.

So, not snapchat, but whatsapp. And it's quite surprising for me. So, Saudis have 0 days which work on whatsapp on iphone (I suppose Bezos uses iphone)? I mean, FB and AAPL, which both can afford tens of billions in security research, were pwned by saudi 0day? hmmm...

>there are a ton of dangerous or complex jobs that can be simplified and made safer with this technology.

Honestly, this is a good point. However, just to play a devils advocate, for emergency situations you don't need a real-time brain computer. You can just measure the adrenaline level or heartbeat rate (which is trivially easy with present tech) and on once it jumps, you shut down the whole machinery.

My point being, complicated brain link is not needed to send what is, essentially, a "SOS" signal.

But eye tracking is a huge problem in itself, and, to my knowledge, it's not solved at all. I type this as I sit in front of my "15 notebook, and I need barely move my eyes to see the whole screen.

I think that figuring out where exactly I look on my screen is impossible problem to solve, since I always clearly see at least 3/4 of the whole screen. You can only guess where exactly on this 3/4 property of my screen I'm really focused.

If you still need to point to right area of the screen using trackpad or mouse, and can only perform the click event with your mind, I can't see how is that useful.

Yes, this surprises me too, since telegram accounts are tied to SIM cards, and my best guess was that it's not easy to get a bunch of SIM's in Iran. But for some reason, Iran bots are considered the cheapest ones out there...

>Basically, any attempt would go about as well as someone walking into the middle east and trying to set up a secular dictatorship in the style of the USSR.

Maybe I'm not getting your point, but Assad regime is secular dictatorship, more or less? So if you wanted to say that this is something completely impossible, well, the metaphor is not quite correct. And Iran before 1979 revolution could be considered secular dictatorship as well.