rmind

Well, naturalisation in most EU countries would involve some other requirements: language knowledge (you'd have to pass an exam) + civic/constitutional exam or integration test + naturally, no criminal record, etc + some countries are quite restrictive on dual-citizenship (i.e. they don't allow it for foreigners, meaning that you would need to renounce your original citizenship).

Visas and residence permits are, of course, easier.

Can you give some specific examples? I would say that, unless you have some additional qualifications (European ancestors, EU spouse and similar), the majority of EU countries actually don't make it that easy. Of course, it depends on your definition of "relatively easy".

While each EU country has its own immigration rules, there is an EU-level route for the highly skilled workers, called the EU Blue Card:

* https://home-affairs.ec.europa.eu/policies/migration-and-asy... * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Card_(European_Union)

Ironically enough, Vilnius is now a very beautiful, safe and high quality of life city that is a better place to live than, probably, quite a lot of American cities..

How times have changed..

Nice. Any plans to add support for affine transformations and perspective transformation (warp)?

Well, it is not really a new problem. Stopping-starting nuclear power plants is also slow and costly. Pumped-storage hydroelectricity and industrial batteries are good ways to solve it at the grid level. In addition to the possibility of some local solutions others have mentioned.

For an academic reference, they should have quoted "Code Inflation" (Holzmann, 2015).

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=705...

It was the case during the Soviet occupation and briefly during the transitional period, but otherwise - no, it wasn't. For example, in 1990, Latvia simply restored its 1922 constitution (still in effect today, although with some amendments) which enacted Latvian as the sole official language. This has also been the case with Lithuanian and Estonian constitutions, respectively.

"Removing Russian from their list of official languages"? It was never an official language in the first place.

You are counting from some early planning phases. Compare, for example, how long it took for the UK to build High Speed 1 line.

It's worth noting that the non-HS standard gauge (part of Rail Baltica I) between Poland and Lithuania (up to Šeštokai Intermodal Terminal) was completed back in 2015. The freight trains have been operating on this line all the time.

The work is very much ongoing in Lithuania: 114 km of railway is under construction, with tracks already laid in large parts of it. That is 43% of the initial phase (links to Poland and Latvia).

Let's keep in mind that it's not just standard gauge track. It's a high-speed rail project (200-250 km/h) and, for any country, it takes time to build such a huge infrastructure.

Baltic States can disconnect already in case of an emergency. The infrastructure is ready, several tests have been conducted. Lithuania wanted to disconnect already, but Estonia pushed for more conservative approach: they want more synchronous condensers to handle a higher number of possible simultaneous failures in the system. It's a technical debate whether that is necessary (Lithuanian operator thinks it isn't): the probability of such failure is already very small, but the Estonian operator wants to reduce it a bit further.

PDF version here: https://kam.lt/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Assessment-of-Thre...

As a guy born in the Netherlands, you have incredibly poor understanding of the European security and geopolitics. Let me answer point to point:

> I don’t want this war to continue.

Nobody wants, but it's Russia who started it. Russia started a genocidal war of conquest against another peaceful and sovereign country. If Russia stops fighting it, then the war will end. If Ukraine will stop fighting it, then Ukraine will cease to exist as an independent nation.

> And I do feel Russia has had a very valid argument regarding the NATO threat and USA has been aware of this for a long time, still they decided to poke the bear.

Why do you disregard the threat from Russia to Poland, Baltics and Finland, and other eastern flank countries? These countries joined NATO for a reason. They were not asked to join, they were not compelled to join. They joined because they are much smaller and live next to a heavily armed and unstable Russian dictatorship. It is incredible how Russian propaganda tries to paint a nuclear-armed and heavily militarized country as a victim.

> USA sabotaged the Russian-German pipeline

Conspiracy theory with no evidence.

> Germany has proven to be a lap dog of US interests

Huh?

> It’s a shame the Western world and Ukraine deceived Russia with the Minsk accords

It is a shame there are a lot apologetics of the Russian fascism. Unfortunately, there were a lot of callers for peace with the "we don't want war" slogans when Nazis were taking over Europe during the World War II. Some even greeted them with flowers, despite all the artocities, including in your country. Well.. history doesn't repeat itself but it certainly rhymes.

Interestingly, they didn't talk much about the information domain this year in the executive summary. However, an example from the report:

    Russia uses cyberattacks to support its strategic objectives (e.g., causing fear and weakening society’s resistance to the aggressor, disrupting the functioning of the state, and creating information noise to make it difficult to distinguish reality from disinformation). The Russo-Ukrainian war confirms that cybersecurity measures 12 make it possible to withstand cyber espionage, cyber sabotage and influence operations.

Russia has had some success in its information operations. It is evident even from the number of pro-RU trolls in the comments here.

Certainly yes, but for debug builds and tests. It can be heavyweight for production.

rvault for small documents: https://github.com/rmind/rvault

It uses envelope encryption with one-time password (OTP) authentication. I like to store data on the systems I own and just run backups regularly.

World War II wasn't just Germany. As a matter of fact, Poland was invanded jointly by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. I think you partly missed the point. Anyway..

It is certainly important to de-escalate, but it cannot happen under the Russian terms. The current war in Ukraine is a war of conquest. Moreover, it is genocidal (as dictator in Russia is questining the very existance of the Ukrainian nation). There must be serious consequences for this, otherwise we just go one or rather two centuries back when invading, conquering territories and enslaving the local populations was a norm.

The civilized world must respond, no questions about that. However, the idea of "WW3" is wrong and helps the Russian regime to instigate the fears in our societies. Unfortunately, it was echoed even by some top politicians. Let's put it this way:

  - Before all sanctions, the Russian economy was about the same size as the Italian economy. Russia barely has any allies: Belarus and to some extent Iran (with some vocal supporters like Venezuela or Syria, but they have nothing substantial to offer). Neither China nor India will back Russia. You can see how isolated Russia is in the United Nations (e.g. UNGA Resolution ES-11/4).
  - Russia has lost most of its conventional military capacity and capability in Ukraine. Russia is nowhere near the Soviet Union with its Warsaw Pact satellites. The illusion of its mighty power was based on propaganda. To the point where Putin himself began believe his own propaganda and Russia's invincibility.
  - Yet, they threaten NATO and the aligned countries. NATO is a military superpower. These countries combined (USA, EU, UK) have a population of ~1 billion people. It is also nearly a half of the world economy.

There will be no WW3.

Russia won't but the West will. If you have a clear cut case of contract breach, then it's pretty straightforward to confiscate the property via courts and so on. The sanctions, on the other hand, are more complex, they might involve freezes (even if permanent, it's not confiscation), have different extent, not all countries subscribe to them, etc. The world is complex.

Doesn't it? [1][2] suggest that Germany paid $25bn for fossil fuels to Russia in 2021, where a large portion of this must be gas. The cost of building Nord Stream 2 was less than €10bn and some of that was probably covered by Germans. So, it might cost something similar to one year supply. Keep in mind that gas contacts are often long-term.

Also, you assume the pipelines are irreparable, but we don't know that.

[1] https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-business-europe-ge... [2] https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/how-dependent-is-ger...

I think they calculated that the Nord Stream projects are pretty much dead in the current circumstances. It was a political project to start with.

Also, I think it is a statement to EU: your underwater infrastructure is not safe.

As I wrote in the post above, they still retain the levarage through the Druzhba [1] and Yamal [2] pipelines (passing via Belarus and Ukraine). These combined have a MUCH greater capacity than Nord Stream 1.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Druzhba_pipeline [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yamal%E2%80%93Europe_pipeline

Because they would have to pay billions for not delivering the gas due to the breach of contracts. Legally, you cannot turn off the taps just because.

Moreover, Russia can still supply very significant quantities of gas via Belarus and Ukraine, so they retain the leverage to blackmail the EU.

So far the most plausible theory is that Russia sabotaged the pipelines for two reasons [1]: 1) to claim force majeure and avoid massive penalties Gazprom would have to pay for the breach of contract (we are talking billions here; now they just blame the West and good luck proving in courts who actually did it); 2) to further blackmail and coerce the European nations (particularly Germany and Italy) who depend on Russian gas to stop supporting Ukraine.

As for explosions, they were recorded by the seismologist in Sweden and Denmark who are quite convinced it was due to a deliberate action: https://www.rferl.org/a/russia-gas-baltic-pipelines-leaks/32...

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/arielcohen/2022/09/29/russian-s...

I have to say "Eastern European" is a quite poor and unhelpful generalization nowadays.

It is ethnically and linguistically diverse: Slavic, Baltic, Finno-Ugric, Romance (Romania) as well as Albanian and Hellenic. It is religiously diverse: Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox, Muslim and even the bastions of irreligion/atheism (Czechia and Estonia). There are significant cultural differences, especially comparing the more reserved north (Finland and Baltics) with the more emotional south (Balkans or even parts of Ukraine). There are also major economic differences, with central/north east being more or less high-income economies compared to the south and east-east. It even has inconsistent geographic definitions, e.g. whether it includes "Central Europe", whether it extends to Turkey or even Caucasus, etc.

Many generalizations really don't work for such a vast and diverse region.

It is very easy to say, retrospectively, in year 2022, that the decisions were horrible. You are talking about the language and decisions made in 1970s. The knowledge was different. The computers were different, their capability was different. Try running your Python on PDP-7, an 18-bit system! ASCII vs EBCDIC is a computer architecture issue and it's unfair to blame the language that it doesn't have automatic/transparent support for EBCDIC (stuff from 1960s, by the way!). Unicode simply didn't exist at that time. And so on and so forth.

On the contrary, I would say C aged really well for a language which was created to support an entire zoo of computers and operating systems. It is worth pointing out that the language has progressed a lot since then and you don't have to deal with many old headaches if you write C on a modern CPU architecture.

> Arguing NATO didn't expand into the Baltic states is semantics, at best. Sure the countries have to apply to join but the current NATO members have to acquiesce. Even with this relationship the US can (and has) communicated policy prior to expansion. The act of expnasion itself is evidene of US policy since the US could veto it fif it was something it didn't want.

You talk about technicalities, but you ignore the key point here: these countries saw NATO membership being vital for their national security.

> My suspicion is you're viewing the US as a benign hegemony. The problem with this thinking is it makes it harder to see things from the other side, namely that another foreign power might reasonably perceive "benign" actions as hotile.

Perhaps it isn't, but it is benign for those countries who want to join (or joined) NATO. So, what is wrong with that?

> This is especially true of NATO, which was founded on the idea of screwing the USSR (quite literally). Well the USSR doesn't exist anymore yet NATO persists. Russia has to view that as aggressive especially with continued expansion.

If Russia would not be a dictatorship which threatens its neighbours, if it wouldn't demonstrate aggressive and coercive behaviour, then perhaps there would be no need for NATO. However, Russia did everything it possibly can to ruin its relationship with most neighbours and gave them every reason to join the military alliance. Now they blame NATO for it?

> Because there are advantages to being neutral. You can't get roped into a war you didn't consent to.

This is just absolutely not true. Baltic States were neutral before the World War II. They were invaded and occupied by Soviet Russia (and briefly by Nazi Germany). Neutrality does not guarantee sovereignty. Moreover, smaller countries which are close to large countries might simply not have numbers to resist a large aggressive neighbour. In such case, military alliances are their only option.

> Because joining NATO requires mutual consent.

Huh? I am talking about a third country. Why should a third country, especially a potential aggressor, have a right to veto the membership? It is a matter of NATO and the applicant country.

> That's my point: this has been a massive miscalculation by Putin. But not all borders are created equal. Geography matters. A border with Ukraine is of more strategic threat than a border with Finland just because most of Ukraine is flat.

Saint Petersburg will be about 100 km from the NATO border. Yet Ukraine is nearly 500 km away from Moscow. It just doesn't add up.

> My sense is they trid to decapitate Ukraine's leadership and pave the way for a pro-Russian regime. This was a massive miscalculation.

We are in agreement on this. Militarily they just didn't even have the right numbers (let alone other spectacular failures), yet Russians still opened wide fronts and went after the capital Kyiv.

Ruble is a weak indicator as the central bank has tools to control the exchange rate. Soviet ruble also had a strong and, for a long time, quite stable exchange rate with the US dollar. However, in Soviet Union you could not legally own foreign currency (nor you could buy Western goods and services). The exchange rate by no means indicated the economic situation in the USSR.