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Belarus’s Soviet Economy

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Re: Belarus’s Soviet Economy

#161

Post by gdy »

andrewshadura wrote: post #90
stevesimmons wrote: post #26

I had my second trip to Minsk last week to work with a local IT company. I was very impressed with the technical skills of the people there. Belarus and Minsk are advanced in many ways (metro with trains every 2 minutes), electric busses (powered by capacitors, not batteries), mobile phone (MTS shop at the airport sells a $9 SIM with unlimited data for a month), Yandex taxis beats Uber, etc, etc. The main downside I…

Yandex taxis are only popular because they bought and extinguished Uber in Belarus. They're much worse in terms of quality of the service, people only use them because there isn't much choice.

Actually, they merged.

"On 13 July 2017, Yandex.Taxi and Uber signed an agreement to merge their businesses and operations in Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Kazakhstan, and Russia. ... Yandex invested $100 million and Uber invested $225 million in the new structure."

Re: Belarus’s Soviet Economy

#162

Post by scottlocklin »

tasubotadas wrote: post #156
scottlocklin wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ukraine liberalized its economy and it pretty much destroyed the place. The whole GDP growth fetish is a lot of horse shit; some measure needs to be taken that the increase in GDP doesn't destroy the lives of some large swathe of the population like it did in Russia. Belarus may be led by a repressive dictator, but the fact that it didn't experience the absurd declines in life expectancy and quality of life in the 90…

Did you miss the bit about corruption in Ukraine?

Gee, I wonder why Belarus doesn't have this problem?

Re: Belarus’s Soviet Economy

#163

Post by scottlocklin »

tasubotadas wrote: post #156
scottlocklin wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ukraine liberalized its economy and it pretty much destroyed the place. The whole GDP growth fetish is a lot of horse shit; some measure needs to be taken that the increase in GDP doesn't destroy the lives of some large swathe of the population like it did in Russia. Belarus may be led by a repressive dictator, but the fact that it didn't experience the absurd declines in life expectancy and quality of life in the 90…

Did you miss the bit about corruption in Ukraine?

Gee, I wonder why Belarus doesn't have this problem?

I do business in Ukraine; I'm well aware of conditions on the ground there.

Re: Belarus’s Soviet Economy

#164

Post by sam_lowry_ »

dblotsky wrote: post #25
classicsnoot wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Always interesting how money data is usually offered up with no context; almost always a ploy to guide thought. In one of my case law classes, the professor had us read a Friend of the Court letter from the CEO of a company that specialized in the wiring for both consumer and industrial vehicles. The case centered on factories being offshored. The CEO was attempting to demonstrate how they had bent over backwards to…

The “PPP” in the graph is easy to miss, but is what makes the comparisons possible.

Except that Central African and continental Europe climates require vastly different expenses to stay alife. PPP is not much better than US dollars.

Re: Belarus’s Soviet Economy

#165

Post by SideburnsOfDoom »

zkid18 wrote: post #40
stevesimmons wrote: post #26

I had my second trip to Minsk last week to work with a local IT company. I was very impressed with the technical skills of the people there. Belarus and Minsk are advanced in many ways (metro with trains every 2 minutes), electric busses (powered by capacitors, not batteries), mobile phone (MTS shop at the airport sells a $9 SIM with unlimited data for a month), Yandex taxis beats Uber, etc, etc. The main downside I…

Minsk is a great city indeed. IT is pretty strong, many startups evolved recently (Wannaby, OneSoil, MSQRD (aq. by Facebook), Fabby (aq. by Google), PandaDoc) Sorry for the meals - Belarusians love their potatoes. There are some 300+ dishes recorded in Belarus - that it came to be considered the core of the national cuisine. P.S. Not quite related to the meals, but Belarus bans use of plastic plates in restaurants re…

> Belarusians love their potatoes

I am a bit fascinated as to how this came to be from Ireland to Russia, given that the potato is native to the Americas, and thus was unknown in Europe before around 1500 CE.

Re: Belarus’s Soviet Economy

#166

Post by stevesimmons »

dzhiurgis wrote: post #117
stevesimmons wrote: post #26

I had my second trip to Minsk last week to work with a local IT company. I was very impressed with the technical skills of the people there. Belarus and Minsk are advanced in many ways (metro with trains every 2 minutes), electric busses (powered by capacitors, not batteries), mobile phone (MTS shop at the airport sells a $9 SIM with unlimited data for a month), Yandex taxis beats Uber, etc, etc. The main downside I…

You make it sound glamorous but as Lithuanian I found Minsk to be rather sad. I mean painting over manhole covers, destroyed architecture, national library that looks like giant bacteriophage that has robots inside but you still have to let babushka sign off a book, the town that looks like it has population of 100k, not 2M. It felt like a dead city with boring food and basically nothing to do. I agree the engineers…

In Belarus, I felt the weight of history more than pretty much any other country I have visited.

To put things in perspective, Minsk is geographically midway between Berlin and Moscow. In World War 2, the whole country was basically the front line between Germany and Russian. Most houses and infrastructure were destroyed and and 2.3m people -- a quarter of the population -- lost their lives. The equivalent in the US today is 75 million people!

I find it amazing that the country has recovered so well.

Re: Belarus’s Soviet Economy

#167

Post by sam_lowry_ »

AdrianB1 wrote: post #134
hprotagonist wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

contrariwise, if there's no jobs (or you broke yourself in a job and can't work, or .. ) .. you might not have a choice. The poster i was originally replying to was complaining that $1 US a goes further in other places and "could be like $10"; my point is that that's still pretty poor!

Poverty is extremely relative. What you consider poor is someone else's rich. I was born in one of these countries with less than $5.5/day and not owning a car was not considered a negative, nobody had one in the entire village, but nobody considered themselves poor. Now we are considered wealthier than one of the countries in that chart (we are neighbors) and the government considers 45% of the population is poor. e…

Georgia has black markets that far exceed Belarusian black markets in volume. Lots of Georgian stats are skewed because they do not account for black market.

Re: Belarus’s Soviet Economy

#168

Post by sam_lowry_ »

dzhiurgis wrote: post #117
stevesimmons wrote: post #26

I had my second trip to Minsk last week to work with a local IT company. I was very impressed with the technical skills of the people there. Belarus and Minsk are advanced in many ways (metro with trains every 2 minutes), electric busses (powered by capacitors, not batteries), mobile phone (MTS shop at the airport sells a $9 SIM with unlimited data for a month), Yandex taxis beats Uber, etc, etc. The main downside I…

You make it sound glamorous but as Lithuanian I found Minsk to be rather sad. I mean painting over manhole covers, destroyed architecture, national library that looks like giant bacteriophage that has robots inside but you still have to let babushka sign off a book, the town that looks like it has population of 100k, not 2M. It felt like a dead city with boring food and basically nothing to do. I agree the engineers…

Aside from downtown Vilnius, Lithiania looks worse than Belarus. At least as far as appearences go.

Re: Belarus’s Soviet Economy

#169

Post by krilly »

l1g2d5 wrote: post #55
stevesimmons wrote: post #26

I had my second trip to Minsk last week to work with a local IT company. I was very impressed with the technical skills of the people there. Belarus and Minsk are advanced in many ways (metro with trains every 2 minutes), electric busses (powered by capacitors, not batteries), mobile phone (MTS shop at the airport sells a $9 SIM with unlimited data for a month), Yandex taxis beats Uber, etc, etc. The main downside I…

> The main downside I noticed was meals based on meat and potatoes, not many vegetables. Do you realize where belarus is? It gets cold in belarus. Meat and potatoes are food that can be grown locally. Also, it is environmentally devastating to transport all the vegetables all over the world like we currently do. Look at how much globalism has damaged the environment, not to mention the problems with climate change. M…

I am positive that vegetables from across the world have much less environmental impact that even locally sourced beef.

Re: Belarus’s Soviet Economy

#170

Post by sbmthakur »

playing_colours wrote: post #115

In the beginning of 1990s, Belarus had more potential than Poland and Baltic states to become a strong prosperous democracy - it was a centre of electronics in USSR, had very good universities with mathematics, physics, electronics, engineering. It had developed textile industry, built heavy carriers, tractors. Sure, they needed innovations, market thinking, and transparent controlled privatization, but there were ho…

> made the country dependent on Russian markets, oil, gas, money

What were their options when it came to oil and gas?

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