Good. Russia should be a wasteland in all possible meanings
Russia killed its tech industry
221–230 of 285 posts
Re: Russia killed its tech industry
#222Earlier quoted context omitted.
Actually, Ukraine was forcing an ethnic, language and religious cleansing on its people in the two regions that petitioned for sovereignty. Read about this several years ago before all this stuff blew up and propaganda made stuff murky. Their current leader was put in place by a coup. The old regime was corrupt but that doesn't mean the new one is better. Ukrain was already in a civil war.
By that standard, the UK, Spain and France are also in civil wars. IMHO, once military forces reach rough parity, civil wars should never be a justification for external involvement, because it always ends badly. Internal problems need internal solutions. If Russia and NATO had both stayed out of Ukraine, it would have been better for all Ukrainians. But we zoomed past the Rubicon on that when Crimea was invaded with…
“By that standard, the UK, Spain and France are also in civil wars.”
Nice try. How do these compare at all to the Ukraine Donbas conflict? During the span of 2014-2022, the war in Ukraine (pre Russian invasion) between Ukraine and Donbas region resulted in the following:
Ukraine troops 4,647 killed, 70 missing, 13,800–14,200 wounded
Donbas troops 6,517 killed, 15,800–16,200 wounded
3,404 Ukrainian civilians killed 14,200–14,400 Donbas killed 51,000–54,000 wounded overall
1.6 million Ukrainians internally displaced; over 1 million fled abroad
Re: Russia killed its tech industry
#223Earlier quoted context omitted.
Multiple actors can be horrible at the same time. The US is pretty horrible when it invades other countries, so is Russia. As far as I know, Ukraine never had a military big enough to actually do any invasion of other countries, but if Ukraine was the size of the US with the military of the US, I wouldn't bet on them not being horrible when invading other countries.
It doesn't even compare. Countries unlucky enough to be invaded by Russia wished we were "conquered" by USA instead.
Uh, millions of dead Iraqis and Afghans are going to see your wish and say "sure, why not?"
Re: Russia killed its tech industry
#224Earlier quoted context omitted.
>However it's a good argument for distinguishing between simplifications introduced by feelings It's not based on my feelings but on the personal experience and some research I did. All the smartest people I personally know and worked with have left the country. I also looked up the top 10 AI researchers at Yandex, and out of the ten I looked at only one was is still in Russia, that's a 90% loss for the top talent in…
> It's not based on my feelings > All the smartest people I personally know > I also looked up the top 10 AI researchers at Yandex > in the hottest industry at the (arguably) most innovative company in the country. All of that is actually based on your feelings that (1) the people you know are smart enough to be qualified and counted among the brightest, (2) the AI software research and the researchers you personally…
Alright, if we're talking fundamental research, what about the number of the Fields medal recipients? I feel safe taking that bet, in the last 30 years for one Perelman there's 6 russian-born mathematicians that received it who are in the US or Europe.
I can disagree and question everything all day too, but you gotta nut up or shut up, pick an objective metric and I'll take a bet on it. Gdp, citations, number of patents, number of users of the product, number of Nobel prizes, anything measurable that would work for you? Literally anything measurable not based on your feelings.
Re: Russia killed its tech industry
#225I'm one of those Russian engineers that fled, and I'm very grateful to my multinational employer for helping me with the relocation. I wanted to leave Putin's dominion since my freshman year, but life kept getting in the way until the last moment.
Do you have any insight to how other educated Russians feel?
Re: Russia killed its tech industry
#226Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most of the brightest ones have left the country, so I do wonder if it might result in being a net positive for the world, moving a million brightest people from a decaying autocracy into the functional countries with good management, potential investors and a culture of innovation. Russian culture in Russia might be done for though, at least for a while.
>> Most of the brightest ones have left the country I feel like that needs to be qualified? Maybe ages 20-40 and of a certain social-economic class can leave fairly easily, but it’s gotta be much harder to leave if you’re too young, too old, too poor, have too few connections, or have aged parents, young children, etc.
For those that cannot afford going to the West, others have migrated to Turkey, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Armenia, etc..
Re: Russia killed its tech industry
#227Earlier quoted context omitted.
where the state governments aren't behaving any better than Putin This is an insane thing to say. He is devastating an entire country. There are 354,000 people dead already. What is your evidence? https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/ukraine-war-already-wit...
> There are 354,000 people dead already. Your link says that as many as 354,000 Russian _and_ Ukrainian soldiers have been killed _or_ injured in the Ukraine war, but you present it as a number of people killed in a single country. Why doing that?
Your quote says nothing about a single country
Re: Russia killed its tech industry
#228I'm one of those Russian engineers that fled, and I'm very grateful to my multinational employer for helping me with the relocation. I wanted to leave Putin's dominion since my freshman year, but life kept getting in the way until the last moment.
Do you have any insight to how other educated Russians feel?
I don't like to speak for others, but the educated Russians I'm in touch with are universally against this invasion.
Re: Russia killed its tech industry
#229I'm one of those Russian engineers that fled, and I'm very grateful to my multinational employer for helping me with the relocation. I wanted to leave Putin's dominion since my freshman year, but life kept getting in the way until the last moment.
Can you share what freedoms are not available to young professionals like you in Russia that are available in other countries?
Re: Russia killed its tech industry
#230There never was any real high tech industry. Everything good was done in gulags which my Russian schoolbook called "Nauki Gorods" ie science towns. Everything else was substandard garbage. However under harsh military rule labor camps work well to produce high tech. German V2-rockets and Curta calculators prove that. But there is time limit for that. You will run out of people.
TIL that Yandex campus where I used to work for so many years was a gulag. Okay.
To our American friends, if the campus doesn’t have McDonald’s and a rainbow flag, it’s a Gulag. That’s the level.