Belarus’s Soviet Economy • Hacker News Board

Re: Belarus’s Soviet Economy

#111

Post by CapricornNoble » Sun, Dec 01, 2019, 10:19 AM UTC

timwaagh wrote: post #101

All this talk of how everyone is cared for feels so cozy. I can understand the desire for tight knit community. Everybody working for the greater good of all. Everybody equal, why should anyone dream of more? No one left behind under leadership of the great Sacha. Sure there is KGB and repression but nothing unnecessary..... But the reality is that most humans are fundamentally competitive and fundamentally awful cre…

>>>Dear communism, it's not you, it's us.

Any system that doesn't take into account the realities of the human condition is about as practically-applicable as the Borg Collective. No amount of self-loathing will change that, or solve our collective problems.

Re: Belarus’s Soviet Economy

#112

Post by Dolores12 » Sun, Dec 01, 2019, 10:29 AM UTC

ernst_klim wrote: post #88

Dolores12 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Non-existent gambling doesn't make it illegal.

> Non-existent gambling doesn't make it illegal. It's illegal outside special zones which are virtually non-existent. Yes, it's virtually illegal.

Special zones are inside of Russia. So in fact gambling in Russia is not illegal, it is limited to special zones.

Re: Belarus’s Soviet Economy

#113

Post by dep_b » Sun, Dec 01, 2019, 10:29 AM UTC

arcturus17 wrote: post #109

dep_b wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not really picking sides here, but the roaming gangs are really visible compared to regular Eastern European immigrants. There's just this watershed moment when the Romanian borders opened where all of a sudden you started noticing them, while the influx of for example Poles was much more gradual and consisted of mostly people that came with the idea at least to work.

I know that Romanian criminals, from petty to violent and organized, have been a thing in Spain since I was a kid, well before their entry into the EU. That being said, what I saw in fact after their adhesion was that the quality of immigration seemed to improve (at least from what _I_ could see). Good number of honest and sometimes very well-educated people in services. I guess the question to ask respective to thei…

Roma or Romanian? It's also hard to tell what time you had your childhood.

Re: Belarus’s Soviet Economy

#114

Post by pound » Sun, Dec 01, 2019, 10:47 AM UTC

konart wrote: post #94

pound wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was only temporary part of russian empire (for about a century), with every attempt to fight it drowned in blood. During that time russia tried to exterminate any self-identity, forbidding to even have a name and calling it "north-western area". To get an idea of what was happening in that region historically you may read about Great Duchy of Lithuania Another point to consider: much of the Rus (Ruth) that russia…

>Another point to consider: much of the Rus (Ruth) that russia claims to be descendent of is modern Ukraine and Belarus lands, and historically they were figthing most of the time with moscow armies. Russia claims to be descendent of many things, from vikings to Byzantine Empire, from slavic tribes to mongols. Russia is a mix of many things, where Kiev and Kievan Rus is just one of the main starting points. Not to me…

russia is indeed big so I will not make broad generalizations, but I've never met any russians who would claim vikings, byzantines or mongols as someone russia has originated from (for many mongols is a conflictive/sensitive topic though, but not in an acceptive way). I'm looking at dominating there slavic 'Rus' history view.

Re: Belarus’s Soviet Economy

#115

Post by playing_colours » Sun, Dec 01, 2019, 10:51 AM UTC

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 hope and enthusiasm in the beginning of 1990s.

My opinion, Russian influence killed it eventually - they helped Lukashenko to stay in power in 1996 and made the country dependent on Russian markets, oil, gas, money - and Lukashenko spent all the money on economically ineffective government projects, lost investors, kept inefficient model. The rigid, indecisive, and toothless politics of the EU toward Lukashenko did not help either. In a short perspective, it may look morally wrong to work and cooperate with “Last Dictatorship”, but politics is a long game of planting seeds and growing influence, small wins, and changing minds - such strategic thinking is unfortunately beyond and above our bureaucrats.

Now the country is basically lost and hopeless. Do not be under the spell of its software industry and some improvements in Minsk - it is a tiny part of the picture.

Young and active leave the country. More than half of people who studies CS, physics, or applied maths from my generation (30-35+) live in Europe, US, Australia. State medicine is poor - medical professionals just run away from the country. Construction workers, trade professionals leave for Russia, Poland, Baltic States. I learnt from my connections there that many bright young people learn German, English, Polish, or Czech to go study after school abroad and then stay there, no plan B to stay in Belarus. They see no future in country.

Recently, it got even worse: first, Belarusian military pushed for stricter draft rules, and, second, Russia has successfully pushed for further integration. It leads to even more migration of the young and educated, plus people living abroad drop their citizenship for a new one - few are excited to find themselves one day a subject of Russian Federation.

Re: Belarus’s Soviet Economy

#116

Post by based2 » Sun, Dec 01, 2019, 10:52 AM UTC

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maps.me https://maps.me/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_of_Tanks

Re: Belarus’s Soviet Economy

#117

Post by dzhiurgis » Sun, Dec 01, 2019, 10:53 AM UTC

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 are great tho.

Re: Belarus’s Soviet Economy

#118

Post by pound » Sun, Dec 01, 2019, 11:07 AM UTC

m0zg wrote: post #60

pound wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belarus and 'Establishment history' there. 1795-1918 - 123 years. "Soviets" was a union of 15 republics, not one big russia. To your original comment: russia absolutely didn't behave nice on that land at any time in history regardless of who they were at war with.

1772 to 1917 my man. Russia could not afford to "behave nice" back then. Every 100 years or so some European idiot monarch would hatch a harebrained scheme to attack it, only to get his ass handed to him a few years later. https://www.google.com/search?q=belarus+part+of+russian+empi...

your original comment was that it wasn't russia that was bad for Belarus historically but those europeans..

and I'm not your man

Re: Belarus’s Soviet Economy

#119

Post by TazeTSchnitzel » Sun, Dec 01, 2019, 11:07 AM UTC

netcan wrote: post #79

We're now a full generation since the west "won the cold war" and I think it's just now that our "wartime" mentalities we're ready to think past simple binary communism-x-capitalism binaries. For example, "privatisation." In Russia & parts of the west, privatisation was a major 90s policy. But like everything else, details can outweigh labels. One privatisation is not like another. There's a massive difference betwee…

Privatisations are disasters because they are designed to be. Its proponents want to see the state fail.

Re: Belarus’s Soviet Economy

#120

Post by markvdb » Sun, Dec 01, 2019, 11:11 AM UTC

atlasunshrugged wrote: post #65

vkou wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a former Soviet state, being a part of former Yugoslavia, which was a member of the non-aligned movement. It was, however, a stong-man communist dictatorship.

I'd also be curious the effect of EU funding - I know Estonia received hundreds of millions if not billions over the years on development and I'd guess it's much the same for Latvia/Lithuania as well

Latvia received EU subsidies of 2.76% of GDP in 2017 [0]. It contributed 0.69% of GDP, for a net EU contribution to Latvia of 2.07% of GDP.

According to government posters pasted all around Latvia, EU support constituted about 12.8% of government budget(!), or 9.6% net after accounting for Latvia's contributions to the EU budget.

[0] https://europa.eu/european-union/about-eu/countries/member-c...