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Belarus’s Soviet Economy

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Re: Belarus’s Soviet Economy

#171

Post by sam_lowry_ »

throwaway8941 wrote: post #59
l1g2d5 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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'm not sure why this comment is being downvoted. I live in Kazakhstan, and while it's not exactly the same as Belarus, we're living in very similar conditions. In winter time, fruits and vegetables are very expensive here. Most of the cheaper ones (the only kind available to most people, myself included) look and taste like they're made of plastic, and are packed with nitrites. I tend to avoid them altogether, you d…

The majority of apples sold in Belarus are produced in the Netherlands. Storage technology matters.

Re: Belarus’s Soviet Economy

#172

Post by sam_lowry_ »

tasubotadas wrote: post #159
kome wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you comment about those issues, it would be nice you knew something about it. Ukraine is very liberalized economy, perhaps more than in the west - and yes, the results are less than stellar, for a complex number of reasons. About Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia the economic results seem OK, but the social one is close to tragedy: in 3 Baltic countries emigration has been terrible, and the lost a large part of their pop…

Why is emigration bad? It is good. People who left started earning more, and people who stayed, started earning more. The only ones who see that in a bad light are pro-nationalist lackeys that put the state above an individual person. It's a win-win.

Industry and even agriculture decline in Baltics are a major reason for emigration. The old EU countries got cheap labour and killed competition. Do you really think the Ignalina power plant was closed for environmental reasons? And the lack of funds for the trans-baltic railway, was it due to these countries lack of cooperation?

Re: Belarus’s Soviet Economy

#173

Post by sam_lowry_ »

rayiner wrote: post #144
jayalpha wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Georgia suffered a massive civil war from the time the Soviet Union fell until 1995, that caused its GDP per capita to fall by 2/3 to 1995. The economic reforms happened in the 21st century and growth since then has been very quick. From Wikipedia: > Since the early 21st century visible positive developments have been observed in the economy of Georgia. In 2007, Georgia's real GDP growth rate reached 12 percent, maki…

What civil war?

Re: Belarus’s Soviet Economy

#174

Post by AndriyKunitsyn »

tasubotadas wrote: post #159
kome wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you comment about those issues, it would be nice you knew something about it. Ukraine is very liberalized economy, perhaps more than in the west - and yes, the results are less than stellar, for a complex number of reasons. About Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia the economic results seem OK, but the social one is close to tragedy: in 3 Baltic countries emigration has been terrible, and the lost a large part of their pop…

Why is emigration bad? It is good. People who left started earning more, and people who stayed, started earning more. The only ones who see that in a bad light are pro-nationalist lackeys that put the state above an individual person. It's a win-win.

>people who stayed, started earning more

Citation needed on this one.

Re: Belarus’s Soviet Economy

#175

Post by juki »

SideburnsOfDoom wrote: post #165
zkid18 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

As far as I know, Europeans used to eat turnips and rutabaga, but in 1700s the potato mostly replaced them due to being cheaper and easier to grow.

Re: Belarus’s Soviet Economy

#176

Post by gdy »

petre wrote: post #76
sparkling wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would argue that in the case of Ukraine and Moldova, the main reason for their bad economy today is the large scale corruption that took place during post-soviet privatization in the 90s. This has lead to the extreme Oligarch power structure that we see today.

And relying on trade with Russia which has shunned them after their pro EU escapades .

Actually, the Ukraine shunned Russia by taking EU deal incompatible with free trade agreement with Russia.

Re: Belarus’s Soviet Economy

#177

Post by gdy »

qualmer wrote: post #131
gdy wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"made the country dependent on Russian markets, oil, gas, money" How exactly did they do it? It's not like with different president Belarus wouldn't need all that. You need to take responsibility for your country instead of blaming Russia and emigrating.

I can see Russian trolls have infiltrated HN as well. They are abundant in my country's (Lithuania) news sites, but didn't really expect to find any here. Oh well, at least visitors of this site can see right through the utter nonsense you guys put out.

Says an account created 4 months ago to an account created in 2012.

Re: Belarus’s Soviet Economy

#178

Post by grecy »

pilsetnieks wrote: post #62
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…

I don't want to sound like a Negative Nelly but you all in this thread are swooning over a dictatorship with pretty awful human rights abuses.

You make the very common mistake of assuming a country with a dictator and human rights abuses is automatically a horrible place to be.

Earlier this year I was in Sudan for a few weeks. Hands down the friendliest and kindest people I've ever met on earth. Much, much friendlier than Australians or Canadians.

Open your mind, accept there are other ways to do things, and we can learn to improve our way of doing things. It's not to say these countries are perfect, just better in different ways.

PS I'm Australian/Canadian.

Re: Belarus’s Soviet Economy

#179

Post by tasubotadas »

scottlocklin wrote: post #163
tasubotadas wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Belarus is a craphole because they have a dictator who only cares about farming. But/thus he isn't afraid of dealing with criminals.

Ukraine is a craphole because of corruption not because it liberalized.

Re: Belarus’s Soviet Economy

#180

Post by jnurmine »

nabla9 wrote: post #3

Technically Belarus and Russia form the Union State of Russia and Belarus. Some speculate that Putin might want to turn this paper union into reality before his term ends and become president of the union. He would avoid neatly term limits for Russian president. https://www.dw.com/en/belarus-rejects-putins-call-for-unific...

That article was 8 years ago.

Fast forward to 2019, recently the Belarus' ambassador to Russia said that the presidents of Belarus and Russia approved plans to establish a common government and parliament. [1]

Their plans seem to be progressing. December 8th should be some kind of proclamation about the state of the union.

[1] https://belsat.eu/en/news/lukashenka-putin-agree-on-single-p...

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