Contrary to what some people believe US gets involved in conflicts beneficial to US. US and Russia have been in a proxy war for years now. Russia was putting bounties on US military.
It is in US interest that Ukraine does as much damage as possible to Russia. Now, the world is seeing how weak the Russian military is, a lot of poorly maintained equipment. Sanctions are going to cripple Russian economy. The western world is completely turning against Russia. London is passing laws to stop Russian oligarchs from owning property. Switzerland stopped being neutral and is freezing accounts. This is unprecedented.
We might be witnessing the downfall of Russian empire.
Please stop spreading literally fake news, it hurts the cause for us to stop real Russian misinformation. Things like this is used to say that ALL western media is lies
Russia and US have been fighting via proxy wars for decades. So in this case it's less about helping Ukraine, and more about thumbing our nose at Russia.
NATO, not the US, and because they’re asking us to.
Also it’s a chilling return to a Soviet era Europe in a way that hasn’t happened since WW2. The whole world is watching to see what a country can get away with, nearly 80 years after Hitler’s Germany.
Ukraine wants to join NATO. And, if they join NATO, rules can be bent, and they can do anything which Russia doesn't like. What would happen to Crimea if Ukraine had joined NATO in 2020 or 2021?
I watched a brilliant interview with Vladimir Klitschko with him basically saying that Ukraine is part of Europe. Why are you standing by and not defending this European country? It was the way he said it, so brilliant and convincing.
Ukraine has won the information war in a total wipe out.
So my friend from Ukraine is lying and reciting Russian state propaganda? If there was ever a time for him to be anti-Russia, presumably, it would be whilst his country is being invaded.
I guess you're right. I'm clearly ignorant for trying to wade through the immense amount of propaganda from both sides[1] here by getting some insight from someone born and raised in Kyiv.
Also, I think Russian state-backed media is banned in the US now (where I am), but I could be wrong.
> So my friend from Ukraine is lying and reciting Russian state propaganda?
I'm Ukrainian from South. Yes, he's lying. They might speak Russian or be sceptical about decisions that our government makes, but they're in no way identify themselves as Russians.
Accepting the most radical point of view of the state massacring civilians in another country is not "trying to wade through the immense amount of propaganda from both sides". Even if your friend "born and raised in Kyiv" is real, lived in Ukraine in recent decades and its their actual point of view that Ukrainians == Russians, that's still just an anecdote. And well, because of people with the views like that, horrible atrocities are justified.
Russian state-backed media is not "banned" in the US (who, exactly, would do this universal "ban"?), and the fact that you think such a thing is even possible makes me suspicious of your claim that you're from or are currently in the US to begin with...
I hope that these people are just paid Russian trolls cause if that many people in the West are following Russian propaganda so blindly, the future is bleak. Russia has not produced anything of value to humanity in decades, just suffering and decay of common sense.
I was trying to refute the claims of the GP. Please don't insinuate I'm on Russia's side because I'm trying to understand both sides of this horrific situation. It's possible to be pro-Ukraine but also see why Putin invaded.*
We need nuance rather than black-or-white positions.
My cynical bet - the victims (aka Ukrainians) look (in popular press photos & video) similar enough to "white" Americans to really push the emotional buttons.
I have Ukrainian friends from college and co-workers (at least in part because my wife is Russian). We have a Ukrainian cleaning lady. It is easy to see people you know caught in this war.
> Because this is the first war in recent memory the US didn't start.
It's not even the first war between Russia and one of its neighbors in the last twenty years that the US didn't start, much less the first war of any kind in recent memory.
The election is coming soon, Audience is bored of Xinjiang "genocide" [1], inflation is high due to printer brrrr.. And, the president is losing reputation due to the Afghanistan war, inflation. So, what can they do? Poke the bear and a madman from Russia starts to invade. Now, they can so pretend they are aligned with humanity by doing something.
However, the Yemen war is still going on and only a few people know that. EU is still buying Russian oil. The US is begging despots from Saudi, Venezuela, or Iran ..... What a mess.
And yet you have to wonder, on an alternative timeline, what if Ukraine says it won't join NATO and stays under Russia's sphere of influence? It would suck for national pride but maybe under that alternative timeline they won't get invaded now and possibly wouldn't even lose Crimea earlier?
Practically speaking, perhaps you should avoid poking the aggressive neighbor next door, especially when you can't have definitive assurance from the police station three blocks over?
There was little support for joining NATO before Crimea was annexed. Ukraine wanted to join NATO precisely because it realized that it will be devoured piece by piece by its imperialist neighbor unless it does.
It's not just Putin; Russian leaders through most of the 20thC have feared encroachment on their western borders, and have launched invasions and installed puppet regimes to create a buffer. The fact that Ukraine has clearly expressed its desire to join NATO, and NATO's refusal to reject that possibility, means that Russia perceives a threat that their greatest enemy will suddenly appear right on their border.
Georgia also wanted to join NATO; so they got invaded.
The West has played this hand very badly. Instead of declaring that under no circumstances would they send troops to Ukraine, they should have kept silent, or possibly sent a division of ground troops, to be dispersed around the country. They should also have leaned hard on Ukraine to make Donetsk and Luhansk officially autonomous regions. The Donbas would then become Russia's buffer zone, making them feel a bit less paranoid about NATO encroachment.
FWIW, I think NATO should have dismantled itself following the collapse of the Soviet Union. The modern NATO is a global organisation, not restricted to the North Atlantic. It's no longer a mutual defence pact for countries at risk of Russian attack; its main purpose now is simply to intimidate Russia.
You can create a new email address if your previous one is blacklisted.
The idea is that no one needs permission in both cases, and the message can be sent only to the intended recipient without a middleman reading its contents. BTC is the same with money.
The same FUD was ignited against encryption back in the day, and "save the children" hysteria still is ablaze if you live in the UK.
People already own their content if they buy it physically. And everyone else prefers the convenience of streaming.
Also there is already multiple platforms with little to no regulation/'censorship' (namely onion service, telegram, kiwi farms, the chan boards, gab, parler...) and we all know how that worked out
Is money really the issue? In many places, everybody gets a free education, and even university is free. So everybody could simply become a doctor or a lawyer and expect an income above the poverty line - at least if money was the only issue.
Having money buys your kid diagnosis and treatment for their learning disability, and later on private tutoring at university. Even if they're reasonably bright the spoilt brat with middling intelligence will have significant advantages.
That would assume the free education people get is equivalent across income levels, which is a hard thing to do in the best of circumstances.
Even independent of educational quality, there is a world of difference between a school's ability to teach a well fed, comfortable child and a child whose only meal of the day is the free school lunch. Similarly, a rich child can afford to do unpaid internships on summer break, whereas a poor one may be working minimum wage jobs to generate an income instead.
This is before you get into the weeds of things like teachers preferring to be placed into good schools because it makes their jobs easier, that well-connected schools can raise money outside of the public system, etc. People say they want educational equality, but this is almost never at the perceived cost to their own children.
In my country the differences beteren universities (and schools) are not very big. It seems very unlikely that more money could buy a significantly better education. Nobody is starving, either.
The idea that education (in terms of knowledge and skill acquisition) is zero sum is wrong. Educational equality starts with parents giving a shit about their kids' education. Why do you think Asians overachieve on every benchmark we have? Could it possibly be because there are cultural factors that motivate parents to care very strongly about their childrens' education?
America spends the most in the world per capita on our schools and has terrible results. It's clear that tossing more money into a black hole won't fix the problem.
Anecdotally, in high school I never heard any white/Latino/black friend joke about getting yelled at if they got a B.
> unpaid internships
You might want to take a look at levels.fyi. Internship salaries are higher than a lot of full time jobs nowadays.
...in technology. Unless we're seriously going to force everyone into tech jobs, we need an economic model that works for broadly most industries.
As an example, nearly all starting first-year internships in law are unpaid. People who don't take those will be competing with those that did do them the next year.
Tech jobs are about capturing externally-created value with network structures... if everyone had a tech job then where's the external value come from?
We don't need more art historians and event coordinators and other roles for which internships are unpaid. For every degree that actually results in positive return on investment (so, not most liberal arts degrees), internships are paid. Economics, biology, chemistry, business, statistics, law, these are all degrees that mostly have paid internships.
About the only place where you can reasonably say "we need more of these people" but is unpaid is legislative offices. And I agree, government should hire fewer but more highly paid and higher performing staff.
Incorrect. If you take a look at the 2018 PISA rankings [1] the top is dominated by Asian and East European countries. Is it a coincidence that ex-Soviet countries which had a strong state focus on STEM are top ranked? Or that the top 10 contains basically every 1st world Asian country (Japan, South Korea, and the Asian city states)?
Education hasn't been free for a long time. You have to spend money on private tutors, books and laptops if you want your children to compete in the rat race.
I am older than 40 and according to qcovid my risk of hospitalization is about 0,1%, so I doubt your 0,4% number. I am slightly overweight, which increases my risk by about 20%. But I doubt all the 18-29 year olds in your group are so obese that they get to 0,4%.
qcovid.org gives an evaluation of the risk of catching and then being hospitalized from Covid, whereas your sources give the risk of being hospitalized when tested positive for Covid. Depending on the testing regime, the latter number may also be biased towards people who are already sick, as they may be more likely to be tested.
There is no evidence that the "vaccine only works for a couple of months".
The vaccine has continued to show efficacy against hospitalization and death (severe covid) even as there has been some waning in infection immunity over a period of multiple months (more than 2 or a couple months though). See e.g. https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7049a2.htm "During February 1–September 30, 2021, mRNA vaccine effectiveness in preventing COVID-19–associated hospitalizations among U.S. veterans ≥120 days after receipt of the second dose was 86% for Moderna and 75% for Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines"
Future covid strains may be more or less deadly - data coming in on Omicron indicates it's more deadly than original COVID but perhaps slightly less deadly than delta. Still quite dangerous to an unvaccinated or immune naive individual.
WTF - then why are "booster shots" needed? In my country they are moving towards recommending them after three months already.
I don't have a English language resource ready, but this article in a renowned German science magazine shows protection against severe illness is drastically reduced after six months for the current vaccines: https://www.spektrum.de/news/wie-lange-schuetzt-der-impfstof...
For example from the chart, after 6 months the protection from Biontec is only 30% of the protection in the beginning.
“ The effectiveness against severe illness seems to remain high through 9 months, although not for men, older frail individuals, and individuals with comorbidities. This strengthens the evidence-based rationale for administration of a third booster dose.”
Possible difference between the Swedish study and the CDC - time period comparison of 4 months (120 days) vs 9 months (270 days) - differences in Swedish population or statistical errors.
Just eyeballing CDC data on who is dying of coronavirus it’s very hard to see how any statistical analysis could show the vaccine not “working” - the smaller unvaccinated population is making up a majority of hospitalizations and deaths in the USA, and most vaccinated persons haven’t received a booster in USA.
Some people want real proof, not having to rely on believing experts.
I guess it is a chasm across society. Some people want to be able to believe.