The story depresses me a little. One of the greatest engineering marvels in history, destroyed by stereotypical Russian negligence, incompetence and corruption and more then 100 lives lost in the process. The Soviets for all their many sins were at least capable of building incredible things, the protections on the nuclear reactor held up, for example, preventing a massive environmental catastrophe.
It's stereotypical now but I remember at the time this was taken as a kind of confirmation that russia had been coasting on and also neglecting a lot of the soviet-era infrastructure. It's hard to reflect back now but in 2000 the soviet collapse was recent memory and the role and effectiveness of its successor was an open question, internationally.
I do remember that in the 90s the "russia understanders" were split into two camps: now that russia is free of the shackles of communism it will step into its destiny as supreme global superpower vs the soviet system was actually quite effective at large scale mundane infrastructure & logistics in a way the russian federation isn't.
By 2000 the weight of evidence was already fairly strong for the second view but this disaster, and especially their response to it, really settled the matter. This is how I remember feeling about it all anyway.
I also remember how frustrating and depressing it was that they wouldn’t allow foreign teams to help with the rescue effort. At the time it was clear that the Russians lacked the capabilities to do it. I also think in hindsight it was a sign how little interest Russia had in being part of the West.
You should look into the history of the 90s again.
Russia opened up to the West in a big way in the first half of the decade, and worked with NATO and the UN in the first half of the Bosnian war.
The result was... A complete collapse of the domestic economy, and a second half of the Bosnian war where NATO no longer felt like it needed to get Russia on board to do whatever it wanted in the region.
The degradation of this relationship was not the fault of a single party. Clinton and Yeltsin (an utter turd of a man) worked hard to have a productive relationship, but then Bush gets elected and takes a more... Unipolar view of the world. As does Putin.
I looked into the history of the 90s again. The collapse of the domestic Russian economy was 100% their own fault. If they had simply accepted their place as a second-rate power under US hegemony (something like France) then everything would have been fine and they would be far more secure and prosperous today.
> The collapse of the domestic Russian economy was 100% their own fault.
It was.
But that doesn't matter - the result was incredible misery and ruin for the country, and it drove reactionary, anti-western sentiment, kind of like how reactionary sentiment over $3 eggs drove Americans to flip the table and rally behind Trump II.
Early in the Bush administration, at least, there was continuing approchement. Bush was mocked for saying something like "I looked into his [Putin's] eyes, and I trust him". I don't remember enough about the early GWOT days to pinpoint the particulars of the falling out, but I do remember thinking that there were areas of cooperation not being pursued. Like, could Russia have been brought along into Afghanistan? I thought that at the time, though I'm not sure how it looks 25 years later. Like you, however, I doubt that Russia's eventual (and justified, mind you!) current stance and status was written into stone.
> Like, could Russia have been brought along into Afghanistan?
It pretty much was. Afghanistan was a UN-sanctioned war, and Russia did not object to it from its position on the UNSC - and provided support for the invasion.
Iraq (Three permanent UNSC members voted against it), on the other hand, was a clear indication that the rules-based world is a sham and a scam... And that the only rule that matters is 'Fuck you, make me.'
You know how Trump is criticized for pursuing idiotic short-term gains that torpedo long-term trust and legitimacy? That was also the real, lasting legacy of Bush II's first term. Anyone playing by the rules is a fool.
Russia had roughly half the population as compared to the Soviet Union. There’s just no way they could have ever competed on the global stage the same way.
Sweden's population is tiny, but by working with "the west" they gain from everything everyone else does. Russia has isolated themselves (both directly and in doing things that made others want to isolate them), and thus cannot benefit from what others do near as much.
I don't understand your comment. Over the long term, communism (or any sort of economic central planning) will obviously cripple any country's economy. The absolute number of people is meaningless if they're only pretending to work.
Look at the war between Russia and Ukraine today. Every day Russia sends hundreds of men to their deaths in human wave attacks with nothing to show for it. They have a large population but but they're not doing anything useful. If they had double the population it wouldn't change anything.
> Over the long term, communism (or any sort of economic central planning) will obviously cripple any country's economy. The absolute number of people is meaningless if they're only pretending to work.
I’m as anti-communist as can be, but saying population is meaningless when it comes to national output is ridiculous. There are many capitalist nations around the world, but the United States is the most populous, and therefore has the most output… because population plays a major role in national output. The socioeconomics of a nation certainly play a role too, but not enough to overcome population being cut in half.
Ceteris peribus, a capitalist country will beat a communist one long term in output and influence. But that’s not the only thing that can influence output and influence.
> Look at the war between Russia and Ukraine today. Every day Russia sends hundreds of men to their deaths in human wave attacks with nothing to show for it. They have a large population but but they're not doing anything useful.
The entire nation is not devoted to Ukraine, they still need to maintain defenses against NATO and China simultaneously. The Ukraine war is just what they can spare on top of those other goals.
Nah, they're not maintaining defenses against NATO and China. Most of those have already been stripped bare due to a mix of corruption and sending everything that still works to Ukraine. Except the nuclear weapons, and most of those probably no longer work reliably anyway due to lack of competent maintenance.
We have some of the highest electricity prices in the world. The politicians obsess over net-zero at the expense of dealing with the issues affecting most people.
Part of the reason why we have high electricity costs (here in the UK) is that we peg the price to gas generation, on the face of it people complain about that but the higher price allows investments in renewables to make sense on an RoI PoV, effectively it's a subsidy to build out renewables at a higher rate than would otherwise be the case.
Electricity prices are high in the UK but there is a net benefit to it at least some ways, as always the devil is in the details, all the details.
Texas has some different choices in their electricity markets but they use the same pay-as-clear marginal pricing system that the above poster thinks is a secret UK plan to subsidise renewables. In reality it is the standard way to set the market price of commodities.
Texas famously had massive spikes in electricty prices and a near failure of the grid because of their electricity market structure, so it's not all sunshine and rainbows.
That would be wonderful. But that hasn't happened yet, so i'll point out that whatever our current energy strategy is, it's failing miserably and wrecking the economy. For some reason other countries seem to have it figured out much better, so forgive me for not falling over in excitement over the fact that some war in the middle east is costing us a billion less then it might have.
Other countries are not likely spending much less on the transition, it's just that they're paying for it more in tax and less in the electricity bill. The UK's strategy here basically means there's now a huge amount of investment in renewables even without government subsidies. And the nature of renewables and relying on gas in the meantime (which has pretty much always been setting the price of electricity, it's just gotten even more expensive recently) means that there's a relatively more painful period of investment before you get to the cost benefits of a nearly entirely renewable grid.
Between Brexit and the aging population, I don't think joining the rest of the world in poisoning the atmosphere for the future faster is going to improve the UK's situation. There are much, much bigger fish to fry than energy policy for improvement-per-unit-effort.
The UK relies heavily on tourism. Tourism is disrupted by global instability. Climate change and fossil-fuel-catalyzed wars cultivate global instability. And the UK doesn't have the land or people to compete on the global stage in manufacturing exports (not that they do bad work, just that the scale doesn't exactly pan out. Not unless people are really keen on telling the tale of two cities again).
Best policy is likely to focus on domestic affairs (how to keep the country stable and solvent as the population shifts towards more and more retirees) and maybe look into rejoining that massive free-trade sector right down the block that the country so short-sightedly left a short time ago, since it'd really open up the tourism and trade markets.
Nice to see you again. Yeah, i feel it's a political thing where green initiatives are being pushed against the interest and benefit of voters. The benefits are continually overhyped and frankly in the UK we are seeing none of them. I actually quite like the idea of renewables and don't entirely understand Trumps pathological hatred of them, but i don't think politicians hamstringing our economy to win green points with their pals is a good thing. Also what's the plan here? Fall years behind the rest of the world while we switch over and then expect to magically catch up somehow?
We have policies that are good in principal but when they interact with other policy become unworkable for a reasonable cost. But then you focus on one individual area of policy rather than the system as a whole.
Also, in my experience the green initiatives generally have terrible publicity and these kind of articles are just pointing out some positives in a sea of negatives. What we endlessly miss is that the British public generally wants Co2 reduced and have got that.
The "political thing" is the oil industry working hard to make you feel like going renewable is a "political thing". It's a matter of life-or-death for them that you believe their lies.
If you like the idea of renewables take some time to understand the economics instead of spouting the same tired lies.
They don't "hamstring the economy". Nor will adopting them cause you to "fall behind". The "rest of the world" is rapidly adopting renewables.
Turns out I'm actually on 20p from a fix from last year, I was just grabbing some representative numbers off the website. Also this discussion has reminded me to put in a meter reading.
> my electricity has been free to negative all day
Like a gambler who only talks about their wins, people on these smart energy plans on the few days it goes very cheap only seem to pipe up with the current low unit price, and never mention their longer-term moving-average unit price...
It's just grandstanding.They are mathematicians not political activists. If they want their organization to slide into irrelevance, getting involved in left wing (or right wing, but with academia it's usually left wing) politics is a great way to do that.
Anyone can be a "political activist". An activist is just an ordinary person who has had enough. Unless you believe the only valid way to influence political discourse is with money.
Sure, anyone can be an activist but it is clear that academia has been turned into an activist training centre. It is also remarkable how these supposedly intelligent people go astray when it comes to the causes they support, from supporting Hamas to defending those who'd throw them off high buildings or putting them against the wall if they got their chance.
Training would imply that it made effective activists, but activism from these quarters tends to alienate outsiders. It's more purity spiral than activism.
Well, no, I don't think training necessarily would make them effective given the context of academic activism. If the whole world would look like a college campus it might but there is such a big disconnect between the real world and academia that even the best trained academic activist ends up doing just what you describe. In some parts of society it has worked though, viz. the rise of the 'DEI' phenomenon driven in part by the infusion of academics into organisations who used their positions to bring in more academics of similar mindset while shunning those who did not subscribe to the desired narrative. Where it used to be said that it did no harm to let those silly students larp revolutionaries because they'd drop all that when they re-entered 'the real world' the truth turned out to be reversed in that they took all that ideological baggage with them into society.
nah. electric is and always was a political fantasy. Perhaps its day will come, electric cars are here to stay and will find their niche, but the car manufacturers are reluctantly admitting that so is ICE. Electric cars can't compete on the figures, electricity is expensive, at service stations it's exorbitant. The electricity infrastructure is woefully inadequete to handle the large numbers needed. Not to mention enviromental benefits are not that huge either.
My EV costs 1/4 pence per mile in fuel compared to my diesel - money saved.
I charge at home meaning I no longer have to visit a petrol station once a week - time saved.
It’s faster than my diesel. It preheats automatically so more time saved scraping ice off my windows every winter.
The national grid in the UK is actually running lower demand than it did 20 years ago due to efficiency improvements, and nighttime charging controlled by my power company means they can balance it as they need - so infrastructure is fine.
The environmental benefits mean that my car was break-even on carbon emissions after roughly 15k miles.
This is mind bogglingly delusional while people are staring at spiking oil prices... and even when oil prices were at record lows it cost 5x to fill up my wife's ICE car as it did to charge my EV.
I'm moving away from that line of thinking. We can discuss how poorly formulated this law is, and the implications for privacy of internet control bills, and the resulting eroding of our freedom of speech. It's correct to be suspicous of attempts to regulate the internet. But I'm becoming increasingly convinced that "for the sake of the children" such measures are necessary. The reality is that most kids these days have basically zero restrictions on internet exposure, and it's frying their brains[1]. Casual warnings from parents won't cut it. Not that they don't have the ultimate responsibility, but as in every other area of child rearing, they need help from the wider society they live in.
[1] I'm not going to quote studies, but plenty exist. I think it's pretty self evident to everyone here how bad internet can be for the mental health even of adults, let alone children with developing minds.
4chan is probably one of the least brain damaging sites kids can go to these days. It has porn and stupid memes, true. But so does google if you turn the safe search off. It's the corporate run sites and services with ai powered recommendation engines that are the most problematic. Infinite scroll sites like reddit or tiktok are what really fucks up your brain. I used to frequent 4chan as a kid back in the day when it was truly a wild corner of the internet and I turned out just fine.
Low quality porn at that. Their size limits and board post limits keep it that way. Only /gif/ and one other board even permit sound. That is hateful against the visually impaired.
Hard disagree. I think the control should stay with the parents where it already is. They can decide whether or not to put protections in place or whether or not to hand them a device at all.
We don't put protections on kids walking out the front door, and there's plenty of theoretical dangers there too. Let the parents educate their children.
The evidence shows they don't have sufficient control. Parents these days clearly are unequal to the task, i'm passing no judgement just observing.
>We don't put protections on kids walking out the front door
My view is that we most certainly ban and/or heavily discourage children from entering certain places and talking to random strangers. There are many safeguards in the real world, there is simply not enough in the internet.
I don't say this lightly. I am very firmly against the nanny state, and i feel equally strongly in parental rights. I've made comments in the past against these laws but i feel it's the only way forward. The only question that remains is how to best implement such policies to minimize the inevitable erosion of our privacy.
This may be true but the laws already exist for parents and legal guardians. To me this reeks of focusing on the wrong aspects to obtain tracking of adults. If parents are not doing their job then prosecute them for it. Or fine them if money is the goal.
"~You are a bad parent. Insert $500. Brought to you by Carls Jr."
> The evidence shows they don't have sufficient control.
What evidence is that? Who gets to say what's sufficient?
Unless there is a high probability that an alleged lack of control will negatively other people than the family in question, I don't think it should be the government's business to police.
In my mind it is. I understand both sides of the debate. I'm not switching one set of beliefs for something i believe is inferior, but i'm still open to hearing arguments why i'm wrong. Nobody has responded with anything more persuasive then "it's not my problem, why are you bothering me".
Recently in the U.S. news a parent was convicted of murder because they facilitated making weapons to their child who then committed a school shooting. They didn't give their child weapons and tell them to go do it, they just didn't keep them away. This is a good trend that I hope continues and will actually help prevent school shootings. Parents are responsible for their children. If children are frying their brains due to Internet exposure, similarly it's the parents fault, and they should be held liable for child abuse in the same manner as if they committed other negligence.
Someone at school has parents who aren't watching their children and allowing them unrestricted Internet access? This is where the bounty-hunter private-right-of-action morality-police laws that seem to be gaining traction can be put to some actual good use instead of, for example, hunting down trans people in Kansas. If someone's child is showing other children inappropriate material because their parents are negligent, the other parents should be able to take those parents to court and recover damages if they can collect evidence. Once parents are fined for letting their children roam with an unrestricted Internet connection it'll stop pretty quick.
> they need help from the wider society they live in.
Help that is not material support (e.g. paying hospital bills, babysitting, etc.) is usually interference.
> I think it's pretty self evident to everyone here how bad internet can be for the mental health even of adults
Agreed, but I can handle myself on the internet (my parents did their job and I am also not a dog and know the difference between a screen and a real object), and shouldn't be tracked with verification nonsense because someone else can't.
Nonsense. They can and should push back much more. If Europe were to show a united front there's little China could do to punish them. Their only option would be to cosy up to America/Trump, which is a realistic possibility, but it's something they would be very uncomfortable with.
But op is frankly absurd. It sounds reasonable for about 1 second before you think about it. What sets tech apart from every other area of human innovation? And why limit it to that? What about mineral exploitation? Oil etc.
It's just not a well thought out comment. If we focus on the "better path forward", the entrance to which is only unlocked by the realisation that big techs achievements (and thus, profits) belong to humanity collectively... After we reach this enlightened state, what does op believe the first couple of things a traveller on this path is likely to encounter (beyond Big Techs money, which incidentally we take loads of already in the form of taxes, just maybe not enough)?
Tech is the most set apart area of innovation ever.
First you have tech's ability to scale. The ability to scale also has it creep new changes/behaviors into every aspect of our lives faster than any 'engine for change' could previous.
Tech also inherits, so you can treat it as legos using, what are we at, definitely tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of human years of work, of building blocks to build on top of. Imagine if you started every house with a hundred thousand human years of labor already completed instantly. No other domain in human history accumulates tens of millions of skilled human years annually and allows so much of that work to stack, copy, and propagate at relatively low cost.
And tech's speed of iteration is insane. You can try something, measure it, change it, and redeploy in hours. Unprecedented experimentation on a mass scale leading to quicker evolution.
It's so disingenuous to have tech valuations as high as they are based on these differentiations but at the same time say 'tech is just like everything from the past and must not be treated differently, and it must be assumed outcomes from it are just like historical outcomes'. No it is a completely different beast, and the differences are becoming more pronounced as the above 10Xs over and over.
Being cynical i would say it's because Burnham could potentially challenge Starmer. Less cynically Labour has a big enough majority they can afford to lose this by election. The headache of replacing the mayor of Manchester is not worth it.
Why can't he just do both jobs? Boris did it iirc.
If memory serves, Dan Jarvis also did it, being both MP and mayor of the South Yorkshire city region or whatever it was called at the time.
It is fairly innately political. No Prime Minister has ever polled as low as Starmer and come back from it, or so is being said in the press. Burnham might be a smart electoral move, but he's not a plaything of the Labour right, so they kept him out.
That's not inconsistency in the rules, that's inconsistency in what being the mayor means. In Sheffield it means you show up wearing funny clothes every so often, in Greater Manchester it means you have a full-time job, a large budget, and actual responsibilities.
For our American brethren, it's like the difference between being the Mayor of NYC vs the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade King.
It's actually the role of Police and Crime Commissioner that prevents them from being an MP simultaneously. In Greater Manchester (and London) the PCC role is combined with that of Mayor, but it isn't in most other city regions.
There's not much actual difference in the mayoral aspect of the roles - Jarvis was the Mayor of the South Yorkshire Combined Authority, not simply the mayor of Sheffield City Council.
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