>Do we want, at a time when Russia is considering the UK as an enemy, to be providing all our personal details to a server in Moscow?
Depends how good the search is. Google doesn’t seem to want to provide me proper results anymore, even very basic image search tasks on google now net you only about 20 results all of which are wrong or useless. Yandex image search actually works.
If you don’t want me to use the Russian tech that helps me get my job done then roll back the Google Search codebase 10 years to when it worked as well as Yandex does today. (Only partially joking)
I wrote a comment a few years back how I was using Yandex quite a bit at the time because there are things I'm simply unable to find on Google – sites like sci-hub for example.
Today though I find myself using it daily. The results are far from perfect, but I've never suspected them to be randomly hiding or suppressing search results like many of the popular Western alternatives.
I don't use image search much, but yes I completely agree with you there. Google image search is completely unusable to me at this point, so I always default to Bing and Yandex for that (still need to try Brave). And Yandex imo is the only search engine with a functional reverse image search anymore.
>but I've never suspected them to be randomly hiding or suppressing search results
the word 'random' must be doing a lot of work in that sentence given that they are subject to Roskomnadzor's regulations and are thus forced not just arbitrarily but systematically censor content: https://meduza.io/en/feature/2023/02/01/a-window-into-yandex...
But us westerners usually don't care much about that kind of censorship because it doesn't affect the searches we normally do. ("normally" as in "we usually don't search stuff about russian politics")
How about if you do searches about history? In Russia, it is explicitly a crime to portray the "Great patriotic War" as anything but noble, wonderful, and a huge russian success story. Multiple game developers have active warrants for arrest in russia because they put a russian tank in their game that isn't OP, or have a campaign that accurately demonstrates an unsavory thing the soviets did in the 40s.
It looks like the best solution is for “westerners” to use Yandex and everyone else to use Google or Bing and this way they can search with less targeted censoring on their terms.
Are people in Russia allowed to use Google? I thought Russia has been locking down their Internet for a while. Not as bad as China, but still missing anything unflattering to Putie.
There is a reasonable argument that, as a minor nobody, we should rather use services from hostile countries. It isn't feasible for Russia to to compel someone in an English-speaking country to do something unpleasant. That is a lot more than can be said for the local police or politicians. Russian corruption doesn't generally touch Western governments - the atmosphere is too hostile to it.
>Russian corruption doesn't generally touch Western governments
No offense but the fact that someone on HN could get to this conclusion is rather shocking to me. Western Europe has plenty of russian corruption and I'm afraid the ongoing war has unearthed only a fraction of it.
Austria is the lobbying arm and safe heaven of Russian banks, oil & gas and oligarchs in the EU, and vice versa, Austrian banks and companies are heavily invested in Russia, and you don't just get to be a major investor in Russia without the bribes, connections and blessing of some very high up people in the government.
Pretty sure plenty of German politicians were similarly cozy with Russia before.
While there will be obvious corruption involved in that, voting for access to cheap energy and access to foreign economies for investment are both things I'm in favour of. Being warm in winter and being wealthy are both good outcomes. So corruption is bad in all its forms, but that corruption doesn't threaten me.
A pretty basic assumption about Google and Facebook is that the US 3 letter agencies use the data in coups. Speaking as an Australian, the next time we have a Whitlam-style dismissal I assume Google will be covertly involved. Yandex not so much. Similar logic would hold in the Americas, Asia, and most of Western Europe. It'd be fascinating to know what role US social media companies were playing in the 2014 Ukraine revolution too as a comparison to somewhere that is very much a place where Russia would want to weaponise Yandexq.
>Being warm in winter and being wealthy are both good outcomes.
You can be warm in the winter without doing deals with "the devil", and most average Austrian people don't benefit from that corrupt "trade", just a few banks and oil execs and real estate moguls who get to become even richer, unless you're gonna tell that their immense riches will "trickle down" to us plebs, any minute now.
>A pretty basic assumption about Google and Facebook is that the US 3 letter agencies use the data in coups.
Sure they do, which is why maintaining tech supremacy is a national security matter of the US, and an issue Europe doesn't get, that the more you fall behind in mainstream tech products and services, the more you are at the mercy of the US (and China).
The fact that US companies own all the biggest cloud, social media and chat platforms, gives the US incredible leverage, that nobody else has.
There's probably no hard proof, but Russia is allegedly funding far-right movements like AfD and whatever Le Pen's party in France is now called. Also, see the career of Gerhard Schroeder, first German chancellor and then a top Gazprom official.
Actually they are very credible; pretty much objective facts.
Putin’s inner circle spokesman, Dmitri Peskov, had his daughter Elizaveta as an assistant to the far-right Aymeric Chauprade, a French Member of the European Parliament.[0]
You will see “coincidentally” similar connections across major western powers like the UK, US, Germany, and Italy.
Just by taking a look at EU politicians getting into russian companies (such as Gazprom) after their mandate should tell you a couple of things. Ever wondered how some countries became so dependent on russia?
Plenty of examples of corruption trickling out... Take Boris Johnson's granting peerage to some Russian not long ago. Corruption is a trojan horse in capitalism, money matters which is OK with honestly earned money but when money is obtained by exploitation/violence/theft it infects the system because ultra rich oligarchs can use money to get influence. Before 2014 west (UK is known for it) couldn't resist Russian dirty money much, now they are learning slowly but unfortunately there's crypto to work around sanctions etc.
I have a better way to frame this. A hostile country is less interested in low profile users and is not as able/willing to use the data it collects against the user. Committed tax evasion / breach of contract / fraud? Russia is much less likely to care than your own government.
For what it's worth, the examples given on that page are either domestic instances or do not, as your parent comment describes, involve low profile individuals.
But it's a fallacy to see the concern being about them having your individual data, right? The concern is the power of the information they yield when they have access to our collective data.
The UK is significantly influenced by Russia. Brexit is a prime, recent example, as well as the frequent donations from oligarchs to the Conservative party
Your claim that Russia influenced Brexit, which the Cameron-led Conservative government opposed, has been thoroughly debunked, as has the Trump-Russia collusion hoax in the US. Indeed, a certain Guardian "journalist", who promoted the Brexit-Russia influence hoax, lost a defamation case against her for falsely promoting it. The UK, which is currently governed by a Conservative party majority parliament, has also been, from the start, one of the most aggressive and dependable supporters of Ukraine in her struggle to resist the Russian invasion. So, I am wondering, to what kind of "significant influence" are you alluding?
They may send killers just for you. For example, they are killing Holodomor researchers around the world (genocide of Ukrainians in 1932-1934: 25 millions were starved to death, 20 millions are recorded as Russian, millions were killed or executed).
The thing I found ridiculous about Google today is the image reverse search, unusable, but I have an extension to use the previous one before Google Lens was a thing.
The classic reverse image search results from Google will not be around for much longer, I've been getting reports about my browser extension no longer working with Google Images in some regions.
Yandex Images also possibly going away or becoming heavily censored is also an issue for journalists and researchers, since it is the best performing publicly available reverse image search engine.
What, you don't like the reverse image product search? You want actual... images? Not thumbnails of stuff you can buy from rando websites? How anti-consumer of you!
>Do we want, at a time when Russia is considering the UK as an enemy, to be providing all our personal details to a server in Moscow?
(answering to the OP) Yes, there is nothing the Russians can do with my data that my government hasn't done.
>Depends how good the search is. Google doesn’t seem to want to provide me proper results anymore, even very basic image search tasks on google now net you only about 20 results all of which are wrong or useless. Yandex image search actually works.
Same, google is either doing this on purpose to then launch the "saving" LLM or they're just forgetting how to do it, google images is unusable and when it is everything is a .webp. And google search is a pay to win, you type "official python documentation" and the whole first page is full of geekforgeeks and other sponsored websited, and don't even get me started on facts/news where it just shamelessly turns into a propaganda machine.
Yandex is at least gives you 5 or 6 good results before it starts showing things in Russian.
> Yes, there is nothing the Russians can do with my data that my government hasn't done.
I understand anti-government sentiment but whenever I see a statement like this it makes me devalue anything that comes after it. You really think there is nothing a foreign government might do with your personal data that your government hasn't already done? You really feel like there's a similar level of accountability at stake?
Given that they live in the US/UK and not in Russia, yes.
As I understand it, the claim is not that the US/UK are as evil as Russia, or even more or less morally equivalent. The claim is that the US/UK hoover up online information just like Russia (maybe even more), and that they are more exposed to what the US/UK governments do than they are to what Russia does.
Without minimizing the misdeeds of Russia, without resorting to (false) moral equivalence, it's still a defensible point. (Mind you, I'm not sure I agree with it. But it's defensible.)
Fair point, and something that should be considered. Also, we're essentially giving them a free, large scale open source intelligence feed.
But the GRU isn't going to come to my door and arrest me because I searched on the wrong thing, even if I use Yandex. So in that sense, I'm insulated from what they know about me.
> To me, the fact is that before pointing to what wrongs others do, we should fix our own thing.
What's the phrase... letting perfect be the enemy of good? We'll never be perfect. So by that logic we won't ever be able to criticise anyone, even if their record is considerably worse than our own.
> The US collects so much data about everyone, but people seem to find that ok. On the other hand, Russia collecting data is outrageous. This is such a weird thinking tbh.
The US government is accountable to US citizens. There are regular elections where they can vote out a government that acts against their wishes. They have no such power over Russia, an aggressive power currently waging war against a US ally. Equivalence is the weird thinking, IMO.
(EDIT: I should add all of this is from the perspective of a US citizen given the OP said “my own [UK] government”. If, in this scenario, you’re neither a US or Russian citizen, yes, I can see why you’d equivocate)
> What's the phrase... letting perfect be the enemy of good
I don't think this applies. When it comes to privacy of its citizens, there is no 'good' in the anglosphere. In the US we have a constitutional amendment specifically about the government not snooping, but it's effectively moot. There is no respect given at all to the privacy of citizens by government.
Unless you live in a shit hole, the worse that can happen is for your government to "just" jail you based on the information you provided. But if you provide that same info to enemy forces, they might use it to get leverage on you, getting you into even deeper shit than you already were. And they'll eventually dump you anyway and you'll be in a much worse situation.
There's also the important question of jurisdiction and closeness.
If I have to share my data with someone, I'd rather it be someone distant, and with limited capability. Sharing my data with Google is effectively the same thing as sharing my data with the FBI. And the FBI can stick guns in my face and lock me in a steel cage for anything they don't like in said data.
While I'm no fan of Putin, his regime can do precisely nothing actionable with my data, so long as I don't set foot in its territory.
Folks are focussing on the Russian part of this. But Yandex just happens to be the one whose source code got analyzed; you can safely substitute "Google" or "Facebook" or any of the other various behavior advertising companies here. They're all doing similar things and it's terrific to have such a detailed analysis of how it works.
Of course we are focusing on the Russian part. Russia has made themselves the enemy of the west, so their spying is several factors more serious case than just a simple violation of privacy.
What is an enemy of the west and what is a friend of the west? Take a random western country like France. Do you know how many Franco-Russian 'cercles d'amitié' there are? Go search in Yandex... or Google. Many quite old with a noteworthy history of cultural exchange. No idea if that exists in the anglosphere (not my speciality). Washington, Brussels or the guy in the Élysée palace can't really transcend that.
> Russia has made themselves the enemy of the west
Well, either that or the west has decided that Russia is the enemy. I honestly don't buy the saying "Russia has made themselves the enemy of the west". Why would anybody want to be the enemy of the global superpower?
> Why would anybody want to be the enemy of the global superpower?
For the same reason that despots around the world "hate the west." [0] Because it takes the domestic population's eyes off of all the domestic issues such as rampant corruption and curtailment of basic freedoms.
[0] See: Iran & North Korea who non-coincidentally are both supplying Russia with arms which are used to kill Ukrainian grandparents and children living peacefully in their villages and cities.
They don't just "hate the west" because it distracts their citizens from domestic issues. That's ridiculous. They are resisting the global hegemony in defense of their autonomy. Just like we don't sign up to be slaves, as individuals.
What does "resisting the global hegemony" have to do with annexing neighboring countries, slaughtering civilians in their homes, and then kidnapping their children?
I'm not in support of war. Don't try to straw man me as a Putin supporter. This is just baiting me into an argument about "who is worse" when that's irrelevant to what I said.
To be clear, I'd much rather live here than in Russia, and I also would prefer that Russia wasn't slaughtering people in Ukraine, including their own.
"Why would anybody want to be the enemy of the global superpower?"
In the case of both the Balkan wars and the invasion of Ukraine, it was because staying friends with the global superpower meant that one wouldn’t get control of the lands one claimed.
They have though. They showed they don't care about borders and that if they're successful in Ukraine then they will just keep trying in the next nation over. Tyrants are never happy and always need more to conquer and to control. You can't just let them roll over other countries because they're a "super power" because evidently they aren't since Ukraine with help from the west is at least keeping them at bay.
Because Russian boomers and nationalists are hellbent on territorial irredentism to the detriment of Ukraine, the Baltic countries, and according to some of their "Greater Russia" maps even Finland.
You are thinking about it in too simplistic of terms. Countries don't "want" to be "enemies". Countries act in their own best interest to maximize resources, security, etc.
Well, I can tell you for certain that they can't make Russia declare war on its neighbor and commit atrocities against civilians. As long as that's happening, the US can demonize Russia free and clear.
According to François Hollande (who served as President of France from 2012 to 2017), the West has been pumping Ukraine with weapons since 2014. From my point of view, this is a provocation. If it's not for you, please explain why.
> According to François Hollande (who served as President of France from 2012 to 2017), the West has been pumping Ukraine with weapons since 2014. From my point of view, this is a provocation. If it's not for you, please explain why
Its not a provocation because it was a response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2014, which included the occupation of Crimea, and the introduction of Russian troops and Russian-sponsored PMCs (including Wagner), and Russian weapons and other support to Russian-allied local proxy forces into Eastern Ukraine, and which was the start of the still-ongoing war.
I appreciate your response. It sounds like you familiar with the topic.
You described the core of the problem as the response to a certain event (events in Crimea), meaning you answered the question of "why". Having said that, could you apply the same reasoning and explain why Russia occupied Crimea? What were the events that led to such an outcome?
Edit: as a side note, I disagree with you saying that was not a provocation. External military intervention IS a provocation. They could've tried to resolve the issue diplomatically, but they chose not to.
> You described the core of the problem as the response to a certain event (events in Crimea)
The 2014 invasion of Ukraine was not, and I did not describe it as, limited to events in Crimea.
> Having said that, could you apply the same reasoning and explain why Russia occupied Crimea
I will not pretend to explain the agressors’ reasoning, but the context was that it was immediately after the people of Ukraine drove out their former Russian-aligned leader.
> External military intervention IS a provocation.
It can’t provoke a war that starts before it occurs, and arms deliveries are not military intervention.
> I will not pretend to explain the agressors’ reasoning
Huh? That's strange. A deep dive is always important.
> the context was that it was immediately after the people of Ukraine drove out their former Russian-aligned leader
This is a media-like description of what happened there. From the perspective of the law, it doesn't matter (and therefore should not be even mentioned) whether the leader was Russian-aligned or not. You are not trying to understand the issue, but simply reiterating on what they say in the mainstream media. I'm Ukrainian btw.
however for hackers it's pretty interesting to see the code as an example of what apple/google/amazon/facebook are up to when it comes to tracking/sending ads/privacy invasion techniques. We are all quite aware of Russia's attempted genocide of Ukraine.
Context: Yandex is in the news right now because a couple of days ago its cofounder and former CEO Arkady Volozh was caught trying to hide his Russian past [0], and today he finally issued a public statement condemning the war [1], almost 1.5 years after the full-scale invasion began.
> today he finally issued a public statement condemning the war
Would you issue such a statement in his position? Think carefully. If you don't, you will probably have twitter brigades trying to smear your name. If you do, your family back home might be at risk, and you will probably never be able to visit them again.
Personally, I cannot in good faith demand anyone condemn the war, if to do so, they are putting family and friends freedoms at risk.
Hmm, on second thought, you may be right and I probably overreacted. I still don't really believe Putin would exact revenge on Volozh — Oleg Tinkoff defected back in spring 2022, and I think his family is quite fine — but relying on Russia not being stupid doesn't sound wise right now.
While some people (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasyl_Makukh
) sacrificed their lives in protest of Soviet Russia invasion into Czechoslovakia, timely public statement is the least he could do.
He could've left russia long time ago along with family and friends.
But he enjoys russian money even though he has more than enough for 100 lifetimes.
So yeah, I can in good faith demand from him and most other russians to condemn the war. Because the reason it happened is precisely that everyone does nothing in russia.
Most of them flee the country because they don't want to get into army, and even when they are abroad and in safety - they still don't condemn the war.
> If you don't, you will probably have twitter brigades trying to smear your name.
Do Twitter crowds actually do that? Do they keep track of anyone more or less prominent, and write in their comments "Have you spoken out against the war yet?" "I haven't seen you denounce the war"?
Remember that time a year ago in February when the Namecheap CEO gave every person with a Russian ID, living inside and outside Russia, 1-week notice that their account is terminated and they have to host elsewhere?
Including expats, refugees, objectors, what have you. Your contract with Namecheap is terminated for being connected to Russia. Prove to us you're not, if you want to keep your service.
His justification? Well we have a lot of Ukrainian staff and you know, we're not with Russia therefore we're against Russia, therefore...
> If we were virtue signaling we wouldn't willingly be giving up a not non significant part of our business. This hurts us financially but it's the right thing to do, at least for us.
Your leader/country is already killing innocent civilians/ukranians. They are putting it all on the line with their lives. They didn't ask for this yet they are dying for it. Change needs to come and the only way it can is for the Russian population to put it on the line as well.
To take you literally for a moment: if anyone can claim land across a border, based on a historical grievance, then no border would stand. 70 years without a border war in Europe, so yeah we should try to push that water back up the hill. Otherwise a recursive "I would like my land back please."
Whatever a person's stance on ongoing political events or active conflicts, punishing them en masse for choosing to be born on the wrong side of an arbitrary border is nonsensical.
Ethnic cleansing of North America, Slave codes, yellow peril, Japanese internment, red scare, islamophobia, red scare 2.0 (ongoing), yellow peril 2.0 (ongoing)
It mostly happens via private messaging, but yes. It's part of the "you are either with us or against us" mentality of many campaign groups.
See ~2 years ago when every opensource project was forced to publish a code of conduct and diversity and inclusion policy... Often the people asking for the policies weren't even users of the software involved, let alone interested in writing code for the proect. That campaign seems to have ended, and nobody cares if your project has either anymore.
There are many active 'master' branches at work, and many, many active 'master' branches on Github.
By that measure, the movement to rename every 'master' branch to 'main' has been a resounding failure.
(If you look at the events at the time it sprung up, you could pretty safely say that it was encouraged as a way to distract from the then-current "GitHub is doing business with US's ICE!" hatestorm, and man was it successful.)
If your only active metric is "all or nothing". Sure, there's a few.
But the major git hosting platforms are only using 'main' as the default for new branches, and there is significant enough social stigma for new projects that it's preferred to use main.
I don't have precise statistics, but I would happily wager that even though master was the default for so long that the majority of git repositories that have been contributed to in the last 30 days are not 'master' as the default branch name.
To change a default with such inertia as to completely skew the demographic in favour of the new rather than the status quo: I would certainly merit that as success.
Don't generalize. Your statement, as-is, is nothing but flamebait.
Some people do that. Some of those people are Ukrainian. I've also seen non-Ukrainians do it, and I know plenty of Ukrainians who aren't doing that, which falsifies your comment from the get-go.
With that said, looking at your comment history, I'm just pissing in the wind saying that.
>Kazakhstani (born in Kazakh SSR, Soviet Union) ethnic Russian stops mentioning “Russia” in his biography during a period of increased Russophobia.
He is jewish.
Just like the rest of the "yandex talents" that moved to work at Israeli office.
They all get to be jewish when if suits them.
UPD.
Also, yandex news was (and still is) the pinnacle of russian putin propaganda. And the person in question was complicit with it. Even, given the fact he wasn't living in russia since 2014.
He tries to whitewash himself because he is a sanctioned individual. And the protocol to get desanctioned is to publicly state he disapproves the war.
> “Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is barbaric, and I am categorically against it,” Volozh said in a statement. “I am horrified about the fate of people in Ukraine – many of them my personal friends and relatives – whose houses are being bombed every day. “Although I moved to Israel in 2014, ...
Israel cares a lot about what happens in Ukraine because it is in a similar position, a highly-militarized vanguard of the West. If Ukraine falls despite backing from Washington, what does that say about possible outcomes should a (full-scale) war break out between Israel and Iran/Arab states?
in this case it just makes sense to write it that way though? leading you to consider, primarily, that the russians might try to do something with the information, rather than an abstract "we think they're probably bad".
Like sure its leading you but imo its leading you to consider the actual issue rather than unrelated questions
> jdangu on Aug 4, 2015
> We (ClarityAd) do this for major ad platforms. We use a mix of static and dynamic analysis to assess risk.
Fuck off. And since you here, you might tell us all how much you get incentive by aligning with U.S. owned Ad platforms, that also align with U.S. national interest to smear foreign tech giant Ad business?
>what I’ve found is both fascinating and deeply unsettling.
I see nothing unsettling, unless one considers Google, Microsoft, Meta, Apple.... unsettling too (which I do, but then I don't act surprised and unsettled by a non-US company doing what everyone else is doing).
They are worried that their populations might work out that Western populations are kept enthralled to the US security state and rebel. Russia is bad but US blows up gas pipeline for democracy and freedom.
Now hand over $800 billion dollars for 'defense'. And $368 billion for AUKUS. And the European bill will be interesting to watch over the next few years.
Something to consider: Your local government might need a warrant to spy on you, but they don't need a warrant to spy on Russia and they can get data about you like that.
I feel like this whole neo-cold war against China & Russia was never put up for a vote. Where can I vote against it?
Please, let's all just get rich together. Governments democratize over time - the UK wasn't a democracy when it started out but over 1000 years of governance transitioned into being one. I suspect it will be much faster nowadays, but in the meantime - please no war.
> but they’re still going to be very unique and therefore uniquely identifying (likely more so than before because of the entropy the hashing algorithm adds).
Surely hashing something can't add entropy? Assuming the hash output is smaller than its input, in the general case I'd expect the hash to have less entropy than its input.
Kind of funny to see how quickly authoritarianism can destroy something that was profitable and usable. I used to use the image search sometimes when google was failing miserably and it worked pretty well. I'm afraid to visit there now as it's not unlikely they could inject a virus into your system.
Great content. Just some feedback for the webmaster: it’s annoying when you scroll up one line of text and the header nav inserts itself into your view frame on mobile. I wish the header nav was not sticky / popup!
So what's the action items? How do we identify apps that include that Yandex SDK (apart, obviously, from those that have Yandex in their name)? How can we block sending any data to Yandex or to Ruzzia in general?
Since this is taking off, Confiant is hiring in engineering and security to work alongside Kaileigh on projects like this. jerome at confiant. Pardon the plug.
Also Western billionaire versus Russian oligarch - even if the source of wealth is virtually identical and their political power probably higher in the West.
>Also Western billionaire versus Russian oligarch - even if the source of wealth is virtually identical and their political power probably higher in the West.
The term "oligarch" has a specific meaning and, surprisingly, Western media uses the term correctly about the subset of corrupt Russian and Ukrainian businessmen who got rich in the 1990s by buying billions worth of state monopolies for pennies.
I have never seen Russian tech billionaires like the JetBrains founders being called "oligarchs".
Linguistic choices aside, the nature of power acquision is very different in russia and western countries. One of the best explainers is on Kamil Galeev's twitter/substack. Highly recommended read:
That is not the definition[0]. I can see how you think it might be, but oligarchy is for governments not monopolies -- even if some cases that line is blurred.
I've wondered that too, and from what I can understand, the distinction is that the Russian Oligarchs don't just have political influence, their wealth itself was a result of political connections with the ruling elites from the start.
American (immigrant) here who happens to think this is still the very best country all things considered. Disappointed in how things have declined over the past 40 years I’ve been here but still thank God for America as far I am concerned.
Not all American super wealthy are oligarch but some are very close to the mark. Borderline cases that are concerning: Elon Musk is an American oligarch. Bill Gates is an American oligarch.
Also can someone dump 4Gs of Google’s codebase somewhere?
I do think they don't use oligarch for all Russian billionaires. For example it isn't used for Tinkov or Durov. In 90s-00s there really were oligarchs, now they use it for the ones that are or were maybe affiliated with government, like the childhood friends of Putin or former KGB/St Petersburg mayor's office employees who all happen to be CEOs of huge companies
I've heard successive stories of oligarchs getting shaken down for money or outright purged by Putin that I don't think Russia is an oligarchy. That implies some collective decision making.
The Ukraine war is madness and reflects a ruler with absolute power.
Eh, while billionaires enjoy privilege in the West, oligarchs literally run gangs, murder people on the regular, and support Putin's attempted genocide of Ukraine. I would say that's definitely comparing grapes and oranges.
"Oligarchs" refer to underground Russian businessmen that cheaply bought up state assets after the USSR collapsed and sold it for exceedingly higher sums later.
It's a blasphemy to capitalism to conflate those bandits with Western entrepreneurs that founded and built their own companies from scratch, even though they have their own set of issues.
In the west, we call that "privatization", and it happens pretty frequently, and it's common for the process to be technically open, but practically exclude all but a handful of buyers.
It's also common for those buyers to make a lot of money from the assets before returning them to the state 20 years later, unmaintained and debt laden.
> Can you name off the top of your head the last 3 significant privatizations?
In the UK, privatisation of Network Rail arches (which will 'break even' for the buyers in about ten years), privatisation or TfL land in London at below-market prices to property developers, and the backdoor privatisation of NHS services through public-private partnerships.
Even further back: during Prime Minister Mulroney's tenure (which coincided with Reagan's and Thatcher's), quite a few public corporations were privatized. Here's a news article from that time period that gives an idea of the pressures faced in Canada at the time, and how what Thatcher was doing in the UK (producing a long list of public corporations and services to privatize) was affecting Canadian judgements: https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/business/1985/08/30/d...
And here's an analysis of how the privatization of Canada's medical isotopes business didn't save the government money, and instead only helped to cushion private owners from risk: https://www.utpjournals.press/doi/abs/10.3138/chr.2019-0010
I asked you for the 3 most recent examples you could think of, and your recent examples were decades old.
You have now linked me to a paper discussing privatization happening in the 1980s and 1990s.
If you want to make the argument that this happens frequently in the west, you need to find examples actually happening this decade. I don't feel like this should be controversial.
If they were 'proper investors' they would cheaply buy up UK water companies, load them with debt, pay out 40 billion of dividends, and then enter talks with the government about insolvency.
Can someone explain this to me? America won the Cold War and had an influence on Russia's (the successor state) transition to a market-based economy. Then how can “we“ at the same time be mad about how the transition was handled?
Luxe Lifestyle was a recently-formed company with no staff. It was awarded £25 to buy protective equipment for Covid.
The very next day, on April 29, DHSC bought another 200 million face masks, this time contracting to pay £252.5 million to Ayanda Capital, a Tory party-linked firm also bumped into the VIP lane despite having no previous PPE experience. It is an investment company specialising in currency trading, offshore property and private equity.
To this day, no-one has been charged with any crime.
It sounds like that, but believe me, it was vastly worse than current times. Except if you were in lucky 0.1% that had those connections, and also had no conscience.
I think the frequent comparisons of GDP leads the West to heavily underestimate Russia.
While GDP may be lower than Italy and per capita is weak, a nation like Russia can probably accomplish an order of magnitude more large scale projects, and also sustain a certain economy climate for much much longer than we think.
So don't underestimate Russia, even though we'd like to think they're soon running out of steam to continue the war in Ukraine.
On the other side of the comparison, I think Italy is a lot more capable than many people give them credit for, so the comparison is not quite as damning as it may first seem.
On just one axis of consideration, Italy has a blue water navy with power projection capabilities roughly similar to Russia and India, surpassed only by the United States, the UK and France.
I think Italy also ranks higher than most anglosphere laypeople would estimate in terms of GDP and scientific output, although this is hard to pin down since I'm talking about layperson perception. Basically, I think Italy is more relevant and capable than people generally give it credit for.
GDP seems like a very questionable, and likely misleading, measure to me, even for Western nations.
For example, Canada's inflation-adjusted per-capita GDP has supposedly increased over time, yet for many Canadians, the standard of living is now noticeably lower than it was (or would have likely been) two or three decades ago.
In terms of production, Canadian businesses and governments generally don't seem to have become more capable and productive, and actually seem to struggle now with the sorts of fundamental work that they managed to pull off in the past. Many common services and products are noticeably worse now than in the past, in terms of cost, quality, reliability, delivery time, and so forth.
And very interesting to note that your name is VancouverMan. The other day I saw a YouTube video about an IT guy struggling in Vancouver and he mentioned one example of two immigrants - both doctors - having to stay in someone's basement as there was simply no way for them to afford a house (rent or buy).
My favourite tidbit for when someone brings 'less than Italy hur dur':
Italy: Size of the labor force from 2014 to 2024: ~23M
Number of pensioners in Russia from 2012 to 2022: ~44M
Italy population? ~58M
There are almost twice as many pensioners in Russia than people in the labour force in Italy and it's 2/3 of the whole Italy population. The whole GDP comparison here is moot.
Is that surprising for a resource oriented economy?
Aramco (Saudi Oil) is the second biggest company in the world, yet GDP of Saudi Arabia is about that of Poland
A GPD lower than that of Italy? Here's something better: per capita is lower than that of Bulgaria's. Perhaps Putin's plan is to lower the country's population to increase the per capita ratio?
They are giants as far as Russia is concerned...Yandex is the biggest tech company there. Gazprom is a Russian gas giant, Rosneft is an oil giant, etc..
Yeah but that term is just you know comical. “Giants”. As if meant to inflate one’s ego, cover insecurity, and project power, like those tom and jerry cartoon episodes where they’d call in their giant friends to save the day. It amuses me every time.
So quite similar to the US where oligarchs (oups, billionaires) are invited at the White House and companies provide algorithmic censorship favoring a particular political camp (obvious with Twitter before its recent purchase, YouTube actions against public free discourse on covid, Google removing pages related to a certain laptop, etc.)
> And lobbyists are not lobbyists, they are oligarchs.
???
No, this is nonsense. The normal meaning of the word "lobbyist" is an _employee_ who uses political connections to push corporate interests. The normal meaning of the word "oligarch" is someone with large wealth. These two are not similar at all.
So the phrase you're looking for is probably "And billionaires are not billionaires, they're oligarchs".
2. a very rich business leader with a great deal of political influence (particularly with reference to individuals who benefited from the privatization of state-run industries after the collapse of the Soviet Union).
As russian, when I encounter people comparing the state of media in Russia to the worst excesses of government influence in media in US like they are comparable - I think to myself “what a bunch of fucking idiots”.
It’s the same ignorant halfwit crowd that compares minor inconvenience to Holocaust, having to follow an HOA rule to Stalin’s repressions, and anyone telling them what they don’t like to Hitler.
I live in US now and I complain periodically about various imperfect, unfair, annoying things that are associated with any society. Humans suck. They are selfish and dishonest in large proportions, some of the time. But what is happening right now in Russia has brought back into focus for me and reminded me just how much better the West is. Fucking treasure it while you have it.
Perhaps the difference is having heritage vs having lived for a large portion of life and still having ties and relatives there?
Also, please elaborate. How does does having come from Poland figure into this conversation? You yearn for Soviet rule and hate what capitalism stands for? Or sympathize with Russian justifications for their aggression against a neighbor state and their own people? I can only speculate lacking any detail.
> As to this particular war - the US agreed at the end of the cold war not to expand NATO east and yet it did, breaking the agreement.
This is a persistent myth, there was never an agreement to not expand NATO with the USSR, and the one person who would know at the time Mikhail Gorbachev has said as much.
> At multiple points during this war, the Russians have offered to negotiate. Instead, the US has responded with "to the last Ukrainian".
The Ukrainians where negotiating regarding the war then the Russians where pushed out of a number of cities that they held and we saw the horrific scene they left behind.
That is likely the point that the Ukrainian's decided that there would be no negotiating.
> Today, Russia is essentially also arguing for pre-emptive war but the reasoning - putting American missiles and forces in Ukraine - is a hell of a lot plausible.
Yet theres no war against Finland is there, and there will be US soldiers in Finland far before they are ever in Ukraine.
> The fact that there has been not one effort to negotiate by the Americans shows that the West isn't interested in peace or the interests of Ukrainians - they simply want a country naive and suicidal enough to throw themselves against the Russian subhumans.
There has been an effort to negotiate by the Americans, which ironically angered a large number of people as it happened behind the backs of Ukraine by using back channels.
The sheer amount of whataboutism, lies, and deflections you just wrote is staggering, truly.
First, no-one promised to expand NATO to russia; Gorbachov himself rebuked this.
Second, have you ever considered that countries want to join a defensive(sic!) bloc not to appease "the West", but to safeguard against what happened in Georgia and what is happening in Ukraine right now?
If russia sees the expansion of NATO as a problem, then why did both putin and his establishment repeatedly deny recent inclusion of Finland/Sweden as being an issue? Why did russia completely empty its Finland border and send equipment and soldiers from those bases to Ukraine?
Third, russians never attempted to "negotiate" in good faith; all their inane "demands" - denazification (aka killing all Ukrainians who disagree with them), demilitarisation, etc etc - remained the same.
Fourth, "at the present the Ukrainians have lost" is simply incredible. Let's see how this year played out: "special military operation to take Kyiv in 3 days" is now reaching its second year; Ukraine regained more territories this year than russia ("world's 2nd army") gained in the same year; russia having to beg North Korea for artillery shells; rouble in free-fall; finally, a warlord's private military company nearly completing his march to Moscow in actual 3 days.
Fifth, the conditions of any peace negotiations remain the same: russia gets out of Ukraine. This has been Ukraine's position from day 1.
Finally, I can assure you the majority of Ukrainian population despises russia after what you've done. There is no "Perfidious West" forcing anyone to fight.
P.S. Quit LARPing. Your first comment on HN is literally about Poland wanting to partition Ukraine - another insane conspiracy theory spread around by IRA et. al. Every accusation is admission with you lot, every single time.
>Today, Russia is essentially also arguing for pre-emptive war but the reasoning - putting American missiles and forces in Ukraine - is a hell of a lot plausible.
The Russian government invaded Ukraine because they consider it a fake nation that was illegitimately carved out of Russia. The "neo-Nazi NATO" excuses were just lies they made up for naive Westerners.
At this point it’s a chicken an egg problem - do russians really believe what you said, or are their beliefs a product of decades of internal propaganda?
I mean, yeah, probably many of them believe it now.
Personally, I lean towards this - after 20 years in power Putin is a defacto dictator perched on top of a government machine he constructed to keep him there. A machine composed of various pieces of corruption, propaganda, repressions, and bribes.
And like many dictatorships before - having to pressure relief valve of changing people in power, he has to deflect discontent elsewhere, external enemies, NATO, etc, and ply his population with achievements they can soothe themselves with while submerged in poverty and corruption. And justifications are made up as needed by the machine of the state.
You are repeating russian propaganda and there are people far smarter than I that have repeatedly tried to explain why it is such and failed, and I won’t bother trying.
You are making analogies between things that are not alike. A person comparing an HOA rule to Stalin's repressions is consciously being hyperbolic. I think your issue with OPs comparison of media influence by the US and Russian governments is you think OP believes them to be similar.
Nothing in the West is even closely comparable to what is happening to Russia nowadays let alone the First and Second World War. People that say the West is about as bad as Russia really don't have any sense of what is really going on in the world and really can be defined as "idiots" in the context of this discussion.
A person actually from Russia that also lived in the West usually has a bit better perspective on these matters.
Depends how good the search is. Google doesn’t seem to want to provide me proper results anymore, even very basic image search tasks on google now net you only about 20 results all of which are wrong or useless. Yandex image search actually works.
If you don’t want me to use the Russian tech that helps me get my job done then roll back the Google Search codebase 10 years to when it worked as well as Yandex does today. (Only partially joking)