Comments by "surely you joke, mein failüre" (@surelyyoujokemeinfailure7531) on "Econ Lessons" channel.

  1. There are a great many people here in the USA who have no immunity to Russian propaganda. They say things like, "Eww, Ukraine is so corrupt" without realizing that Ukraine is in the middle of the list and making improvement, whereas Russia is at the bottom of the list (extreme corruption) and not improving at all.
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  2.  @MrKakibuy  That's not how they calculate over there. In this, the Kremlin has gone full Robert McNamara - as in, "We can win if we just throw MORE resources into it!". And you never go full McNamara. Their demographic future was horrific even before this Three Day War .. now Putin has guaranteed that the population of Russia will be half its current level in 50 years.
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  3. Russia is going to find things "interesting" if current trends continue. The steady stream of refineries and fuel depots being taken out is definitely going to leave a skid mark. Now their shaheed drone factories are being taken out, and now Putin is taking soldiers from Moscow and St Petersburg. Surely someone, somewhere in the Kremlin command structure has gotten the hint that the Ukrainians are going to go all the way on this.
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  4. This is fantastic stuff. Thank you for this video.
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  5. Excellent video, and thank you for sharing this. From Kontantin I had heard that SMERSH is being brought back, so it's already happening. We've already seen the rehabilitation of the monuments to Stalin. Gonna get bad over there :(
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  6. Feeling sorry for their kids.
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  7. Folks are going to have to learn the hard way what happens when you hand the city keys to the whiny, bullying serial arsonist who complains that there are fires all over the place and tells you that only he can fix it.
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  8.  @Princip666  .. because data coming out of Russia is so accurate? Pull the other one ;)
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  9. Can someone please send a gpx file of the pipeline route? Asking for my cousins in Ukraine.
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  10. It is good that Ukraine is taking Russian refineries offline, but hopefully they can expand to other forms of infrastructure so as to render industrial Russia much less workable.
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  11. He's from eastern Europe and has been to Russia a bunch of times.
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  12. OP - check out what Russia does to artists in the occupied territories. From attempting to stamp out the local language, to getting the artists in line (for they speak to people through their souls and senses), to deporting so many children to be Russified .. yes, they are at risk of losing their culture.
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  13. @Econ Lessons - have you ever read the book "Ecocide in the USSR"? The Soviets very much abused and polluted their own environment, to the extent where (by the time of the conflict in Afghanistan) they were having trouble fulfilling quotas of healthy young males for military recruitment. Also there is the matter of how they place their industrial facilities. Here in the west we [mostly] use zoning to separate residential and industrial areas, but in the USSR they would place everything together, so that, for example, there would be neighborhoods and schools right next to a factory belching green smoke into the sky at all hours. Living like that, the thought of drinking less vodka probably seemed like a waste of good self-control.
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  14. Another few who can provide interesting windows into how real Russians live and think are Vasya in the Hay and 1420 by Daniil Orain.
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  15.  @EconLessons  That is why the formerly burned-out and defeated WW2 losers (primarily Germany and Japan) later turned into economic powerhouses. Look at how much stuff in your house is of German or Japanese design. Their wealth is in the skills and drives of their people.
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  16. Right. He could step aside 3 days into the new administration, then guess who's president.
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  17. Speaking of games .. has anyone else noticed how seldom (more like never) Russians factor US material aid into their boasting about WW2 victory? I ask this because not too long ago I read the book, "Stalin's War" by Sean McMeekin. The amount of stuff we sent to the Soviets was absolutely stupendous. There are products still on the market today that we designed for the taste and battlefield nutritional needs of Soviet soldiers, such as Spam. We sent weapons, ammo, propellants, explosives, vehicles of many kinds, boats, ship, aircraft of many kinds, trucks by the thousands, oil, lubricants, fuels of different kinds. So while they may boast that it was their mass charging of enemy positions while screaming "Hurrah" that made all the difference, it remains a buried, unpatriotic, and unmentioned truth in the neo-USSR that American stuff (and sht tons of it) is what made their victory possible. Whole generations have been raised on the myth of the invincible red army. You see now how the war goes for them when limited amounts of western material aid are available to Ukraine - and what we give Ukraine presently is nothing like the amounts or variety we gave to the USSR back in the day.
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  18. "Haw-Haw" Carlson went to a nomenklatura store, which is always stocked. A real Potempkin visit.
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  19. Seconding the OP. I go have what adventure I can, which means 2-3 months a year on a motorcycle, camping all over, and I only come back to town to make money so I can hit the road again. I'm at home more in the winter and less in the summer. You can tell exactly what money is by the way longstanding friends treat it when they're doing stuff - when you're way past that stage of keeping score - it's just some disposable commodity you can go get more of when you need it. The experiences you have, the memories you save away, the good times you have .. all of that is priceless.
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  20. Very interesting. Konstantin Samalov (channel INSIDE RUSSIA) has a fresh video out about how far eastern Russia is suddenly becoming China-friendly. Apparently those two nations are in some early stage of coming to a different understanding about the far east. (Japan is not going to appreciate being left out of the deal)
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  21. Old Russian folk saying - "The tallest blade of grass is the first to get cut." And don't even get me into the childrens games, like Blind Cat, that are designed to inculcate the thinking patterns of learned helplessness.
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  22. The only Russian stuff you can find in the US are things like small quantities of canned fish .. old propaganda books from Progress Publishers of Moscow .. the occasional pre-2007 Ural motorcycles which used to be made in Russia (now only the frame and fenders are). Their consumer goods are generally too shoddy for the western markets.
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  23. The dissolution of the USSR was an immediate improvement for the peoples of the republics but was the opposite for the Russians. Unfortunately for them, the Russians got used to taking quite a lot from the republics (especially money, young men for military service, any factory they wanted to relocate, as well as the brightest and prettiest) and had become long accustomed to living that way. Downsizing from the USSR to just Russia caused Russian lifespans to drop precipitously - but it had the exact opposite effect in the republics. Long oppressed, they improved quickly with the removal of the Russian boot from their necks. This is the future that Ukraine is heading into :)
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  24. The OP has it right. Our little Caligula is flailing about for an easy victory to brag about. Trouble is, everyone remembers what an easily-misled dunce he is, and there isn't any low-hanging fruit available to him in that department.
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  25. Exactly the sort of store that Tucker Carlson (the Lord Haw-Haw of the 2020s) visited in order to "prove" that Russian stores are well-stocked.
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  26. This is a recipe for a thriving black market. Expect the Russians to attempt full employment if they're not already doing it. Things there will get .. interesting, one might say.
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  27.  @Green_Moon77  Love working with camelias. They are picky about the sunlight, the soil, the moisture, etc, but well worth the effort.
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  28.  @tanyaroberson9629  Well, if push comes to shove, the parents can always get a free ride to Siberia for re-education and the kids can be adopted out. What's Putin's is Putin's, sure, but what's theirs is really Putin's too.
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  29.  @EconLessons  And if they haven't yet lost everything, there's room for them to regret even more. Wonder how badly they burned the bridges behind them when "fleeing" "too woke" Canada?
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  30.  @alldecentnamestaken  Also, the weapons that take out those artillery pieces are both cheaper than the artillery pieces themselves and can be produced faster and in larger quantities than the artillery pieces they take out. This is Russia's war to lose.
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  31.  @gnice8765  Requiring the use of Ukrainian language for official/public transactions is not the same as banning Russian. Is that the best you have? Oh, and Russia banned the Ukrainian language back in the 1930s. Using your logic, would that have been a cause for war?
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  32.  @daniellarson3068  Back in the 90s I had a Russian office coworker. He didn't last long at the job in the information/records department of a major hospital. Not only could we not get him to show up on time and put in his hours, but he was forever putting vodka into his tea. I think he eventually reformed and became a lawyer later in life, but back then he was a train wreck. Life in the USSR did not condition him to be like what we would consider to be a decent worker.
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  33.  @сырпошехонский  There are also the considerations of distance to market; transportation & infrastructure costs required to deliver to market; etc. As Zeihan notes, areas of Russia are so agriculturally unproductive that they have only one partially-decent crop per year, and are too economically unproductive to afford to build good roads.
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  34. No doubt Gosplan 2.x is still running on some old PDP-11 that was smuggled in long ago ..
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  35. There is all upside and no downside in going that route - which is why it will probably happen. FYI Konstantin Samalov (channel INSIDE RUSSIA) had a video out on that. Seems the state has a new official posture towards China, at least in the far eastern provinces.
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  36. 45 was unsuited to be president long before 2016 came around. So many kept hoping he would change .. and he simply got worse.
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  37. A shame. The only made-in-Russia objects I have ever seen in my life are some old Progress Publishers books and the rare Ural motorcycle. Generally their goods don't make the cut.
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  38. If anyone doesn't know the channel, Vasya in the Hay shows how people live in Russia not very far from major urban areas. Places in permanent state of destruction, as if WW2 ended only last month there.
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  39. Germany too. It is their people that make their strength.
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  40. Correct. The replacement government would be operating under the burden of (so to speak) higher entropy levels.
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  41. Trump's "peace plan" reads a lot like the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact by which Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany divided Poland between them after attacking it.
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  42. I'm voting for those who support Ukraine wholeheartedly - and Ukraine is right at that stage where we were, 250 years back, when England was using violence against us to reclaim us as a colony. France and others supported us back then, and we have never forgotten it. Now it's our turn to pass on the favor.
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  43. Perfect and succinct ;) He stands head and shoulders above his surroundings.
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  44.  @EconLessons  My cousin and I were planning a trip, but then the war came, and two Americans with German parents are probably not the most welcome people there just now.
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  45.  @ftboomer1  There's no doubt that Soviets did a lot of fighting. The amount of material aid is pretty substantial. They would have had a harder, longer struggle without it.
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  46.  @caveman-zd5yv  Russia is not yet out of Ukraine AFAIK, but certainly it keeps getting hotter for them. Crimea is definitely getting very warm now :)
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  47.  @EconLessons  That "low cognitive function" aspect is much on my mind every time I see the content of Vasya in the Hay. Through comments on one of his videos I saw that mini documentary series about the run-down apartment complex people referred to as "the pentagon" :( wish I could unsee it.
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  48. Cool, now I don't need to watch Fox to know what they're saying there.
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  49. Putin is a trained KGB case officer, and GWB was the sucker he took with ease.
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  50. When Putin decided to pursue the agenda of, "I'm going to keep pushing this war even if it destroys our country and fcks our people demographically", perhaps he did not understand the full consequences of that. Ukraine is busy showing Russia what that means. With the loss of so many men in combat and the loss of so many educated professionals who probably will not return in their lifetimes, the country is doomed to even steeper population decline over the next 50+ years. Already this past winter the loss of maintenance/engineering talent caused infrastructure failure in a number of Russian cities. In this regard, Putin is behaving like George Weller did at the Santa Monica farmers market back in 2003, if you remember that. Everything he does to push this causes drastically differential outcomes.
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  51. Sure it is helping the GDP. They do dirty and dangerous jobs, or jobs that many native-born won't do. Those six road workers who died in the Baltimore bridge collapse, for instance, were mostly family men and were all from the Mexico - Central America region. By the numbers, immigrants commit crime at lower rates than the native-born.
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  52.  @gnice8765  So Russia says. But they say a lot of things, those sheep-fking vodka fueled bear wrestling drunk toilet thieves who keep breaking treaties. They sure do whine. Most people know better than to take the whining seriously.
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  53.  @EconLessons  Agree. I have long been thinking that the west is in this primarily to keep Russia tied down in Ukraine and bleeding. It makes sense from the western POV. It would be important to postpone or delay any Russian realization that Ukraine will not be theirs. Metering the flow of western stuff to Ukraine is the spigot for inducing Russia to have hope that they could win. A short sharp quick defeat there would only convince Russia to move its empire-building activities to places that are harder for the west to supply - and probably bring out Lavrov for another highly-punctuated (almost spitting mad) rattling of the nuclear threat. Ideal option for the west is for Russia to exhaust itself there and go home - and that is absolutely horrible for Ukraine :(
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  54.  @snivanov  Too bad Russia seems to produce such people in large numbers. Hope they can turn that around.
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  55. OP - correct. Trump is looking for some easy victory to brag about. Trouble is, there aren't any such easy things available, and everyone abroad remembers how easily misled he is. Unfortunately Trump is still daydreaming about that brief golden age in the US economy for the years right after WW2, when the rest of the world had been bombed to pieces, and no one else had an intact manufacturing base.
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  56. It is not too hard to imagine a future in which the people of two generations younger than Greta Thunberg are really cheesed at the previous generations. We all know the numbers for sea level rise if all of the landlocked ice were to melt.
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  57.  ForageGardener  You may wish to check out the World Population Review page on that subject (homelessness rate) as well as the wiki page. Sorting by high values, homeless rate per 10K population, the following countries rank higher than the USA: Germany, Latvia, Sweden, Greece, Luxembourg, Australia, France, UK, Canada, Turkey, New Zealand, Mexico. As an interesting note, Mexico is ranked #3 at 1,111 homeless per 10K (11%), Canada is ranked #36 at 62.5 per 10K (0.625%), and the US is ranked #55 at 19.5 per 10K (0.195%).
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  58. "Almost NO action stands alone" - you mean?
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  59. Re "Condoning breaking the law is certainly in line with the libs !! " << Guess which party has been supporting the guy with all the felony indictments.
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  60.  @EconLessons  That old black market is surely going to come back with a vengeance. Surely the Russian government hasn't tried to eliminate paper-money transactions? Smuggling people out of there should be a big business. Guessing the government will have to make food and housing contingent on gainful employment - and we know how that's going to turn out.
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  61. It's simpler than that. Fox and other bad actors filled the airwaves with "Democrats are supporting bad things" nonsense designed to sway the easily-swayed types. Which is how the Republicans used a tiny minority, half a percent of the population, to beat the drum about some alleged great evil happening in athletic programs everywhere. (trans kids)
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  62.  @petardetar5191  Ukraine isn't perfect, but they're working on it, whereas Russia is one of the most corrupt places on earth and not getting any better. One is in the middle of the sort list and one is at the worst end of the sort list. Do the math.
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  63.  @tessjuel  I am fine with Ukraine as long as they are improving. Russians, on the other hand, can pat themselves on the back at being less corrupt than, say, North Korea.
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  64. Heh, I like the way he didn't mention visiting St Catherine street ;)
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  65. It honestly gives me the creepies to see you standing with your back to a pool of muddy water in that place. Feel free to throw something in that goes 'boom'.
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  66. Source?
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  67.  @EconLessons  Speaking of our era's Lord Haw-Haw, his latest money-earning venture is to claim that Lyme disease escaped from a lab somewhere.
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  68. Noise. Putin was already told what the result would be: immediate overwhelming conventional attack from all Allied forces. The kind of attack for which the late general Stormin' Norman was known. Russia can't even deal with an autopiloted Cessna coming in from Ukraine .. and they certainly can't deal with a couple thousand incoming cruise missiles that take out every military installation, dam, power plant, pipeline, bridge, railroad yard, etc.
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  69.  @AsG_4_  Not the way we do it in the US it isn't. The first-world parts of Europe are closer to that goal, but then, they have dense fast electrified rail to move people and goods quickly. In the US we're still gung-ho on suburbia/exurbia, SUVs for everyone, and bigger highways.
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  70. Konstantin has occasionally touched on these aspects of the Soviet mentality in his videos, but you'd have to go through all the comments to find it. What a guy. Love his videos also.
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  71.  @lsemenov  If Russia has it all, they would be getting invaded, but instead it's them invading other places to take their children, Russify the place names, ban the Ukrainian language, etc. Russia has outhouses, Ukraine has flush toilets. No one wants Russia's cold country, what with 7% arable land and a declining population. The Chinese could certainly manage it more profitably.
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  72. Europe may be rising to the occasion, but America's Vichy Republicans are hurrying to join the Axis powers.
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  73. Putin is what you might refer to as an amoral murderous bad-actor.
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  74. I'm saddened by the election results, but folks are going to have to learn the hard way what happens when you hand the city keys to the whiny, bullying serial arsonist who complains that there are fires all over the place and tells you that only he can fix it.
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  75. For Russians, the end of the USSR was basically an end to their exploitation of the human, material, political, and economic resources of other nations. They were accustomed to decades of being able to take money, people (the best and brightest), whole companies, basically anything they wanted from "their" empire. The dissolution of the USSR caused a drop in living standards and life expectations in Russia .. but the experience was the other way for the peoples that regained their independence. And they seem to have no interest in returning to life under the Russian boot.
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  76. Seems anyone who thinks VP Harris is "too woke" are the same ones who watch Fox and who think covid wasn't real.
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  77.  @hkuiper100  And Europe basically said, "Meh, we might be chilly for a winter or two, but we were going to quit that Russian energy addiction anyway" and got some sweaters and extra blankets.
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  78. "Food is like dark humor - not everyone gets it." -- meme Stalin
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  79.  @caveman-zd5yv  If Russia is so mighty, why is the Conquest-o-Meter still pegged at 19% after 2+ years? Their performance in Ukraine is only slightly less miserable than their time in Afghanistan. Only now the US is handing out more than just stinger AA missiles.
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  80.  @Алексей-ч2ф9л  Things happen when property is reclaimed by its rightful owners. Some will not be happy, but there won't be much they can do about it.
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  81.  @bmoretinker  Not to worry, I didn't say that anyway.
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