Maybe the difference is the fact that russia invaded Ukraine and is murdering, raping and pillaging there? Or maybe the fact that most of russian society is actively supporting that invasion? But those are just my opinion.
I guess we'll never now what's the difference :)
Well, American society supports Trump, right? and Trump wants to invade Canada and Denmark.
No, "Russian society" is not a monolith supporting the war of aggression. Just like American society is not all like their government officials and quite many people there do not support the autocratic course. Though yes, even here on Hacker News you can meet supporters of both. Sadly.
Yes, it is alarming that many people in Russia support their government. Just as it is alarming for the US. Or any other autocratic country. This isn't a blanket permission to call "all Russians" or "all Americans" or "all Israeli" or "all Palestinians" or "all immigrants" (insert your pejorative of the day).
American troops are not raping their way through Canada now, are they? They are not systematically aiming bombs at schools, churches, hospitals? They are not committing the war crimes already[1], are they? They didn't kidnap hundred of thousand of Canadian or Danish people, right?
Wth are you on? How is the unhinged and massively unpopular president comparable to the majority of the Russian society consistently showing the support to rape and war crimes?
Small minority of the American residents support kidnapping and trafficking of the other residents and citizens.
These two are not comparable.
[1] unless we add steadfast support for the genocide and war crimes of the Israel, but then we could add all the atrocities Russia supports in Syria and Africa in general.
Are the Russian people being persecuted such that many of them are being bombed in their homes after being given a token amount of time to evacuate, or many are starving to death?
No they're not. Because the Russians are the actual perpetrators.
Just like Hamas is.
Israel is defending itself against that aggression.
And yeah, being the civilian population of a brutal dictatorship that wages war against neighbor(s) without regard to the well-being of its own population sucks. It's horrible.
Should Ukraine stop defending itself because some Russians may get hurt?
Should the allies not have conquered Germany and Japan in WW2, because of the toll on the German civilian population?
Yet whoever provided more aid is irrelevant, since it's not enough anyway. We, as a world, are observing (and doing nothing, for the most part) fourth reich coming into action.
It looks like your charts include things like refugee aid costs, which make up a large percentage of European aid. If you remove these costs and go strictly by military support, which is what we are talking about, then my point stands.
Seems kinda unfair. USA has the biggest military complex, bigger than the rest of world combined IIRC. Naturally, can they deliver military aid faster and better than the rest of the world.
Part of the annoyance, as a US citizen, is that we spend ~3.5% of GDP on military. And that's off a large GDP, so hiding scaling efficiencies that would allow it to run lower while maintaining capability. And much more during the Cold War era!
That "bigger" is bought, and has been every year. We could spend that money on other things: social welfare, health care, etc.
So, excusing Europe's inability to deliver mass military aid, when they've willingly underinvested in their defense industry and equipment for decades, rings a bit hollow.
Yeah, especially when Europeans have mocked the US for decades for spending too much on its military while relying on security guarantees for their protection.
The US does get a lot from that in exchange, it's not like the US is being altruistic and providing security out of the goodness in your hearts, the US never does anything altruistically (as most nation-states do not), the dissonance that even well-educated Americans have as if they were footing a bill without getting nothing in return is frankly baffling.
It's infuriating how many Americans don't seem to realize that we would spend the exact same amount on our military even if Russia, China, and NATO all evaporated tomorrow.
We police the world because being the world police is fabulously profitable. You want to maintain the largest economy in the world? Well then you want to keep up the status quo of "you can do business between most countries, and can ship anything across the world for pennies per pound with near zero risk".
And yet because of exactly that, they are hesitant to take hostile action towards the United States, because of the whole "being starved of imported food and oil" thing that would trivially happen. That's a big reason they've been trying to build so many overland routes for shipping, to offset the inability to protect maritime shipping without US help.
Yet again it's the US explicitly spending money to keep someone dependent, similar to Russia's selling cheap gas to put economic pressure on the west.
China and the US really really really don't want to go to war, because even an unsteady "peace" between us is so goddamn profitable. But the US wants everyone to be able to sail by the Chinese coast without harassment, and China wants to own the entire sea north of Australia so.....
Fair in what way? My point isn't about who is better. My point is that the US has been an extremely crucial partner to Ukraine, in terms of countries, _the_ most crucial partner. My feeling from the interactions on this forum is that Europeans do not see it that way.
Can you win a war with weapons alone? Can a nation survive with military aid alone?
USA is not the only crucial partner for Ukraine in this war, they are the crucial partner in a specific area. That's why it's unfair to undersell the crucial partners in other important areas. Everyone is doing their thing to support in the areas they can give support. But not everyone can give the same support, and not everyone should support in areas already covered by others.
That seems kinda unfair? You don't think it's unfair that the US invests in defense for its own strategic reasons but also happens to greatly benefit the rest of the world while the rest of the world can invest in social programs that only benefit themselves all to turn around and criticize the US as soon as that plan seems short sighted? I think that's pretty fucked up personally.
That's for the US to decide. Outside of fair share of NATO dues, the rest isn't for Europe to stick its nose in any more than the US doesn't stick its nose in how Europe spends its budget.
Sure, that is unfair. But what is happening right now is the US having dragged its European partners into a very aggressive position in the Ukraine war, suddenly decides that it no longer cares about it. So Europe has a half dead crazy Russia on its door, has to fill in for the lack of US aid and might very well have the US retreat from NATO when Trump takes office.
Well yes, a big chunk of the world relies on the US to provide military power. How dare the US actually be good at doing the thing that the world asks the US to do.
You are not rephrasing, you are moving the goal posts, you said:
> The US has provided more funding to Ukraine than the world combined by a large margin, and the lesson you take away is that the US is somehow at fault.
No, it has not provided more funding to Ukraine than the world combined, the EU by itself has provided more military aid than the US already.
You're just wrong. It's not hard to admit that, trying to save face just made it worse...
The EU's military commitments narrowly edge out US military commitments before a new bill is approved. This does not take away from the larger point of the US not being a bad partner to Ukraine or that the US cannot be trusted as a partner.
I don't disagree with the overall point you are arguing (AKA I agree with you), but comments like this are of no help to the conversation. I get a strong sense from this and other comments in this thread that you might be anti-American, which strikes me as biased and small minded thinking for someone that seems so intelligent.
This is not intended to be an insult, but be better. There are plenty of forums to act like this on, and HN isn't one of them.
"we" are doing nothing because "we" are not under attack; Ukraine did not have defense pacts with other countries, and the military aid took a while to get started because of the risk of Russia seeing it as hostility towards them, further escalating the conflict.
If it escalates, it will escalate bigly. If Russia attacks a NATO country, article 5 will / should kick in and the combined military force of 31 countries (with or without the US) will combine their strengths.
But nobody wants this to escalate further, because nukes. Nothing will matter anymore if Russia decides to use them. It doesn't matter if they lose hundreds of thousands of people, material, and are completely humiliated, as long as they have nukes, "we" cannot strike back.
At this point, wishful thinking that the Ukraine conflict seizes up again, keeps the Russian army occupied, and things cool off slowly. Or that the Russian leadership is replaced, but there's no guarantees it would be replaced by someone who would stop the war.
Actually the USA does have a defense pact with the Ukraine. Ukraine gave up its nuclear bomb and destroyed its strategic bombers with the promise that it would be defended by the USA and Russia. Now that Russia stept out of that deal, it does not mean that the USA no longer has the moral obligation of its part of the deal.
I stand corrected, the Budapest memorandum is not a defense pact. The Ukraine government acted in good faith that they would not be invaded. Now that it has indeed be invaded by one of the countries signing the memorandum, it does give the other parties a moral obligation to step in. The USA is now showing to be an unreliable party and I think that this weakens the position of the USA in the world.
What are you going to do with Kaliningrad if you occupy it? Are you going to hand out EU Schengen passports to its residents? You may get a large line for ingress if you're going to swap Russian passpors for EU ones.
If you don't, Russia will politely ask to have its territory back and would get that eventually.
Bottom line, stop thinking about the land as if it was not full of people settled there.
Honestly if you offer residents of Kaliningrad some free EU passports on condition they need to move out of Russia I pretty certain like 90% of them will gladly accept.
Because Germany has no interest in Kaliningrad and Poland has no (or a very weak) claim, I'd say should it come to that, Kaliningrad will be demilitarized and then "given back" to Russia.
And the argument was about nukes, in the event NATO invades Kaliningrad because of missle sites, not if it should or would.
Funnily the staunchest supporters of Putin in Germany (Nazis) would also be the only ones who would like to have Königsberg back.
The easiest solution to this war is sitting Zelenskyy down with Putin and striking a compromise and forming a peace treaty, if the U.S. war mongers allow it.
Like the last several ones, before or after Russia invaded Crimea?
Or the one where Russia guaranteed Ukraines sovereignty if they would give up nuclear weapons? (Russia playing the long con, got what it wanted, Ukraine free of nuclear weapons, ready to be invaded).
The nukes deal wasn't about granting sovereignty. Ukraine had sovereignty since the formation of Soviet Union over 100 years ago(Ukraine even retained it's seat in UN, upon founding).
That deal was just about nuclear proliferation. It was well reasoned at the time and had no special conditions.
That being said - the idea that Ukrainians are a "fake nation" has been a prominent talking point in Russia my entire life.
Russia signed the Budapest Memorandum [0] ("guarantee Ukraines sovereignty") so Ukraine would sign the Lisbon Protocol [1] ("give up nuclear weapons").
Ukraine gives up nuclear weapons, Russia guarantees Ukraines sovereignty. Simple:
"The Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances comprises three substantially identical political agreements [..] to provide security assurances by its signatories relating to the accession of [..] Ukraine to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons [..] Respect the signatory's independence and sovereignty in the existing borders" [0]
What about the next war? Have you listened to Putin? Ukraine is an artificial nation according to him and Russia has the right to reabsorb "Little Russia". How do you compromise with that view?
I listened to him speak for two hours. Hundreds of thousands of people have been killed in the war, how many more lives should be sacrificed to avoid compromise? What about prioritizing the value of human lives over drawing lines on a map between two very broken, very corrupt countries?
I don't really get how you can even begin to trust anything that Putin promises or signs.
Russia has a long tradition of treating treaties as scraps of paper, and they have a recent history in this regard with Ukraine.
Their long-term aim is to absorb Ukraine and exploit its industrial and agricultural potential for further imperial expansion. The next will be the Baltic countries and after them Central Europe.
Whatever peace will be signed now will last precisely as long as it takes Russia to rebuild their offensive capabilities for the next round of war.
All the dead are fault of Putin and his imperial ambitions. Our only choice is whether to submit and become serfs in a neo-Russian empire, or fight back and help Ukrainians fight back.
I'm not sure how anyone begins to trust our own military or elected Establishment leaders who start and fund endless frivolous wars for decades, for greed, leaving the Middle East absolutely laid to waste.
Bush, Obama / Hillary, and Biden are no different than Putin, if not far worse. They deserve no more trust from Americans than a serial killer who took out members of your family for fun. They are reckless abusers, for greed and continued power.
If I were a Middle Easterner, I would agree. Or South American, for that purpose.
(With one huge caveat, both the Middle Easterners and the South Americans are perfectly capable of starting various shit themselves. Don't deprive them of agency by painting them as blind and obedient puppets of Washington. Especially the Middle East is a very ancient civilization with a tradition of backstabbing and betrayal going deep into the Antiquity. They don't have to learn that from some Westerners.)
But in the context of European security, the main problem of the last decades was either the USSR or Russia, not the US. It was Soviet tanks that rolled through Czechoslovak cities in 1968 to crush our attempt at political independence, not American ones.
Context matters, and for former Soviet Bloc nations, Americans are an ally against potential reestablishment of Russian rule.
But today's Russia is explicitly against the Bolsheviks and any form of the USSR altogether. Russia has moved well beyond that, so it isn't a matter of reestablishing former Russian rule under the same horrible terms as before. They are prospering now, are they not?
In 2023, a trusted, world-renowned expert — Bill Gates — stated that Ukraine is one of the single most corrupt nations in the world, and that he feels very sorry for the people there. [1] That says a lot, doesn't it?
Zelenskyy shuts down churches, imprisons political protestors and American journalists, and launders money back to the U.S. war machine after we "fund" them every month or less — to the order of $113 million per day now. How could anyone not see clearly what's happening there? It seems that people are so blinded by their hatred for Russia, that what the people are suffering in Ukraine on Ukraine's own accord isn't enough of a problem, despite how gaping it is.
Russia may be explicitly against Bolsheviks (though recycling the Soviet anthem!), and Putin's Russia is indeed more akin to the former tsarist Empire than to USSR, but the tsarist Empire was fairly evil, too. Just ask the Poles or the Jews. Russian empire didn't grow to its huge size by trade and friendship, it was conquest.
Ukraine is corrupt. So what? Ukrainian corruption is a threat to no one. Not a single nation from Finland to Bulgaria considers itself vulnerable to Ukrainian military aggression, because they aren't an imperial nation and don't seek to dominate others. They were perfectly fine within their 1991 borders and never attempted to annex any extra territory by any means.
It is Russia's problem, in the words of great Václav Havel, that it does not know exactly where it ends.
All the hatred for Russia stems from their former heavy-handed rule of other nations. If they sincerely tried to make amends, it would slowly go away. They are now trying to rebuild their former imperial system. OF COURSE that nations which escaped their tyranny once are going to hate them.
It is freaking simple: we, as in Estonians, Latvians, Poles, Czechs, Rumanians, Ukrainians, Georgians etc. DON'T WANT TO BE THREATENED OR ATTACKED BY RUSSIA. That's it. We have had enough experience with Russian rule. It is primitive and brutal at the same time. Never again.
"Estonians, Latvians, Poles, Czechs, Rumanians, Ukrainians, Georgians etc. DON'T WANT TO BE THREATENED OR ATTACKED BY RUSSIA."
Exactly. Last time Russia and Germany signed a deal to cut Eastern Europe in half, then each invaded countries on their side of the line (and cut Poland in half). Sadly this is not how it is teached in Russia. Which is one of the reasons for what is happening now.
Russias goals haven't changed. Luckily Germany (currently) wants nothing of it.
After Ukraine baited them on their border, right? Nobody can say Ukraine nor the U.S. didn't want this war in desperation to poke the hornet's nest that is Putin, used as a means to obfuscate abuse around the funding of the war.
The U.S. was heavily active in 2014 onward helping Ukraine prepare for this. Specifically in 2016, as shown in this video [1].
Baiting? Are you seriously insinuating that Ukraine was about to invade Russia and thus, as Putin claims, they had no choice but to attack? How naive one has to be to actually believe it?
US and Europe were not (and sadly, are not) doing nowhere nearly enough in providing defensive weapons to Ukraine, if they had, this invasion would have been stopped long ago.
Invade? Absolutely not -- they would have no chance.
Poke the hornet's nest? Yes, I'm saying that. This was a collusion between the U.S., Ukraine, and other globalist EU nations to make Russia look bad using their mass media machine to spread lies about a senseless war, use it as cover to launder money around, and punish / attack a nation (Russia) that isn't submitting to their globalist agenda -- just like they did to Iraq, and several others who wouldn't comply, on the basis of not accepting the U.S. petrodollar.
Why is Russia forming BRICS with nearly half the world? To escape from the clutches of the U.S. empire strangling them.
"Make Russia look bad" - what does that even mean? I'm country A, country B writes bad things about me in their media, so I will invade them, bomb their electricity grid and try to overthrow their government - by what logic is that a valid casus belli?
"Isn't submitting to their globalist agenda" - again, what does that mean? As you yourself point out, nobody was planning to invade them. Russia is the largest country in the world by land mass with abundant natural resources - oil, gas, diamonds and other riches. But instead of focusing on improving lives for ordinary russians, they want to expand that "russian world" which only brings death and destruction.
See this [1] for a perfect example of the imperial mindset - Putin saying that "Russia’s borders do not end anywhere"
Mariupol siege was completely flattened with hundreds of thousands dead from constant shelling.
While IDF in Gaza was fighting building to building with most of the population evacuated. The destruction of Gaza you see is following controlled demolition because of the tunnels below (basically every house).
"controlled demolition"? Yes, very controlled, especially when we see outright admission by their officials that they're after "damage, not accuracy". Indiscriminate shelling and bombing is very obvious and has been recorded for history to remember.
"we would already be seeing Poland and other neighboring territories taken over by Russia with great ease"
The same ease as now in Avdiivka? It took five months of constant bloodshed for Russians to gain the upper hand.
"Putin wants to reclaim only a small fraction of Ukraine where the people in those regions have openly stated wanting that very thing to happen, due to Ukraine's corruption and oppressive policies."
I don't even know what to reply to this. Hitler also ran fake referenda. BTW That small fraction of Ukraine is something like a sixth of its total territory, plus multiple important cities and most of the coastline.
I never really understood why people believed Hitler when he declared in 1938 that Czechoslovak Sudetenland was his last territorial demand, but hey, here we go again.
"Kiev is practically spotless when you compare it to Gaza"
And? There was never ground fighting in Kiev proper, given that the Russians didn't manage to enter the city, and both Ukraine and Russia have enough of AA to keep each other's air assets at bay.
Look at Bakhmut or Avdiivka, places of actual fighting and former homes of tens of thousands of people. They actually do look a lot worse than Gaza. How did you miss those cities when looking for context and perspective?
What geopolitical motive does Russia have for a costly, and likely unsuccessful invasion of Poland? If your argument is "Because Putin is Hitler", you're not really making logical or coherent arguments.
> specially the Middle East is a very ancient civilization with a tradition of backstabbing and betrayal going deep into the Antiquity.
As a "Middle Easterner" (a colonialist term by the way), I didn't realize that the "Middle East" was one conglomerate culture. Thank you for teaching me about my history /s
Civilization is an umbrella term that usually covers multiple cultures.
We also speak of Western civilization, even though it doesn't equal to one conglomerate culture either.
As for 'colonialist' term ... sigh, do I care how people call Europe on Arabic or Turkish forums? Every cultural region has some lingo that reflects its history.
'Europe' itself is a Phoenician word that means "country of sunset". From their perspective, it was. Hereby I am forgiving old Phoenician colonialists (and they indeed colonized much of the Mediterranean) for naming some continent according to their local perspective. That is what people tend to do.
So your statement is a tautology. You'll find good and bad people in any group; there's nothing inherent in "middle eastern civilization" that promotes backstabbing, and in fact you'll find the opposite.
Yes, definitely. I had undiagnosed adhd until the age of 34yo, so the only way I could focus on a project was with an immense amount of caffeine, sugar and short deadlines.
When I took up a project, I knew I had a limited amount of time before my body says it needs a serious break, and before I lose interest in a subject.
Since I got meds, 6 years ago, I can finally focus whenever I want to, and I experiment more with 9 to 5 kind of work. But I still find it less appealing - very difficult to do seriously deep work this way. If I find something I'm passionate about, I tend to focus all my attention on it.
The biggest challenge is that it's almost impossible to build a real startup this way. And with age, it's more difficult to find people to work with. When both me and my peers were students, it was ok for all of us to just skip school or live off savings for a while and build cool stuff. Now, most people my age have regular jobs and families, so they won't take 3-6 months off to build something cool.
You don't ever see anything about the invasions of Grenada or Panama, let alone all the murk that the US does with Haiti, heck Puerto Rico is not even a state but a US Caribbean colony, the US used to torture the separatists leaders of Puerto Rico with Radiation
It really was! I believe they were doing well, growing at a steady pace. Another part of the puzzle was that client relationships were long, over years, so if we wrote bad code it was us that would have to deal with it later. The clients were typically larger, which helped to that end.
We did take on a rushed project at one point, so there is a good comparison in that project. It shipped, but everyone was unhappy, some key people left and had to be re-hired for. It triggered a very transparent discussion roughly titled "let's figure out how to never do that again" and to that end they curated the clients more carefully, and put in some checks to see if projects are a good fit.
But I understand that is probably unique, and at previous jobs the "good enough to make money" mantra has worked out okay.
I think when your software domain is complex and rapid, it pays to have sound architecture. When it is simple, or slow to change, it doesn't matter quite as much.
I've clicked the link out of curiosity. Ended up chatting with one of the listeners for 2 hours... Well, actually almost all the chatting was done by me, listener was...listening. :) Man, it feels good to spill it out!
Great service, thank you!
Maybe the difference is the fact that russia invaded Ukraine and is murdering, raping and pillaging there? Or maybe the fact that most of russian society is actively supporting that invasion? But those are just my opinion. I guess we'll never now what's the difference :)
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