Oh wow, a Russian lib in Lemmy, that’s a rare sight.

I didn’t express any political positions, just informed you of history.

I’ll answer your comment later, but know this: it is thanks to the USSR that you LIVE.

No. The possible alternative to USSR is some other development, not no development at all. By mostly the same people, just without professional revolutionaries ignorant in anything else on top.

If it wasn’t for the Bolsheviks, your country would either be a colony of France, England and Japan and wouldn’t have been allowed to industrialise.

Russia was industrializing and even politically reforming (that’s how Bolsheviks were a legitimate party) while being an ally of France and England. Unfortunately WWI happened, and then the revolution. By the way, you mentioned whites - the revolution I blame on both these sides, Bolsheviks and proto-fascists. Neither is better than the other.

You can thank your sorry ass that Lenin existed and set in motion what allowed your life to be that of a developed country and not a western colony or a genocided barren German slave field.

You simply don’t know what you are talking about, I’d bet you don’t read Russian.

Kerensky’s provisional government would either have been ousted by the whites (there were attempts already), or would have become colonised by western powers.

Finland wasn’t. About whites again. Why?

Seeing as the whites received half a million troops from western countries to destroy bolshevism

Those troops were there to defend their economic interests, like Odessa port, Far East ports. Not to turn the tide fighting in a war. They basically left when asked.

There is no alternative timeline where Russia was allowed to develop along with Western Europe in peace and to exploit the profits of imperialism in the rest of the world.

Except the one that happened, where USSR did just that, only its colonies were called Central Asian republics and its own Siberia.

US can’t manufacture iPhones, but it can manufacture other things. That you can’t build Versaille overnight doesn’t mean you can’t plant a few flowers and lay one square stone.

I think SPARC CPUs were manufactured in the USA even in 00s.

The whole re-industrialization idea is good, people making something know it’s not magical and wonderful. That an ARM CPU in an iPhone is a relative of an MC in a toy, and that said MC’s internal structure can be grasped in an evening.

Worker jobs in manufacture affect societies very well. Just believing that this is going to happen means believing yet another US administration promising something until its term ends.

will preach to them about Spartan values or something

Spartans kinda invented separation of branches of power. Not all bad things.

But since they were a slave-holding polity, where actual citizens of Sparta were the occupiers and the helot population hated them with passion, that didn’t last for too long.

Also the real world attempt at Spartan values (in philosophy) was the USSR, you can trace the ideas and how it was built architecturally, didn’t work too well. Of the “layers of citizenry” too, their workers turned into poets, their warriors turned into slaves, and their philosophers turned into thieves.

USA in any case just can’t be that, not in this century.

You really don’t know what you’re talking about, are you? The USSR rarely had “shortages”, believe it or not.

MWAHAHAHA, I live in fucking Russia

People having to go on waiting lists to acquire luxury products was a feature, not a bug,

Were it a feature it would match the social adverts and state propaganda, where you have ads, USSR had centrally determined propaganda posters. They didn’t say it was a feature.

that guaranteed better distribution of scarce goods in a limited system.

Oh yes, better distribution via acquaintances and relations and via ministry hierarchies and to employees at work, LOL.

Say, in parts of USSR far from anything with a sea port people would see something like oranges or bananas extremely rarely and mostly given at work.

While someplace south there would be shitloads of those oranges, no shortage at all.

That’s a clear result of bad logistics.

In the Soviet Union, because the basic necessities were extremely cheap (housing costing on average 3% of the monthly family income,

Housing wasn’t bought, it was assigned and sometimes given, so talking about cost is useless. There were people still living in communal apartments (a few families living each in their room, with one kitchen and bathroom and shower for all) all across the USSR in 1991.

Still, housing is one thing I won’t blame USSR for, despite the picture of “a young family having their own apartment” was impossible there, young families would live stacked in a small place with grandparents.

people generally had money to spare.

You clearly don’t know anything about USSR, what you needed wasn’t money (of course it was necessary too and no, many people didn’t), but knowledge, connections, relations and wits to “get” something, by “getting” it means that having money to buy the thing wasn’t enough, having the opportunity to spend it required work.

It was a miserable society requiring more bootlicking than you can possibly imagine to do something you consider a given in your land. Better goods required a permission to buy, you couldn’t just walk in with the money, you also needed a paper that you can buy those boots. And there were stores where you could buy something only via “special rubles” only ministry workers, party workers, foreign communists (like Linus Torvalds’ dad, just so you knew, he was something of a god in that status), such kind of people possessed, but yeah, no other permission required. And there were stores where only military people could buy something, or only workers of some specific area, etc.

And groceries you’d mostly buy on markets or from familiar people growing something etc, not something official likely. Technically breaking the law, LOL.

When you live in a self-sufficient economy where you can’t extract more resources than you do or put more people in factories because employment rate is 100%, producing more of one thing implies producing less of another.

Building so many tanks that most of them just slowly turned into rust after 1991 is a useless direction of resources in your book?

USSR’s economy since early 70s was built on selling oil and gas for everything it needed. All other areas of its economy had negative margin, one can say, and were intended to keep production of strategic goods, like weapons, in place, and the whole system of society.

Of course it was more intelligent than today’s Russia, but praising it is bullshit. The older it gets, the more numerous are its fanboys.

The distribution of some luxury goods like cars, was handled through waiting lists,

Cars in the 70s were less of a luxury good than today. You live in a post-industrial society where cars are really something one can live without.

because the idea wasn’t that a wealthy class would be able to appropriate all the goods and leave the rest without anything (as it happens in capitalism).

You are fucking joking. You really don’t know how it was in the USSR, yes, LOL?

You should have met some of those people whose parents were Soviet hereditary elite and who are now Russian hereditary elite, how their parents and grandparents lived, and how they live. You’d learn to appreciate Elon Musk.

It’s not a shortage, it’s just another more equitable form of distribution of goods than “poors can go fuck themselves”.

It’s “serfs can go fuck themselves” instead of “poors can go fuck themselves”. Poors can stop being poor and sometimes do. Serfs are forbidden from becoming something else, unless they are permitted.

Examples please. Specific ones.

but it works much better than suburban sprawl

“Better” is always tied to a specific criterion, there’s nothing absolutely better than something else.

SWIFT is not the only way to exchange money. The actual power doesn’t suffer from it being cut off. I do. And also from problems with card payments in the interwebs where MC or Visa is expected.

Also I don’t think you realize how much money the Russian gang had in the open and hidden, one can basically say their credit is infinite. Other than trading national resources, they can, unlike American governments, cut local businesses and entities like lifestock to get more. They can do drugs trade, with their size it doesn’t bear any consequences at all, Russian (and Azeri, and Israeli, and which not) embassies have been caught with smuggling industrial amounts of heroine all over the world, nothing followed after those cases. They can just catch people on the streets and sell them for organs and they do. They can extort. They can confiscate. They can enslave.

They are inefficient, for gangsters they are cowards, for mafia they are dishonorable, for cutthroats they are weak, for fanatics they are dirty, for thieves they are tainted. Nobody respects them. But that doesn’t matter when you have such a shitload of resources.

They’ve spent hundreds of thousands of people in the last few years just for fun, to come to the same idea of war that has been found in Syria and in Latin America and in African conflicts without such a process. No way they are this stupid, but they wanted to feel this kind of power because there are not many things for them to want anymore. And also to kill brave people.

sociaIism

This word doesn’t mean anything. It was what they call “meme” today in the late XIX century, and then a political-religious term.

China has a bureaucratic, one can say imperial, system with laissez-faire economy, except for the moments when the empire has a project.

USA has an economy less free in fact due to oligopolies, monopolies and use of lobbying instead of competition, but a freer political system.

Views, not people.

We have been sanctioning Russia for decades

This is not true. There have been plenty of surface, symbolic sanctions, some on those with no power to overcome them and some on those with power, but not enough for them to notice - even if they lose atrocious amounts of money, they have a country and feel themselves kinds.

That wasn’t a blockade or a siege, and if it were, then again those to suffer would not be anyone with decision-making power.

It’s wasteful and kind of amusing but at least they got something done and may even have a city coming next

If something can be unintentionally wasteful, there are fewer steps to make it intentionally wasteful, and it’s not just theft and loss of efficiency, but way to build up power to do more of the same. Which eventually corrupts a society fully. Which is what has happened to the USSR.

Well, this is happening to all of the world now, so nothing specific for planned economies.

Maybe USSR actually did the heroic sacrifice of detecting the minefield ahead.

Like with writing programs, some people prefer exceptions somehow handled with try-catch, and some prefer logically complete processes. If a language supports exceptions, you’ll use them if you want to work with other people, but there are benefits to being strict to yourself too. Same with the USSR - it failed encountering a problem, but that other big powers didn’t fail right then doesn’t mean they didn’t encounter the same problem or did process it correctly.

Russian gov is probably laughing at the free clout they are getting from this ordeal.

If you’d seen people comprising “Russian gov” closely, you’d adore Vance, he’s a warrior-philosopher with a subtle feel of poetry in comparison. EDIT: honest one at that.

far better than the “peasants” in the United States who are not used to the hardship and scarcity that will result

I’m not sure of this, Chinese system has quirks, like subway stations in the middle of nowhere or, say, USSR-like shortages in some places as opposed to abundance in others. In case of all-out mercantilism boogaloo we might see people’s well-being drop harder than expected in many places, and such a quirk might hit worse than “not being used to hardship and scarcity”.

After all, having enough to eat is not just matter of habit.

The backlash exploded on Chinese social media, garnering 140 million Weibo views.

Isn’t this nothing for China?

Putin is like Australopitecus or a Neanderthal, not all Neanderthals lived in Neanederthal, not all Cromagnons in Cromagnon.

It’s a kind of people, thieves evolved enough to steal a country, but not further. It’s our time’s game, how is that problem going to be solved. They themselves don’t see any global problem, only local ones of keeping power and getting more and disposing of those trying to prevent it, and in general doing what they want.

But yes, they desperately hate equality of rights and transparency and distribution of power, and of course Trump is partially a project of others such.

This doesn’t matter, it’s an infestation, one particular cockroach is called Putin, but there are many others procreating.

Дефолта не будет, твердо и четко.

Free and open source software. “Open Source” has always been an attempt to attract big fish, hoping they are not evil, just slow. It’s morally obsolete, while FOSS still isn’t.

And BSD\ISC\MIT understanding of FOSS is even less morally obsolete every day that comes, no expectations that a properly designed virus license will somehow convert the humanity, just letting out seeds of knowledge that will eventually change the world or maybe not. It’s sacrificial, but also very potent.

Anyway, most of those expecting free support are companies making money on products they haven’t spend a dime improving. Or employees of such companies.

The whole world is using Java, but where is Sun? The whole world is using Asterisk (ok, maybe not all of it), but its developers are not millionaires AFAIK.

Entitled script kiddies are just dumb and rude, but I think there’s much less of them than the former group. And they are less persistent, than that former group.

On desktops. All Android UIs are clunky.

Just because Session is a fork of Signal doesn’t mean it isn’t better.

And nobody said that, strawman count one.

Session adds identity protection and it is decentralized.

Just so you knew, everything about security is made much harder and more complex by decentralization. Welcome to the real world, two good things do not help each other, you have to compromise on something.

This statement adds nothing but the vague idea that decentralization helps security, so answered only that.

There is no personal information needed to create accounts; no phone number or email required. There is no metadata storage.

The article I don’t remember was about purely technical mistakes of Session developers in processes inherited from Signal. Mistakes! Mistakes happen in software. While what you are doing is listing features.

Signal requires a phone number to have an account which traces to an identity and metadata that logs time and date.

You are again talking about features and policies and limitations.

Damn right it’s better to use a system where users using their IP addresses store messages in a blockchain, very anonymous.

Had the Trump cabinet used Session instead of Signal, there would be no evidence to the identities of the individuals messaging each other. Signal requires a phone number to have an account which traces to an identity and metadata that logs time and date. The leaked war plans were not from encryption failing, but traceable identities by an insider.

Buddy, that journalist didn’t trace anything, they just were added to a chatroom, saw what’s being discussed there, said oops, informed others and left it.

I’m sure you can set a nickname to your real name in Session too.

In a different time, and a different age, somewhere around year 2000. The Phantom Menace, The Matrix, Peter Jackson abusing LOTR fans. PlayStation before it got boring, Web before it got stupid, Sun Microsystems before it got dead, construction and aerospace and software design alike being done by actually competent people.

Microsoft did the barely necessary to be taken seriously.

This also helps child predators and other traffickers.

Having backdoors and means to create stalkerware and spy after people in various ways benefits those who have energy to use them and some safety. Lack of truly private communications also benefits them. The victims generally have very little means to ask for help without the criminals knowing that.

Human trafficking, sexual exploitation, drugs, all these things are high-value crime. They benefit law enforcement getting part of the pie, which means that law enforcement having better ability to surveil communications will not help against them, - the criminals will generally know what is safe and what is not for them, and they will get assistance in such services.

Surveillance helps against non-violent crime - theft, smuggling, fraud, and usually only low-value operations.

Surveillance doesn’t help against high-value crime with enough incentive to make connections in law enforcement, and money finds a way, so those connections are made and operations continue.

Giving more power to law enforcement means law enforcement trading it in relationship with organized crime. To function better, it needs more transparent, clean and accountable organization, not more power.

But all this is not important, when someone is guilt-shaming you into giving up your full right, you should just tell them to fuck off. This concerns privacy.

This also concerns guns. The reason it’s hard to find arguments in favor of gun (I mean combat arms, not handguns or hunting rifles) ownership is because successful cases for it are rare (by nature, that’s normal, you don’t need a combat rifle in your life generally, your country also doesn’t need a nuke generally, but it has one and many more), and unsuccessful (bad outcome, but proving the need for gun ownership) are more common, but hard to notice, - it’s every time you obey when you shouldn’t (by that I mean that you harm others by obeying).

Point being - no person telling you that dignity should be traded for better life has any idea. You are not a criminal for desiring and achieving privacy, you are also not a criminal for doing the same with means to defend yourself, you are also not a criminal for saying all politicians and bureaucrats of your country are shit-swimming jerks and should be fired, and even demanding it. And if someone makes a law telling you differently, that’s not a law, just someone forgot they are not holding Zeus by the beard.