Meh. It's competetive enough. Productivity per hour worked is about the same (sometimes higher) than in US. We just work reasonable hours.
> Those places are not liveable from a European perspective.
If the sacrifices these people make were at least for something that was obviously good - I could maybe understand that. But it's mostly making the world worse (either through financial schemes, addictive social media, marketing, AI, or other pointless bullshit).
Imagine wasting your life slaving away at making better ways to get people addicted to nicotine. That's IT now.
Old-school piloted aviation is good for the first 3 months because you have missile stocks that you can launch from further away with basically 0 risk.
If you have to fight longer than that even US runs out of the expansive stuff and then drones win.
> when Poland attacked the Soviet Union in the 1920s
Eh, it was more complicated than that. Basically a gradual build up from 1918 advancement of Polish forces from west and Soviet from east into the territories abandoned by German armies, then "border incidents" then regular army clashes, and eventually a full blown offensive by Poland and counteroffensive by Soviets.
I guess you can interpret it as Poland invading soviet russia (no soviet union yet btw, and Poland was supporting one of the 3 Ukrainian states that existed at the time).
But yeah Poland wasn't innocent anyway. For example it did the Putin's Crimean trick on Lithuania back in interwar. That was much more clear-cut.
> In any case, Eastern Europe is deeply plagued and poisoned by all of this past violence. No one is able to have a mea culpa moment, no one is able to admit their own guys were bloody murders often killing thousands of people like cattle. No one can admit their ancestors crap.
Poland did mea culpa after WW2. The whole thing is based on recognizing that Poland has been imperialist and did bad things and that it's in the end bad for Poland to continue trying to control these territories because it pushes us into conflict against Russia without the support of the other countries.
On the other hand admiting guilt and renouncing imperialism makes us clearly the lesser evil for the countries in between and gives us buffer zone in case Russia turns evil again (which we predicted, and which did happened).
It was the basis for Polish eastern foreign policy for last 37 years and still is (it's another question for how long it stays that way if far-right wins the next elections tho).
I highly recommend anybody interested in Eastern Europe after WW2 to read Giedroyc and Mieroszewski. They were visionaires. They predicted back in 1950s that USSR will fall and that the independent nationstates that will appear will have 2 choices - go back to chaotic ethnic wars or drop the territorial and historical disputes. And they developed the doctrine in 70s and slowly persuaded opposition in communist Poland so when Poland regained independence in 1989 - almost all the elites bought into it. It was a big bet and it worked very well for Poland.
Sadly nowadays half of Polish political scene starts to move away from that, but that's another subject. Mostly just unchecked far-right propaganda.
In the case of Poland, though, the post-war situation had more to do with Stalin wanting to punish Poland for interfering in Ukraine, as well as put more distance between the core of the Soviet Union and Germany, by seizing Polish territory in the east to give to the Ukrainian SSR, but in exchange and to weaken Germany, most of Prussia in Germany was seized and given to Poland, with the attending population transfers. In any case, with the Warsaw Pact, any revanchist sentiments that may have remained in Poland weren't going to get off the ground.
Stalin forcibly moved millions of Poles and decreased Polish territory by 1/7th, that after hundreds of thousands of Poles were murdered by Ukrainians and 2 out of top 5 pre-WW2 Polish cities become Ukrainian/Lithuanian capitals.
Poles behaved very responsibly after 1989. Let's remember Poland got independent in 1989 and Ukraine/Belarus/Lithuania in 1991. There was a window of a year or so in which Poland had already organised state and army and the eastern neighbors - didn't.
It could have gone very wrong (think - Yugoslavia like) if not for the 30 years of internal discussions about the imperialism and future reconcilliation among Polish oppositional elites.
Giedroyć doctrine was pursued by all the governments since 1989, even if the society as a whole wasn't always entirely persuaded.
For one example Poland accepted all the borders around it after WW2 the instant any country appeared (it was usually the first or 2nd country in the world recognizing each of these countries as they appeared). And renounced any territorial disputes. That's despite the fact before the war Vilnius and Lviv were top 5 Polish cities with huge cultural impact, and despite the fact that Poland lost 1/7th of it's territory after WW2 (even including the territory we got on the west as "compensation"). I will admit we got better land in exchange for marches and forests. But millions of people who got forcibly relocated after WW2 could be much more unreasonable about it than they were.
I agree German society is more reasonable about it than Polish society, but when it comes to elites - it was the opposite for a long time. German eastern policy was much more imperial than Polish one at least till 2021. They tended to ignore EE countries issues over appeasing Russia, treating all the problematic stuff as "russophobia" and dealing with Russia over the heads of the smaller countries (Nord Stream 1 and 2 is just one example, there were also the issues of Russia hacking Estonian elections, blocking the gas deliveries against the contract on purpose to blackmail EE countries, etc.) Germany was ignoring these for the longest time.
Also - Germans waited with recognizing Polish post-WW2 borders and only did it when they were forced to - to get unification accepted. It was surprisingly realpolitik. Similarly - to this day Germany does not provide most Slavic minorities with minority rights despite Germans enjoying German city names, street names, education in these languages, etc in German-speaking Polish regions. It's very weird when you compare the treatment of minorities in practice with the sentiments of the population and the stereotypes about the countries.
So I wouldn't single out Germany as the most reasonable politically regarding EE. Their political instincts were till the last few years to deal with Russia and ignore the small countries.
It's why elephants have thick legs and are barely able to move themselves, not to mention jumping. And spiders and ants have needle-like legs and can lift stuff many times their weight or jump many times their length.
It's also why there's no gigantic walking robots and anything large moves on wheels or tracks.
It's also why so many insects fly and flying drones and RC planes are easy. You can make a pizza box fly if you glue engine with a propeller to it. No engineering required. But big aeroplanes are hard.
no, not really. occasionally the power pickup thingy would get detached from the overhead wires, but the driver had a big pole to hook them up again.
the trolleys were basically replacements for trams, which needed a lot of street furniture in the form of rails, points, etc. which caused problems for the increasing use of cars. but i always liked them (trolleys).
So there's no electricity. But you were prepared, you have cash. You go to the shop to buy something with cash, and their cash register doesn't work, they can't record your purchase or calculate taxes, so you cannot buy anything anyway.
It is helping a little bit, but the benefits of this kind of preparedness are overstated.
I once went on a date where we hit a state-wide power outage. (Let's just say that the date did not go as planned.) We wound up eating at this restaurant, two towns over, that we saw a bunch of cars parked at. Turns out they had gas grills. They were working by flashlight and candlelight, they were cash only, they were adding up the bill on a hand calculator, they couldn't do shakes or french fries, they were pouring soda by hand out of bottles, but wow, were they ever doing business.
When something like that comes, you find a way or the business goes elsewhere. Taxes? Count the cash - that's what you sold during the power out. Multiply by the tax rate, and call it square.
Where I live, any taxes are built-in to the sticker retail price.
In a shorter term crisis, I can absolutely imagine smaller grocery stores near me using a cashbox for takings and recording purchases with a pen and paper. Any government would be highly supportive of this as it would be essential to prevent anarchy.
I think it stops at “after 2 hours the fire alert system stops working and anyway it’s too dark inside so any accident would not be covered by insurance hence we should wait it out”. Cash helps but it’s really overstated.
Most EU countries have widely used alternatives. In Poland you can pay with Blik in basically every card terminal and use it intead of your card at ATM, and for online payments it serves 70% of transactions.
And before Blik most people used online direct transfers for online payments, not cards anyway. It is funny how the leapfrogging works.
The only reason I need a debit card is paying subscription to American companies. I really wish they integrated better.
And to the extent that even when you pay with cards with a Visa/Mastercard logo odds are high that it will go via a national network domestically.
E.g. in Norway, BankAxept handles 80% of in-store card payments in Norway - essentially nearly all debit card payments, despite the fact most debit cards are also Visa cards. The Visa/Mastercard part typically only gets used outside of Norway.
BankAxept is also owned by the same group of banks that owns Vipps, and MobilePay that dominate the mobile payments market in Norway and Denmark as well, with smaller user bases in Sweden and Finland.
And many of these European payment providers (including Blik and Vipps/MobilePay) are moving towards being part of the European Payments Alliance to make these systems interoperable across Europe as well, which would take Visa and Mastercard out of a significantly larger proportion of European payments. Some of those cross border payments are already in place.
Yeah Poland had national electronic direct transfers system across all banks since 90s. In 1989 we had to build the banking sector from scratch after communism so we had a chance to design it right.
The comments and commit messages AI writes is often worse than useless, it's misleading, because it spreads the (very likely to get outdated) implementation details from one place to another.
I'll ask AI to write integration between 3 services, and it'll write the class names from the service A in comments in service B and C if I'm not careful.
I'm pretty sure it's more "AI-Pilled" than this.
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