Toxic community is mostly a meme myth. I have like 30k points and whatever admins were doing was well deserved as 90% of the questions were utterly impossible to help with. Most people wanted free help and couldn't even bother to put in 5 minutes of work.
Happy winter solstice! I used to like Christmas but current version of geopolitics and christo fascists really nerfed the joy of Christmas. Maybe they'll release a patch fix by next year
as Lithuania - this is absolutely not true. Even before Soviet union the Russian empire was exterminating language to the point where there's an entire Lithuanian history chapter on Lithuanian book smugglers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithuanian_book_smugglers
Soviet empire wasn't better either. My great grandmother who was a Lithuanian language teacher was sent to Siberian gulags _for_ teaching Lithuanian. Luckily she survived and lived to a 100 just to prove these disgusting people wrong.
I speak Russian and due to war I've completely abandoned the language and the culture. Russians not showing any resistance is a good litmus test whether culture is worth being involved with and the answer is a clear no imo.
Kinda sad as russian language is quite incredible but any sane individual must sanitize their environment for their own sake and abandoning russian culture is a perfectly reasonable take.
You mean not the level you would feel satisfied, there are plenty showing resistance, they just disappear. Very easy to judge others when you have little risk.
The ones showing resistance are leaving Russia and immigrating to other countries if they can.
You should take pity on them. They are unfortunate people who live in a dictatorship. Russians who tried to protest were arrested and taken in unknown direction by authorities.
Ahem. The Baltics got independence when the Soviet regime collapsed. With all due respect to the struggle of anyone who opposed this regime while it existed, attributing the collapse of the Soviet Empire to the resistance in the Baltics is a bit too much. It was mostly driven my processes internal to Russia itself.
Hence, the weak spot in Russia‘s age old decrying of „NATO-encroachment“: It is Russia‘s neighboring countries themselves that immediately sought NATO-membership
Ah yes all the freedom fighters and culture preservationists had zero impact in securing Lithuania's freedom - what an incredibly dumb, disrespectful and frankly depressing take.
depressing - certainly, disrespectful - perhaps, but dumb? if instead of Gorbachev there had been another Stalin (or the current version of Putin), the empire would have endured that period of turbulence intact, and you would still be part of it.
also, the provinces that didn't fight for independence - Kazakhstan, for example - had got it anyway, whether they wanted it or not at the time.
No your logic is fundamentally flawed because it assumes a job has to reach 100% completion to have an effect. What if soviet empire collapsed precisely because the resistance was too costly.
In Lithuania in particular sabotage was a constant reality of the country for bigger chunk of a century. People were breaking the empire not only via outside resistance and cultural identity preservation but also by sabotaging soviet operations in daily activities. The empire fundamentally became unsustainable and collapsed under it's own weight and no new glorious leader could have saved it.
So whether Lithuanians are free because of their own efforts or because it just so happens that soviet empire collapsed is a fundamentally flawed question as these two things are not only correlating but are causal as well.
You're are feeding into a myth of unbreakable ussr and belittling efforts of former member states.
In any colonizer's strategy, this tactic achieves following goals
1. Instills fear, and demotivates and fragments resistance
2. Internalizes inferiority into a colonized nation
I might've been too hasty assuming you are doing this on purpose. But otoh, saying Kazakhstan is independent... that's rich. The moment Kazakh government thinks about denouncing russian as official language, putin will send a new government. Well, maybe not now, as his resources are strained.
Point is: Kazakhstan is far from independent, and Baltic states have done a lot to gain their true independence.
>otoh, saying Kazakhstan is independent... that's rich.
Kazakhstan is dependent on Russia and there is massive corruption, but for the most part it is independent. Just as independent as any other country with massive corruption.
Also, Russian speaking non native-Kazahk people are not treated so nicely there.
Young Kazakh people indeed started questioning the state of things. And I celebrate that.
At the same time, russia has huge influence over the country. Yes, corruption is exactly how russian influence is usually maintained.
That doesn't contradict my claim, however.
>saying Kazakhstan is independent... that's rich. The moment Kazakh government thinks about denouncing russian as official language, putin will send a new government
at the time of the empire's collapse, Putin was essentially a nobody. Yeltsin and the oligarchs didn't really give a fuck about Kazakhstan, Ukraine, the Baltics, and the rest. they were truly and unconditionally independent, and Russia, given its humiliating defeat in Chechnya, couldn't do shit about it even if it wanted to (which it didn't).
Oh, they gave a lot of fucks.
They ensured russian language has a special status in Ukrainian constitution, for example, despite freedom of speech and non-discrimination were already there.
They ensured the presidential candidate with strong nationalistic views, arguing for severing ties with russia, won't make it to elections.
They financed political parties pulling Ukraine back to russia.
There might've been a temporary loss of russian grip on Ukraine in those turbulent times, but that was just a tiny blip on the scale of whole timeline
I honestly do take pity on russians but I also chose to not engage with russian culture to sanitize my own environment as it's just too ruined for any healthy engagement.
As Russian many crazy supporters of Putin and Ukraine war I met outside of Russia are foreigners speaking English. Sure it's worse among Russians but if you were serious about anti war position you would want to speak Russian more because that helps spread your position. It's not like PRC yet, people can disagree with government without being so afraid
There are several features that are only available if you self host github runners like this concurrency issue[1] that has been open for 3 years with the only solution being to use self hosted runners. So you'd expect at least a new product release that fixes these issues before they start rug pulling people.
I really dislike how minimalism took over the world. The brain is pretty awesome and more information does not always equate to longer processing time. Sometimes more is simply more.
How would Indonesians use cars that cannot go anywhere? It's not about affording but about people/m² compression.
Here's a quick napkin math: a 1.3m² scooter can take 1-3 people, a toyota camry of 8.8m² can take 1-5 people. This gives the humble scooter aprox 3-5 times the space efficiency that of a car.
Not to mention the agility and parking benefits of scooters. There's no way any SEA city could get rid of scooters in favor of cars. Scooters are incredibly under-rated in the west and my favorite tool here in SEA - it's peak practical engineering at scale.
I agree with other commenter and speed is primary danger for scooters. I've been driving for 7 years (mostly in Thailand) and never had an accident as the risk distributions is incredibly obvious:
- stay within reasonable speed
- keep distance
- don't do highways
- project your intentions very clearly with no sudden moves
vast majority of accidents happen when this simple rule set is broken (aside from obvious DUI). If you're driving 40km/h max in a city you are surprisingly safe, especially as scooter traffic culture is very river like so once you're familiar with the area you are basically being carried by the traffic.
Most stats of SEA scooter deaths are coming from really bad driving, as in drunk uncle driving a scooter on the opposite side of the road with no headlights sort of bad driving (sadly very common). The culture can be very unserious about scooter safety when it's quite achievable in practice. It really is an incredible form of transportation when taken seriously.
Since this is scooters who rarely even reach >150cc, it's actually quite safe since it's slow and light. There are always high risk when we want to go to very rough roads that are also full of trucks (common in rural areas), but in well maintained roads like lots of Jakarta, it's mostly fine.
Though it really isn't helped by attitude of people around here who aren't even wearing helms.
I'd take Bangkok over Singapore any time of the day/month/year. There's still a bit of chaos in Bangkok in 2025 but once you spend a few days there and learn how to avoid peak traffic hours and areas it's incredibly charming and charistmatic city with loads of activities and opportunities for all classes of people. Singapore while clean is incredibly dull and characterless unless you're a billionaire.
"Learn how to avoid peak traffic hours." Most people living in Bangkok cannot do this. Also, a very high percent of the time, the Icon Siam area is extremely congested (even on weekends). Yes, you can avoid living in or going to that area, but there are also very few nice areas in Bangkok in general.
Most don't have the luxury of the flexibility to avoid certain areas and/or certain peak travel times (which in BKK are many throughout the day)
> "Learn how to avoid peak traffic hours." Most people living in Bangkok cannot do this
you can absolutely do this. Once you learn how to live there and design your own routes with motorbike taxis, sky train etc you do save a lot of time. It's still quite bad but it's 20 minutes vs 2 hours sort of better.
Every time I tried taking a motorbike taxi, they charged me probably three times more than a local to just travel maybe 1km, not to mention Bangkok has one of the deadliest roads in the world, if not the deadliest. I have explored pretty much all of Bangkok and I don't think the MRT and BTS are as convenient as some people make it out to be. It is built as it is in any other city where it's very concentrated around the city centre but anything right outside of that is terrible.
Also, for two weeks in December you have the Red Cross festival. I challenge you to schedule your day every single day to avoid that mass of hell if you live anywhere in a 2km radius of that. Even if you call a tuktuk or a motorbike, they will absolutely NOT come to get you if they think there's too much traffic, or worse, they will tell you to get off somewhere where it's convenient for them.
Like a lot of foreigners, you seem to have built your life avoiding many things in Bangkok, which you can do in any city, but that's not the point. You are compensating for how poorly the city is built and how poorly the city is ran. A city is not appealing if you have to self-impose so many restrictions and find so many workarounds.
This comment is proof that the parent commenter has never actually lived in either city.
After a while, a city's 'character', 'charm', and 'charisma' all become annoyances. People live, work, go to school, file taxes, use transport, not just visit tourist attractions. Singapore's quality and efficiency of administration is light-years beyond any other country, perhaps bar Switzerland. 6.1 million people live in Singapore; they're not all multimillionaires.
It's hard to put into words how unsafe Singapore makes me feel.
No, literally, it's hard to put it into words. I feel that if I criticize the country, the govt might take revenge the next time I visit. (See also: Bald JD Vance)
Metrics aren't everything. Singapore might be on paper a great place to live, but it could never be a home.
I agree it's hard to explain why Singapore is so dull. I go there every year or so as that's where the closest Lithuanian embassy is and the entire country feels like a shopping mall.
It's a great example how "on paper" metrics don't match reality but it's hardly surprising given that manipulating paper is the entire function of the country.
Lots of people labouring under weak and old stereotypes here...
I wonder what people would think if I said that about London, if I only visited central London and said 'it feels like a tourist trap'. London is huge, as is Singapore (for a city, it's pretty big— it has a larger population than all of the Baltics and the Nordic except Sweden).
Oh, for goodness' sake, drop the melodrama and hyperbole. I take it you haven't lived in the country either.
Singapore is not North Korea, the PRC, or any of the Gulf countries, where people just get disappeared (or sawn into pieces and stuffed into a suitcase) for 'criticising the government' or 'criticising the country'.
I am Singaporean.
I can absolutely call the ruling People's Action Party a bunch of ivory tower-dwelling bureaucrats who have lost touch with the issues of the populace, and are mostly far cry from Lee Kuan Yew's days. I can say that Ms Josephine Teo really needs to keep her mouth shut, and that Mr Ng Chee Meng, MP for Jalan Kayu, didn't deserve to win his constituency one jot. I can say the ruling party regularly gerrymander the districts so they keep winning, even though they deny it. I can say they stifle the development of creative pursuits and the arts with their heavy-handed censorship. I can say they have their vices backwards by being extremely light on drink-driving, but simultaneously extremely harsh on cannabis, which smells horrible but isn't a big problem in terms of addiction or withdrawal.
I can say they are strongly influenced by Anglospheric right-wing Christian evangelism, and they need to root it out before it settles too deep into the country's psyche. I can say they are trying to build a cult of personality of Lee Kuan Yew, who has been dead for 10 years; it's time the country, the government, and the ruling party built on his legacy and moved forward instead of circling around him and his memory.
If you want more criticism, how about actually watching the Singapore Parliament, and deciding for yourself?
Oh, and if you ever decide to drop by, leave the hard drugs at home (including weed), if you want to leave with your head on its neck.
As for metrics: Singapore is both on paper and in reality a pretty good place to live, if you can stand the humidity and heat (frankly, that's the only truly oppressive thing about the place, how ruddy hot it gets). Why do you think people still emigrate to it, from lower-income countries, and from the West?
And finally, 'bald JD Vance', I don't understand how US politics is related to Singapore. They are countries hemispheres apart. One occupies a full third of a continent and has a population of 350 million. The other is a tiny island city-state of 6 million.
The politics of the US have also degraded to something worse than sports rivalries and the discourse is generally of extremely poor quality; it is only a reflection of the competence (or lack thereof) of its leadership and the majority of its people.
I agree with everything you say, however I would note that Singapore has a substantial resident (ordinary definition of the word) population on various types of work permits who, rightly or wrongly, don't feel so free to speak out as you do.
A substantial proportion of those would like to become PR or even citizens, but can't risk prejudicing an already-opaque process in doing so.
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