This looks like a very classical and well-known case of executives copying each other.

That other company is doing layoffs and seems fine? Reports the line going up? Let’s do it, too!

The guys across the street are already implementing AI? Investors love it? Let do it, too! We may have taken a risk with blockchain, but this one is just sure to work better for us!

The big name is going for the money, predator-style, and they’re still afloat? Finally, we can cash out, too!

There are a lot of things illegal in Ukraine that are weird. One is dual citizenship;

Ukraine is, unfortunately, hardly a special case in that regard.

Looking at the most “powerful” passports around the world, you’ll see that most of them tend to follow the same restriction, although some more exceptions, whether perfectly legal or just people being more laid-back.

I have no idea since when the same restriction is in place for the Ukrainian passport, but it would make sense to me if they imposed it after deciding to join the EU. Maybe without it, there would be a greater number of people potentially reaping the benefits of holding a member passport without having to contribute much?

I’m just grasping straws here, really.

You’re welcome and пожалуйста. I consider my English skills one of (if not the) most important assets of mine and try to use it to offer some perspective from within the anti-war/Putin population; I can’t say I’ve seen many other Russians doing the same in places I visit, so I try to be the voice when I can.

Sometime ago I considered making a blog for that kind of thing or something, but ultimately fell out of it as I doubt I’d keep it well enough to gain proper traction; and it’s much more work than writing comments and talking to people on a more personal level, which may divert a huge chunk of my attention, too, resulting in a clouded perspective.

It is, partly. Nadezhdin has been part of the Russian politics for decades, authored and co-authored many laws and took part in many initiatives; him running for president is basically him exercising his passive right to be elected, but as he himself said, he’s been thinking about running for president since Summer 2023.

He’s been invited to the Russian propaganda TV shows numerous times as a liberal scapegoat of sorts - they’d just try to portray him and people like him (anti-war or anti-Putin or both, basically people who want freedom and peace for their own country and for everyone else), often failing, as there never was any clever way to make him shut up; the man knows many of Putin’s cronies because he’s been in politics for that long, and he’s very smart with what he’s saying because he knows what kind of narrative gets you assassinated or jailed.

From everything I’ve heard from him, Nadezhdin just wanted to act in the most influential way he saw for himself and for others, coincidentally being the safest one, too. He had hesitated at first, but quickly joined the race to get the signatures after Duntsova got turned down, and he really believes in change and progress and a brighter, non-violent future for Russia. It’s a good thing, too, because as we’ve seen times and times again, resorting to violence to deal with one regime in hopes of building a new, better system for each and for all is a sure way to attract and amass even more people who should never bear anywhere near any sort of power, and do so precisely in and around power, ultimately leading to greater terror.

To me, Nadezhdin seems like a pragmatic man who can believe, which is important, and he readily pursued the chance to become a candidate for the elections because of it, but also because he did speak, extensively, with the current Russian opposition (the ones that haven’t been murdered or jailed, at least) and cooperated with them (one would be more accurate to say that it was vise versa, actually, so props to them putting weight on the attempts and spreading the word, as well as assisting him during the process) under some shared understanding that, in times of great despair and misery and seemingly inescapable reign of darker, evil, greedy, murderous forces, when calling for peace and life is a crime, when people have been carefully manipulated into disunity and feeling small - it’s in these times that it’s important to do something to make people realize that they’re not alone, they’re not few, but that they’re many, that there’s something they can try and do to show the regime that they do not agree with it, nor do they want it.

Apart from this pursuit, very important and uplifting and very much needed by the Russian populace evident by the last several weeks, there is also an important factor of actually putting pressure on the regime - despite what many may believe, the current regime doesn’t completely ignore everything; very few regimes do or can, actually, but the Putin’s regime especially so, as we’ve seen time and time again through various displays and in various forms. Of course, it is far from perfect, but it’s not insignificant or minuscule for many reasons: it makes the regime move under pressure and uncertainty, which leads to rushed decisions, which leads to mistakes, which leads to opportunities… which is ultimately good for everyone, as without Putin and his regime, there is no war, for he’s the sole “benefactor”, if there’s anything of benefit left for him in this stupid mistake.

Last but not least, when the regime sees that some “irrelevant and small” candidate manages to gather an absurdly large and arbitrary number of signatures (try and find another country where you need to get 100,000 perfectly prepared signatures along with names and addresses and passport numbers before you can run for president), with lines of people popping all over the country despite what felt like its coldest days of the year (for larger parts, at least), then you know that there’s still a significant chunk of people that won’t be happy with, say, another broad mobilization or martial laws or anything like that - for every person who managed to go and leave their signature (along with some sensitive personal data), there’s who knows how many more people who felt too scared or simply couldn’t leave their signatures because there weren’t any collectors or posts near them (some had to travel 100+ km, some don’t have the opportunity, as Russia’s very, very big), and there’s even more people who probably could’ve signed if they had known about the whole thing if Nadezhdin had access to TV and radio to spread the word, as it should be during election such as these (in more democratic country). Nobody can say for certain what’s going to come out of these last several weeks, but Putin and his lapdogs surely have enough to consider now - and a lot of stress that, again, will ultimately help in turning things for the better.

Lemmy, too, has algorithms that determine what you see - how many upvotes a post has, how many comments, how recent, etc. The communities you subscribe to may have some high-quality, niche posts that you’re very likely to miss because they’re overshadowed by bigger, more active communities where posts simply gain more traction - RSS lets you circumvent that.

Catered feeds, for example.

You can create a feed that only includes Lemmy communities dedicated to a specific topic - like only those related to video games in some broad sense. Or a news-only feed.

It’s much more convenient that just subscribing to everything you’re interested in and then trying to filter out on our own (good luck not forgetting stuff), as you’re basically on the algorithm’s mercy as well.

My bad, I see now.

Still not a Slavic problem primarily, as far as I know - it’s just the Russian language being kinda bad at spelling, especially when it comes to Ё. Learning German made me realize the true value of Umlauts and clear, consistent rules for using them in a given language with definite alternatives for cases when they can’t be used as is, such as email addresses and other tech areas dominated by the Latin/English alphabet.

I’d make it a strict rule to never use Е instead of Ё - they’re not interchangeable in any way; maybe there was a period of time when typewriters couldn’t conveniently take this letter into account, but in the digital era, with its greater ease of typing, there’s really no excuse in going with Е instead of Ё, ever. If that was the standard, I’m sure some relatively short time in the future the inconsistent transliteration could be much less of a problem for all the Russian-native Artyoms out there.

As for the international documents… I believe a proper standard would suffice, one that would define proper and correct translations for names. There probably is one (or one thousand) already, but it doesn’t seem like it’s that definitive after all.

Diacritics: the bread and butter of the Slavic languages.

My source of credibility is that I’ve studied linguistics and translation/interpreting and got a BA on the matter, so I’m not talking out of my ass entirely.

Get ready for some dorky read.

Artyom is pretty much the expected translation, regardless of the original spelling: like with Sapkowski becoming Сапковский in Russian, which may not be what the original pronunciation or spelling intended, but that’s fine, because it’s intended to be used in a different language.

If you want to follow the spelling example, then every language is fucked because King George is very far from the Russian equivalent of Король Георг, let alone the fact that individual vowels and consonants and then their combinations are all, in fact, different sounds between languages. None of it means a translation isn’t accurate or right - it’s about ideas and legibility, comprehension achieved with the means of a target language first and foremost, no matter the limitations or differences of the source language.

Back to Artyom, regardless of the spelling I Russian, either Артём or Артем, you pronounce it the same, so it makes most sense to spell it as Artyom in English.

@x4740N@lemmy.world said languages should translate words phonetically, but that’s far from practical or comprehensive in general - but it has applications in proper names, and even then there are exceptions to handle stylistic or purely linguistic aspects.

And none of that is strictly a solely Slavic problem. It’s not even a problem, actually.

Very much this.

The suffix at the end of that last name is also causing some trouble:

• In Ukrainian, it’s Зеленський (note the “ь”, a silent letter supposed to soften the consonant before itself)
• In Russian, it’s Зеленский (no “ь”, the “н” is not soft)
• In Polish, it’s Zełenski (no “й” or anything similar, resulting in a different pronunciation again)

Now compare it to the last name of a Polish author: Сапковський (Ukrainian), Сапковский (Russian), Sapkowski (Polish).

Ukrainians, Russians, and Poles all have examples of last names like these, but the rules of our languages dictate that we handle them differently, even in terms of spelling and pronunciation; for people not speaking a Slavic language naturally, it understandably is a nightmare, as neither spelling is objectively the right one in terms of linguistics.

For now, it’s probably best to either go with one of the following:

• Zelensky or Zelenski, akin to Polish equivalent spelling of similar last names
• Zelenskyy, as seems to be the more or less official or judicial spelling of this Ukrainian last name

As messy as it seems, I believe it’s going to stay the same. Romanization of the Russian language is already an equally messy phenomenon despite multiple efforts to standardize the process, yet it only resulted in several ways of tackling the difficult cases, which is of very little help; Ukrainian seems to be an even more complicated case for romanization as it has some features that would either require intricate rules to create accurate spellings, or make greater use of diacritics.

Doesn’t change that much, really.

Russia, as a country, does not trust many foreign institutions already - at least the western ones. They’re considered unfriendly, undesirable, and dangerous.

At the same time, Russia, as a country, is comprised of many people, including the ones that either directly represent its government in the form of deputies, ministers, and many other official figures, or use the wealth they’ve built in Russia through schemes and theft and murder and other crimes to build their stashes in democratic countries that have strong institutions and slow bureaucracies to protect their assets.

Most of these people have mastered doublethink, being able to switch their work and private personalities with ease: Get to the government office and pretend you absolutely hate everything to the west of Russia’s borders (except Belarus, maybe), including their values, happily vote for laws opposing or hurting them (mostly because you were told to “from above”), make anti-western speeches and so on and so forth - but once you clock out, you check on your kids in London, check on your French business, check on your real estate in Spain.

They live very double-agent type of lives, and will keep living them that way. None of the people in power have any incentive to make Russia a self-sufficient country in any metric, because that’s not what they wanted to be in power for, not even close - so Russia will always be interested in foreign institutions and markets and investment, because isolation is definitely not in its interest, nor is it appealing to anyone in power.

As seemingly morally correct as it is, you’re just talking about way too powerful markets here to dismiss that way. Maybe we, the Lemmy/fediverse crowd, may want and welcome it, but neither the governments nor a large enough portion of their electorates would sacrifice even relative economic comfort and their standard of living for that.

Not to mention that uncovering who’s done what atrocities is a very big Pandora’s box, opening which either blocks everyone from trading with each other, or leads to heavily-manipulated decisions and results as to whose atrocities justify embargoes and whose don’t.

This whole things is neck-deep pile of shit to say the least.

I don’t know shit about finances or economics or markets, but this seems to make sense. That’s probably why it makes sense to me in the first place.

It seems similar to mutually assured destruction, like the one that a nuclear arsenal poses, acting as a deterrent to all the parties involved. If you harm their market, they harm yours, and in this day and age, it’s more disastrous than ever, perhaps.

The bigger problem is likely spread out across smaller markets, which, combined, net you a solid benefit and profit, but if some of they start using such precedents as an excuse to seize your assets for only their benefit and profit, they might lose less than you do, ultimately proving the concern in @AlteredStateBlob@kbin.social’s comment above.

We might as well be discussing it in way more detail than the decision-makers here, as yeah, setting precedents that could (or could not) potentially harm their profits and leviathan wealth is a no-go for them.

One of the Russian politicians calls this whole tendency “acclamation” - Putin is basically doing it to make everyone nod in agreement, saying that they at least don’t mind him being in power; long story short, it a mental gymnastics move to push lies about legitimacy and support around the country and outside so that everyone argues over nothing instead of acting.

And then beatings on top of that.

NOTE: I turned to a lot of ranting after 2nd paragraph, so don’t read anything past that if you’re only interested in learning what we, the anti-war Russians, think.

I have only ever heard the former from - for the lack of a better word - the westerners; more specifically, I’ve only ever heard that from non-European westerners, as every German, French, Pole, etc. only ever had a different idea of why the war ever happened, but nothing about resources or any other nonsense like that. I’ll try to respond as best as I can, and some things may look like I’m excusing myself or others, so please bear in mind that it’s just my attempts to explain some of the most bizarre things that people may see coming from Russia in these times.

The anti-war Russians either don’t rationalize it all, mock the initial talking points (“No NATO expansion!”), or talk about Putin’s ego and his long history with Ukraine. I’m in the latter camp: I believe that Putin wanted to have Ukraine in his pocket the same way he has Belarus right now, but he failed multiple times, which ultimately led to the Euromaidan protests; at that point he just got pissed I guess and tried to bruteforce some influence into Ukraine or something, first annexing Crimea (overtly), then sending various agents and actors to the Southeast of Ukraine (covertly at first), and eventually starting a full-blown campaign hoping for a quick win and patriotic points akin to Crimea… we all know it failed, and it’s good, but I still doubt it ever could have an effect that is in any way similar to the Crimea annexation because Putin managed to sell it as the will of the people over there, having enough material to force the “not a shot” narrative of the peaceful annexation; I just think that even if Putin conquered and held the entirety of Ukraine in 3 days or less, the way things happened already was covered in blood, and that’s not very popular, neither here, nor anywhere else; then there simply was more blood and more suffering that was much more prominent and noticeable to the people living in Russia because, well, it’s Ukraine of all places, the amount of all kinds of relationships meant that none of the killings and pain could ever be hidden or downplayed. I really doubt Putin ever wanted it take any longer than a couple of weeks, but oh well, here’s what 20+ years of rampant kleptocracy gets you, I guess.

One could argue there’s always been support for the war effort and the anti-Ukrainian sentiment, but all of that is artificial first and foremost, and then fueled by massive amounts of copium that a lot of people need to stay at least somewhat sane. I should know because following my ever-growing discontent with my country (both its people and the government), I’ve mentally emigrated years ago, mostly talking to people living outside Russia and solely in English, and developed very humanistic, leftist views over that time as well as gaining a massive base of various resources to get news from all around the world with the least amount of (one-sided) propaganda - so when the war started and I saw what my government was doing, I could not believe any of that shit. It honestly felt like a nightmare that was not surprising because I knew what kind of people made up my government on all of its levels, but still a gut-turning nightmare. And that was me, someone who had very little ties to the country despite living there and basically hoping to move out one day - I can’t even begin to imagine what it would be like to happen to be more of a patriot on 24 February 2022 and later; that’s way too rapid and insane and brutal to believe and properly accept, and so many people - a lot of which had vigorously complained about Russia and its government before the war, by the way - developed a coping mechanism that just happens to look very fucking wrong.

Many fell victim to very powerful and long-running propaganda, which is a very serious and difficult problem to tackle on any level, be it individual or collective; the people who blame them are very lucky to not have witnessed this kind of shit first-hand, and they simply don’t understand what it is - even Orwell would’ve shat himself had he had the chance to live with it side-by-side. It’s a very complicated and difficult issue, and we’re in deep.

As for the anti-war Russians, I don’t even think anybody rationalizes it anymore. Thankfully, we’ve seen many speakers talking about the real reasons for the war (2nd paragraph, it all basically being an ego trip and an attempt to gather some political points in lieu of having done anything worthwhile at all in over 20 years), so I guess that’s the stance most of us take now. Funnily enough, I tried to be a bit more mentally present in Russia after the war started, like trying to find some Russian websites and communities online and stuff to stay more up-to-date and, well, try and make some influence, but recently I’ve come to the same conclusion again that I just can’t stand many of my fellow countrypeople, especially online because they’re either more likely to show some of their not-so-sociable faces or just hold some disgusting views in general; by the time I got capable of leaving, I realized that I can’t because, despite all the shit, I now have people that I care about over here and can neither leave (because I highly doubt I’d be able to get them into crypto to financially help anyone if need be, or will face massive issues if I have to visit) nor take them with me (because they won’t move).

On top of all that, I just don’t know what to expect from the future - not my future, but just the future in general. I’m going to try my best to aid the anti-Putin effort for the March 2024 elections, but I don’t know if that’s going to be any success. I’m not feeling too good about the right-wing sentiment gaining traction all over the world again. I’m certainly not happy about the climate situation and the big players just not caring about shit other than their profits. Real estate is not even worth talking about.

It’s all so tiresome and weird.

That, too. Good points, thanks.

The people that got mobilised late September last year already lead to many reports of extremely poor and lacking equipment, and news like that usually don’t break out of something as gated and hostile to any outside world communications as the Russian army.

Prigozhin and his Wager group got increasingly mad because of that, too, among other things, as they weren’t pumped full of money and best gear the Russian government could muster. They said they were getting g ripped off and such, but what really happened is they got down to the same tier gear as everyone else (maybe higher, still), and that was THAT infuriating to them.

It’s very ducking complicated, but I’ll do my best to give you a sensible answer. I live in Russia and while I’m no journalist or expert, maybe I have something worthwhile to say for an insight.

We do have the numbers, period - there’s money in killing our neighbors, there’s some sort of twisted fate or purpose that always emerges during this kind of times, and there’s people willing to do this kind of stuff for the kind of money or purpose offered. There’s also, well, just people of various backgrounds, skills, and capabilites to forcefully throw into the war effort, but the most important thing is that it’s not just a number game - like, it’s not a dead-simple RTS game where you select some units and magically convert them into equally capable combatants over a set period of time to go and win with some tactics.

Despite the somewhat prevalent opinion, this is not a popular war, it’s not supported or sacred or anything - Russia wouldn’t see so many people fleeing and imprisoned otherwise. Wouldn’t have to forcefully mobilise anyone either.

There’s enough people in the country that the government can try and throw at the wall of this war and see if they stick and magically do something, but that doesn’t guarantee any success of its own and has massive risks that even the current old men aren’t willing to take.

As a bonus, any good dictator loves a war, especially a war that’s prolonged, that’s convenient excuse for anything - establish the right kind of info, punish anyone who disagrees, make people praise you for the very little they may get because things could always be worse, make the war the excuse, tell people it’s good and creates work places and gives them purposes, and so and so forth. I don’t belive Putin wants an end to this war - he’d much rather let it help him sit tighter on his blood-drenched throne, and make Ukraine suffer for not playing along with his egomaniac ambitions; under Putin, the war dies with him, not a minute earlier.

Star Citizen is a game that’s been in development forever, all while attracting money in forms of donations and sales of in-game ships. A single-player game by the same devs, Squadron 42, is a somewhat similar story, except that people can’t even play it yet (as far as I remember).

A whale is a tern that often means someone/something that brings you the substantial part of your revenue, so in case of the games above, whales would be the players that spend most money on the in-game ships or donations to support development.

The “whale fracking operation” in this context probably means that the entire trailer is a yet another bait for the community to go crazy and bring in the money so that the devs don’t starve and finally deliver finished products.

The punchline is, however, that it’s likely not gonna happen anyway lmao

You shouldn’t really assume that the Russian government is up to anything aside from imitating some activity to present the their superiors, which is all a long chain going from the very down to the very top.

It’s a corrupt government that consists of people only aiming at filling their pockets with as much money as possible, for as long as possible. Sometimes they need to play along and make people (mostly their gone-mad old-aged marasmatic superiors) believe they’re loyal, should be allowed to keep their money and pay, and are super busy.

There is no ideology. There is no long-term goal. There isn’t even an evil goal. There’s only greed and some things that they think they must do to keep their pockets growing.

Gernans make many jokes about British trains being much more reliable in their schedule than Deutsche Bahn.