The only reason why Russia is winning the war is that our side's elite is more fucked up. We have way more resources, but it's all squandered, rendered ineffective by our public education.
What they mean by that is not a generation that loves freedom, but a generation of absolute retards.
Example: a professor of some liberal arts or other in Urals was scammed and gave away 5,000,000₽ (about $50k) to some Nigerian prince. These scams are usually operated by Ukrainians, because they all speak Russian (they only use their Ebonic for government business) and they are free of any accountability thanks to the war.
But wait. In a week or so time, Ukrainian secret services contacted her, and instructed her to carry out an act of terror and promised her to return the money in exchange. Russian counter-espionage service arrested her when she was setting fire to a theater or something like that.
When asked if she realized that it's a crime, she said that she didn't think about it at all. All she wanted was to get her money back.
This is a professor in her 30s, fully educated after the fall of Communism. Thinking at the level of 4chan meme about San Quentin inmates and living in the moment.
The problem here is, the collapse of Metaverse will not make Zuck and Priscilla's kids go to bed hungry tonight. But my buddy the Uber driver is in a serious pickle because of it. That is the difference.
Okay. I wanted to troll everyone here and present it like even driving for Uber was better than frontend devel. But I changed my mind and will tell you the truth.
The guy quit HTML+CSS 5 or 6 years ago and cannot restart now that he has this gap. He wanted to make a living programming 3D equipment, because it was a big fad and the time, and he wanted to get ahead. Not gonna like, frontend is an absolute sweatshop, worse than embedded if you can believe it. He started driving for Uber while working on 3D. But his 3D project went bust together with the wave of consumer enthusiasm for Oculus and the other one. So now he's stuck with Uber.
Also! Driving for Uber 6 years ago was like showeling money off a conveyor belt. These riches did him bad, by robbing him from the sense of urgency hacking on 3D. He treated his key project as a hobby instead of his chance.
@Moon@thendrix@ageha@icedquinn@nep Trump ushered an unprecedented prosperity during his 1st term, just in case your "goldfish voter" memory kicks in. It literally was without equal - the country has set an all time record of length of a growth period between recessions. And he's done it by using protectionism that every expert out there predicted would tank the economy (not only Krugman). As much as I can tell, Trump's protectionism disrupted the worst excesses of the rent-seeking globalism, and thus delivered the goods to the American workers. I would absolutely love a repeat of that, although perhaps conditions had to be right. The debt is now much worse, inflation is much worse.