A lot of Russians also believe things like drinking water with ice cubes will give you a sore throat. I wouldn't put too much stock in something just because the locals believe it.
Personally, I think the water boiling thing is one of the dumber things they do because, at least in most of the big cities, the thing that is most likely to be wrong with the water is not bacteria and other things that would be killed by boiling your water but rather heavy metals (and, last I checked, boiling my water does not remove lead!).
Also, anecdotally, I've yet to die from drinking from drinking unfiltered Tomsk tap water & never noticed abnormal levels of anything nasty during blood work. I think there is a lot of paranoia about the water system here that has generally been undeserved over the past decade or so.
From their open job positions - it looks like the Android app is indeed native (mostly Kotlin + heavy use of RxJava).
And only iOS + web (+ desktop?) are mentioned in the post.
I'd imagine the reason they didn't use RN on Android is because historically it's always had much worse performance on that platform. iOS RN performance is usually acceptable, but Android has always been a bit of a 2nd-class citizen.
Since their iOS and Android apps are different, and the iOS one is built using React, I just assumed the Android one is native. Why would they build two different React apps? Isn't the entire point that you can share the code?
When was the last time you were in Russia? I've lived here for a few years now, almost intentionally trying to get into trouble, and I've yet to ever have any real problems. The biggest issue I've run into is food poisoning.
It's very safe in most places, and my hometown of Odessa is especially friendly for tourists these days (to the extent that I think that it's becoming too much tourist-oriented). I've helped a Korean tourist find a way to the sea (she asked me in English) in the middle of November, long time before the tourist season begins.
Most cities in Ukraine are great tourist destinations.
Except for anywhere in Donbas, which in 2015 was a literal effin' warzone, and where people still die during the "ceasefire".
All reasonable people that could stay the fuck away from Donbas did so. That's about two million people, just to give you the scale of things. Still, the area attracted some people. The kind of people that downed that Malaysian airliner.
I doubt that guy made it anywhere close to combat. There's still law in Russia, but the moment he crossed into Donbas, he was a goner.
A remarkable investigative job by the parents and the journal, though.
> All reasonable people that could stay the fuck away from Donbas did so. That's about two million people, just to give you the scale of things.
Did all the people in different villages just leave leaving their farms etc? I was seeing travel vlogs of "Bald and Bankrupt" and I see elderly people in former Soviet Union countries living alone in extremely remote places. Most of the places are sparsely populated with supplies coming once in a week or so.
In these conflicts do they harm the village population or is the fight limited between the armies in the region? What would they gain by harming elderly people?
The battles happened where they happened; nobody was specifically targeting small towns, but nobody took much care to avoid them either. There aren't any really remote places in Donbass, it's not that big of a territory - and most people live in the cities or large towns.
A lot of elderly people did stay. Ukraine does pay the pensions (which they absolutely rely on), but one needs to travel outside of DNR-controlled areas to get them. DNR also pays pensions, and some people, apparently, get two pensions; both DNR and the Ukrainian government are not happy with that, and so that won't last long. Russia is being more active now with giving the people there Russian citizenship, but one would need to go to Russia to get the pension.
All in all, it's a complicated mess, and the weakest get the worst of it; those people who live alone in villages are screwed.
Nobody gains anything by harming the elderly, but they are a liability that nobody really wants to take on. For Ukraine, it's dumping money into territory occupied by the enemy. It's a burden for Russia, which their citizens aren't too happy about either. DNR has little need for the elderly, but has to pay up if they are playing the "we are an independent state" game.
There is a mounting pressure to resolve this situation, but the whole point of this mess was to make it complicated (Russia didn't play a Crimea scenario in Donbass so that it remains a long-term unresolved slow conflict, like Transnistria in Moldova and Abkhazia in Geogia).
I was wondering when this one would come up.
"Snitches end up in ditches" mentality is at fault here.
You pretend that someone cracking everyone's password is not a problem that the organization should address or even know about.
We should not turn our gaze away. "This is not my problem" is simply not a correct response. Snowden knew that, and yet, some people call him a snitch and a traitor.
I am not saying that either Iran or Saudi Arabia should be able to X, Y or Z. I'm not going for a "the Saudis do it so Iran should too" argument. Rather, I am simply saying that the sanctions themselves are just an imperialist American power move.
Again, it's not actually about whether Iran is good or bad. If it was simply about good VS evil, nobody would be standing idly as the Saudis yeet missiles into Yemeni civilians.
The sanctions are a joke. It is all about American political agenda.
You're overgeneralizing, which isn't helpful, and seem to be unable to see the story from the perspective of countries within the region we're talking about. People sympathize with people like the developer this story is about, not with the theocratic apparatus within Iran's government structure. If Iranians in general were as bad as you portray them, then no regime change in Iran could ever have any positive effects anyway. Of course, they aren't.
There is also an inability to differentiate between secular power play in the interest of one's country and the influence of religious fundamentalists. There are really two different issues, Iran's ambitions in the region, which are backed up by secular forces in Iran, too, and the theocratic constitution.
1. Some of the actions of Iran's government you describe are pretty much what the US does all the time, except that Iran does it only within their own region. For example, the US sends special forces into all kinds of countries to do their dirty work (e.g. into Iran, Afghanistan), and Iran sends special forces into all kinds of countries to do their directly work, too. There is a slight difference, though. The US has been doing that almost everywhere, whereas the Iranians are mostly trying to fix (in their favour, of course) a mess that was caused by the Second Iraq War initiated by a US aggression. The US basically destroyed the neighbouring country, so for the Iranians this looks similar to e.g. if Russia had just occupied Mexico, put heavy sanctions on the US and would constantly threaten to bomb the US. That's not a good basis for future negotiations, and trying to act against such moves and trying to keep or increase one's own country sphere of influence in neighbouring countries seems like a natural and rational policy.
Here we see a power struggle between two nations whose geostrategical goals are not aligned. However, I'd still say, from the eyes of an impartial observer, that Iran clearly has more of a reason and a right to extend their sphere of influence to neighbouring countries in the region than the US, who have just absolutely fucking nothing to do in the region and are biggest reason why it is in turmoil in the first place. The idea that e.g. the US had a special right to control the Strait of Hormuz is, simply put, absurd.
2. Then there is the problem with the theocracy, which has nothing to do with the previous point. Many if not most people in Iran are probably against their theocracy, but unfortunately the constitution is designed as a theocratic regime and that's hard to change. The government of Iran is not necessarily for Ayatolla Khamenei and his verdicts either, and the younger people would like to get more freedom and many of them would like to get rid of the theocractic elements in their constitution and particularly the religious police.
US foreign politics and Western foreign politics in general are muddling up the two issues, and that's very regrettable. Allying with Saudi Arabia, who has literally just hacked a US journalist to death, will make you a hypocrite about it anyway in the eyes of Iranians, and then the constant confusion of 1 and 2 makes things even worse.
Iran primarily needs change 2, whereas 1 is simply based on a desire to act on their own interests and can only be moderated, e.g. with suitable treaties. The best way of promoting the change 2 would probably be to open up to Iran and do what's best to strengthen women's and LGBT rights in the region (e.g. by guaranteeing asylum, anti-censorship help, diplomatic pressure for human rights, etc.)
The US currently is unable to do that, since the current US government is ideologically very close to the theocratic apparatus in Iran.
No need for condescending sighs, I kind of know what I'm talking about and to be honest, I'm not quite sure whether I buy into your claims of irrelevance. International rights and their moral justification are to a large extent based on habits, i.e., customary rights, and on the principle of reciprocity. There are also principles of state sovereignity to consider. Finally, there is the problem of only selectively applying moral principles and international rights, which is inherently unjust.
I have argued that people should base their judgements on a better understanding, trying to put themselves into the shoes of e.g. someone in a country that is being threatened to be invaded by the largest military force of the world and has been threatened in the past. I have also suggested to be careful not to confuse geopolitical strategies of countries with moral points, and that any sanctions or other efforts to influence Iran should be targeted against its theocratic structure, which is at the heart undemocratic. In reality, however, the US mostly seeks to increase their sphere of influence for geopolitical reasons and the US has no right at all to do that. There is no international law or any other reasonable construction that would justify that the US does anything in that region of the earth at all. I'm suggesting that sanctions should be justified morally and, if so, extended to countries like e.g. Saudi Arabia, too, in order not to appear to be selective and therefore unjust. I am for sanctions and other non-violent measures to increase democracy in countries like Iran, Saudi Arabia, China, Russia, and so forth, if these measures promise to be at least moderately successful. Otherwise, I believe that change almost must come from within.
I'm not sure what you ware suggesting in contrast to this. This looks very much like a conflict between the US and Iran that is mostly about geostrategy. This is what I suggested to and you consider it irrelevant. What is it, then, you're suggesting? That the US should act as a world police without any mandate, despite the US's horrendous track record of torture, illegal kidnappings, aggressive wars against other countries, and so on? This doesn't make sense to me, especially given that the US has already created great havoc and chaos in the whole region.
I'm really baffled at what you're trying to argue for. It is obvious that in this conflict both Iran and the US primarily act out of strategic interests in the region and not because of any moral concerns, and accusing the US of hypocricy seems quite justified.
The problem is with how we decide which are the "bad" countries. If both "good" and "bad" countries fund militant groups, anyone who tells you that this is how they distinguish between them is lying.
I don’t think anyone on here is in favour of bad people doing bad things.
The general point is that when sanctions are used selectively on some regimes and the US buddy up with other regimes that follow the same kind of politics as the first regime; then you have to question if those sanctions are used for the good of the world (ie what is publicised) or for the good of the US (ie financial kick backs, back door deals, etc).
The fact that Saudi Arabia literally get away with murder because the US have profitable arms deals with them should speak volumes about the true purpose of sanctions.
For what it's worth, KDE [Plasma] is just a desktop environment - you can run it on Ubuntu.
As of 2019, I'm fairly happy with Linux on the desktop; usability is really solid, WINE is significantly better than years before, and many games will play perfectly fine with basically no manual configuration thanks to projects like DXVK.
I'm running KDE on Arch. And, I'm definitely happier than I was on Windows.
Personally, I think the water boiling thing is one of the dumber things they do because, at least in most of the big cities, the thing that is most likely to be wrong with the water is not bacteria and other things that would be killed by boiling your water but rather heavy metals (and, last I checked, boiling my water does not remove lead!).
Also, anecdotally, I've yet to die from drinking from drinking unfiltered Tomsk tap water & never noticed abnormal levels of anything nasty during blood work. I think there is a lot of paranoia about the water system here that has generally been undeserved over the past decade or so.