• Welcome to Maher's Digital World.

General chat room

Started by Shadow.97, August 06, 2016, 11:39 AM

Previous topic - Next topic

scarface

Apparently it works again. Humbert was afraid Maher might be held prisoner in Russia or Ukraine but it seems he's fine and the forum is repaired. I was afraid of a closure of the forum because I had new videos to post as well as new game repack updates for the users of the forum.

Shadow.97

Quote from: scarface on March 19, 2022, 10:16 PM
Apparently it works again. Humbert was afraid Maher might be held prisoner in Russia or Ukraine but it seems he's fine and the forum is repaired. I was afraid of a closure of the forum because I had new videos to post as well as new game repack updates for the users of the forum.
Do you know what happened?
I believe some posts went missing.

I remember specifically asking Daniil about what the best way for West to "punish"/help Ukraine without sanctioning civilians. I cant find that post in any part of the forum

Daniil

Maybe we just shouldn't talk here about politics?

scarface

Quote from: Shadow.97 on March 20, 2022, 02:36 AM
Do you know what happened?
I believe some posts went missing.

I remember specifically asking Daniil about what the best way for West to "punish"/help Ukraine without sanctioning civilians. I cant find that post in any part of the forum
I don't really know, but it was fixed anyway. Maybe Maher was trying to apply updates and then the forum was acting up, I can't tell. As for the missing messages, I remember a photo of a leerdammer (in this cheese you can find the holes of the emmental and the flexibility of the Gouda, but it is an industrial cheese and I prefer the taste of the original emmental. What's more, it's very salty), but it disappeared and then it was not possible to post messages any longer due to a sql error.

As for the question of shadow.97, it's virtually impossible to prevent this war since Russia is financing its army essentially thanks to its commodities. Unfortunately, despite the announcement of a Russian oil and gas ban by the US and the UK, the other European countries are still importing oil and gas. And it's likely there will be no embargo in Europe because there is no oil and gas in those countries. In fact, only the countries that can manage to phase out oil and gas imports announced an embargo. As of today, the oil from Russia still accounts for 30% of the oil imports into Europe. Russia is the main EU supplier of crude oil, natural gas and solid fossil fuels.

humbert

Finally the forum is back. Contributing to the delay was the fact that I lost Maher's phone number. When I texted Scarface he accidentally gave the the old number  :( : :-[ - It then occurred to me to send Maher an email, he saw it after a day and got back to me. According to him, the issue started because he changed hosts. Fortunately it's fixed.

Daniil: I know you're kidding but I like talking politics. We share opinions and learn from each other. I say we continue.

With respect to lost posts, I responded to Daniil with a detailed account of what happened during the Vietnam War (historians call it the 2nd Indochina War). It never occurred to me to copy it to a text file. If you're interested I'll gladly post it again. The interesting thing is that there were some interesting historical ironies as well as interesing parallels between what happened to Lyndon Johnson (US President at the time) and what Putin is currently going through. If you're curious I'll retype the whole thing again.

Before I forget: Daniil, I agree with your Wiki links regarding US propaganda and propaganda in general.

Daniil

#385
Quote from: humbert on March 20, 2022, 04:02 AMDaniil: I know you're kidding but I like talking politics. We share opinions and learn from each other. I say we continue.
I'm not really kidding actually. You see, russian society is very heterogeneous. There is a lot of people even between youngsters, who supporting putinism. Some of them are IT specialists, sometimes better than me. They are crawling over internet, "fighting" against dissent by defacing sites and attacking forums where discussing any opposit thoughts. I don't want troubles to our forum. So if that was an attack, probably we should take measures.

Quote from: Shadow.97 on March 20, 2022, 02:36 AMI remember specifically asking Daniil about what the best way for West to "punish"/help Ukraine without sanctioning civilians.
Yes, I remember your question. Firstly, I should explain, that any sanctions will hit civilians in Russia, because of structure of our economics (all of economics are under hard control of governmental corporations owned by oligarchs, and any sanctions against any branch of economics will hit hard most of civilians). Today all european sanctions are palliatives in fact (because european oligarchy are tightly linked with russian by a big money).
Teoretically, effective measures of Europe in confrontation with Russia would be like this:
1) Apply real sanctions against russian corporations. Stop using russian gas and hydrocarbonates. Without this all other sanctions are useless, even a deny of exporting to Russia high-tech electronics like Intel and AMD CPUs. One of main basises of russian economics are oligarchs, and their main business are exporting of energy, resources and hydrocarbonates. While world continues to use this, any other sanctions are like a joke for them. Denying to sell Louis-Vuitton in Moscow are not a sanctions. And when in Europe they arrested a mega-yacht of Usmanov and a day later returning it with apologises - this is not a sanctions too.
2) Offer a free visa (green card in US, etc.), valid for 6 month, to russian IT and tech specialists, who has marks of real employments in workbook and proved examples of finished projects. This is modified idea of Robert Zubrin (he is a well-known aerospace enthusiast and scientist, but with nazi ideas sometimes). His idea was to pull specialists with high education out from Russia. In fact, his idea is partially wrong. Because most of tech specialists in Russia are now in IT, and many of IT specialists in Russia have no high education in IT (or even no high education at all).
3) Offer to emigrated tech specialists to pay their credits in russian banks at once, if they found an employment while their visa/green card is valid. Banks are main chain in modern russian economics - without them, any activity of force structures are impossible now. Yes, if West pay the credits of russian tech emmigrants, this looks like West support russian regime. But in this case it's not true. Russian tech specialists is a most part of "middle class", those who use a credits. Only a credits provides rotating of capital in russian economic. If west repay mentioned credits, returned money will lay down in russian banks like a dead weight. This will destroy them, and stop all russian economy.
4) Stop to export weapons in Ukraine. Yes, in that case Russia will defeat Ukraine very fast. But - are West wanted to stop the war, or they supports war and are against russian and ukrainian civilians? Political regimes such as current russian regime can't be defeated with force, the main contermeasures are economics measures I described before. Main goal in Ukraine now - stop the violence. But West are just pours oil on the fire. Stop to send to Ukraine overdue US weapons (Javelins are ineffective against russian tanks), but send there a humanitarian missions. If UN can't send their forces, use Red Cross, any medical organizations, but save the people.

(I made an edit on this post, because of appearing of some unpleasant tendencies in our news here)

humbert

#386
There may be many people supporting Putin but I bet anything there are more than oppose his policies. Remeber these people risk 15 years in jail for merely saying this is not a "special military operation". If most people supported him there would be no need to impose censorship. You probably don't know about Marina Ovsyannikova, the courageous reporter who went on TV with a sign condemning Putin's unnecessary war. She was promptly hauled off to jail. And of course nowhere in the Putin-controlled press did you see pictures of the 3 Russian cosmonauts on the ISS. They were all wearing yellow and blue uniforms.

I strongly disagree with stopping weapons shipment to Ukraine. This despot has to be stopped. He destroyed whatever remained of Russian democracy. He started wars against Chechnya and Georgia, and now wants to destroy Ukraine and make it a part of Russia. The comment that javelins can't harm Putin's tanks is a total lie. ALL news agencies outside Russia report exactly the opposite. If Putin's propaganda machine were true, why is it that now, one month into this invasion, Putin is no closer to crushing Ukraine than on the first day? Why is it that Russian casualties are FAR higher than anticipated and are already close to approaching the total number of casualties in Afghanistan? Why is it that 6 generals have been killed? This NEVER happens in any war unless things are going very badly.

Putin grossly underestimated his enemy and has gotten himself into a jam he cannot easily extricate himself from. He is a stone cold killer and might even go so far as to use his nukes if he doesn't get his way.

Daniil

#387
Oh, looks like forum is heavily updated. :) Thank you, mr. Maher! Now all works fine!

Quote from: humbert on March 20, 2022, 04:02 AMI responded to Daniil with a detailed account of what happened during the Vietnam War (historians call it the 2nd Indochina War). It never occurred to me to copy it to a text file. If you're interested I'll gladly post it again. The interesting thing is that there were some interesting historical ironies as well as interesing parallels between what happened to Lyndon Johnson (US President at the time) and what Putin is currently going through. If you're curious I'll retype the whole thing again.

Before I forget: Daniil, I agree with your Wiki links regarding US propaganda and propaganda in general.
Thank you, mr. Humbert. I, in outline, remember your counterarguments.
So, let's continue our analysis. You said (in outline) that:
1) US attacked Vietnam basically because of paranoid ideas of top government officials
2) US didn't destroy Vietnam
3) Vietkong leaders, demonised in US, later overcomed the Pol Pot regime and saved people of Cambodia.
4) Today US and Vietnam are in good relationship, and
5) in US is believed that Vietnam War was a horrible mistake.

Also you said that you in your posts express your own thoughts about this historical events, and not only official position of US historicans.

That last one statement makes some of your argues unclear for me.

To make things clearly, is the 5-th statement is official position of US propaganda, or it's your own opinion? Could you, please, describe official position, if your opinon is different?

Then, you said (in 2-nd statement), that US didn't destroy Vietnam. Maybe I, because of difference of our languages, didn't understand real meaning of word "destroy", and under "destroy" you meant "destroy politiaclly, prevent to be separate country"? Because, I understand word "destroy" as "ruin all the infrastructure, kill the dwellers, make a country impossible to live there", etc.

And, finally (in 1-st statement) - I can't believe that only a paranoid ideas of some of officials could push such a large country as US into a big war. I.e., I really can't believe! All of us are knows, that in democracy countries there is large system of of checks and balances, preventing to rising to power psychically unstable people and blocking society from too emotional actions of politicans. Even in Russia, today, there is such kind of system (it's just working only in interests of oligarchy). Is that 1-st statement your own opinion, or it's an official explanation?

Again, thank you very much for your explanations. It's very, extremely interesting to understand a view "from other side". It helps to understand ongoing events better and learn us alot.

Quote from: humbert on March 21, 2022, 04:54 AMThere may be many people supporting Putin but I bet anything there are more than oppose his policies. Remeber these people risk 15 years in jail for merely saying this is not a "special military operation". If most people supported him there would be no need to impose censorship. You probably don't know about Marina Ovsyannikova, the courageous reporter who went on TV with a sign condemning Putin's unnecessary war. She was promptly hauled off to jail. And of course nowhere in the Putin-controlled press did you see pictures of the 3 Russian cosmonauts on the ISS. They were all wearing yellow and blue uniforms.
Things is much more complicated, then you imagine, mr.Humbert. Modern dictature in Russia is very different of what you can imagine basing on dystopian books and films. We all know about all of this you mentioned. We can't DO anything! I'll explain this later. Before this, please answer me to my questions in previous passage of this post.


Shadow.97

I'm having a hard time reading the text on the background on my primary monitor after the theme was changed. Works fine on my secondary, but it feels like I have to squint with my eyes for some reason.. :'D Atleast forum works now!
Cant wait to get a new monitor. These old TN 144hz monitors are not great for reading on. The white/gray/black is atrocious after a few years of usage.
When turning on the monitor it is next to impossible to read gray text on gray background. After around 30 min to an hour it is usually better. There is a shortcut, using a hairdryer on the monitor to physically heat it up.

Electronics do be weird.



Back "ontopic" I appreciate all your posts about this stuff, it's interesting to see your insights on the current matters.
I've finally been able to relax a bit more about the ukraine stuff. It's been stressing me mentally.

scarface

Finally we know why the forum was down: A surprise was coming. I miss the original layout which looked like the jungle of Amazonia, but we'll have to make do with the new one, which is certainly more sober.