Rumpelschtiltzchen wrote:
Well, they are doing exactly what you recommend here - and I find it kinda strange that you don't know it. Increasing pension payments, doctors', teachers' and scientists' salaries, giving $10000 for each kid after first one, building new roads and houses and repairing old ones all over the place, providing facilities to schools and hospitals, investing in science and innovations, creating new super universities, making all other stuff under national projects, making huge investments abroad. Moscow is just about to get rid of all the ugly Khrushchev's apartment complexes, building new, bigger ones in their place (it's almost done - which is impressive by any standards as it seemed impossible). In the last 8 years my own city has changed completely with so many new buildings and facilities. The state invests in human capital more than ever before. How come it's not putting the surplus to good use? I mean, there's still a lot of problems to address, but saying they are not doing a good job is just weird...
Buildings don't mean anything. Jakarta has more new buildings than New York, but Jakarta is still a third-world city.
Other than food products (I never get tired of frozen pelmeni) I've yet to see anything made in Russia. I've never seen anyone do business with a Russian company outside the energy sector. How much is being done to diversify away from fossil fuel as a chief source of national revenue to reduce market shock?
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Don't you think that in a country of 150 million people there would be ONE opposition leader that is viable? Putin has managed to silence most of the opposition, but he didn't do that by being "OMG AMAZING" for Russia.
Perhaps due to the oppression, we're still stuck with the lack of a viable opposition leader. What do you think should be a hypothetical opposition leader's priorities if he becomes president?
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Truth hurts, doesn't it? Look, I support Obama for president, but this cult of personality shit frightens me.
Spiders frighten me. Each to their own.
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I don't know much about its oil and gas reserves, but being dependent on a commodity for your economic prosperity is not a good thing.
You're spot on -- look at what happened to OPEC in the 1990s.
