It certainly was a risk in 2013, when the open source libraries were slow and riddled with bugs. Today, there are two stable, well maintained and fast open source libraries available:
Not just perception - there was a very real conflict in the 19th century between traditional Russian values and western ideas such as nihilism and socialism. Dostoevsky was such an idealist in his youth, then turning his back on those movements after being imprisoned in hard labor camp. In his book Demons, he very much groks the dangers of these western ideas, which led to the disastrous 70 year reign of the Bolsheviks
If you take an objective look at the USSR from 1917 to 1990, while there was a lot of bad things, they also completely industrialized the country, literacy rates went from 28% to 99.7% (triple it in the first 15 years, by trying to teach everyone to read their native language first instead of Russian first). They were the first country to put a man in space. I'm not sure that it was all disastrous.
That's exaggeration of course. Many but not THAT many.
Story from my step-grandfather:
He was a village school director and teacher in Ukraine at times of 1932/33 famine (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_famine_of_1932%E2%80%93...).
With students from senior classes he developed piece of farm land just to feed junior classes - make real breakfast at list for them.
Each day he walked to school with knapsack - prepared for detention, as all agricultural surplus should go to collectors. All that was real, indeed.
...
At WWII, he served as an artillery lieutenant, literally walked by foot from Voronezh/Russia to Berlin/Germany.
They were crying "for the Motherland, for the Stalin" all way along. And that one was also real.
Later he was a father of an academic and two doctors of science in USSR.
You can’t look at those numbers without comparing to other societies. Raising literacy over that time period….is not especially rare?
Nor was industrialization. You’re giving them credit for something basically every european country did in that timeframe. And many other countries besides.
Not strictly saying you’re wrong. I haven’t done the comparative argument so it’s possible they did have a comparative advantage on either front. But you’d need to compare to other countries to have a meaningful claim.
In particular try Italy and Spain, countries with many peasants circa 1900. Virtually identical trajectories.
The USSR, if around today, would have a population of 300 million. They were a superpower. Only large powers made it to space. It was certainly impressive, but also a natural result if you have a large portion of your economy devoted to military spending and missile research. The space program in both USA and USSR allowed for ICBM delivery of nuclear warheads, a crucial strategic goal.
Not that impressive if you consider population and vast, really vast amounts of land that have gigantic natural resources and lack of any real power blocking them from the east.
Basically with that base anyone could do it (I don't dispute that having a gun pointed at your and your family head wasn't mobilizing for scientists, but that's normal for authoritarian states).
it was called "colony" back then and Western Europe was doing it for several centuries. For example the wonderful rubber being a major part of the European technological leap at the end of 19th - beginning of 20th century was produced in Belgian Congo where not doing your daily quota would for example result in your family members mutilated or killed:
"How to get that rubber, as much and as quickly as possible?
In the absence of scruples, the answer was distressingly simple. Send armed men to a village, kidnap the women and children, and if their menfolk did not bring back enough rubber, chop off a hand - or kill a family."
No. We just exterminated countless indigenuous peoples/nations and stole their land. Not to mention stealing resources/capital from china, india, middle east, africa, etc plunging much of the world into unimaginable poverty from which many still haven't recovered. Nothing as terrible as the gulags...
People are naturally born poor. Nobody told the Chinese or Africans to create that many poor people. Most of those children were born with the expectation that they die early. Isn't that cruel?
Poland had been split 3 times by a Prussian+Austrian+Russian alliance long before WW2. Some of those nations were even trying to forcibly transplant their own culture in Poland.
This is a great lesson for all those playing Civilization-like games.
Don't start a country on plains without any mountains or hills blocking access from at least 3 sides.
Poland was unlucky by having mountains in south, where we have rather peaceful nations. Sea from north (Swedes invaded Poland once, but that's mostly it) and nothing (except forests) from west (with Germany) and Russia in the east.
(of course now it is a bit different, but lack of natural obstacles from east/west is still real).
OK, so which West countries had plantations?
Did Germany have them? Yeah, first ones in 1884 and lost all of them in 1914.
And it was most industrialized country.
Unification into the German Empire didn't happen until 1871.
The parts that were industrialized were part of France. Germany itself didn't undergo a massive industrialization until a century after Britain.
The western industrialization didn’t create gulags in the western world, but it was largely paid for by untold cruelty in Asia and Africa, and slavery in the US. Concentration camps existed far before the Nazis, and many millions died through genocide and famine created by the European powers.
Most people with a regard for human life consider mass murder[1] on a scale hitherto unseen[2], which is really saying something given that the world had just seen WW2, to be disastrous.
[1] Thus not including battlefield deaths of soldiers.
I barely overlapped with both of my great-grandfathers but fortunately one of them left his memoirs behind.
in there it says that he ran away from home early and "during revolution was just a street hooligan breaking streetlamps for amusement". He did eventually complete engineering school and wound up designing and building ports and hydroelectric dams during all the heavy industrialization and the war. He said he was happy about that change that allowed him to become educated.
A planned economy is great when you have a few well defined tasks to really worry about. But you can't really become dynamic and resilient like a market economy can. So certain goals, like getting everyone to read or building a spaceship work reasonably well but it simply can't compete with a market economy in the longer run and dies a death of a thousand capitalist cuts eventually.
The Chinese probably have it more right than the Soviets in that they manage a few big things and then let the market more or less self manage to a point so long as the CCP is getting their cut and gives their blessing.
Socialism is a perfect system. I mean: socialism is probably the system that God uses to rule his Angels in Heaven. It has only one tiny flaw: in order to work it requires the society to be perfect as well, and most importantly completely selfless. But for less than perfect societies capitalism works better, because it can turn people's flaws (i.e.: greed, ambition) for the common good.
Yes, I agree. Consider the greatest flaw in capitalism: Greedy people want greedy money for greedy people. The problem with greedy money is that it turns everyone into a greedy person. Similar dynamics exist for housing. People clearly want a gold style asset that they can greedily hold onto. The problem is that this greed gets in the way of the utility of the asset. Money exists as a medium of exchange (i.e. a means to repay debt) and real estate exists to house people.
It's funny how Bitcoin was created as a response to 2008 but all it merely did is replicate the flaws of conventional fiat currencies that lead to 2008 in a much shorter time span. All it shows is that the demand for greedy money is unstoppable.
Bolshevism was a disaster, but the traditional Russian society that preceded it was not much better. The Russia that overthrew its Mongol overlords never managed to develop the social and cultural institutions required to form a stable and prosperous society. Novgorod had them, but it was one of the first victims of Muscovy.
There was perhaps a chance in the 19th century, when Alexander II tried to turn Russia into a constitutional monarchy. The chance died when nihilists killed him and his son reversed the course. The same ideas that gave rise to social democracy in the West turned into Marxism-Leninism in Russia. One was a great success story, another was an equally great catastrophe.
Why, socialism was fine with most Russians, that is, the peasants. Check out the obschina thing [1] which was the traditional structure of non-noble country living; it's full of communal and rather socialist institutions.
The revolutionaries like the young Dostoevsky and a number of other Russian left intellectuals were quite westernized, and had the French revolution as an example, with its franternité, egalité et liberté. (Interestingly, not the American revolution which was hugely more successful but not leftist.)
Nit pick: I think they mean "every day", not "everyday" which is a synonym for commonplace. See this person pushing back against inane Coca Cola slogan :
For JPEG, if image is encoded using resolution progression, then decoder can not decode using quality progression (where image quality improves with each new piece of the image) and vice versa. With JPEG 2000, the decoder can decide which progression it wishes to use at decode time - by resolution, by quality, by component, or by spatial region.
The issue you are facing with OpenJPEG has nothing to do with PHR, (which isn't actually "personal health information"), but the fact that the library doesn't decode truncated images. The standard is designed for best-effort decoding when there are corrupt or missing packets, but the implementation errors out when it detects this.
Steinhaus, Ulam and many other mathematicians in the Lviv school were Jewish, and had to flee or go into hiding to survive the German occupation. Interesting that there is no mention of this in the article.
I'm not sure how that relates to the OP since the article is on a Polish website. "Remains hostile" seems to suggest it was hostile before WWII. Remember, Lviv today is largely Ukrainian (as was Bandera). Most Poles, Jew or gentile, were either expelled after or killed during the war.
It's mentioned briefly through a single paragraph but not much beyond that.
"He lived through the war under the name Grzegorz Krochmalny and hid in an estate near Lviv and at a manor neat Nowy Sącz. He gave private lessons in exchange for firewood, oil and milk. In his spare time he played chess and worked on designing a solar clock. During the war he resorted to solving serious mathematical equations by post but continuing his research from before the war was out of the question."
Oh I just got a linked to this. Thanks. Can u share a screenshot so I can look into this. It's SSL only site with a Jekyll render, and I host it on app engine.. so should be alright. Thank you
