Well, in the case the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are genocide! The all the Americans(still alive) and American state entities responsible for it must be held accountable
No, that's far from anything related to genocide and Putin is actually right: Russians and Ukrainians(and Belarussians) have the same common root in the Kievan Rus. The idea of Ukraine didn't even exit until about 1700s and the country itself was founded in 1917.
There's no free world. There are just different degrees of totalitarianism. The highest level of totalitarianism is in the country with the highest number of criminal laws - that by definition reduce freedom, and the highest percentage of population in prison. Guess which country is that?
In lots of wanna-be "free" countries, people can no longer live their normal lives because they can get thrown in prison for some of the most absurd reasons - like leaving your children play in the street, insulting someone on facebook, having an open bottle of alcohol in a car - and thousands upon thousands other such fictive, victimless "crimes". In these countries people get indoctrinated that political freedom is the only freedom that's needed but that's colossal lie! Most people don't care about political activism, don't really need such freedoms!
Your criticism of the US incarceration aside, which is nonetheless a good point, of course if you philosophically deconstruct the world there is no freedom. You are subject to constraints of the natural world at a minimum, and really technology and the modern world were created to possibly give more freedom than the constraints of a "natural existence".
But the stack of technologies and institutions that relies on obviously have both practical limitations (with guns you have the ability to kill far more than you can with bare hands, but we'll restrict that with prohibitions on murder than you wouldn't have in primitive existence) and political (arbitrary declarations of property and ownership and therefore power).
Thus "freedom" is the range/opportunity/ability to do things with modern technologies and society. The idealistic freedom is laid out in the laws and structure of governance, and the practical freedom is access to resources, technology, and services to accomplish something.
With "totalitarianism", what I think is meant within what I just wrote is that the central powers both restrict the ideals AND dominate the practical access to resources to degrees that trigger the palpable instincts of unfairness and existential danger in humans, especially in comparison to other societies.
I guess with respect to incarceration, we look at what they are in jail for. Incarceration is generally due to the war on drugs in the US, and then unfair enforcement of the war on drugs against minorities over white people. To some degree (bullshit possession charges and other similar atrocities of the prosecution of the war on drugs) a great deal of the incarcerations are for laws that have somewhat of some line of thought (deterring the drug trade) even if it is actually creating perverse economic incentives to encourage/enrich the drug trade.
But am I more "free" in Russia/China or the US? I would say both practically and idealistically I am clearly more free in the US. Not to the degree that the US markets itself as ("propaganda") but clearly better than my perception of Russia and China.
When I say "freedom" I'm really referring to the most literal sense of the word: lack of restrictions! Not other philosophical meanings(like being provided with the means to do one thing or another)
We can all agree that we need A FEW, strictly NECESSARY restrictions, in order to reduce OBJECTIVE HARM being caused to us. The so-called malum in se deeds, like murder, theft, fraud, physical harm and so on. If we count all these deeds, they're no more than ONE HUNDRED!
The biggest PROBLEM we're facing today in the developed world is the fact that the legislatures and the governments GO FAR BEYOND what's strictly necessary for a functioning society in terms of criminalization and other restrictions! In the US there are somewhere between 25k and 300k criminal laws and statues or civil legislation that can turn into criminal legislation under certain circumstances.
Incarceration is a super-big problem in America, but it's far from being the only one: any conviction even without incarceration, any other kind of judicial restriction, or even mere arrests - all of these infringe on all kinds of liberties and rights, often lead to discrimination and can easily lead to actual incarceration in a variety of totally harmless situations.
Then there's ever increasing surveillance, more and more use of cctvs, more and more collection of data, the governments and certain companies get to know far too much about ordinary citizens - this can and does lead to a lot of harm!
Those in the repressive state institutions like the police, prosecutors, judges, intelligence services, the military - get more and more power and are less and less accountable for their (mis)deeds!
All these things do happen all so called "democratic" countries!
Oh, I thought they'd donate half their incomes for some noble cause like buying electric cars for the poor, buying carbon credits, or something like that...
>>Why didn't they hire 2-3 (more expensive) experts instead of 10 juniors? <<
For the same reason they don't hire 2-3 architects instead of one architect and 10 workers to build a small house.
Actually hiring solely "experts" the productivity may be lower because they're used to doing only certain kinds of things.
In startups? Then they're doing it wrong. Even in enterprise-size businesses they're doing it wrong. If manual repetition of a task occurs it has to be automated or refactored if it costs significant developer time (=money): http://xkcd.com/1205/
Repetitions are often a result of changing requirements things that can't (normally) be automated. If you think that enterprises are doing it wrong and you know more than them, you could become rich by showing them the right way of doing things - on one condition: you have to prove what you're claiming. :)
It's a myth that large companies have a lot of repitition tasks. They know how to automate. No need to tell them what they already do.
As my postings are focussed on the German market, I rarely see real Lean Startups that. It's still very common to build one thing big and to hope that it succeeds. So actually you don't start from scratch more than 1 time except some low profile developers messed it up.
There's plenty of concurrency and parallelism out there but there's not a single piece of important software that is written in a functional language. Many people claim many things but when it comes to empirical evidence. it turns out that imperative, stateful programming is still the best choice.
Erlang has some limited and very niche uses in telecom, bua it was replaced even at Ericsson to good degree with c++.
>There's plenty of concurrency and parallelism out there but there's not a single piece of important software that is written in a functional language.
Important to who? I use tools written in functional languages every single day.
>Many people claim many things but when it comes to empirical evidence. it turns out that imperative, stateful programming is still the best choice.
>>Important to who? I use tools written in functional languages every single day.<<
To the market. There are all kind of servers from web servers to database servers to other kinds of servers. Almost none are made using functional programming. Then, there is lot of software out there, which is made almost exclusively in C/C++, Java & .Net. Haskell & co. are only used in academia and by hobbyists (math people who can't learn proper programming)
