It is not that Russia is USSR, it is that USSR was Russia + colonized, enslaved nations, like Russian Empire before it.

The evil of USSR did was because Russia was in charge.

There was never such a thing as a Russian state that didn't include colonized neighbors.

Even if you unwind all the way to the Grand Duchy of Moscow, we'd have to talk about Kazan etc.

How about Novgorod, which was a member of the Hanseatic Union back in the day, among other things?

I‘d reserve the word „colony“ for its original meaning. USSR was a dictatorship, but not a colonial state. As a matter of fact it even prioritized the reduction of inequality between the republics of the union for several decades.

I‘d reserve the word „colony“ for its original meaning.

Which per Wikipedia is simply:

   A colony is a territory subject to a form of foreign rule.

And which was a perfectly reasonable description of the situation in all the peripheral republics, as well as many constituent parts of the RSFSR itself.

The fact that it might have also provided subsidies to some of the republics at various times (when not withholding food and/or engaging in massive, violent repressive actions against them) is entirely irrelevant to this definition. Recall that the Western colonial powers always bragged about all the infrastructure they built in their colonies, and South Africa always tried to point out the subsidies it provided its Bantustans, etc.

It is not a reasonable description, because there was no „foreign“ rule in USSR. E.g. Russia was not ruling over Ukraine, both were equal parts of the union and both Russian and Ukrainian republican governments were subjects to the rule of the communist party and union government. Same as Germany not being a colony of EU or contemporary Australia not being a colony of the Commonwealth. Russian colonial empire has fallen in 1917-1922 during the civil war.

I think this is highly debatable, as even the European part of Russia hosted no less than dozens of different ethnicities. What you say makes little sense in the context of Russian and generally eastern European history.

You can be both right. I would say that ClickHouse is a focused system - it is really really good at the things it's good at, and it is not good at the rest.

Anecdote: I tested ClickHouse as possible replacement of Trino+DeltaLake+S3 for some of our use cases.

When querying a precomputed flat tables it was easily 10x to 100x faster. When running complex ETL to prepare those tables, I gave up when CTAS with six CTEs that takes Trino 30 seconds to compute on the fly turned into six intermediate tables that took 40 minutes to compute, and I wasn't even halfway done.

The tricky part is, how do you know whether your use case fits? But you have to ask this question about all the "specialized tools", including Pinot.

Nowadays, Athena is Trino under the hood, but pretty heavily patched.

Yeah that makes sense.

Just downvote, flag and move on. This guy is here to insult people for fun and stir shit. No reason to engage (and yes, I know I'm also guilty of engaging with anti-Western but definitely not pro-Chinese/pro-Russian trolls).

Alliances are not just about power, but also about common values and goals. Strong allies are good. Strong enemies that are for historic reason part of alliance are pretty bad, and need to be managed.

That is why Turkey is not getting F-35s or even F-16s now. Why help arm your enemy?

The fact that Israel is a nation propped up by $3.5 billion of arms spending by the US, yet makes sure to oppress the Palestinian population in their country in the guise of maintaining their "Jewish mess" is a direct affront to your "western values in alliances" nonsense.

Alliances are based out of pragmatism and a common enemy/threat. They have always been the case since history, whether it was the aggressive Assyrians' neighbours against them, to the Franco-Ottoman alliance, to the Axis alliance in WW1.

Israel is still considered ally for multitude of reasons: big organisations don't turn on a dime and sometimes take decades to change course (same reason Turkey is still considered ally), fascists love Israel as model "pure people state" more than they hate Jews, and small but influential part of American Evangelicals believe that Jews having their own state is necessary step to get us the Rapture.

But you probably know all this, nothing you said was in good faith and and just come to HN to turn your hatred on random people.

I mean what values do the west share with middle eastern monarchies? Yet they are propped up and lavished with weapons.

Alliances are mostly power jockeying. Common values will help to provide longevity to the alliance, but power is primary.

I don't see many middle eastern monarchies in NATO.

Bahrain houses the 5th fleet. USCC and USAFCC are out of qatar. I’d call that being allies. And since they’re US bases they will be used by nato in times of conflict (or otherwise).

RedShift, Snowflake, Citus, Greenplum and Athena are OLAP engines, but not real-time focused. For this one, it is more similar to Druid, ClickHouse or RockSet.

The 1.0 version of Pinot seems to bring a lot of maturity, they seem to have added new engine that can do joins now. I'm not sure how stable it is, but it seems interesting.

As for what is this kind of database usedful for, this is for operational analytics on large data that also update in real time. In my domain that would be things like having insight into large supply chains or manufacturing operations, like power plants or factories, just in general for monitoring stuff. I know it's also used in security and finance (for fraud).

Louis Daguerre was a French painter who created "daguerreotypes" a process that gave portraits a sharp reflective style, like a mirror.

Only if I can be your data dragoon.

> Mark Buckingham is free to do his version of Fables (and I dearly hope he does). Steve Leialoha is free to do his version of Fables (which I’d love to see). And so on.

... does anyone have Alan Moore's phone number?

You mean the guy who has been retired from comics since 2017?

'In 2022 he confirmed it, saying "I'm definitely done with comics, I haven't written one for getting on for five years.'

Not sure why he'd be interested.

Given how DC treated him there's maybe a slight hope he'd do it out of spite as a "one last hurrah."

I doubt it, but I wouldn't blame somebody for trying.

Alan Moore writing Fables to spite DC would be the comic event of the year. It would easily outsell anything on the market right now.

The implication is that Moore might potentially be able to pull the same move, releasing the watchmen, top 10, v characters into the public domain

Moore has a complicated relationship with Watchmen (and VfV), spurring from his complicated (and constantly changing) relationship with superhero comics. One of his bones of contention with DC is precisely that he didn't want the work to grow offshoots; I doubt he'd want the world to write them freely either.

The common wisdom is that gas stations already make most money on sweets, snacks and drinks. Becoming charging stations might even improve it.