An opinion survey conducted by the European Council on Foreign Relations, indicates that the majority of Europeans expressing an opinion want the Ukraine war to end now even if that means Ukraine making territorial concessions:
"Respondents who want peace as soon as possible are in the majority in all countries except Poland, insisting the war must end even if Ukraine has to make territorial concessions to Russia. Italians are the least concerned about retribution for Russia, with 52 percent of those polled just wanting an end to the conflict that has destabilized the European economy and worsened the cost of living crisis. In contrast, just 16 percent of them would see the war continue.
A similar story can be seen in Germany where 49 percent want peace compared with 16 percent who back a continuation of the war. Romania follows with a 42:23 swing, France with 41:20, and Sweden with 38:22." Source
Which is consistent with our proposal for a plebiscite across Ukraine allowing citizens to indicate whether their oblast (that is, state or province) should be ruled by Kyiv, Moscow, or should become an independent self-governing state.
This creates a tricky situation for the NATO warmongers, Bojo the Clown, Biden the Oblivious, the airhead Trudeau, plus the, as normal, insane Poles striving to get a nuclear holocaust out of this conflict, so look forward to much hate-Putin rhetoric in the days to come.
Related:
Moon of Alabama: Ukraine - The U.S. Is Moving Towards Escalation
globalresearch.ca: Ukraine War: Western Media Have Systematically Misrepresented Developments on the Battlefield Well, obviously. In times of war, deceiving the public is what the media, plus Google and other public information providers, are for.
Mainstream media survey finds no one trusts the mainstream media, or presumably, Google, Twittter, and all the other lying bastards. Question is, why are they announcing that they found out what is obvious. So they can act surprised? LOL
"Yes, and in America, where money is, for so many, the ultimate measure of human worth, people at present seem ready to tolerate abuse by billionaire corporate heads, for example, Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google. (see my letter to Pichai posted above.)"
ReplyDeleteOne of the vexing aspects of this situation, for me, is the way the existence of this crop of billionaires and super-rich is the result, not of fighting it out in the free market and the creation of the best product or service, but of deliberate governmental policy.
It significantly bothers me to see the public fund research and development in the universities and elsewhere, but then be required to pay a second time when someone outside the university (or someone leaving the university with the express purpose of capitalizing on R & D) reaps enormous profits on a privatized version.
The medium we're conversing over, for example. The ingredients were first put together by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN, to facilitate communications between scientists. (I am not sure, but believe most of the ingredients were the results of government funded projects.) It was downloadable for free, to anyone with internet access. (Mainly scientists employed one way or the other by governments.)
What would become a commercial product came to the USA through the University of Illinois National Center for Supercomputing Applications. One of the people credited with developing a commercial web browser, Marc Andreessen, was a student at the university, working at the center as an intern. His involvement began when he was assigned work by a fulltime employee of the center. (I just checked: Marc Andreesen's current net worth is 1.6 billion.)
The software crafted by Andreessen and the other center employees was very, very similar to CERN's. It is obvious to me all of the genuine creativity and innovation was generated at CERN. (Just checked this also: Tim Berners-Lee has a net worth around ten million. Good on him, but orders of magnitude less than Andreessen.)
Getting long winded here, (and simplifying too much even so), when Bill Gates jumped into that fray to save himself from being eclipsed by Netscape (the company Andreessen as a junior partner founded with Jim Clark), he was just a poor boy, only 6-10 billion. Where you really see his wealth jump was after the "victory" over Netscape. It was around that time in the late 90's when the press started using the 100 billion dollar estimate of Bill's net worth. Bill's browser and internet technology also came from the University of Illinois NCSA via an arrangement with a company called Spyglass. (IIRC, the bigwigs at Spyglass were also from NSCA originally.)
The original, or "founding" software was developed by Tim Berners-Lee of CERN to facilitate communication between scientists.
"It significantly bothers me to see the public fund research and development in the universities and elsewhere, but then be required to pay a second time when someone outside the university (or someone leaving the university with the express purpose of capitalizing on R & D) reaps enormous profits on a privatized version."
DeleteOne reason for this is that many government research agencies haven't a clue about patent issues. Several minor technologies that I developed when working for several governments were patented after I had left Government service. In each case, the technology had been described in detail in peer-reviewed journal articles, which should have precluded the subsequent acquisition of a patent, but patent examiners are evidently not very diligent in evaluating the validity of patent claims.
The thing about the Internet is that it provided scope for the creation of multiple more or less global monopolies at incredibly low cost. Some were more attentive to the opportunity than others. Gates, who apparently attended some business school or economics department classes concerning monopolies clearly recognized the opportunity.
Even we were able to hit the headlines with out now defunct science mag: NaturalScience, which, at one point, the U. of Illinois Center for SuperComputing Applications named "Website of the Week"! But we were so busy publishing real journals that we had no time to pursue the opportunity we might then have had!
The development of patent law for software is part of what intrigues me. It was controversial from the very start. And from the very start, there was Bill Gates.
DeleteHis original BASIC program for the Altair, the first personal computer, wasn't that great. Neither was the Altair, for that matter.
(I admit, though, Bill and Paul Allen were quick to cobble together something that worked at all. They were also quick to seize the opportunity offered by the personal computer-- right at the start of the PC revolution.)
People who bought the Altair and tried to use BASIC were frustrated by their inadequacy. Almost immediately these people, who were savvy hobbyists, not far behind Bill and Paul in this revolution, began to pirate and copy unauthorized editions of BASIC just in order to get it to do what they thought it would do when they shelled out the funds to buy it.
The idea behind patent protection is to encourage innovation. If the hobbyists weren't discouraged by patent law, I am quite sure they would have promoted innovation on their own, and this would have been greater than the innovation achieved by Bill, Paul, and their Microsoft, eventually protected by patent law.
Someone might argue "we'll never know", but in my opinion, the way the internet worked out, maybe we have confirmation or at least evidence. The open source code of the internet was never allowed to become "closed" and proprietary. Beneath Internet Explorer, there has been lots of anonymous, amateur innovation.
That's exciting you came so close to greatness, CS.