Ukraine’s tech industry was well positioned to capitalize on this opportunity thanks to the dramatic evolution it’s undergone in recent years. Since the first IT companies appeared in the mid-1990s the sector has experienced a meteoric rise. Today it accounts for 4 percent of GDP and employs roughly 200,000 people, boasting some of the country’s highest salaries. Much of this growth has been built on outsourcing. But while in the early days the main sell for international customers was the ability to hire competent programmers at lower prices, as the industry has matured the value proposition has shifted considerably, says Chubay. “It’s not about the cost anymore, it’s about the expertise and ultimate outcomes,” says Chubay. “We have moved up the value chain. We have become more holistic, and we are gaining more and more responsibility over bigger chunks of our client’s businesses.”

BBC World News.

Oh yes. Ukrainian programmers charge like total bastards. And good for them. I don’t think anybody should undersell their labor. But the idea that you can hire them cheaply – this hasn’t been true since last century. This creates a weird situation in Ukraine where a class of people makes the kind of money that’s way higher than even the US median while the rest makes between 1/10 and 1/5 of US median.

I’m still not fully over the poor guy who left all this and went to Mexico with the hopes of recreating the Ukrainian programmers there.

“Among a cohort of 432,302 persons aged 2–19, rate of body mass index increase approximately doubled during pandemic compared to prepandemic period. Persons w/ prepandemic overweight or obesity & younger school-aged children experienced largest increases.” https://t.co/vQPl5ILd17

I’m not sure I understand why, though. We didn’t have Spanish-style lockdowns where people weren’t allowed to go outside. Most people with children don’t live in huge, blue megalopolises. I was outside with Klara for 5-6 hours every day in April-May 2020 (before the schools reopened on June 1). Playgrounds were closed but there was a ton of other outside options. How come “no sitting at school all day” means more and not less fat?

It’s gotten to the point that people who pooh-poohed my concerns about the increasingly totalitarian COVID measures for a year now freak out and I have to repeat, “Let’s stay calm! We’ll get through it. Many things can still happen to turn this back.”

One issue that trips up conservatives constantly is that they keep trying to play woke games and hope to beat wokesters at them. “Democrats are the real racists” is one of the saddest among such games. You can’t win if you start running around calling people racists because the other side has years of experience on you. Just stop. Don’t support this nefarious practice by participating in it. It’s not OK, it’s not helping anything.

All these blackfaces, watermelon juices, climate changes, “more people of color support X than Y” – leave all that crap to the idiots who invented it. Talk to those of us who couldn’t care less who’s “a bigger racist” and who’s got more diverse whatevers.

There’s no bigger sign of losership than mimicking the behavior and language of your opponent.

This is why I’m saying Canadian conservatism is dead:

With everything Trudeau has done, this is the only criticism of him that Conservatives have been able to muster? That he wasn’t woke back when nobody was?

And what can O’Toole stop Trudeau from doing? Posing in “insensitive” costumes? Who the ef cares? NDP voters? They are so far gone anyway that screw them.

The country is literally circling the drain while these bozos virtue-signal about who was more politically correct at a costume party back in 1998.

Canada’s conservatives are for vaccine passports, for lockdowns, for woke policing of everybody’s past, and they think the biggest problems in Canada are “climate change and racism.”

“Canadians need to choose how we finish the fight against COVID-19 and build back better, from getting the job done on vaccines to having people’s backs all the way to and through the end of this crisis,” Trudeau continued. “In this pivotal, consequential moment, who wouldn’t want to have a say, who wouldn’t want their chance to help decide where our country goes from here?”

First of all, why is he stealing a slogan from a presidential campaign in a completely different country? Too stupid and subservient to afford Canada a bit of dignity as a country in its own right?

“This pandemic has provided an opportunity for a reset,” Justin Trudeau told a United Nations conference last year. “This is our chance to accelerate our pre-pandemic efforts, to re-imagine economic systems that actually address global challenges like extreme poverty, inequality and climate change.” 

Also, “re-imagine”? What’s next, “circle back”? Can the fellow say anything that doesn’t make him sound like the ditzy WH press secretary? Canadians already don’t have much by way of national identity that can’t be reduced to “we are different from Americans.” (Sorry, Canadians, but you know I’m right.) This slavish recitation of American slogans weakens an already tenuous national identity.

In short, please don’t vote for this smug, stupid bastard. And don’t vote for the other smug, stupid bastard. Vote PPC.

I’m hoping this is a conspiracy theory. I really am:

Vaccinations can be a controversial subject for many people, especially when it comes to injections. So what if you could replace your next shot with a salad instead? Researchers at the University of California-Riverside are working on a way to grow edible plants that carry the same medication as an mRNA vaccine.

I don’t usually recommend blogs because there aren’t any any more (which is a shame because blogs remain completely uncensored). Here, however, is a really funny blog about all things British. Enjoy!

One thing I hate on social occasions where parents congregate is when people start sharing the academic and developmental achievements of their kids. We all understand that my kid isn’t lacking in such achievements but she’s not a trained poodle for me to parade for social brownie points.

Share your own achievements and let the kids share theirs if they wish. (Usually they don’t because standing out from a peer group isn’t a good thing until well into adulthood).

Michael Burleigh says in Third Reich that the leadership of the Weimar Republic messed up royally when it refused to cultivate the feelings of nationalist attachment to the republic. They didn’t create a big, touching ceremony for the signing of the constitution. They avoided all pomp and circumstance. Refused to create commemorative medals for the survivors of the Great War.

This was a gigantic mistake because the Great War had only been possible because nationalist sentiment had been manufactured and people felt it strongly. Weimar’s incapacity to channel these feelings somewhere productive created an opportunity for horrible people to channel them into a horrible direction.

Obviously, this was far from being the only factor in the rise of Nazism but we all know about the other factors while this one is something I never considered before.