SamirCasino

Been in the industry for 10 years and i deeply disagree with you. I work in COBOL.

Not that migrations don't happen, but in my experience, many, many companies kick that can down the road each year, because migrating huge and critical services is extremely costly, time-consuming and risky. In the short term, just paying people to maintain the dinosaurs is waaaay cheaper.

Also, it's extremely easy to get a job in it ( my company now hires people with no IT background and tries to teach them cobol from scratch ), because even though it's a niche, the demand for it still outweighs the supply of people willing to learn it.

Will it die out eventually? Maybe. I've been hearing about its death for a decade, so i've become skeptical about it in the short-term.

Edit : would also like to point out that it is indeed a fantasy that it pays truckloads of money. Does it happen? Sometimes, but you need to be really good and experienced at it.

It's good to ask the question.

The problem is when they refuse to accept the answer.

Here in Romania, we're exactly like the Poles. There's deep, deep national trauma related to Russia ( even before the USSR ).

However, it's not the same everywhere in the former soviet block, places like Bulgaria, Hungary or Slovakia are far more torn on the issue.

People who grow up almost anywhere else on earth can also tell how big something is based on their experience with metric. That's not something inherently based on the imperial system. The same way you go "oh that's about 3 feet", we go "oh that's about 2 meters".

And of course, switching systems overnight is insane, people are used to imperial, you're right. But at the very least do what Britain did, and have both systems in parallel at the same time, everywhere. And in time, people would get used to metric too.

Nono, you're fine doing that, just make sure you're bleeding hard enough so that the manure can't get in the bloodstream.

I made absolutely no mention of Ukraine and i would have written this comment with no changes ( and i probably have ) years before the invasion. It's a strawman on your part to assume i uncritically support Ukraine ( or the US or EU for that matter ), just because i'm criticizing Russia. And if anything, i feel like we echo the same sentiment in both our comments, that just by criticizing one side doesn't mean that the other doesn't have flaws.

It just doesn't mean they're equally bad either.

At the very start, i point out that this worldview of all politics and politicians are dirty and corrupt is being pushed by Russia in many countries. I didn't think i need to mention that i'm including Italy.

This attitude of "all politics and politicians are equally dirty" is straight out of the russian propaganda playbook. This is the narrative they've pushed in my country for decades, and it's chillingly effective. It closely resembles whataboutism, whenever you criticize a politician, people yell "AS IF THE OTHER SIDE IS BETTER."

Why push this narrative, you ask? So that people become so disillusioned and apathetic that they don't vote, so it takes less votes for Russia to get the parties it wants into power. It also breeds internal dissent, malcontent, instability, leads to low voter turnout.

Russia also pushes a version of this at home, and in allies like Belarus. The gist being, all politics is dirty and corrupt, don't get involved, don't vote, nothing matters, it doesn't concern you.

So yeah, sorry about the rant, but when i see variations of that quote "if your vote mattered, they'd make it illegal", i get really annoyed. If your vote mattered, they'd make you think it doesn't so you don't vote.

You're right, but it depends on the infrastructure already set up. In areas with high rail density ( like here in Europe ), if you can use the existing rail infrastructure, electric trains would be amazing.

Do you?

We wouldn't mind so much if your system wasn't so damn arbitrary, and if you weren't literally the only country on earth to refuse to come together with the rest of us.