roastpotatothief

Most people agree about the ongoing Ukrainian war. Russia invaded Ukraine. Invasion is wrong. There is much resulting damage and suffering and death.

This is all true.

But it focuses on the superficial, immediate goings on and misses out on the context and reasons. There is no point in blaming people or regimes for things they have been compelled to do by circumstance, for which they have no choice.

There is an opportunity for a new world order where regimes are punished for invasion, by for example being excluded from international banking systems and trade and airspace. As a first consequence, Israel would be immediately punished for its ongoing invasion of Palestine, in breach of a peace treaty which it has signed, and the ongoing genocide in the occupied territory. This is a much worse and clear cut case than that of Russia and Ukraine.

But Israel will not be punished as Russia has been. Because this is not about war and peace, or right and wrong, or crime and punishment, or even good and bad or preventing suffering. This is about the USA and Russian and their ongoing political competion. Russia is being punished, and its people pushed into further poverty, and losing access to the sea, just because it suits the USA's geopolitical interests.

Economies need access to the sea. It is the one crucial thing they need for security and prosperity. Landlocked countries are all poor.

Russia is already a very poor country. It cannot risk losing access to the Mediterranean. Losing this access would mean losing trade routes, making goods more expensive, and the people poorer. Being cut off from the sea is a disaster for a country, even one with coastal provinces thousands of miles away.

Russia will not lose access to the sea in Ukraine. It will fight forever and make huge sacrifices to keep that access. It will do whatever it takes, because it has no choice. The alternative is eternal destitution.

Russia must regain good political relations with Ukraine, or else subsume the south-eastern portion containing the deep-water ports.

Russia also has a good justification for invading. Ukraine signed a peace treaty with Russia, then broke its rules. Then it made laws to persecute Russians living in Ukraine. That provoked Russia and created the political opportunity to invade.

Ukraine has nothing to gain from separating Russia from the sea, and economically much to lose. Ukraine has nothing to gain from being endlessly at war. This USA's war.

It is the USA which is working to separate Russia from the sea. It has worked hard on this for years, supporting (or possibly instigating) the Ukrainian regime change, and heavily supporting the Ukrainian government and army since then.

The USA is paying for the war and supplying the weapons and all sorts of support. It is a proxy war between Russia and the USA, identical to many others before it, spanning 100 years.

Russia has repeatedly asked for peace talks. It wants to end the war, regain access to the sea, and guarantee the protection of Russians. So why does Ukraine refuse to negotiate a peace?

This option would anger the USA. Ukraine would be punished forever by the global powers, and maybe become a poor pariah state like others which opposed the USA (like Russia).

There are theories. For example what happened to Gaddafi and Libya after refusing to trade in dollars. But I think only Mr Zelenskyy knows. He has been working very closely with USA agencies for years. There must be some personal arrangement where this is in his interests.

Without USA support, the war would end in an instant. Ukraine would be forced to negotiate a peace, a new border would be drawn, and the region could become more prosperous. This would be the ideal result.

It is unrealistic to talk of reparations from Russia. These only happen after total defeats, like in world war 1. They usually inspire the conflict to resume soon after. This will not be the outcome.

The war will end in the normal way, with compromise. Probably Russia will get some land. Ukraine will get peace and maybe economic aid.

The war will continue until the USA stops supporting it.

But the USA is very happy for the war to continue. I has a need to be at war constantly, to spend and justify its military budget, to test and develop weapons and strategies and logistics, to test its competitors' military abilities.

The best thing about the war is that it wastes Russia's money and weakens it economically. Pushing Russia deeper into poverty is a major focus of the USA regime. The USA will try to keep the war going forever.

Most people agree that summer/winter time is counter-productive. this is true.

• It creates confusion, clock-changing work, disturbed sleep, and missed appointments twice a year.
• It changes the time-zone differences many times a year, because different territories do not all change on the same day.
• It has no advantages. Some people say that the school hours must be shifted to ensure they are always during daylight, but really that's an argument for shifting the school hours twice a year, not the whole notion of time.

But this is only the first step. Time zones are not needed at all. Just as society quickly changed from imperial to metric one generation, we could switch all of business and society to UTC. Only the old can continue to use the local times if they choose to, by applying the conversion. This solves one extra big problem:

• In small countries and near borders of big countries and international settings, nobody is ever sure what time it is. All the confusion with airport and train schedules, gone.

This sounds nice but it does bring up a problem. Here are four versions and solutions of it.

1. The day changes when the clock is at 0:00h UTC. It changes from Tuesday to Wednesday at an arbitrary point during the day. Christmas Day starts and ends at a different time of day in each place. How do bank holidays work then?
2. Use UTC but the days don't change at 0:00h, they change at midnight, whatever time that is locally.
3. We keep a few local time zones, maybe one for each continent, so that 0:00h is always during the night.
4. We use UTC but also keep some concept of a local time, somehow.

This is the question that must be answered before we can resolve the scourge of time-zone chaos on our global society.

As an aside, I find it mad that we have all these discussions about clock and calendar reform, but the only unit we never try to reform is the week, even though the week is the only truly arbitrary unit. Somehow the week feels right and useful, but the natural units all feel wrong.

People work faster when feeling slightly cold. Warmth makes workers drowsy and slow. Hence the controversy of offices always being cold (which allegedly is sexist because it bothers women more than men) and wasting energy in air-conditioning.

People also work better when they are hungry. Hence the tip of always booking meetings for before lunchtime.

People also work faster when on hard chairs or stools or standing, under too-bright lights, etc.

So there is a pattern that being uncomfortable (not unhappy exactly) increases productivity.

It is well known in HR groups that the best way to retain workers, is not to pay them well or improve their quality of life in other ways. People mostly leave because of social problems at work or other sources of discontentment. To make people content to stay, you organise parties, offer free coffee, have company competitions. You keep them socially bound to work, which is much cheaper than increasing pay or otherwise really improving their lives.

So the common theme here is to make people permanently physically uncomfortable, but occasionally joyous. And ignore how well they are doing outside of work.

This is obviously not a serious theory or explanation like most of my articles. Just some connected observations.

I find that people resisting new ideas. They resist understanding new ideas.

This happens both online and in real life, among diverse kinds of people. They all (in my experience) have the very same reaction to new ideas.

People oscillate between two reactions

• This idea is absurd. It breaks with established principles, therefore is is nonsense.
• This idea is identical to another old idea that I am familiar with.

People oscillate rapidly between these two (opposite) reactions. The more you explain, they do not progress towards understanding. Once you show that one reaction is wrong, that in fact the new idea [is different from the old / complies with basic principles but in a new way] they realise the one reaction is untenable, and just switch back to the other one. They never manage to form the new synapses required to broaden their understanding of the world, in order to comprehend the new idea.

People (most people) are incapable (beyond a certain age) of grasping new ideas at all. So they must draw one of those two conclusions to avoid feeling stupid. But the surprising thing is that everyone seems to do it exactly the same way. And that they can have a response so irrational, oscillating between opposite beliefs many times per minute, without realising it.

What does work is authority. If the news or the government says something radical, people will rapidly absorb it. Or in social groups where I am highly respected, people make the effort to understand and eventually are convinced.

My question is, how can I really teach people anything? Is there some rhetorical method that helps people get past this?

There are two conflicting ideas in criminal law

1. The commit a crime. Do your punishment. After you complete your penance you are free to live a normal life again. You have paid your debt, and the crime is expunged. You are a free and innonent man again.
2. A criminal is a criminal forever. We need to keep records on them, so people can avoid them. As a side-effect, they are ostricised from some of society and unable to do certain things, forever.

Of course, in real legal systems it's a mess, a mix of these two ideas (both of them a bit naive anyway, to be honest) and many others.

But the kernel of good from them can be taken and used.

What I propose is like a criminal record, but for people who have never been convicted of a crime.

It is for anybody who has committed a crime, but for whatever reason has not been punished. I'm thinking for example of all the people who maim or murder, and whose crime is in the newspaper for a day or two then forgotten.

If the crime has been documented (for example in the media) and is not just a slander, it is added to a publicly searchable list. The definition of "crime" is (as always) flexible. It's up to the people making the list to define it. So the list would be maintained probably by a non-profit org set up exclusively for this.

That theire names are known and remembered, and their crimes recorded forever - it could be a small dicincentive for people to do crime, for those who normally have none.