Diverted Attention

With recent events in Israel, we no longer hear about the conflict in Ukraine. I understand this could pose a problem for this conflict because people’s attention is severely diverted. Support for Ukraine was already waning before the attacks in Israel. Military aid packages are harder to get. Any interruption in weapons could destroy any small advances by the Ukrainian army. There is no magic here, to fully reverse the dynamic in Ukraine, look no further than into Israel’s army reaction to the Hammas. The West needs to sharply increase their support, not the opposite, in order to kick the Russians out of Ukraine.

Sorry But No Sympathy for Russian

From a lunar rover to a plane (probably, to be confirmed) carrying the head of the infamous Wagner group (plus a few of his “friends”), they all crash and burn in hell. I don’t care about the root causes, I have no sympathy at all for Russian failures. The more, the better. Eventually, some will wake up and make a revolution.

Musk reminds me of Trump when he says he wants to have a conversation with Tim Cook about the App Store’s 30% cut on whatever shit they allow to sell through X.com. Just like Trump walking to the room in Ukraine or Russia and solving the Ukraine war in a day. What a pair of clowns these guys can be.

George Monastiriakos: The only way to save Russia is to dismantle it:

“To be clear: The Russian Federation is the third iteration of the Russian Empire. Spanning 11 time zones and comprising hundreds of ethnically, linguistically, religiously, and culturally distinct societies ruled by, from, and for the benefit of a small circle of kleptocrats primarily based in Saint Petersburg and Moscow, the Russian state has been unviable for centuries. Like empires of old, the only way to save Russia from itself is to dismantle it,“ writes George Monastiriakos, a fellow at the Geneva Centre for Security, in his recent op-ed.

Photo: Getty Images

A day at the office. Today, I had a meeting with my client’s external IT resources. One of them had a strange name, hard to pronounce. While waiting for everyone to join the meeting, wanting to fill in the silence, I asked where he was from. He responded, “Russia.” I said, “Oh.” 😱 This was followed by a big silence while I could see in mack back my Tidbyt display showing a prominent Ukrainian flag. 🇺🇦👊🏻We moved on to the meeting’s first subject. 😏😂

A colleague of mine told me after the meeting that not all Russians are ok with this war in Ukraine. Yeah, right. I guess. This is not a valuable excuse in my book. Where are the diaspora demonstrations, in Canada? In the US?

Women in Iran have more courage to defend democratic values than those men in Russia to defend what is blatantly right from what is wrong. This is utterly frustrating.

Glory to Ukraine. 🇺🇦🇺🇦

Is NATO Prolonging War in Ukraine?

Found on Reddit:

NATO has always pandered to Putin, says former officer Samantha de Bendern. “If we’re gonna help Ukraine, we have to go in and help them with as much as we can as fast as we can. Drip feeding weapons is what’s prolonging the war”

Indeed. I cannot see how, today, NATO could be more involved in the Ukrainian conflict. Politically it’s a big challenge to put boots on the ground.

How Amazon put Ukraine’s ‘government in a box’ — and saved its economy from Russia

Since the day Russia launched its invasion Feb. 24, Amazon has been working closely with the Ukrainian government to download essential data and ferry it out of the country in suitcase-sized solid-state computer storage units called Snowball Edge, then funnelling the data into Amazon’s cloud computing system.

As a guy working in IT for nearly 30 years, I can imagine how complex and critical this project was for Ukraine. Transferring a vast amount of data doesn’t happen overnight. Preparing a landing zone in a cloud provider is a complex project. AWS’s (Amazon) contribution is essential, and I wonder if their contribution covers the subscription fees too. I wish I could work on this kind of project myself.