There’s a free pdf on the publisher website if you don’t need a physical copy:

https://www.iskrabooks.org/stalin-history-and-critique

May she recover quickly and good that you were there to help :rat-salute:

I hope this happens, but something tells me that even if the war in Ukraine ends, the Finnish government might continue their anti Russia policies for a while. I agree it sounds like an awesome trip if you can make it!

I’ve done the Helsinki to St. Petersburg trip several times since the war started so I could PM you with all those details if you want. The short answer is you have basically two options to get to Russia:

First option: Flight through a third country.

This basically means Helsinki-Istanbul and then Istanbul-Moscow or St. Petersburg. The best tickets are pretty expensive (over 1k eur/person), but you can find a bit cheaper if you can deal with a longer layover. A less common route is through Serbia (Belgrade), but I think the flights are less frequent and have longer layovers.

About the 404 pages, a lot of flight aggregator websites aren’t showing tickets to Russia anymore. You can search the Turkish Airlines website directly for Helsinki-St. Petersburg or Moscow. Or through Serbia it’s probably AirBaltic and then transfer to Aeroflot.

If you can read Russian or can handle page translation, aviasales.ru shows flight options. Here’s Helsinki-Moscow and here’s Helsinki-St. Petersburg.

Moscow likely has high speed rail connections to like Kazan, but probably standard rail the whole way across Siberia. I haven’t researched the cross-country train options, so I don’t know how fast it is.

Second option: Ferry to Tallinn + bus to St. Petersburg through the Narva-Ivangorod border point.

This is the cheapest and sometimes the fastest way to get to St. Petersburg. Unfortunately this border point is under reconstruction, so it’s pedestrian only (no vehicles). This means the bus stops at Narva, everyone gets out and takes their luggage, and crosses the border by foot. Lately the lines have been very long, but it varies (expect at least 2 hours, probably longer). Bring water, snacks, and a hat.

We can cross our fingers and hope the Finnish-Russian border is reopened before your trip, then you could easily take a bus from Helsinki. (Same kind of companies operate, for example LuxExpress or SovAvto.)

Getting a visa

Of course, to enter Russia you also need a Russian visa. There used to be a third party visa center operating in Helsinki (Jätkäsaari), but they have been temporarily closed since January 2024. Now you need to submit your visa application through the consulate. However, the visa center’s website has some useful information to help you apply. If you decide to go down this path, I can give you tips from when I was doing my application.

Anyway it’s a bit complicated, but if you have time to plan and this is going to be a month or longer vacation, this is how you could cross the border.

My coworker: Those protestors don’t even know what it is they’re protesting, they just want to be anti-something

Veljeni Kristuksessa, they aren’t running for US president, they surely know where they are and what for

“because I smell something burning”

The thing which drives me up the wall about FPTP and “lesser evil” moralizing is that, given the FPTP voting system, the onus is on the party to put forward a candidate who can win a majority. Don’t blame the voters for the party’s failure. The democrats are putting up a shit candidate, so if they lose, it’s their fault. Not the people. A real tail-wagging-the-dog situation.

If you believe in democracy, then you must believe that power comes from the people, not that power whips the people into line.

He’s in pretty bad health is he not? Is this just letting him free due to illness?

That’s been on my mind too lately, history is filled with intense events that were the entire world for the people experiencing it. Current events are just history being made, but rather than being locked into a track as when we read history, we can directly affect the course. Though, history is also full of completely forgotten stories of people like us and not like us, fighting for things which are motivated by things almost completely irrelevant now. And they would go on being forgotten events and people of the past, except that we can retrospectively analyze them as tools for our present. Interesting to think about when it comes to the legacy we’re collectively leaving to the world’s children.

also it’s kinda wild realizing how old people are still pretty young in a cosmic sense, we’re all just someone else’s kids that inherited the fucked up world handed down to us. Like how stories get passed down through generations, except only the ones told by the oppressing classes are remembered.

The link to last week’s post in the description is outdated, here’s the last week post

https://hexbear.net/post/2783436

ngrok is free for development if you only need to serve HTTP, haven’t used it personally but I think it basically acts like a reverse proxy

#Tradle #840 5/6
🟩🟩🟩⬜⬜
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟨
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟨
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟨
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩
https://oec.world/en/games/tradle

Oh yeah this album works so well to sing along to. I also recommend checking out other albums like On Avery Island or Ferris Wheel on Fire

#Tradle #837 1/6
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩
https://oec.world/en/games/tradle

Following a racially-motivated stabbing of a 12 year old girl at a shopping center in Oulu, Finland last week, a teenage boy stabbed a “foreign-looking” man at the same shopping center in a copy-cat attack. The injuries are not life-threatening, and the boy can be tried criminally since he is over the age of 15.

Yeah I’m only a beginner in learning Russian but I haven’t seen the verb пожирать before, I figured it was something more descriptive like “consume”

Maybe пожарить also works - to fry 😂

Epic bacon quoting the Jorjor Wells book! You win the internet for today.

There are some browser based solutions like sharedrop.io and file.pizza. I haven’t had the latter work for me though, not sure if it’s still functional. They work through WebRTC to discover local candidates for receiving files, the same way that video calling typically finds the best connection.

Security

ShareDrop uses a secure and encrypted peer-to-peer connection to transfer information about the file (its name and size) and file data itself. This means that this data is never transfered through any intermediate server but directly between the sender and recipient devices. To achieve this, ShareDrop uses a technology called WebRTC (Web Real-Time Communication), which is provided natively by browsers. You can read more about WebRTC security here.

Andor

large parts of the world stand behind Ukraine in the war against Russia

But not as many large parts as those who don’t fall in line behind the NATO line.

while Russia today looks even more isolated

8 billion minus 1 golden billion nets you into negative support, this is peak westerner arithmetic

The purpose of the summit was to begin a proper peace process where all participating nations could present ideas on how to work towards a lasting peace in Ukraine.

Didn’t these business major failsons learn in their first semester that a meeting is pointless without all the necessary stakeholders?