The Gaming Den

This is mostly for our local Russian Star, but what the hell is up with Putin cracking down on Casinos?

American version of the Story.

It seems incomprehensible to me that this is in any way an attempt to get rid of crime in any real sense - and yet the casinos were a well established point of vory power. So seriously, what the hell?

-Username17

The casinos, like a lot of Russian business of any reasonable size, is run by the oligarchs. It's possible that one of them pissed him off, and hence this is what motivates the crackdown.

Note that Starmaker isn't the only local Russian star.

Okay, but what does Putin actually want to get out of putting the screws to the casino owners? Respect? Political support? Because Russians want it?

Perhaps he is less rational than we give him credit for. Perhaps he even has (*gasp*) a moral sentiment. I know, I know: ex-KGB with a moral sentiment??? Seriously, though, stranger things have happened.

Lago PARANOIA wrote:Okay, but what does Putin actually want to get out of putting the screws to the casino owners? Respect? Political support? Because Russians want it?

He wants to mess up the oligarchs who run the place, because they decided to do shit he doesn't like. Khodorkovsky got done in for the very same reason.

He doesn't need respect, political support or to give a damn what Russians think - he needs firm control over the centres of economic power, which these oligarchs ultimately are.

Do you think that Putin's gambit will be successful, and if not, what needs to change on his or Russia's end to make it work?

I think he's just letting people know who's boss. Perhaps the assassinations have just all gotten a little out of hand and this is the message?

Lago PARANOIA wrote:Do you think that Putin's gambit will be successful, and if not, what needs to change on his or Russia's end to make it work?

Define 'gambit' in this case. Your question is too vague to be answered at present.

mean_liar wrote:I think he's just letting people know who's boss. Perhaps the assassinations have just all gotten a little out of hand and this is the message?

The former is true. The latter isn't really meaningful - assassination remains the method of conflict resolution between the economic strongmen in Russia, which is why private security is such big business there.

Sorry for being vague.

What I'm asking is this: do you think that Putin's plan to show the oligarchs who in fact wears the pants around Russia is going to pay dividends or is it just going to get him laughed at and/or put him in undue danger?

And if you don't think that this crackdown on casinos is going to help him (either in the short or long run) what do you think needs to be done on Putin's end or his opponents' end to benefit him if he decides to go through with this plan anyway.

Yeah, I was grasping at straws with the assassination thing. When I read it, it sounded like the building part of the plan was where cronies were going to make serious money, but that's not going anywhere so I'm still confused.

Lago PARANOIA wrote:Sorry for being vague.

What I'm asking is this: do you think that Putin's plan to show the oligarchs who in fact wears the pants around Russia is going to pay dividends or is it just going to get him laughed at and/or put him in undue danger?

And if you don't think that this crackdown on casinos is going to help him (either in the short or long run) what do you think needs to be done on Putin's end or his opponents' end to benefit him if he decides to go through with this plan anyway.

To the former question - it has worked in the past, and it will continue to do so. Again, I refer you to the case of Khodorkovsky - the guy was imprisoned virtually without charge and had all his assets seized because Putin thought he was getting too big for his shoes.

As far as the crackdown on casinos goes, it's not really designed with business or money-making in mind. Yes, financially, this is likely quite stupid, but that wouldn't be the first time such stupid legislation went through. Remember Starmaker's little post on the really daft law that prevents you from graduating without a degree? This is cut from the same cloth.

@mean_liar: As I said before, money isn't what's at stake here - it's Putin saying to people 'hey guys, I still run this damn show, and don't you forget it'. This is particularly targeted at the oligarchs, because surprisingly enough, their economic might is about the only thing that could displace Putin if not kept tightly under rein.

1. Putin vs. the oligarchs is a myth. It's always oligarchs vs. oligarchs. The government has a hold on the media and thus does not have to worry about its image.

1986: Chernobyl (see below) blamed on the (dead) workers. Nevermind that the real reason was design errors and the real culprit got a promotion. At least 4e didn't kill anyone.
1998: Financial crisis blamed on the current Prime Minister Kirienko, recently appointed, fired immediately afterwards.
2005: Failed intentionally fvcked up healthcare and social welfare reforms blamed on the Healthcare Minister Zurabov. Who retained his post.
Do you see the tendency there? Politicians care for their public image even less than they did in Soviet times.

That's something western media never get right. Hardly anything Putin or Medvedev ever do has anything to do with gaining popularity because there are no competitors. The political parties anyone cares about are:
[*] United Russia, the ruling party
[*] the Liberal party, led by the class clown Zhirinovsky, that no one ever takes seriously
[*] the Communist party, led by another class clown Zyuganov, that is only taken seriuosly by the party members, which makes them look very stupid
[*] the Right-Wing party, evil propagandists sold out to the corrupt western regimes, serve as the bad guys. Sometimes they overact and perform the equivalent of chuckling evilly or sporting a goatee which looks funny even to the casual observer.
If there's any real struggle it's between various businessmen who try to buy their way into the parliament in order to get legal immunity (that's how Fair (United lite) and Agrarian (Commie lite) parties got formed, though the latter were unsuccessful in obtaining seats). Also, the movers and shakers got tired of right-wings getting some, so they don't have seats in the parliament anymore.

2. Casinos are an easy target. Both large and small casinos are hated by the general populace for obvious reasons, and papers often publish sob stories about gambling addicts. So opinions mostly range from "I don't care" to "serves them right".
No one cares about the workers. Ever.
Not thinking about the common man is very (duh) common in Russian media. My parents are not tech-savvy (yes, I'm 22 and I live with my parents; 20 grand can buy that girl a house but it won't buy a room in Moscow), and when they turn on the TV which is their only source of information, I either get out or scream insults at the TV (so that they turn it off). Free TV is shit. Even when the talking heads don't give advice on with what jewels you should decorate your chihuahua this season*, they still manage to show utter disregard or utter contempt for anything Russian. How do you like this gem, for instance:

Russian 1st channel, the only channel many people ever receive wrote:The government tries to prevent anyone defaulting on their loan payments from going abroad, so the suckers have to stay at their dachas this summer, bwa ha ha!!!

Never mind that Russia does have resorts, like Sochi (see below). This won't occur to the talking heads. Ever.

3. Gambling per se is not banned. It's getting relocated to certain regions.

the above article wrote:The development replacement zones -- in southern Krasnodar, the Baltic enclave of Kaliningrad, east Siberia's Altai region and the Far East -- require investment of up to $40 billion and have not been built.

Wow.
I don't go to the gym. At all. It's not exactly expensive, but it's very time consuming. It takes me 3 hours to get to and from work, and 3 more hours to go to the gym would leave me with no time to make up insane emo plots for my adventures, not to mention actually run them.
Now, I have read in the local newspaper that $7 million has been spent on building a sports center in my area since 2007. $10 million more will have been spent by the end of 2010, when it's supposed to start functioning. And guess what?
The sports center territory is walled up, full of trash and smells of hobo piss. The building is actually an unfinished shopping center, falling in ruin since 1994. Do you think anything will change by 2010? What do you think the citizens do when they read blatant lies?
And four regions (think four US states in terms of territory, not the # of people) is no sports center.

CatharzGodfoot wrote:Perhaps he is less rational than we give him credit for.

Ha. Ha. $40 000 million and counting. Less rational. Ha. And don't forget the Olympic games in Sochi, what do you think they're for? International prestige? Lol.

*There's another type of program on Russian tv. The "Look at this 7-person family happily living on 6 square meters without electricity and running water - you should, too" type.


Fun story, redux, since it was mentioned in the neighboring thread:

The truth about the Chernobyl catastrophe was told to me by one of the scientists who did the investigation and was ordered to keep silent about it.
The government stated the reason was human error, and indeed it was, though not on part of the operators but the designers. The faulty design was approved by Eugene Adamov, who later went on to become the Minister of Nuclear Energy.
Obviously, the fact that the greatest nuclear power wasn't able to build a power station that doesn't explode couldn't have been made known. But when a country has been run in succession by a retard, a drug addict and a couple of people too old to give a fuck, what do you expect? And do you think the situation was getting better with a foreign spy as head of state, of which we had two?

Decades earlier, a student was taking his final exam and fucked up in a major way, so that one of the examiners said,
"That young man doesn't understand physics, like, at all. Therefore I suggest we let him off with a 'sat' (satisfactory, the lowest passing grade)."
The other examiners started objecting, saying that a sat would totally ruin that promising young man's career. So he relented.

The young man was of course Eugene Adamov, and the examiner too concerned about the physics of combustion engines rather than the young man's career ended up investigating Chernobyl. He had been told to keep quiet about the matter and he did, but since then, he swore that never ever would he let a student go away with an undeserved grade.

That person currently works at the physics department where I studied. He's respected by peers and somewhat feared by students because of his known tendency to give no quarter at an exam. So when a student said,
"Hey, I want an 'excellent', otherwise I won't get the premium, you're making me lose some real money here", he paused and answered,
"You know what... Have an excellent, I'm seriously too old to give a fuck any more."

My good-aligned grandma died of cancer in the autumn of 1986, so it's personal. That fucker Adamov hid his tracks, buried some American nuclear waste in Russia and pocketed the money, sold some nuclear fuel for laughably low prices and pocketed the money (see the pattern?) He spent 2 months in prison in 2008. Oh, and did I mention the 2005 money grant from the USA to Russia, the purpose of which was to "increase the nuclear safety"? Three guesses as to where they went instead. Meanwhile, people are dying of cancer.

I'd heard a different story about the disaster, which was that the reactor design was known to be bad, so they decided to stress test some of the safety systems. Your story may be true, but the real screwup was testing a live reactor to destruction.

The stress test of certain safety features was done without supervision or knowledge of higher ups or even without it being on a damn schedule. In order to speed up the test several safety features were intentionally defeated by the operator. And the operators ignored several of the warning signs that still worked for... god knows for what reason.

Now there were several things really bad about the design such as the lack of primary and secondary containment, the lack of a way to cool the core when the normal path of coolant failed, a design error in the emergency shutdown feature that temporarily adds reactivity (which is very bad when the core is about to meltdown), and worst of all the cores had a positive temperature coefficient of reactivity. Which means as the moderator becomes hotter reactivity increases which makes the moderator hotter, etc..

Nuclear power plants in the West and China have a negative temperature coefficient of reactivity which means that only a catastrophic design error or intentional operator action (like pulling the control rods or reducing the temperature of the core some other way than control rods) can increase reactivity--further, once reactivity increases by some way, such as pulling control rods, the negative feedback causes power to level out at some new lower level. Since this method limits the maximum power you can get out of the core and also requires more dense fuel (since a lot of power is wasted by the negative feedback effect), the Chernobyl reactors have positive feedback, which means that a computer or operator needs to constantly move rods to prevent the reactor from shutting down from being too cold or melting down from being too hot.

In short, the Chernobyl disaster was caused by operator error but aggravated by bad design.

I'll buy Yeltsin as a foreign spy, but not Gorbachev.

-Username17

Nuclear power plants often have terrible user interfaces, which tends to compound errors into disasters.

What the fuck are half of those even for? How can a block of nuclear material, a set of retardant systems, and some piping be so complex as to require all of that?

Most of the switches remotely control valves. Since all U.S.A power plants have a water secondary plant you have to monitor temperature, flow, and pressure. And those tiny lights are alarms/warnings/indications, which can be anything from 'emergency reactor shutdown' or 'valve balogna fuckest is open'.

Design was part of the fault, but the mere fact they kept the damn thing open and ignored warnings several times over - even when it was melting - was a serious error.

But, hey, those guys are all dead, so...

-Crissa

The lack of adequate primary and secondary containment is was really makes people scratch their heads. Though since they used a Super Speshul coolant there (I can't remember if it was sodium or graphite, I want to say sodium) wasn't really anything they could do once the core shat itself. In Western reactors one of the big reasons why water is still used as a coolant is because if things fuck themselves up you can A) flood the compartment to keep it cool, B) prevent the release of radioactive contaminants to the air and C) water is actually a fairly effective attenuator of radiation. A foot of water reduces radiation flux by about a tenth and water (or rather, the oxygen and nitrogen in it) doesn't stay radioactive for very long.

Of course, aside from having a godawful containment the fact that it took Russia many hours for them to get the core covered--they air-lifted in cement and dumped it on the melted mixture that was once a core in an attempt to cool it and supress the motherfucking fires that developed, Funny thing about nuclear cores--once they start melting down, it sustains itself like that for a really long time. But of course it was too late by then due to the fact that a ridiculous amount of contaminants were released to the air and surrounding materials were radioactively... activated.

Graphite, which catches on fire at a certain not very high temperature. Once the core is open or burning, you don't want to put plain water on it; the water will evaporate and while that will cool it, it will launch heavier materials into the air. The concrete was actually a good idea because it left shards of silica behind to block the release of heavier isotopes into the upper atmosphere. But it did mean the fighters were bound to die within the day, and they did. Waves and waves of them.

Water may have solved it early on, and is safer. But once you have a radioactive fire, water is no longer useful.

-Crisa

They threw in boron too. If fact, that was most of what they had people dumping into the core from helicopter.

Starmaker wrote:Free TV is shit. Even when the talking heads don't give advice on with what jewels you should decorate your chihuahua this season*, they still manage to show utter disregard or utter contempt for anything Russian.

Another example.
June 25: Michael Jackson dies.
July 1: Ludmila Zykina dies. She may be not as well-known worldwide, but when panegyrists say something to the effect that "anyone's name was synonymous with Russia", they usually greatly exaggerate or lie outright, except in Zykina's case.
Guess whose death got more coverage in Russia.

Making money with Vova Putin

When my grandfather's apartment hadn't yet been stolen by dishonest relatives, I found a stack of old magazines for teenagers there - Soviet magazines, so the articles there were less of the "how to tell if he really loves me" and more of the "how to make nukes with a file and a screwdriver" type. This caught my eye:

"Extra Ring Discovered! Scientists (credited) discovered the third Ring of Saturn. It was previously considered there are only two of them, so don't forget to write a footnote into your home encyclopedia".

In 2006, Pluto ceased to be a planet. Did this automatically made all the books on astronomy worthless? Hell no.

This September, Russian legislators approved a law that established several widespread but supposedly incorrect pronunciations as correct. And by several, I mean like ten or something. Now, there are numerous dictionaries complied by various authors, from learned linguists to common hacks, and the differences between all these dictionaries are HUGE. Thousands of words are missing from one dictionary while included in others with wildly different write-ups. No one seemed to mind until this September, when the language reform struck and only four dictionaries are now considered officially approved. All others need official approval and should be replaced until then.

Fun fact: these four approved dictionaries 1) contain glaring errors and 2) are published by the same publishing house. And while conceited douchebags are still butthurt over the 1918 reform and write TL;DR livejournal entries partially in French and partially in Wingdings, someone's making big bucks printing the dictionaries and distributing them to all kinds of public and educational institutions all over Russia. Nice job Vova.