Talking bollocks thread #2

Isos wrote:

SeigSoloyvov wrote:

PapaDragon wrote:
I hate to play mod here but looks like this place has gone way off topic again.

Can we go back to talking about Boreis?

I really like those subs and I hate when I click on comment links on this tread only to find poop flinging about AShM and Navy size...

In regards to the sub the concept is iffy. Because if you have no intention of hiding the submarines and don't care who knows where they are you can honestly just use ships to do that.

While I don't agree with some of what Peri said, economically speaking it does make little sense to keep those old subs running to have a job you could merely have ships do in it's place if honestly, you do not care about detection

The point of turning a sub into an arsenal ship would be you want it to sneak it's way close and fire a surprise salvo, for this, the Delta's are to old, they are easily found.

I think russia could benefit from some Arenal subs but they need to be able to hide if they plan to do that with subs.

Another thing papa you need to realize the Oscar's that are undergoing modernization. Can fire their missiles at land target and they have around 80, so I mean technically you do have your arsenal ships.

I  agree on your first part about but not about Oscars. If this scenario happens which basically means US/Russia war, Oscars would be used to send massive attacks on carriers, that's what they where build for and the crews is trained for that. Same for Yasens.

An arsenal ship should be a ship designed for this role. Not a ship that was designed for something else.

SeigSoloyvov wrote:

kvs wrote:BTW, the so-called "inaccurate" old Soviet missiles are only so because they were not designed for the electronic warfare of later
decades.   Be sure that modern Russian missiles have the latest counter EW technology.   One that Yankistanis are not even aware
of.   Science does not happen on Wall Street.

Sure russian missiles these days modern ones are very accurate, indeed. My statement was the older ones Garry was going on about where inaccurate like most missiles of that era where

So which of these stories best reflects the real state of Russian science and technology?

The one in which a technologically adept elite are seriously driving the development of things like strong AI and pondering on its world-historical consequences – or the one in which a clique of kleptocrats pay lip service to innovation while skimming off even the modest resources they bother investing into science and technology?

The Soviet Union in 1986 produced around 7.6% of the world’s scientific articles. In the wake of the brain drain and financial collapse in the wake of the USSR’s dissolution, this figure plummeted to below 3% by the mid-1990s and below 2% by the mid-2000s. It was only in 2014 that Russia’s relative standing began to recover.

However, with 73,000 articles published in 2016, Russia remains far below the United States (602,000) and China (471,000), as well the bigger European countries like the UK (183,000), Germany (166,000), and France (113,000). As the 13th most scientifically productive country in the world, it is wedged in between South Korea and Brazil. This is true across the board. For instance, even in the sphere where Russia does best, in the Soviet mainstay of “Physics and Astronomy”, it is still only fourth in the world with 23,000 articles, well behind both China (79,000) and the United States (59,000).

Despite modest improvements since 2012, Russia remains a complete minnow, accounting for well less than 1% of elite global scientific research. It is worth noting that it lags China not only absolutely, but in per capita terms as well. In total, Russia produces as much elite level science as does Singapore, Belgium… and the University of Cambridge.

Russia spends a relatively low but far from catastrophic 1.1% of its GDP on R&D, which is similar to the Mediterranean and Visegrad countries.

Many explanations have been proposed as to why Russian science has been in an unending death spiral. Some of the more ideological works cite factors such as the lack of democracy and human rights, and its estrangement from the West – as if Yeltsin’s Russia was a fount of innovation (or democracy, for that matter), while the scientific explosion in modern day China is a mirage (not to mention countless historical counterexamples, e.g. the most scientifically dynamic country in the world prior to World War I was authoritarian Wilhelmine Germany).

No, the real reasons are much more banal: Money, or rather the lack thereof.

Russia’s performance is… rather underwhelming – its measly 0.6% global share of the world’s top 500 supercomputers is equivalent to Switzerland, and lower than that of Sweden, Ireland, and Saudi Arabia.

Nor are the trends anything encouraging. While there was an uptick in Russia’s numbers of top 500 supercomputers to around 2% of the world total around 2010-2011, those figures have been dwindling ever since.

According to an exhaustive study of global academic salaries published in 2012, the average Russian academic received 2-4x less money than his equivalents in Visegrad, the Baltics, and even Kazakhstan, and an order of magnitude less than in the developed world.

Finally, it would be amiss not to mention the astounding prevalence of corruption in Russian academia.

The Russian plagiarism detection project Dissernet has found improper borrowing in around 4% of all the dissertations defended in Russia.

However, consider the case of the Ingush. They produced six times fewer scientists per capita than Russians during the less corrupt Soviet period; today, their homeland is the highest unemployment, most subsidized region in Russia. And yet today, they somehow manage to have the highest concentration of postgrads per capita in all of Russia, around 50% more than in second-place Moscow.

Russia’s performance in patent applications isn’t too bad by global standards – comparable in per capita terms to the UK and France, much higher than in the BRICS minus China.

But you can’t realize ideas without money, and despite growing by leaps and bounds in the past decade, the Russian venture capital industry remains tiny from a global perspective.

In 2016, VC funding in Russia (€295 million) was at the level of Ireland (€367 million) and Finland (€324 million) in absolute terms, though a bit above sluggish and overly bureaucratic Italy (€162 million).

This expresses itself across the entire range of the hi-tech sphere, but we will just focus on one of the most important and “hip” applications.

It accounts for 13 of Europe’s estimated 409 AI startups as of mid-2017…… or just 0.7% of the world’s 1951 total. Russia is once again in the company of countries like Sweden, Finland, and Switzerland, who have less than 10% of its population.

Russia’s (total!) figures are slightly higher than in Slovenia, but lower than in Slovakia. In per capita terms, the rate of robotization per worker in Russia in Russia hovers between that of India and Iran, and is far behind middle-income industrial countries like Turkey, Brazil, and Mexico, to say nothing of a China fast gallivanting its way up to the levels of its super-automated East Asian peers.

Although they diverge somewhat in their assessments, the underlying picture is clear – only around 500 industrial robots are introduced into Russian industry per year as of 2014, accounting for a dismal 0.25% of the global total. This is about thrice less even than Brazil’s 1,300, and two orders of magnitude lower than in China, where 57,000 were sold in the same year. It is likewise highly unlikely that Russia saw any improvements since 2014, considering that this was when it fell into a two year recession.

As you might expect, the lists of countries that dominate industrial robots and machine tools production – Japan, Korea, the Germanic lands, Italy, and increasingly, China – are highly similar. Russia is not an exception, accounting for just 0.6% of world machine tool production.

The Russian Federation also massively lags even the late USSR. As an autarkic military-industrial empire, the USSR understood the necessity of being able to make the machines that make all the other machines, bequeathing the Russian Federation with 2.8 million machine tools in 1992 upon its dissolution. Since then, that machine tool stock has inexorably depreciated, and as of 2013 constituted just 760,000 pieces, with the average age almost doubling from 12 years to 21 years.

Since the end of the USSR, it has become clear that a chasm has opened up in in terms of scientific and technological output between Russia and the developed West.

This video juxtaposing the lumbering Robot Fedor versus the agile Atlas built by Boston Dynamics seems like a good metaphor for what is perhaps the single biggest failure of Putinism in the past 18 years. [Won't even bother linking it, the point is clear enough, and I think many here remember Fedor.]

In comparison, any successes or failures in the Middle Eastern military adventures that pundits and commenters obsess over are basically irrelevant.

The government has a strategic goal to get five of its universities into the global top 100 by 2020, to which end it has lavished significantly greater funding on its 21 most prospective universities. Consequently, academic salaries have greatly improved since 2013, at least in the elite institutions.

There’s no very obvious reasons why Russia can’t succeed more at science. The average IQ relative to British norms is around 97, which might fall significantly short of Germanic and Anglo-Saxon (native!) averages, but isn’t really out of place relative to Mediterranean or East-Central European standards. Moreover, there are signs that Russia continues to enjoy a Flynn Effect, and besides, surely any minor disadvantage with respect to raw IQs is cancelled out by Russia’s traditionally very strong performance in international programming and mathematics contests.

Meanwhile, as regards industry, it is worth pointing out that Russia does consume around 2.7% of the world’s machine tools – it is, after all, the world’s eighth (or so) manufacturing power, not the gas station masquerading as a country of John McCain’s imagination. Infrastructure – roads, rail, airports – has genuinely gotten much better in the past decade, and with post-Soviet inflation finally tamed, Russia looks set for fairly vigorous growth.

But the problems holding Russia back are severe, and possibly intractable.

There remain strong financial and ultimately institutional barriers to unlocking Russia’s scientific potential. Putin and his clique seem to prefer lavishing resources on status-signalling sporting events and white elephants as opposed to serious science and supercomputers. The former burnishes his prestige amongst simple people and provides endless opportunities to siphon away money to his Ozero chums – the latest lunatic project is to built a bridge for $10 billion to Sakhalin and its 500,000 people (a contract won by Arkady Rotenberg – who else?), which is about what the federal government spends on the Ministry of Education in a year – while the latter will only cause political trouble.

Ending corruption within academia would likewise seem a quixotic endeavor. While one can say much more on this topic, consider that PhD’s are no less a status symbol for the Russian elites than Mercedes cars and English boarding schools for their children. High-flyers found to have plagiarized their doctoral dissertations include no less than one in every nine members of the State Duma, and for that matter, Vladimir Putin himself. Waiting for these people to solve the problem of academic fraud is about as realistic as expecting them to solve corruption, or training foxes to guard hen houses. Nor is it possible to imagine a serious response to ethnic nepotism in academia in the land of Article 282, where you can be prosecuted just for arguing that the Caucasian republics should get fewer federal subsidies.

Finally, the absurdly low levels of robotization in industry raise serious questions about Russia’s political economy and its economic future. Why are Russian businesses loth to make serious moves towards automation in industry, even though Russia is, despite everything, a reasonably high IQ and well educated country? Is it because these require big capital investments that they are not willing to risk because of what they perceive as Russia’s environment of legal nihilism? It is correlated with Russian elites being the most apatride of any major civilization?

Now this is not to say that the problem is with the Putin regime and that its removal will improve things. The pro-Western liberal elites are at least as rapacious as the kremlins, no less authoritarian in spirit, and far less patriotic to boot. Although this post was primarily about Russia, feel free to go back through the hyperlinks and study the case of the Ukraine, where liberal “lustrators” have repeatedly won; it might as well be Sub-Saharan Africa so far as advanced science, native hi-tech (as opposed to offshored work), and any sort of capital-intensive manufacturing that wasn’t bequeathed to it by the USSR is concerned. Even the Visegrad and Baltic nations don’t have much to write home about. While most of them – especially, Czechia, Estonia, and Poland – do substantially better than Russia on most of these metrics, they still hugely lag the developed West and have been left behind in the dust by the Chinese juggernaut.

I don’t propose any great over-arching solution to these problems. “More money for RAN, less money for the Rotenbergs” might be a nice slogan, but as they say, the devil is in the details.

However, a solid start would be to look at the statistics and acknowledge that a very big problem exists, which, unresolved, will continue to degrade Russia’s economic, industrial, and eventually military competitiveness.

It was stated these arsenal ships would be attacking third world countries, not the US.....so I responded with that mentality in mind.

Isos wrote:

SeigSoloyvov wrote:

kvs wrote:BTW, the so-called "inaccurate" old Soviet missiles are only so because they were not designed for the electronic warfare of later
decades.   Be sure that modern Russian missiles have the latest counter EW technology.   One that Yankistanis are not even aware
of.   Science does not happen on Wall Street.

Sure russian missiles these days modern ones are very accurate, indeed. My statement was the older ones Garry was going on about where inaccurate like most missiles of that era where

They were nuclear armed missile, idem for the torpedos. 1 of them could actually destroy a carrier group if the ships were near the carrier.

SeigSoloyvov wrote:

Isos wrote:

SeigSoloyvov wrote:

kvs wrote:BTW, the so-called "inaccurate" old Soviet missiles are only so because they were not designed for the electronic warfare of later
decades.   Be sure that modern Russian missiles have the latest counter EW technology.   One that Yankistanis are not even aware
of.   Science does not happen on Wall Street.

Sure russian missiles these days modern ones are very accurate, indeed. My statement was the older ones Garry was going on about where inaccurate like most missiles of that era where

They were nuclear armed missile, idem for the torpedos. 1 of them could actually destroy a carrier group if the ships were near the carrier.

the intensity of nuclear weapons is greatly reduced at sea, if you would like a crash course on this. At some point, I can go over the science with you.

Kimppis wrote:Anatoly Karlin: Russia's Technological Backwardness

For decades I have spent a couple of hours every morning carefully reading The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and several other major newspapers. But although such a detailed study of the American mainstream media is a necessary condition for remaining informed about our world, it is not sufficient. With the rise of the Internet and the alternative media, every thinking individual has increasingly recognized that there exist enormous lacunae in what our media tells us and disturbing patterns in what is regularly ignored or concealed.

te]]I am a blogger, thinker, and businessman in the SF Bay Area. I’m originally from Russia, spent many years in Britain, and studied at U.C. Berkeley.

One of my tenets is that ideologies tend to suck. As such, I hesitate about attaching labels to myself. That said, if it’s really necessary, I suppose “liberal-conservative neoreactionary” would be close enough.

Though I consider myself part of the Orthodox Church, my philosophy and spiritual views are more influenced by digital physics, Gnosticism, and Russian cosmism than anything specifically Judeo-Christian.

GarryB wrote:I would say if they are underfunding R&D they must have some of the most capable engineers in the world... how many baltic states are making 5th gen stealth fighters and new generation stealth bombers and hypersonic missiles of all types?

And all things being equal I suspect his logic is therefore flawed because it fails a simple common sense test...

However, a solid start would be to look at the statistics and acknowledge that a very big problem exists, which, unresolved, will continue to degrade Russia’s economic, industrial, and eventually military competitiveness.

Kimppis wrote:First of all, he does apply it for quality weighting: "But if Russia’s raw research output is nothing to write home about, it diminishes to near irrelevance when adjusted for quality." The language barrier/cultural barries/NATO propaganda arguments also might work to some small extent, but the fact is that China is alrady number 2 and rapidly catching up.

When it comes to IQ, I think Karlin worded it quite weirdly in the article. I guess he just presented it as a potential explanation for Russia's current limitations in technology. I think his general view is that Russia actually has high average IQs and it's a strength for Russia. So really, the difference between China (around 105), Western Europe (around 100) and Russia (97, so really: around 100) is actually quite small and they all have high, first world level IQs. I quote: "There’s no very obvious reasons why Russia can’t succeed more at science." Btw, he has also pointed out quite a few times that it's possible that the "real" Chinese IQs are closer to 100 than 105 because East Asians (Japan, Korea...) seem to be "less curious" or whatever, but it doesn't matter too much, they're high either way. So he's aware of that argument.

And I think he actually agrees that there has not been a lot brain drain since the early to mid-2000s. He obviously doesn't want these problems to be true, so I'll just quote this again:

However, a solid start would be to look at the statistics and acknowledge that a very big problem exists, which, unresolved, will continue to degrade Russia’s economic, industrial, and eventually military competitiveness.

=========================

Garry, he actually mentions that Baltic states are not doing much better. It's interesting actually. Western Europe, Canada, Australia, the US and East Asia seem to be positive outliers. So while countries like Czechia, Spain and Italy have high to very high living standards, they are clearly doing worse in science, for whatever reason.

Naturally the Russian MIC is one of its biggest strengths, while Baltic states and really other Eastern European countries are too small to develop 5th generation fighters. As I also pointed out on the Su-57 thread, the delays, especially if those reports about "two squadrons by mid-20s" turn out to be true, might in all honesty be an indication of those problems that Karlin is talking about.

Russia's total R&D spending in PPP is quite high (like 5th or 6th largest in the world), but its GDP share (slightly above 1%), while actually above the global average, is still lower than in the "West" and East Asia (2%+), and again: that is weirdly the case I think basically everywhere in Southern and Eastern Europe, including Spain and Italy. Why?

=========================

GunshipDemocracy, I think Karlin is actually kind of criticizing The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal there.

He lives in Moscow currently: http://www.unz.com/akarlin/go-back-to-russia/
The only reason he ever lived in the West was the the Soviet collapse and the ensuing brain drain. His parents had to move, because the Russian state couldn't afford to pay them high enough salaries.

That Putler thing is an obvious joke as well, a meme, if you will. "Putler" just basically describes the Western image of Putin. The article itself is really good, IMO, it shows that there's not a lot that the UK (or even the West as a whole) can realistically do to hurt Russia. He's also writing a book called "The Dark Lord of the Kremlin", IIRC, and the whole purpose of the book is to criticize Western elite's and MSM's narrative on Russia. I recommend you read this: http://akarlin.com/2009/07/top-50-russophobe-myths/ (Admittedly the article is a little outdated.)

So Karlin is no Russophobe, very much the opposite in fact. But his views are pretty nuanced and I guess kind of surprising to certain audiences. He describes himself as a "Russian nationalist", and he is going to vote for Zhironovsky. Karlin is no fan of Navalny or Sobchak, don't worry about that. Also liberal in the Russian and especially Russian historical context is not the same thing as in today's West. I think Putin is also quite liberal by Russian and older Western (even going back only 20-30 years) standards.

Also people: no ad hominems, don't shoot the messenger and all that. There are also positives in that article, some quite encouraging trends and reasons for optimism.

Kimppis wrote:I think I said that neither of those are low. Especially IQ. Russia IQs are high, as I said. Su-57 delays potentially indicate some problems: subsystems not being fully ready, problems with mass production. Again: just a possibility, would explain the delays and low production numbers, but who knows... It's the same situation with Armata.  

However, a solid start would be to look at the statistics and acknowledge that a very big problem exists, which, unresolved, will continue to degrade Russia’s economic, industrial, and eventually military competitiveness.

Isos wrote:

SeigSoloyvov wrote:

Isos wrote:

SeigSoloyvov wrote:

kvs wrote:BTW, the so-called "inaccurate" old Soviet missiles are only so because they were not designed for the electronic warfare of later
decades.   Be sure that modern Russian missiles have the latest counter EW technology.   One that Yankistanis are not even aware
of.   Science does not happen on Wall Street.

Sure russian missiles these days modern ones are very accurate, indeed. My statement was the older ones Garry was going on about where inaccurate like most missiles of that era where

They were nuclear armed missile, idem for the torpedos. 1 of them could actually destroy a carrier group if the ships were near the carrier.

the intensity of nuclear weapons is greatly reduced at sea, if you would like a crash course on this. At some point, I can go over the science with you.

If the ships are 2 or 3 km around the carrier the blast will probably kill the crew. Once the crew is no more the ship can be considered as destroyed. It would be contaminated by the nuclear blast and nno more usable.

If it is fired above the sea the explosion will be normal. Why would it be reduced ? You mean maybe for torpedo and Under sea explosion ?

SeigSoloyvov wrote:

In regards to the sub the concept is iffy. Because if you have no intention of hiding the submarines and don't care who knows where they are you can honestly just use ships to do that.

While I don't agree with some of what Peri said, economically speaking it does make little sense to keep those old subs running to have a job you could merely have ships do in it's place if honestly, you do not care about detection

The point of turning a sub into an arsenal ship would be you want it to sneak it's way close and fire a surprise salvo, for this, the Delta's are to old, they are easily found.

I think russia could benefit from some Arenal subs but they need to be able to hide if they plan to do that with subs.

Another thing papa you need to realize the Oscar's that are undergoing modernization. Can fire their missiles at land target and they have around 80, so I mean technically you do have your arsenal ships.

kvs wrote:
So Karlin made a "proof by assertion".   What possible metrics of quality would this unqualified clown without a PhD even have in any science field?
There is no way he reads any of these papers.    I am aware of no metrics aside from citation numbers that one could use for quality.  The
problem with citation counts is that Russian journals have smaller readership basis.   In other words, the citation index is biased to total number
of readers and not to quality.

BTW, the IQ scoring is not some sort of physical constant.   It is biased to cultural aspects.   So if someone does not get a movie reference they are
scored lower.   This is utter BS.   I am sure there are geniuses out there who have not seen a single Hollywood movie.    Also the IQ distribution
is rather narrow.

Kimppis wrote:
So Karlin is no Russophobe, very much the opposite in fact. But his views are pretty nuanced and I guess kind of surprising to certain audiences. He describes himself as a "Russian nationalist", and he is going to vote for Zhironovsky. Karlin is no fan of Navalny or Sobchak, don't worry about that. Also liberal in the Russian and especially Russian historical context is not the same thing as in today's West. I think Putin is also quite liberal by Russian and older Western (even going back only 20-30 years) standards.

Also people: no ad hominems, don't shoot the messenger and all that. There are also positives in that article, some quite encouraging trends and reasons for optimism.

miketheterrible wrote:The real question should be "how many companies in Russia produce machine tools (joint production and not), vs other countries?