It's worth noting that at least a lot of the (non-health) insurance rises are driven by the reinsurance market responding to ever higher dollar amounts of claims annually due to disasters.
This underestimates the SUI premium hikes following the COVID layoffs. Most states charge businesses a risk premium when employees are terminated, and given that most states UI and Workers Compensation funds are now insolvent [0] they fight tooth and nail to increase premiums.
the "world" part of world war is also important. pretty much every economy involved was at least undergoing heavy handed rationing of goods, encouraging people to donate scrap metal, etc.
Here’s hoping they feel the war in Moscow and St Petersburg this year. A bit of rationing wouldn’t hurt them.
More than the war, they’ll feel the peace. More than 100% of the economic growth of the last few years has gone into war production, meaning the civilian economy has shrunk. When the weapons factories are scaled back the economy is going to hurt something fierce. Even Muscovites will notice.
This is why Putin can’t stop fighting. When the fighting stops Russia will face a reckoning. Better to postpone that day hoping that Europe runs out of steam.
That was a very different situation. The USSR was still catching up in industrialisation, and despite its huge losses still had vast reserves of labour in the countryside to tap. It was much more like the process of industrialisation in China that’s seen huge growth there over the last generation. Russia has already industrialised so it doesn’t have a catch-up growth opportunity in the same way. They are much more labour and resource constrained these days.
This labor was, pre-war, a bunch of poor, uneducated serfs (basically slaves). But leading up to WWII, they were transformed into educated, literate, laborers. Also the USSR had invested leading up to WW2 in agriculture outside Ukraine (since the Nazis controlled it).
So while there was less labor, they were far more productive labor thanks to post-revolution, post-WWI measures
So one person says, USSR was still catching up in industrialisation, the other one says, they were far more productive... what is it? The whole argument still feels far-fetched at the very least.
> This labor was, pre-war, a bunch of poor, uneducated serfs (basically slaves).
This is incorrect. Serfdom in Russian empire was abolished in 1861, long before the revolution. Peasant literacy rates, while still poor, had been gradually improving after that.
> Also the USSR had invested leading up to WW2 in agriculture outside Ukraine (since the Nazis controlled it).
What? Not only Ukraine was controlled by Bolsheviks at the start of WW2 its territories have also been extended with parts of Poland and Romania annexed by Soviets between the start of WW2 and the so-called "Great Patriotic" phase of the war.
The USSR's (well, Russia's) growth had begun before WW2, and it was in response to pre-WW1 Russian being severely underdeveloped. There was a ton of room for growth that started before WWII, and it continued unabated.
Basically, Russia up to WW2 had economic growth because it was "catching up" to the West. Industrialization was one place. Literacy was another. There was a huge effort to improve literacy after the Tsar was killed.
Finally, because the Nazis occupied Ukraine during WW2, Russia/the USSR had to develop other places during WW2 just to feed its people, which accelerated growth post-war.
These conditions do not exist today, I don't think. But this isn't my area of expertise. I just know that Russia was a feudalistic shithole until the Tsar was overthrown, and then they worked hard to turn the serfs into educated and literate people, right as they were forced by invasion to economically develop previously overlooked lands.
If you want a very pro-1% take on this, check out Anna Karenina. The "good guy" main character of the novel is a large landowner with a lot of serfs (read: slaves) whom he visits and instructs, based on latest science, how to farm better.
Same thing happened in Japan about a generation or two earlier. There's ar eason tiny, flyover Japan beat Russia in the Russo-Japanese war. Russia was totally backwards, even by "barely industrialized Japan" standards.
The article mentions that other countries have much higher spacing between stops to begin with, so in that sense they don’t remove bus stops today because they already have.
There is technology at least with traffic lights so that buses get priority by detecting an oncoming bus and either extending the green or shortening the red.
The number of stops inversely affects speed, and the bus is really slow compared to driving in pretty much all of the US. A 15 minute car drive is a no brainer compared to a one or two hour bus.
It is possible to have faster buses, even time competitive ones. Though stop spacing is only one component of such a system, the other being dedicated infrastructure and traffic priority.
Doors open time is actually possible to optimize and speed up; with modern tap to pay systems, you can have all door boarding where even at the busiest stops dwells are measured in seconds.
The real killer for bus travel times is not getting up to speed, and the delay from finding a break in traffic when pulling out of a stop.
EU enlargement largely paused after Bulgaria and Romania because there was a sense that those countries had been let in too early before they had dealt with their corruption issues. Most of the Balkans haven’t made much progress on their accession for this reason.
There has also traditionally been hesitation to let in countries with active border disputes since Cyprus has been a geopolitical headache, but that kind of went out the window with the invasion.
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