17Likes
LinkBack URL
About LinkBacksUp until recently I was working with this American woman who had spent 6 year with a multinational, well known US firm in Kiev. It was UNBELIEVABLE how arrogant she was in her views of local business practices, local people and geopolitical matters.Originally Posted by UhOhXplode
She hadn't bothered to inform herself about anything to do with culture etc.
I quickly realised I could not mention my personal views to her, as she was a senior person to me. Why that particular company she worked for was even needed in Ukraine, I struggle to understand, it's related to a business practice that all civilised countries can do perfectly well for themselves. By allowing a US company to expand into Ukraine, and sending over Americans to serve in all key roles they sucked money OUT of the country and robbed local people of skills and expertise in a field which I am 100% certain Ukraine has plenty of qualified local staff.
You see the same thing across Eastern Europe. Western European and American companies move in, make a lot of profit which is then moved out of the country. Local staff paid extremely low salaries and critical management roles filled by non-locals. And their local companies are not as good at PR and can't compete under EU laws.
Was this why they threw out socialism, so they could be robbed by Western Europe and the USA and be second class EU citizens. It's very tragic and I think most clever people in countries like Romania and Bulgaria are beginning to wonder.
The funding is but a fraction of what it used to be. They just can't afford it, and there is no profit in it, so NASA's been reduced to crumbs of what it used to be. That's probably what he meant. The same thing happened in Russia, a decade earlier, so it's nothing unique.Certainly not much evidence that NASA is "falling apart." They've done quite a job with the Mars Curiosity thing (unless of course, you don't believe that has taken place)
One thing that really got me at the time the USSR fell apart, was that they had developed this really AMAZING space launching system called Energia. It had some vessels called "Buran". They were just about finished and had started testing it, if I recall (I was pretty interested in that kind of stuff when I was younger).
Then they just had to pull the plug. Nothing more was heard, ever about Buran.
TWENTY years of engineering work at the highest possible level down the drain.
Unbelievable. I don't know what happened to this vessel, probably a lump of rust on the steppes of Kazakhstan by now. It was only launched once in a test. It was totally superior to anything the US had, or anything that has been built or even devised since. Both Roscosmos and NASA are but a spec of what they were before. Energia could have been used to launch a manned flight to Mars, if the USSR had continued on. What a tragedy.
