And I’m not arguing with that, Stalin also did massive purges of his own officers, leaving the red army severely deficient right before the war, but as horrible as this is, this is not total genocide, which is what awaited Poland had the USSR not won the war.
German genocide of other nations consisted of exterminating weak people and forced labor for the strong. They integrated people with "Aryan features" into their society and we're slowly getting rid of the rest.
Soviets exterminated scientist, priests, doctors and officers - the very people who could fight back. They integrated poor and weak. Their idea was to melt the remaining people into one nation. This is a form of ethnic cleansing.
Both Nazi and Soviets had the same goal - to take over the world by killing the people they didn't like and integrating people they needed. They just had difference of opinion in show to achieve their goals. Fortunately they didn't succeed, unfortunately it still resulted in millions killed by both sides.
The question is not if the Nazis were the bad guys, but if the Russians were bad. I think the answer is pretty simple. If anyone has any doubts they should ask millions of starved Ukrainians, thousands of killed Polish officers, hundreds of thousands of killed eastern Europeans and millions of people sent to gulags. Oh wait, you can't...wonder why? Probably because Soviets were really such a nice group of people.
Jesus freaking Christ, read the German plans for Slavs - it's all public information. They were going to starve and work them all until they are dead, and then populate the lands with Germans. Poles are Slavs. To draw moral equivalence between Soviets and Hitler is idiotic. If it wasn't for the Soviets, you'd be writing this in German, or (depending on your ethnicity) you wouldn't exist at all.
Of course you can draw a moral equivalence. You can't plan[0], invade a country[1] perform genocide on it's people, install and support puppet government and only let go when your own country totally imploded and expect anything other than disdain.
If Russians were so worried about Slavs being exterminated why were they sending supplies and resources to Nazis until the day German invasion?
Oh now I get it.. Poles and other eastern European nations should be thankful to Russians for killing millions of them and enslaving the rest instead of just exterminating everyone. Got it.
USSR did not “kill millions of Slavs” in Eastern Europe. You’re severely confused. Hitler, however, did. Fully extrapolating this line of propaganda into the future, 30-40 years from now people will believe that an amateur Austrian painter wanted European unity, but bloody dictator Stalin unfortunately got in the way. And I think that’s exactly the narrative which will dominate in the future based on the current trends.
What's more likely to happen in 30-40 years is what you're trying to do - make people forget that there were two equally evil empires - Nazis and Soviets. You want people to remember only Nazis.
The Soviets killed millions - there is no way to deny it. Holodomor alone resulted in 3-5 mln deaths. At least one million were murdered in Russia alone. In total, up to 60 mln people are estimated to have died at the hands of the Soviets. Millions more were forced out of their homes, raped and maimed.
There is only one difference between Germans and Japanese on the one hand and Russians on the other. Germans and Japanese admitted to these atrocities and apologized for them. Since the end of WW2, they have not attacked anyone else.
Russians, on the other hand, are still trying to whitewash the crimes committed by the Soviets, and they keep invading other countries. We can only hope they will either grow up and join the civilized world this century or the Russian Federation collapses.
There's already talk about nationalizing large models and clusters Manhattan project style.
But even taking that with a very large grain of salt, doesn't it seem like a no-brainer to want to incentivize at least some LLM development to happen in Europe as well?
Just make a good game, there are plenty of games that don't follow the skinner box/psychological tricks that are extremely addictive e.g. Counter Strike.
> EY believed the documents shown to them. Sloppy for sure, and EY got their amount of flak for it.
There are strict rules and guidelines around verifying an asset. The auditor isn't supposed to "believe the documents" - they need to form an independent opinion.^1
If the auditor is unable to obtain sufficient appropriate audit evidence to verify the asset, they can issue a qualified opinion due to a scope limitation.
Good nitpick. Thing is, the proof EY got from Wirecard was good enough to meet these thresholds, at least I never read or heard anything else. All that evidence was fabricated, of course.
What EY did was ignoring all the warning signs they had: money laundering, making up business, fraud and all that.
EY also wanted the proof the standards it seemingly met, that was the failure. But then those audits are not really meant to find organized fraud at a company to begin with.
> Thing is, the proof EY got from Wirecard was good enough to meet these thresholds
It objectively wasn't. I've never heard of a case where the auditor doesn't independently verify the bank account balance with the bank itself.
More reliable evidence reduces the need for additional corroborating evidence. In general the evidence obtained from the company itself wouldn't be considered reliable by itself.
Always happy to be corrwcted and learn something new, unfortunately the FT link is behind a paywall...
If memory serves well so, it is quite a while I read Dan McCrum's book, Wirecard produced documents from the Asian banks (fake ones, as we now know). Of course, and I couldn't agree more, they should have at least called the banks up. Especially since a German fin-tech start-up, with on-going bad press, claims to hold billions with some Asian banks from business activities directly related to said accussations circulating in the press. EY deserves all the flak it got.
That being said, again, if a company wants to defraud its auditors, they can for surprisingly long periods if they try hard enough.
From what I gather they not only called the bank, but actually went to a branch in the Philippines. They spoke to a clerk, took a picture of a screen showing a balance. But the branch office was fake.
reply