That's what he says, but I very much doubt that. He was running an investment fund in Russia in the 90s. Back then such activity was impossible there without some connection to the organized crime, whether state-affiliated or otherwise. He likely lost the power struggle against other crooks and got Interpol used against him.
I know about this, but again, this does not mean that Browder himself was squeaky clean. My opinion is that he bit off more than he could chew, aligned with the wrong crew and lost the fight with the people more powerful than he was. Of course I don't know anything for sure, but it is highly unlikely that an investment fund in the 90s Russia was compliant with the law. At the very least, a lot of wheels had to be greased in order to be able to operate, and that opens the door for more shady stuff. It is a bad example of an innocent person being referred to Interpol.
By that logic Mark Carney (the PM of Canada) is a potential criminal as well because he did M&A and Sovereign Risk work for GS's Russian investments during Shock Therapy and the post-Apartheid government in ZA (most of whom ended up being associated with Zumagate) in the early-to-mid 1990s [0].
Alephnerd, I doubt Mark Carney was personally involved in anything shady, but it is entirely possible that GS operations in Russia proper were not entirely clean.
I am not even implying that GS was aware of anything. What I am saying is not a long stretch by any means, just look up the 1mdb scandal. And Browder was right there in Moscow in the middle of it.
Tell any Russian old enough to remember that Browder's operations in the 90s were in complete compliance with the law, they would laugh in your face.
> For the analysis, the researchers divided California into 1,692 neighborhoods, using a geographic unit similar to zip codes. They obtained publicly available data from the state’s Department of Motor Vehicles on the number of ZEVs registered in each neighborhood. ZEVs include full-battery electric cars, plug-in hybrids and fuel-cell cars, but not heavier duty vehicles like delivery trucks and semi trucks.
> Next, the research team obtained data from the Tropospheric Monitoring Instrument (TROPOMI), a high-resolution satellite sensor that provides daily, global measurements of NO₂ and other pollutants. They used this data to calculate annual average NO₂ levels in each California neighborhood from 2019 to 2023.
> Over the study period, a typical neighborhood gained 272 ZEVs, with most neighborhoods adding between 18 and 839. For every 200 new ZEVs registered, NO₂ levels dropped 1.1%, a measurable improvement in air quality.
Seems pretty clear to me that that's controlled for.
NYT says Russian AD in Venezuela wasn't even hooked to radar, with much of it kept in storage.
Indian AD (S-300 or S-400) performed very well during the recent conflict with Pakistan.
I have been generally successful at learning Russian as an adult, but tonal languages are something that I just struggle with on a fundamental level. I want to express meaning and connotation with tones, rather than denotation. On the other hand I've never been terribly motivated to learn a tonal language, so it probably could be overcome, but it's something that would take an immense amount of training to overwrite that tone=connotation/emotion/question instinct.
It is also quite frustrating when a native speaker is completely unable to understand something you say because of a tonal issue. To their ear it must sound entirely different, yet to a non-tonal ear it sounds like you're saying everything 'almost' exactly correct.
> I want to express meaning and connotation with tones, rather than denotation. On the other hand I've never been terribly motivated to learn a tonal language, so it probably could be overcome, but it's something that would take an immense amount of training to overwrite that tone=connotation/emotion/question instinct.
Why would you want to? Pitch also provides connotations / emotions in Mandarin.
> It is also quite frustrating when a native speaker is completely unable to understand something you say because of a tonal issue.
That will never happen. Your bad pronunciation can aggravate other problems, but if your sentence is otherwise good, ignoring the tones will still leave it fully intelligible.
(I once asked a student in a Chinese school whether a particular class wasn't occurring, and he responded "poss". After some confusion, he was frustrated that the pronunciation difference between "poss" and "pause" should make such a difference in communicating with an English speaker.
But of course, it doesn't. If "pause" were a valid way to respond to "is chemistry class happening today", I would have had no difficulty understanding "poss". His problem was in bad knowledge of the language, not bad pronunciation.
You appear to be making the same mistake here. If you try to communicate, and fail, that is not evidence that you are qualified to diagnose what the problem was.)
Only somewhat related: I was surprised by how simple and sound vietnamese grammar is when read through the latin alphabet. Tones are only a problem when speaking but it's increadibly easy to start understanding signs and labels in the country. Slavic and baltic languages i can read are MUCH harder to start with.
So i kind of suspect it might also be the case for chinese: tones and the alphabet are obscuring a clean grammar.
Conveying what I've heard from a few Vietnamese that also speak Chinese, so not any kind of firsthand experience since I speak neither: Vietnamese is more difficult to speak but is a simpler (less expressive) language.
I agree that written Vietnamese is relatively straightforward. It isn't that difficult to read to the eyes of someone used to latin script.
Fiendish logographic writing system (Chinese) vs fiendish grammar (Russian). I'm not a fan of Pinyin transliteration aesthetically.
Russian has a lot of words I can recognise in it. Not just loanwords either but words such as brat, dva, kot (brother, two (twa), cat). The other problem is the tonal system although Mandarin balances that out with simple grammar. Mandarin strikes me as mostly vowels and Russian as strings of consonants.
It's actually the other way around; the Saudis are only able to sell their oil because the oil money is flowing into US treasuries and other financial instruments, and it has been like this since the 70s.
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