🚀 go-pugleaf

Ok McIver, get off my back. What are *you* doing, directly, to
help *anyone* inside Russia? When the dollar to ruble ratio
is over 1 to 100, Moscow has lots of scientists, engineers,
programmers who are desperately trying to make a living,
we have projects there is no way we can pay Boulder programmers
what they expect - especially in competition with US Government
contracts and fat NSF and DOE grants - then you gotta come
up with a hell of a lot more solid reasons why we should
(1)just ignore the problem like you are or (2)offer far more
than a reasonable market-rate for programmers there than your
flip remarks. 

A laser scientist we are in touch with, via telecom, is being
paid 1,200 rubles a month, which is totally insufficient to
live on, so he and his scientist wife are translating 
Rambo II, fer gawds sake, to make ends meet. And they fear
they will have to leave Russia if they don't make it through
this crises. They are so idealistic that they formed a
non-profit organization to help link Russian school-kids
to the rest of the world via telecom. A friend of mine just
delivered an old 3B2 to them, whose disk crashed in transit,
to them. So we followed up with an offer to (1)hire one or
tw C programmers via telecom through them to help develop
s set of NAPLPS programs which can handle math/science
symbols by telecom, as well as foreign languages such as
cyrillic (2)pay the scientist for his project coordination
role (3)pay his wife to do documentation - in Russian (4)
a 'piece of the action' - or precentage of sales if we
make any and the product is any good (5)and pay them in
hard currency (where even *getting* dollars to that country
is difficult and frought with risk, because 'individuals'
there cannot even have bank accounts.

Of course we could also just send some money to some 
starry eyed Boulder charity which is there to 'help'
the poor Russians. And continue to view them as a welfare
basket case. But we decided to take a big risk and
do something far more fundemental, like engage in an
honest business deal with them, only made thinkable
by this fragile telecom link to Moscow, and maybe help
them help us build a small software business with them.

Since you can be so instantly-judgemental without either
knowing the facts, I can play that game too. Which I
will,
after seeing that you are from that tax-supported
economic coccon the University of Colorado, whose
supervisory salaries are so obscenly high - paid
for by me a taxpayer - and begging for more from
eithr (1)the Legislature, whihc means me or (2)from
students, that I am convinced UC lives in a fantasy
world where its real policy toward other countries
must be 'Let em eat cake.'