Thanks!

How’s the sound quality?

Nice

Always feels like you won this life

It doesn’t :(

Didn’t hear of something like this, most likely a local scandal somewhere. Not a common practice. However, some officially paid options remain, like the most potent forms of anesthesia, or a private room in some instances.

There are some forms of widespread corruption. Many of the head physicians are bribed by pharmacy companies so that doctors prescribe unnecessarily expensive (albeit still relevant) medication, racking the patient’s bills on that. In some instances, bribing the right people allows you to bypass the queues as an urgent patient without being one.

As per maternity hospitals, I’ve heard of a few…questionable practices, still. The “husband stitch”, for example, is still a thing in some regional hospitals, and it’s not good for women’s health and wellbeing.

Russia

Everyone has free health insurance that covers all procedures, doctor visits, ambulance calls, and most hospitalization cases in the respective government clinics based on where they live.

General physicians are available at any government clinic as needed, regardless of where you are. Other specialists are only available at your main clinic and directed to either by GP or as part of a free 5-yearly checkup. You can book an appointment online, call into the clinic, or come in person to do so. GPs are always available on short notice, and you can get there without booking if you need urgent care. Dentists are also available without booking for urgent cases. Trauma units operate 24/7 and accept without booking.

If you’re too sick to come in person, you can also call for a GP to arrive through a unified hotline, regardless of your current location, or even whether you have Russian citizenship or insurance for that matter.

The quality of care itself is highly regionally dependent, but mostly alright. Larger cities like Moscow and Saint Petersburg have it better, smaller, faraway cities have it worse. Queues differ significantly between places and specialists, and can be anything between 15 minutes and 2-3 weeks.

Private clinics exist, prices are bitey, but the quality of care is generally high. Work can offer private health insurance, giving free access to their services.

TL;DR all free (with some paid options), available to everyone, decent quality, acceptable waiting times.

Putting something small and dense into something big and not dense helps

Even dense brains know that. Ooga booga fly!

Preserving a mass while maintaining the ability to fly would require you to significantly increase in size, which comes with all sorts of drawbacks.

Humans can’t fly precisely because we’re too dense. Birds and other flying creatures have plenty of adaptations meant to reduce mass (or, rather, density) by all means possible.

I find it cute as long as people are just fooling around, joking about why THEIR same instance is the best. I can play that!

But when people are seriously like “all people from .ml/.world/whatever are scum”, this is where it gets weird.

It depends regionally and contextually, quite some Russians are quite hyper-polite in their own right, which in turn is a laughing matter for the others.

I mean, if you would be so kind to accept another possibility, that is. I don’t insist!

In Russian, it is “be healthy!” (будь здоров!), much to the same tune

True

That’s some weird American thing.

Most countries normally have their showerheads on a cord that you can grab and direct wherever you want. Plus, occasionally, a wall-mounted one added to it. But you can just put the corded shower on a mount to the same effect.

Having a corded shower is pretty much the only way to wash properly without wasting tonnes of water.

Yep

Губка Боб Квадратные Штаны

Also Squidward, but in Russian

Сквидвард

Absolutely. I don’t have a leader, but I do have you and others by my side.

Fuck the war. Fuck the so-called “leaders”

Daily life…it depends. Overall, things as running as usual, except for some things that cause everyone’s anxiety.

First is, obviously, heavy Internet censorship. Living without a VPN is so unbearable even older generations call the younger one for help. Government is currently high on pushing the state-controlled messenger Max, but no one, even the older folks, wanna join. So, they do everything in their power, from forcing government services to use Max as a communications platform, to blocking all other options. People keep using Telegram regardless, and find ways not only around blacklist, but even whitelist blocking. Max is nearly universally despised. VK remains a not-much-better alternative for those who didn’t yet find their way around whitelists. Unease grows about plans to use state-controlled apps to monitor VPN connections on Android phones and block respective IPs. iPhones are better protected in this respect, but other plans are devised as well.

Second is war. The last 2-3 years of it were relatively chill for most Russians, but with drone strikes appearing as far as Saint Petersburg, the war knocks back home. The unease is amplified by Russia turning mobile connections to whitelist mode when drones appear. The appearance of circumvention methods (bridging through whitelisted resources into the wider Internet), on one hand, relieves the anxieties of losing last bits of access to the world, but on the other, shows governments inefficiency at maintaining the drone defense.

Third is more broad and globally known - the cost of living crisis, which hits here just as everywhere else. Housing is practically unattainable for most, and rent goes through the roof. Food gets more expensive, and scandals arise about managing the existing supply, such as Miratorg claimed to push government’s hand in exterminating private farms’ livestock under the guise of disease prevention.

Overall, plenty of room for anxiety and sense of instability.

The Putin support has long switched from “go go Putin” to “who, if not Putin?” and then to “if Putin loses, the country is going to collapse”. So, over time it became less of actual support and more of added anxiety about war’s resolution and what it means for Russia going forward. Putin is often seen as a beacon of some, fainting, stability. But even with all that, support does indeed fade.

Yay blue!

Yep, I went blue! Previously was purple, but blue are more chill

As someone living in Russia, it indeed works to trick complex DPI systems. Unlike classic Wireguard, it works.