One of the mistakes in viewing Russia/USSR is applying similar social/cultural patterns typical for the Western civilization. But they are a very different culture and mentality.
Their space achievements are an impressive proof of how far one can go in faking progress at scale by massive technology theft, enslavement, and violence. You can really achieve a lot this way! Rockets and nuclear devices have been designed by captured Nazi scientists and imprisoned engineers (later designs by home-grown engineers have been largely based on those designs). Key technologies were not invented but stolen, copied, and reverse-engineered. Factories designed and built by US design bureaus (before WW2). Cheap labour provided by enslaved peasants who didn't even have the freedom to move to a big city. Borders closed to prevent brain outflow. And lots lots of violence against their own people just for the sake of "looking like a global power".
And since it was always fake, no major technology went out of the USSR and became widespread globally such as computers, networks, internet, software stacks, protocols, etc. Nothing major and widely useful came out of the USSR or post-USSR Russia.
So what you see with Russia happening now, is just the bubble popping. Long due.
I think it makes sense. The EU is possible because the founding countries are of more or less similar size. You can't really make a fair balanced partnership with a country 10 times bigger, we've just learned that. So Canada joining the EU makes sense from a political perspective. Carney had a point when talked about "middle powers" in Davos.
From an economical perspective, it makes less sense because of, well, the Atlantic ocean. Nevertheless, Canada has what Europe needs - oil, LNG, minerals. To a certain extent, things can work out.
We were burned by Wise as well when they suddenly moved our business account to another partner bank in the US and that of course changed our account number. The account was registered in dozens of procurement systems of our enterprise customers and it took us several months and a lot of pain to resume receiving payments from those customers who kept sending them to the now wrong account. I can never imagine a "traditional" bank doing that.
After that, we transferred the bulk of our funds back to a "traditional" bank and now never use Wise as the main business account. We now use it mostly for operational expenses.
Wise still has something to learn about banking business.
Yeah the Montreal area transport system uses the opus system (the disposable cards are part of that) for everything. Sadly, it's now bizarrely more complicated with the weird zones that they recently added after half a decade of consultations that were meant to... stream line intercity travel! for example, if you take the metro in Montreal, then ride it until Laval, you have to buy a specific type of ticket with the two zones.
Meaning that if you just buy the normal ticket in any Montreal station and make the mistake of going to Laval, you can be fined and they do tons of ticket traps because they know that people make that mistake pretty ogten. It's not even a separate line or something. And the same card wouldn't let you take a bus in Laval because again, it's another ticket (but not the same as the one for the dual zone metro that I was talking about earlier...). Just a huge mess when it used to be much simpler before they "streamlined" it.
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