my understanding is that it has something to do with the province's debt/credit ratings. paying it out all at once in the trough of the last recession hit them pretty badly. of course, that's selective accounting. they could just as easily look at the decrease in corporate taxes and blame it on that. but, it was instead decided that it wasn't structurally sound to make a habit of paying out that kind of sum on a yearly basis, and the process was changed to pay it out monthly or wait until the following fiscal year.

so, where's the interest on the money? well, if the state is holding it, it should pay interest, should it not? but, in a way, that's exactly the point.

100nni
Why are these guys wearing our bundeswehr uniforms?

noprofitmaximierung
Why do the Ukrainian Nazis wear NATO uniforms? /watch?v=I5N5qnD7trg

Pickleman
Have any of you people ever been to a military surplus store? That is all surplus apparall, German jackets are very common at them, along with all nato member nations.

http://www.keepshooting.com/german-flecktarn-field-shirt.html

deathtokoalas
it's funny, that's what the russians say about the crimean self-defense forces.

there have been some rumours about special ops from poland and lithuania streaming over the western border. they're probably not entirely false.

Jan-Niklas Runge
There's a bit of a difference between thousands of troops in the same uniform out of nowhere and some dude with a German jacket.

deathtokoalas
well, that one dude is arguably evidence of a greater movement of people that has been talked about (where'd all these guns in kiev come from, anyways?). there's even been some rumours of an actual nato unit being stationed in lvov, that is to say a nato invasion of western ukraine. don't misunderstand me: this is sketchy info. i have no meaningful evidence to back it up. but these rumours of nato soldiers in the ukrainian uprising do exist and have existed the whole time, and if you understand the geopolitics underlying the actions of the major powers (if not the actions of the ukrainian people), it becomes too plausible to write off off-hand. it's far from crazy. so, the extent of the truth of these rumours is difficult to ascertain due to shitty western media coverage, but that there is some truth is hard to reasonably reject. whether he realizes it or not ostrovosky seems to have finally provided some evidence for it...

Pickleman
the only thing its evidence of is where they buy their clothes. there is nothing  suspicious about this. seriously look at my posts, clothes like this is very accessible to anyone, and again, does not evidence anything other then that they buy their clothers from military surplus stores

deathtokoalas
sounds exactly like a russian propagandist....

Pickleman
are you a troll?

deathtokoalas
i dunno. are you cia?

Pickleman
I am both a member of the Soviet Union and the USA. I am also the son of Idi Amin

instead of trying to blindly invalidate me with baseless claims that contradict even your own statements, how about you look at what i have posted. There is nothing strange about what they are wearing. I know this because military surplus stores always sell these types of apparall, the field jackets and blouses and such are all very popular, especially in eastern europe

Essentially nothing they had was military exclusive apparall, me and you could go buy all that stuff on the internet or at a store and that would not mean we are internationally backed. alot of the stuff they are wearing are out dated, and none of it has actual bullet proof properties, they are essentially casual military apparal for various weather conditions

deathtokoalas
all i'm pointing out is that that's precisely what the russians said when they were confronted with explaining why there were people that looked like russian troops walking through crimea. that's a matter of the historical record. you can look it up, if you'd like.

i mean, it could be that they're both telling the truth. it could also be that they're both lying. it's interesting how similar the responses are, though, isn't it?

Pickleman
Russians was not simply wearing jackets with flags on them, they were actually doong the opposite.

Russian special forces occupied Key isntalations and governement fascilities, while covert operations at night were carried out to sabotage Crimeas Telecomunications and intenernet access, essentially cutting Crimea off entirely from Ukraine.

http://www.upi.com/Top_News/World-News/2014/02/28/Telecom-services-sabotaged-in-Ukraines-Crimea-region/7611393621345

These were not people who were in Ukraine, every in Crimea knew that when they looked up over the Russian border and saw this

http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=287_1393605865

Thats a little bit more incriminating than simply wearing a 15 dollar jacket from the military store, and to act as if they are equivelent is illogical

deathtokoalas
well, i think a bit more than that happened in ukraine over the last few weeks.

how's the coffee at the pentagon?

wait. are you senior enough to be allowed in the pentagon?

Pickleman
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem

deathtokoalas
that's actually not an ad hominem. it's more of a red herring. but it's justified, because you're clearly on the payroll.

so, it seems like they're shipping them out to military bases for retraining.

i think it's good news, in general, that they're gone. yet, what this means for the composition of the ukrainian army is another question.

you know, i don't know how they're managing to derp out of environmental causes. if there's strong evidence that it runs in a family, yet specific genes have all but been ruled out, is this not an argument for environment?

i don't want to argue against this directly. it makes sense in terms of it's core findings. i just have a hard time drawing a connection between mismatched androgen levels and orientation. it makes a little sense if the topic is transsexuality, but how does this propose to explain the gay butch or the lipstick lesbian? it seems starkly incomplete, at best - and borderline ridiculous at worst. i mean, confusing orientation with gender is a basic error. gay people exist across the gender spectrum...

try as you may, you won't find any conclusive science on the topic. my perspective is that this push for a genetic cause is ideologically driven. i think it's worthwhile to explore it as rigorously as possible - in order to rule it out! but i'm incredibly skeptical...

i just can't make sense of the idea that this could be innate. forget the evidence, it just strikes me as wholly irrational. the only way i can make sense of anybody even beginning to think this is if they're beginning with a creationist perspective. "born this way" only makes any sense at all if it means "god made me like this". now, supposing it were true, imagine a christian trying to argue against gay rights, based on that premise. it's not really possible. it would require rejecting the perfection of creation.

i don't think it's thought through, though. i mean, you're also asking that christian to reject the bible. a more likely result is eugenics policies. this is why i push back against this. the idea that we're genetic defects is actually a powerful argument in the hands of the far right.

http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/668167

i'm not going to go so far as to argue it's necessarily a conscious choice. i think it very well can be. what's to stop a straight person from waking up and deciding to be gay? and who is to question their sincerity?

i'm more likely to lean towards subtle psychological causes. i think we're born bisexual and end up one way or the other based on extremely complicated psychological development, much of it at a subconscious level. freud is more useful here than mendel.

i mean, it's not hard to find some gay dudes that would laugh at the idea that they're low in testosterone...

i'm a little less hostile to the idea of genetics + environment, which is closer to the consensus than a lot of popular media will suggest. again, i don't know why there's this push in liberal media for the hard-wired argument. it's a creationist argument...a liberal argument is that people have the right to live the lives that they want to....

in general, though, i realize that the nurture v nature thing is mostly put aside as too restrictive. a little bit of both. that's the view for pretty much everything. and these dichotomies of all types are mostly rejected. complex phenomena generally have complex (and multiple) causes.

but i just can't fathom how anybody could honestly argue that genetics overpower environment in this case, because we're talking about *behaviour*. we're not robots. i see no reason why we couldn't choose to be gay, even if the genes are not there - and i see no reason why we couldn't choose to not be gay, even if the genes are there. so, even if they are there i can't think of them as absolute, defining things. in the case that such a genetic cause is eventually shown (and again i doubt one ever will be), that's still at best an incomplete answer that could only be applied in limited circumstances. in the end, there's a choice, whether some people like it or not.

i think an overlooked question is how much of it is sexual in the first place. i'm going to use my aunt as an example. she's been married twice in her life - first to a male, and then to a female. i haven't really prodded, but my perception is that the second marriage wasn't really about sex at all but about companionship. she seems to have grown into somebody that would prefer the company of another woman over the company of a male.

i can relate to that. i find myself more physically attracted to men, but more emotionally attracted to women. my emotional needs overpower my physical ones. so, how does that make sense in terms of androgens or genes? it's entirely a psychological issue.

there's far too much evidence that orientation is malleable with circumstance, experience and age to take this wiring idea seriously. at best, it's about "genetic predisposition", whatever that means, in context.

yeah. east ukraine is small potatoes. if the russians are going to flex, it's going to be further west.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/apr/01/transnistria-putin-west-europe-dniester-river-moldova