Perun
4 HN mentions · mentioned in 4 months, 2022–2025
1:05:27 · 1.6M views · Nov 13, 2022
Perun's hour-long analysis of how institutional lying, cover-ups and corruption ("vranyo") undermined the Russian military in Ukraine. It examines how false reporting up the chain degrades readiness and decision-making.
Cited for the concept of vranyo and as an explanation of how corruption and cultures of lying cause failures.
4 comments from Hacker News
They've won then. Nobody can do anything and Russia is lost and has become North Korea. I don't believe that. How do you think change happens? Someone does something, while you continue to "wait it out". Look into the Arab spring and many other examples of people changing things in ways that probably seemed impossible just the week before. Nothing was 100% safe, and yet it happened. I hope that somewhere out there is a Russian that doesn't think it's "just better to wait it out", and isn't just impotently waiting for a fantasy 100% safe solution to be provided without any sacrifice. I do understand that it's scary, but from the perspective of an interested outsider looking in... Just like the Russian military, Russian society seems like a disorganized drunken shitshow, not well-organized nor impossible to overcome with concerted effort. It's all lies, bullying, bluster, imaginary facades, short-sighted and selfish corruption. Vranyo. this video In comparison, I'm sure you'd agree that North Korea is much more of a brutal, almost impossible to overcome dictatorship. People starving and with no electricity. What do you think would happen at a North Korean rally if the people threw the flags in the trash immediately after, with open disdain for the authorities, as they do after Russian ones? That's the society to which you're headed. Don't kid yourself, you are not headed in the direction of a society where 100% safe solutions will present themselves out of thin air. Russians need
The US Mil-Spec design/procurement/production is larded with pork at all levels. The good aspect is greater reliability - we have seen how badly some Russian stuff is made. The Mil-spec process had it's start with discrete components back in the day. I can recall cases where 1K 1/4W film resistors were tested one at a time, and each one x-rayed. Each one had a cost of over $10. Production and quality have advanced greatly so that now you can buy them for a cent each at Radio Shack types of shops with a reliability on the order of one failure in 10 million. At the same time we have progressed to sub-miniature IC's and surface mount tech so that when coupled with automatic testers with use of heat soaked assemblies that the main cost factor is the small runs of a few thousand assemblies where the parts cost is minimal compared to the cost of design/assemble/test - which can be 100 times the cost of the parts used in that production run. Japan faced this and produced VCR's that ran the USA/ROW out of competitive hopes = we make few, if any of these. Now the Russian stuff is crappy by comparison but they are able to make a lot of it. Ukraine is fortunate that Russians steal everything not nailed and sell it. Their officers allow this because they get parts of the take. The officers also sign off and approve soldier training courses - that the soldiers did not take or pass - they paid the officers who happily reported up the chain - 'We have a good army'. In fact Diesel engines, w
They've fired a bunch of government employees who work in e.g. air traffic control, inspections, etc. This is likely not a case of some hand-wringing villain at the airline declaring "haha, we're finally free of that pesky regulation, now we can skip all the safety checks!" Rather, we're seeing "the people in charge of all the procedures" (Govt employees, not airline employees) being grossly understaffed. It's a bit like "inbox zero"; you have a list of SOPs you want to observe, and you want absolute inbox-zero for completely every single procedure, to the letter, for something like flight control, spaceflight, etc. If you cut staff, and still demand the same throughput, then the simple reality is balls are going to get dropped in the juggling - and at worst, if you refuse to accept that you don't have staff on hand to do it, and threaten to punish people who fail to keep up the same output with less staff, people are going to start lying about it . And that - that, is the nightmare scenario. That creates what the Russians call "Vranyo": this video
As the level of corruption grows, the organisation starts to stumble and eventually gets sued to dust. An interesting youtube on Russian corruption grew to such huge levels thatover 80% of the budget was diverted. Soldiers stole engines/tires/optics/fuel and so on and the invasion of Kiev failed. this video [LINK]