There are other places yes but out of the countries I've visited, the US is definitely one of the worst. All the Europe I've visited (Paris, Berlin, Zurich, Istanbul, south-eastern region of Russia) has been about as well kept as Australia, my home country. Aside from Malaysia, I can't think of a country that's worse than the US. Even the (disclaimer: nicer, less impoverished) parts of Mexico I've visited were arguably better maintained.
Another disclaimer: I live in the Bay Area and that's where most (but not all) of my feelings about US public spaces come from.
I don't mean to offend but I suspect it's because people in the USA, at least in cities, just can't take care of public places.
There's urine in the train stations (either visible or smellable), elevators shut down by faeces, people shouting, yelling and preaching in the streets, also, toilets, often even in private restaurants, are disgusting.
I don't mean to say that things are always like this, all the time or in all cities and I understand that it's a minority of people who cause these problems but the problems are far from uncommon.
With a place like a public bath in particular, cleanliness is extremely important and I just can't see it working. It only takes one inconsiderate person relieving them self in the water to ruin it for everyone and I find it hard to believe that in a day in an average US city you wouldn't find such a person. My impression is that it works in Japan because the society is extremely communal and you're far, far less likely to find such an inconsiderate person.
I can kind of see it working in smaller US communities where people know and respect each other though. In small communities, everyone knows each other and people are much less likely to be inconsiderate towards friends and acquaintances than they are towards strangers.
That's the implication but what exactly did he observe that led him to say that? It's an awfully big claim and very little is given to back it up. It may not be possible to show us all his tax returns or bank statements but there should certainly be more than that it "appeared" to be Putin's answer.
Did Putin become drastically richer in the following years while the oligarchs became poorer? In what way?
> That all changed in July 2003, when Putin arrested Russia’s biggest oligarch and richest man, Mikhail Khodorkovsky. Putin grabbed Khodorkovsky off his private jet, took him back to Moscow, put him on trial, and allowed television cameras to film Khodorkovsky sitting in a cage right in the middle of the courtroom. That image was extremely powerful, because none of the other oligarchs wanted to be in the same position. After Khodorkovsky’s conviction, the other oligarchs went to Putin and asked him what they needed to do to avoid sitting in the same cage as Khodorkovsky. From what followed, it appeared that Putin’s answer was, “Fifty percent.” He wasn’t saying 50 percent for the Russian government or the presidential administration of Russia, but 50 percent for Vladimir Putin personally. From that moment on, Putin became the biggest oligarch in Russia and the richest man in the world, and my anti-corruption activities would no longer be tolerated.
What does he mean "appeared that Putin's answer was"?
> Are we talking temporary throttling after having transferred hundreds of GB in a short time span (hours? days? do you know how fast they allow you to upload?) or throttling more or less forever once you store just hundredes of GB?
The former, from the people I've heard who run into it. These people are generally uploading tens of terabytes however.
I had ~4TB on a dedicated Gbit connection (sitting in a DC, not Google Fiber or something) and was averaging ~400GB/day, which is ~40Mbit. This was through duplicati though, I'm trying it now with rclone to see if it's a bottleneck elsewhere.
I've seen others saturate 300Mbit connections so it might be on my end.
EDIT: Just ran with rclone on the same server and I get about 30Mbit/s with small files (even with --transfers=16). With a single large file, I'm getting ~250Mbit/s. I think my issues in the past have been due to file creation overhead.
EDIT2: Ran again with numerous large files and --transfers=16 and I'm getting ~900Mbit. It seems the bottleneck is the api calls rather than the upload bandwidth.
Also noteworthy is Tsung[0], which is (far) more complicated but can speak more protocols, be configured to emulate user behaviour a little more closely and send crazy amounts of traffic.
Another disclaimer: I live in the Bay Area and that's where most (but not all) of my feelings about US public spaces come from.