That definitely happened with Serbian students in year 2000 - proven (as much as it can be) link between CIA & Co, and the funding and training of the Otpor movement, B92 TV station ...etc.
So far there's been no indication that this time it's been anything but an actual grassroot movement.
Also - having Vučić around was probably better for basically everyone except people living in Serbia.
No one outside had enough interest to see him gone - hence no abroad supported the students. And he's been fucking up lives of people in Serbia long and bad enough to cause an uprising.
While I'm no longer a student, nor living in Serbia anymore. Still having there both older and younger family/cousins that are students and were part the protests - I had a bit of a glance of internal functioning.
It was literally kids/students from a city where rallies/protests were happening - self organizing food and accommodation for other students coming in from other cities.
Other people and business also pitched in with bringing out food/water/etc to the streets for students/protestors.
Students do not have enough resources to organize large-scale multi-day political protests against the political opponent in power.
What we saw was the proof that the leader was not a dictator, that the country was not a dictatorship, and that the democracy is functional there, and that the democracy can be steered by people willing to fund said large-scale protests.
What we saw was the same as what we saw in Ukraine fifteen or so years ago, and what we saw in Iran 50 years ago, and many other countries that were proven to be influenced by the foreign entities.
what are the chances that some broke kids with no governance and expertise, raised by naive parents, outsmart political and electoral expert like vucic? is it even possible? apparently everything is possible in serbia.
There are a lot of assumptions in that general observation, right?
Not just that you need experience in order to deal with these unsavoury/dishonest/crook characters.
But that you even need to deal/compromise with them at all, that doing so would lead to a better outcome ...etc.
And also not to mix up the other meaning of "dealing with".
The biggest thing that the Student movement rallied around was dealing with previous government and various public and private sector corruption that it instigated/facilitated - in the bringing them to justice/rule of law sense.
Part of dealing with someone might be just making sure that you associate with them.
Also dealing with criminals often means imprisoning them or killing them (depending on how dangerous they are).
The politicians, be it President, Prime or other Ministers, or just members of the parlament - usually don't directly put criminals behind bars.
That said back in 2003, so ~2 years after the previous student protests in Serbia that brought down Milošević - Serbian Prime Minister was assassinated.
Officially the assassination was done by criminal gang that had ties with previous government - that just so happened to also be (former) members of the special antiterorist (military) police.
And it is said that he was assassinated because he was doing things (setup special investigation/prosecution) to fight organized crime.
While some of the current students might not know about all that. Older people, the ones that are now discussed/proposed as ministers and such - definitely know about.
> The politicians, be it President, Prime or other Ministers, or just members of the parlament - usually don't directly put criminals behind bars.
Obviously. I would have thought that it would be obvious that it is delegated to the various security services.
> Officially the assassination was done by criminal gang that had ties with previous government - that just so happened to also be (former) members of the special antiterorist (military) police.
Well, bringing the rule of law didn't work out for him, did it?
He should have made sure these people were tracked down ASAP and killed. To have law and order, you need to have order first.
While in absolute terms things can almost always get worse.
Situation has been so bad with Vučić and his political party SNS - systematic corruption, private profiteering with iron grip on media and legislation, security services... etc.
So in that sense - even doing nothing would probably turn out better than continuing with the previous levels of intentional corruption.
And while there might be some things done by previous government that (accidentally) turned out good and are worth keeping.
For a lot of things (e.g. various institutions that lost their independence in the last ~20 years) - the rough WIP roadmap/plan can be as simple as "Undo or do the opposite from what the previous government did".
Do numbers go completely out the window due to inflation?
While the price of gas, real-estate, groceries doubled or tripled over the last 10-15 years (here in NL).
It also seems that Stocks/ETFs also did the same, right?
Some of the Tech/IT/AI (and hence to some extent also S&P500 that's heavy on those) increased even more. But even if we consider it an artificial bubble - loads of other more traditional industries/ETFs also grew similarly to inflation, didn't they?
You are right of course.... but one's risk tolerance diminishes with waning work income. So retired folks have less of their money in stocks/ETFs and are more exposed to the ravages of inflation.
So with hindsight, one can easily weather inflation... only hindsight is hard to come by (says the guy who cancelled his NVIDIA buy order a few years back)!
I think the two of you are thinking/talking about two different things.
In most workplaces before ~2020 individual teams had designated desks/islands - all team members were sitting next to each other, actually every individual had their own permanent desk.
And you could have a quick chat, pair program, and even adhoc whole team meeting by just removing your noise-cancelling headphones and talking to each other.
Though of course bigger/longer meetings would still be better in a meeting room because of big screen, not being nuisance to other people ...etc.
Most workplaces now do some variant of flexi-desks. At best a group of teams is allocated some specific area/desks, at worst it's completely random which desk you get.
And to have a chat/meeting you often need to still do it via conference call, or get into a meeting room.
Between that, and usually having some people from the team still WFH on that day (many workplaces don't even have enough work desks or cafeteria - for everyone to come into office on the same day) - you now need more meeting rooms than before.
And for some reason they didn't add more meeting rooms, even when redesigning office buildings.
Actually, you both misunderstood what I wrote: the team is spread across multiple locations in three countries. They all work from their respective offices, but for meetings we still have to use Teams. That's especially galling: my company is more than ready to embrace remote working tools when it's to its advantage, reassigning people as it sees fit, but it now completely denies the advantages of remote working/home office to its employees. Actually, because of budget restrictions, I have never seen any of the team members (except the one I'm in the same office with) in person. My company is one of those typical multinationals that grew through mergers and acquisitions and now has offices all over the world - but I'd bet it's not one of those that come to your mind, somehow it managed to fail to build any sort of brand recognition, mostly because it's a B2B company.
So far there's been no indication that this time it's been anything but an actual grassroot movement.
Also - having Vučić around was probably better for basically everyone except people living in Serbia.
No one outside had enough interest to see him gone - hence no abroad supported the students. And he's been fucking up lives of people in Serbia long and bad enough to cause an uprising.
While I'm no longer a student, nor living in Serbia anymore. Still having there both older and younger family/cousins that are students and were part the protests - I had a bit of a glance of internal functioning.
It was literally kids/students from a city where rallies/protests were happening - self organizing food and accommodation for other students coming in from other cities.
Other people and business also pitched in with bringing out food/water/etc to the streets for students/protestors.
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