@Lionsmane8 I would imagine so, but I'm not sure if it's structured well. I would imagine though that a lot of low-key private money will be awkwardly finding its way there. So I mean a lot of people bringing in $5-15k on their person.

One big thing though is that since the currency is so low that people are investing locally, and getting a lot for their money. Their money is shit elsewhere, but quite nice in the local market. That (now) famous American veteran BBK is living there with his wife. He says that it's not easy to find land to buy since there is such a construction boom. As a side note, that BBK is a better breed than most of the types on this site.

I think that it will be bumpy, but if Russia connects up to Transnistria, and provides better Black Sea access then I think that there could be a huge immigration boom here. For Russians, Tiraspol is offering a lot of advantages of deep into Siberia. They'd think in terms of more pleasant weather, homemade wine, and cool access to Europe, and possibly even closer to Moscow than in Siberia.

I'm not sure that this will be easy, or that it will even be a short-term improvement for me. Assuming that they only link up, and don't take over Transnistria then I'd need a VISA every time that I went to Odessa, while probably my wife would not. In the long-term though it would likely be a lot better because I'd be able to make a play for gaining Russian residency. Even assuming that a short-term war situation doesn't come here, the whole thing would likely not be super smooth.

I see this as the glory period now, which is why I'm trying to get so much done while its still a super depressed pricing situation. Also there is the matter of getting and keeping a good worker. Prices can go up, but also though, a lot of these guys aren't very capitalistically minded, which means that they won't raise their price until their backlog is reduced. Instead many of them would just run around chaotically like a chicken with their head cut off. I mean that for such a person you can't simply pay them more, because they still might take lower paying work just because its there. They're not setup to exploit abundance by maximizing their income. That could be really annoying for me.

I'm going to try a build-less front end. So I'll use htmx, hyperscript, alpinejs, and lit-html.

The idea is to get back to a much simpler webdev experience. The server will be loading all HTML directly, but with caveats. htmX allows me to start everything with a simple model where the server old-school loads HTML via a route. So that is like the web of 1995. From there htmX (The loud X is emphasis added by me) allows me to make very simple swaps and actions. The interesting part is that the server will be sending HTML instead of JSON. That is very simple, even if oddly disconcerting to the modern web developer.

From there I have a few options for making a page more dynamic. In no particular order, I can use a a vue-like syntax using alpinejs to dynamically iterate on lists and json data. Within the alpine template I can place htmX directives on it for quick and easy form updates.

Perhaps even more useful (if not oddly so) is Hyperscript. It's a strange dialect that allows complex interactions to be written on the element in an English-like syntax. It's very powerful, in particular becomes it smooths out synchronous and asynchronous actions so that you don't have to think about them. This appears to be a real winner for me around simple interactions that jquery is great for, but I'm not so sure about these large multi-line Hyperscript directives.

The great part about these techs is that they're very small, and they don't require a bundling step, or a package installing step. I will be manually downloading these dist files and placing them into the public web directory - old school. They don't really need to be updated. Alternatively, you could still use NPM to fetch them, and then with a most minimal build step which simply bundles them together. Of course you can also directly link to the CDN.

Finally there is Lit-HTML. This is a successor to the Google Polymer project that was able to dramatically slim up the library due to much of that research making it into the formal HTML and Javascript specifications. Basically it allows you to define custom HTML elements. So the idea here is that you could hide a JSON API call, or complex JS interaction behind a custom element, that you can then place on the page with HTMX or Alpine. These are just custom html element with a thin helper wrapper, and so that isn't going anywhere for a decade or so. Any future changes will be very easy to upgrade to.

The interesting thing about all of these techs is just how completely tiny that the runtime is, and how they automatically convert any HTML that is written to the body. So it's like that HTML is actually live.

About HTML custom elements, think about your default HTML video player if you were to simply place a <video> tag onto the page. This is basically just a custom element with a shadow DOM (for encapsulation). In fact, this default implementation on browsers is likely simply a build-in custom element that is using the same exact mechanisms that are available to us.

So all of this said, I still think that for a complete SPA (Single Page Application) with all of the bells and whistles that Svelte is by far the best. I've written advanced Vite build steps, integration with Go, and Vite manifest parser that sets up multi-staged loading with prefetch and preload, etc. The problem is that this is just a really damn heavy place to start for your average fuck-around site, or for personal use.

The actual motivation though is that is makes it difficult to develop on a Raspberry Pi if a complication step is needed for every little thing. I would like to build my Golang binary with all of the bindings that I require, and then to be able to hack on the code such that every little change doesn't trigger a slow multi-second long rebuild step. That rebuild step can be as long as 10-15 seconds. I basically want to have the old-school PHP experience, but in a modern way.

I'm going to be able to experiment with all of these different libraries interacting together in order to find the exact correct combination of them in various circumstances. For example, for admin forms, HTMX seems like the clear winner. There is very little reason that a server needs to return JSON that then needs to be converted into HTML. Instead the server can just control all of this. Forms are boring, and far too much time is spent massaging the data into a nice API, and then turning that nice API into a form UI update.

Professionally I'll likely be continuing to use Svelte for the magic part of an app, and then I'll use HTMX with support for admin forms. For passion projects I'll likely be making much more clunky apps that are dead simple using all four of these techs in conjunction. They all play well together, except in situations where dynamic page reloads are necessary and one is wanting to maintain complex alpinejs state. In such a situation I think that the best thing to do is to just make a full page refresh instead of spending 10x of the time to smooth out something that is really not a big deal.

@Lionsmane8 I think that this war has flushed out of Russia a lot of people who don't believe in it, or who are more interested in momentary pleasures than their own civilization. I understand that this might seem very ironic to the BBKs (Brown Baby Killers) coming from me, but it's a very different dynamic when a country is on the rise compared to falling.

America as it's falling still provides the best shopping. If anything we're heading to the Snow Crash world where America is only really great at software and pizza delivery. Leaving during peak shopping is different than leaving because shopping has been diminished.

Russia has signaled that it's a safe place to build a personal house (and possibly to invest, but I really don't know about that part). So I'd expect lots of high value immigrants to start pouring in, perhaps similarly to when my German great-great-grandmother narrowly avoided genocide in Russia during the early revolutionary periods. It seems that my great-great-great grandfather wasn't so lucky, and possibly he was killed by some early variant of Bolshevik, or whomever it was that felt that an educated German doctor wasn't the good people.

Hopefully though, this time, people like my family won't be caught up in that sort of "Marxist" (or whatever it was) purging again, and that they can thrive in Russia. For example, the South Africans whites have been eyeing Russia for a while as a last resort. They are said to be some of the best farmers on the planet (similarly to their people in Europe).

There is a youtube channel "Siberian Freedom" about a Australian family that has setup in Russia. It might be interesting for anyone to follow.