Hacker News Reader

Comment by alephnerd | Hacker News Reader

If you can understand Hindi, here's the labor recruiter's YouTube video advertising working in Russia - https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BRX7LQio2Sg

The guy promises that they wouldn't be sent to the frontlines in the video, and was clearly lying.

He also recruits in Nepal and Pakistan, and the Nepali recruits mentioned probably came from his labor recruitment agency as well.

It's clearly breaking multiple India and UAE labor laws, and don't be surprised if his agency gets shut down.

Working as a mercenary is a felony in India.

Also, this is clearly irrelevant for HN.

View on HN

Relevance to HN is debatable. The spirit of the guidelines is that typical "front page news" is generally off topic unless there's evidence for a new phenomenon.

Maybe being shanghaied into an army is not new but it is new in the context of contemporary war.

Most often when people use words like "clearly" they are clearly wrong.

Clearly

In this case he appears to be correct. The article suggests 20 Indians have been "employed" by the Russian army.

It might be relevant if India gets really unhappy about it, but they might also just kick up a small diplomatic stink then move on. 20 people in India would be doing well to register as a rounding error, the Indians appear to have been benefiting greatly from the war and one of their major diplomats has been talking a lot about making sure the Russian's have diplomatic options. So maybe it is a big deal or not, it really depends on India's response before there is anything interesting to note.

As the article as has 28 upvotes, 28 people on Hackernews disagree about the relevancy.

Not sure though if calling 20 possibly dead people a "rounding error" is appropriate.

I've personally dealt with groups of ... probably hundreds who are wrong about something that I could prove technically. 28 upvotes is not persuasive to me. You'll need an argument.

HN has some pretty reasonable guidelines about what it is for. This isn't it. And it also isn't a powerful story on its own, we need to know what India's response is. Unless maybe there is something meaty behind the paywall?

It's very early in the morning in North America.

It looks like we're getting articles that are more Europe focused.

To Europeans, this seems more relevant, but isn't as much to North Americans

Yes, as a European I think - not to argue the relevancy of this story - sadly "irrelavant" often means "not in the US".

Not necessarily. China feels much closer than Russia to the US, and military deployments do reflect that as well.

While Russia is absolutely a major threat, the mutual feeling of danger that both China and the US have of each other dwarfs any supposed feeling about Russia.

Do you have numbers? I might think the US still has the biggest deployments in Europe (UK, Spain/Italy, Ramstein/Landstuhl in Germany) and the Middle East vs Guam/Korea/Japan.

You might be right with carrier groups

https://news.usni.org/2024/02/05/usni-news-fleet-and-marine-...

Only 64k American soldiers are deployed in Europe. 131k are deployed in the Pacific (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_military_deplo...), but should be 150k once you include the Alaskan deployments which are relatively close to China and Murmansk

The bitter truth is any Russian aggression will be fought back by German, Turkish, Polish, Ukrainian, French, etc bodies.

We don't have a similar buffer with China beyond the inner ring, as our treaty allies (Japan+SK) will have their hands full with NK.

The only time the US was invaded by a foreign army in the 20th century was the Japanese invasion of Alaska along with the invasion of (then) American Phillipines

Thanks!

"The bitter truth is any Russian aggression will be fought back by German, Turkish, Polish, Ukrainian, French, etc bodies."

As a European, I think this is a good thing, not relying on the US.

The guidelines state "What good hackers find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups " If a Wikipedia page about a cinder cone volcano[0] can be posted, then this can too.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39548260

Well if this trickles to people who could be impacted by this death trap, and saves >0 lives, I would say it is relevant...

Why would anyone believe what a guy on a video is saying? As long as you don't have conditions of your job in a written form, everything could be lie. And in Russia even having an agreement in written form is worthless anyway.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com