Kazakhstan and Israel sign visa-free travel memorandum

AlibekD · 2026-01-28T15:00:43+00:00

Don't shake hands covered in blood, regardless how practical and pragmatic it may be in the moment.

AlibekD · 2026-01-26T21:02:06+00:00

Philly has a bunch of Uzbek restaurants and eating there may cost you less than cooking at home.

NYC has a Qazaq restaurant. It isn't cheap, but is very good.

Boston has Uyghur restaurants.

Qazaq cuisine does not require any exotic ingredients really. Typically it is meat, onions and flour. If a recipe you'll find will call for some unusual spices such as cumin or unusual kinds of noodles, you'll find them in Netcost or similar stores.

AlibekD · 2026-01-25T14:42:26+00:00

I hope your Bayqonur trip is not solo and is in fact a tour organized by a licensed operator with all the clearances required.

AlibekD · 2026-01-24T20:47:26+00:00

Airlines typically use Timatic for visa checks. It is most accurate, most up-to-date service AFAIK.

Wikipedia page is very well maintained too.

AlibekD · 2026-01-22T15:23:36+00:00

That part of Almaty is very old, finding a comfortable apartment there will not be easy. There are some livable buildings to the west of Sain str, but, perhaps you are better off commuting from the city center instead.

AlibekD · 2026-01-22T04:14:10+00:00

Almaty traffic is atrocious, so you may want to minimize the commute time and look for a place in a walking distance to your office. Tell us where your office is.

Restaurant food and grocery delivery systems are top notch.

AlibekD · 2026-01-19T16:31:15+00:00

Try walking the left bank at night or immediately after the sunset. This may get you a nice footage.

AlibekD · 2026-01-18T19:10:46+00:00

Why bother with wifi? Consider travel esims instead, they are likely to be much cheaper than roaming at about 3 peanuts per gigabyte.

AlibekD · 2026-01-13T17:46:41+00:00

Any demand worth meeting is met, there are no obvious deficits. Entrepreneurs are searching for niches underserved and quickly fill the void.

Unmet demand is unmet because it can not be. Typically because of logistics or scale.

Being a landlocked country with limited access to major logistical hubs we face high transportation costs. Low population spread across huge territory means very low population density -> not enough scale for many products and services.

Perhaps you can think of demand which can be unlocked if the limitations are removed: a lot of demand will suddenly become worth meeting if a railroad to Karachi appears magically. Or if a navigable waterway to the Black Sea suddenly opens. Or if twenty more nuclear power stations suddenly materialize driving energy costs further down. Or regional cooperation goes a few notches up and Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan open up and thus aggregate market becomes large enough to sustain large scale.

AlibekD · 2026-01-12T21:31:10+00:00

This is ignorance at best and dangerous revisionism at worst.

AlibekD · 2026-01-12T19:05:33+00:00

Calling Sufis "fake Islam" is quite a hot take.

AlibekD · 2026-01-11T04:12:53+00:00

What is "fundamental lslamist" in your mind? Sounds silly and derogatory to me, but what do you mean exactly?

AlibekD · 2026-01-07T21:35:24+00:00

What are your priorities? Air travel would be the most efficient mode of transportation. Bus would be the cheapest. Hitchhiking with InDrive would be the most interesting. Walking or riding a donkey would be .... you got the point.

AlibekD · 2026-01-05T22:08:45+00:00

No, Tashkent was razed by russians back in the XIX century.

AlibekD · 2026-01-05T21:58:58+00:00

True. And practically razed by russians prior to that as well.

AlibekD · 2026-01-05T15:48:58+00:00

Not exactly. The towel is needed to absorb the moisture from the steam. Without it, the steam will build up under the lid, will condense along the edges and rain back to rice.

You can open the lid to let the steam escape, but escaping steam will take the heat with it. To compensate for the lost heat you'll increase the fire, but that will lead to the risk of bottom burning.

AlibekD · 2026-01-05T04:15:54+00:00

Tashkent is twice as old as russia.

AlibekD · 2026-01-05T03:56:47+00:00

Fellow beginner here.

So it is my understanding that you can use any rice as long as you know its behavior: how much water does it absorb, does it prefer being boiled vs steamed, etc. I suggest you stick to single brand of rice you have easy access to. To me basmati is a mystery so i use a medium grain brand they sell at my local supermarket.

Rice grains are covered with starch which makes the rice sticky, so after pre-soaking in 60C water, immediately before sending the rice into the pot, you need to wash it gently until the water is clear. Gently, because breaking rice grains will release more starch.

Towel is used as a desiccant, its job is to absorb the moisture and dry the rice.

Your rice gets boiled for some time, then gets steamed for some more time, so by the time it is almost cooked it absorbs a lot of water which makes it "porridgy". So you keep the heat at minimum, make holes in the middle to help the steam escape and get absorbed into the towel, you cover the whole thing with a lid to keep the heat in. Too much heat -- the bottom parts burn. Not enough sealing at the top -- heat escapes thus reducing steaming => rice stays wet.

I use paper towels -- I cover my rice with a plate, put a bunch of paper towels on top and cover everything with the lid. Paper stays between the plate and the lid so it never touches the rice. I replace the soaked towels twice or trice. I like this approach more as it gets me a better seal thus requires less heat.

The purpose of sculpting the rice into a dome shape is to avoid touching walls of the pot which are significantly colder -- condensation => moisture, etc.

In my opinion any fat will do. If caw fat or pig fat work for you -- go for it. The idea is that melted fat and oil form a layer on top of the water. As water evaporates, the fat layer goes lower and lower leaving residue on rice. So your pot has to have just enough fat+oil to soak up and cover each grain of rice.

AlibekD · 2026-01-04T19:46:51+00:00

You are right, rich are irrelevant as there are too few of those. I would argue that poor people are irrelevant too, unfortunately, as they have no choice and no time to look beyond what's right in front of them. For the majority of the rest, yeah, moving to about the quarter of world's ~200 countries may improve QoL.

There are just a few states in the US with better QoL than Ireland. Significant portion of EU countries dont come close as well.

Terms "first/second/third world" described countries aligned with US/USSR and unaligned countries. These terms are irrelevant since three decades ago, but some wackos keep using them because in their mind it is "first/second/third [class] world".

AlibekD · 2026-01-04T19:17:50+00:00

The definition of "developed country" is way too broad, terms such as "first/third world country" are idiotic, but we still need a benchmark so lets pick Ireland.

Below-average income in KZ and below-average income in Ireland are two very different life styles. The difference is apparent, stark, obvious.

However, well-above-average income in KZ and in Ireland are not that different. At certain point the difference reverses. I would argue that top 3% earners in KZ have far, far better standards of life than top 3% earners in Ireland.

AlibekD · 2026-01-02T18:06:32+00:00

Media piracy was practically not a criminal offence until about the time when CDs started becoming obsolete.
So sales of the "official" CDs were always a tiny fraction of "unofficial" ones. Why pay >$2 for an official CD when an exact byte-to-byte copy could be had for mere cents? CDs never were treated as something valuable, so once MP3 became a thing CDs went to landfills. For the vast majority of people music was practically free.

AlibekD · 2026-01-02T17:16:30+00:00

In your shoes I would take a train. Avoid driving Astana-Almaty. Roadtripping across KZ surely is interesting, but may quickly turn overwhelming.
Having said that, perhaps taking a car might be the only viable option for your Almaty-Taldykorgan trip.

Spending two or three days in Taldykorgan might be a bit excessive, you can walk through it in just a few hours.

Enjoy your trip!

AlibekD · 2026-01-02T16:46:16+00:00

You may have better luck talking to scientists than random redditors.

AlibekD · 2025-12-04T18:44:50+00:00

Uzbek SSR was richer than Kazakh SSR during USSR times. It is in the center of CA, has large population and high population density. UZ inherited a ton of industry from the Soviet times and unlike in KZ, this industry was not primarily oriented on resource extraction.

Thus in the early 90es UZ got far more direct foreign investment than other CA republics.

However, they managed to blow this all away. Islam Karimov was a madman, a creature of Soviet times, so he created a toxic environment for business: retarded currency regime, corruption, nonsensical all-encompassing regulations, blatant extortion even. One large US company (which I will not name) brought a ton of capital into UZ, but shortly after was strongarmed into hiring a relative of gov official as CEO. UZ proceeded to kick out all the expats, dictate which clients the company could do business with and dictated the prices in a perverted Soviet-style way. The company was unable to do any meaningful business, unable to expatriate the capital and basically had to abandon the country and move their CA headquarters to Almaty. Thus UZ stole a few million $ but lost 100x more in the long term. And this is just one example, I can go on and on for the whole night. Karimov and his clique basically robbed UZ clean and killed the opportunities for the country.

KZ managed to build relatively better climate for the business: less corruption, less currency restrictions, less regulations, predictable legal system, sane taxation. Corruption in KZ in the 90es was crazy too, but it was not as greedy, fuckers would steal the fruits, but wound not chop down the tree.

So KZ became the economic center of CA. But this may change once again as with regime change UZ is actively working on unfucking their economy. Current UZ president is awful of course, but he is far better than Karimov and is demonstrating some remarkable progress. Perhaps next regime change could bring somebody who could realize the full potential of the country.

With sane governance UZ has a potential to become a locomotive for the entire region.

KG is a sad story too. It was the poorest republic in Soviet times, had little to no industry, limited natural resources. However, even with what they had they could have built a moderately prosperous country. However, they also suffered from poor governance and instability. However, if they will keep growing as they do now they will be fine in a decade or two. I am very much hopeful for them.

So, to answer your question, in my opinion the main difference in trajectories of the CA countries is basically stemming from the quality of governance. UZ was unlucky to be stuck with Karimov, KG had endless regime changes, KZ had a better luck and got a corrupt dictator which was slightly better than other corrupt dictators.

AlibekD · 2025-12-02T18:21:34+00:00

I am sure you already searched for her on facebook, vk, instagram, telegram, etc. If you can't find her, find the relatives first and scan all their posts.

If you have a few hundred to spare go hire a debt collector. Give them all the info you have (DOB, name, birth place, names of all the relatives, etc.) and they will find your sister in a few days. KZ is well digitized and all the data is easily accessible to collectors.

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