memracom

I like that one. Doing well in school is seen as a point of pride. If that attitude ever takes hold in the USA then you will know that the MAGA movement has succeeded, utterly.

Will Trump's America be able to overcome the deep seated American cultural attitude that being stupid is being superior?

My 10y0 daughter wants to get this.

She is busy dreaming up genetic experiments, mostly inserting features of one organism in another, and has a theory that there will be a future movement like the Amish that will have rules as to what technology they will use, and which they will forbid. Of course she thinks CRISPR will be one of the things allowed.

In British Columbia, the westernmost province of Canada, the bonfire night celebration has been grafted onto Halloween instead, and the evening of October 31st is filled with the same echoing of explosions and fireworks that you would experience in a city in England on Nov 5th.

A great real-world example is the Russian Federation's program of new and improved military aircraft produced by several suppliers. Westerners constantly vastly underestimate the capabilities of Russia. Probably because Russians are smart enough to encourage this kind of thinking.

But when you look at the history of Russia who went from an agricultural peasant nation in 1917 to the WWII powerhouse that beat the Nazis in 1944, followed by an encore in rebuilding their country to the point where they had the first TV network in 1950, first space satellite, first man in space, detonated a hydrogen bomb only 10 months after the USA, you can see that these people are not dummies.

After decades of studying the Russians, I think the clearest way to explain who they are, is they are a nation of builders. Of course they are human and not perfect, but overall they know how to build all kinds of things and they fearlessly push forward with project after project all over their vast expanse of territory.

99% of what people say about Russia is wrong and rooted in ignorance because too few Westerners will learn Russian and get their info direct from the source. This means that Russia has not had to worry about keeping secrets from the USA because the USA does it for them. Electronic warfare capabilities are a case in point. And when you learn how the Soviets defeated American stealth aircraft capabilities even before they were deployed, you wonder why the USA spent the money to develop it.

When you compare the speed and effectiveness of Russia's military renewal (including planes like the Su-35) with the chain of fiascos in the US defense sector, one really wonders whether the Soviet Union's KGB campaign was a success. The KGB wanted to place deep cover agents within the US establishment (political and defense) in order to subvert the USA and damage its ability to threaten the Soviet Union. Normal KGB practice for this was to set up agents, but then let them run free with no control from Moscow or any requirement to send info back to Moscow. This made them virtually undetectable and when the Russian Federation disbanded the KGB, those deep cover agents continued to function. Soviet defectors in the 70's and 80's warned about the KGB campaign but nobody seemed to listen.

So when we see so-called "bad decisions" resulting in useless aircraft, useless stealth ships, and a whole chain of military equipment fiascos (up to and including $10,000 hammers) you really have to wonder whether the KGB won the cold war after all. We now know that the USA ran a decades long campaign to subvert the Soviet Union by sowing corruption deep within the Soviet system. How could the KGB not have done the same? Also, the Soviet Union disbanded itself quite abruptly and unexpectedly. Students of the KYB and of Russian strategy seriously wonder whether this was done to prevent the ultimate endgame in the US plan which would see Russia balkanized into a dozen small squabbling countries. Watch the film "The Turkish Gambit" to get an idea of the kind of chess games that Russians are capable of playing.

The problem is that this independence movement is not really an independence movement. In the modern world, no political entity can truly be independent. All are dependent on their neighbors.

True independence became extinct when people stopped living subsistence agricultural lives.

So the Catalan issue is more about how the EU is structured and whether nation states are the appropriate level of division for the different territories in the EU.

Even outside the EU, nation states like Ukraine cannot be independent because they have too much dependency on Russia, the USA, China, Turkey and so on.

Sovereignty is another question, but confusing it with independence is wrong.

This is why the post office model is superior. The local post office receives the parcel and keeps it safe until you come to pick it up. Nowadays (at least in Canada) these post offices are colocated in pharmacies and other businesses that can spare a bit of space and are open outside of 9-5 hours.

If a Fedex or UPS would buildup a network of similar business partnerships in residential areas (or just rent some space in a shopping mall) then people would use then in preference to this expensive key gimmick.

Why hasn't anyone ever thought of that before? Delivering goods to people in their local shopping mall?

Maybe because Silicon Valley is hung up on disruption and replacement so they never noticed that simply taking over existing businesses could be a lucrative model.

If this kind of technical creativity (way outside of the box) was possible in Russia under the Soviet yoke, then what kind of things are they capable of creating today?

Perhaps a whole bunch of electronic warfare devices like those used against AEGIS and the USS Donald Cook? And what about the fact that NASA and the US space program are so dependent on Russian rocket engines? Or the Russian jet that can hover or reverse in mid flight?

We know that the Russian system of higher education is very rigourous and places a lot of emphasis on mathematics Could this be the root of it? Or is it something else in the culture of Russia?

One of the biggest mistakes of the USA after the Cold War was to stop taking Russia seriously and to stop watching what Russians were doing. The west accepted the views put forward by Ukrainians about Russia, instead of going direct to the source. Now we know that neo-nazi forces within Ukraine were spreading misinformation about Russia in order to benefit Ukrainian oligarchs.

It is time to move beyond this. More of us need to learn Russian fluently and analyze Russia based on direct knowledge of the country and people. Russia isa powerful nation and it has a rich and vibrant culture. There is a lot to learn there, not just about technology but also about how to approach and solve impossible problems.

That is thinking out of the box, something that military forces have great difficulty doing. Number 2, 4 and 5 quite publicly caused a collapse in the victory of the first Gulf War.

It is too bad that there are not more Soviet and Russian WWII movies overdubbed in English, because the NKVD and the KGB really mastered this stuff back in the 40s and 50s. Not in all departments of the organization but in enough of them to become the masters of the Cold War.

Most interviewers who use torture do that because the believe that the evil criminal deserves a punishment, and the interviewer derives great satisfaction from doing the torture.

But you have to admit that criminals are not normal people. They are in fact, insane, in a specific way that our laws will not give them diminished responsibility. It is dangerous to think that the criminal is not a sadist. You have to maintain control over the criminal and over the interview. And you must maintain full control over your own psyche and emotions. Never be bored or frustrated. Have infinite patience. Map out the criminal's psyche to learn what makes them tick. Listen to your own intuitions because as you learn more about criminal psychology, your subconcious becomes a more powerful tool.

It is possible to train people to provide misleading information under torture. What if that phone has two passwords, one which unlocks secrets and one which leads you on a wild goose chase. Which one will you get by torture?

I have noticed a change in the interview techniques portrayed in some police shows. Gibb's team in NCIS is one of those but the British TV series Scott and Bailey really comes closest to what is discussed in this Guardian article. Sometimes Soren in Law and Order comes close as well.

Any police officer who wants to try this could get started by learning some basic psychology and watching a few episodes of these TV series. And also, you need to fix your own psychological issues because these techniques work best when you are not choked up with hate or other emotions. They require empathy for the criminal and to do that, you need to have firm control of your psyche otherwise it will break you to try it.

I am reminded of one of those Sales empowerment books of the 60s and 70s written by a luxury car salesman. He said that you could not be successful unless you genuinely liked your customer, and only then could you help him to spend his money on what you are selling. Part of the book was exercises on how to turn on that "genuine like" within your own psyche.

Let's face it, it takes years of daily practice to become a skilled musician, or a skilled skateboarder or a skilled parcour athlete or... Humans can do amazing things if only they apply themselves with a few years of daily practice. Stage magic is even more so because those folks never stop practicing the most impossible actions.

If the takeaway is that companies should seek out more older candidates to hire, then your comment reinforces that takeaway.

The point is that software development companies are missing an important element of diversity when they fail to hire older workers. Suret the younger ones can learn new tricks, but who is there to teach them?

Lots of the knowledge that older workers have is not taught in books or university programs. Knowing what not to do, what to do first, how to properly prioritize the work, and where to find bugs and eliminate them. This is stuff that you only learn from exp;erience unless you have an older guide to light the way.

If they cannot justify statehood then annex it to Florida.