sajforbes

It was a needlessly snarky way to word it, but they are right. The issue is the verb 'scale/s' rather than 'advance/s'

After getting a lot of requests on Reddit for guidance on how to learn a language, I decided to make a proper guide for people. The first few chapters are available on my website. The full PDF/epub guide can be downloaded for free using a link in the guide. Enjoy!

Curious to know how you think it's possible that Chinese people are able to speak with each other if you think writing their language phonetically would render it incomprehensible.

I'm a bit confused about your reasons for signing up, but it looks real to me. It could be with all the buzz around AI it really did see a large surge in interest. I'd be interested to hear from the founders and how they managed to grow so quickly.

Hard agree. People post links to websites with technical descriptions and little basic info all the time, and this is the first time I'm seeing a thread of people complaining about it. If I'm interested in something I see, I start Googling terms; I don't expect a specification for software in a specific field to cater to my beginner-level knowledge.

I disagree for three reasons:

1. While Russia warned against NATO expansion, it wasn't (and still isn't) in their power to do anything to stop it. Its actions have resulted in the expansion of NATO, a reasonably forseeable result.

2. NATO is a defensive only alliance, and can't be invoked for an invasion of Russia. If their concern is the ability of the US to store missiles and other military gear on its border, too late - the Baltics are already members. It would be an odd choice to invade purely based on the likely future expansion of an alliance that is designed to prevent you from invading its members.

3. NATO expansion or no, an independent, westward-leaning Ukraine is not an acceptable outcome. This would make NATO expansion irrelevant or at best an ancillary cause.

It's also worth noting it's not like this is the first time Russia has invaded and occupied one of its neighbours. AFAIK Georgia wasn't about to join NATO. We can't see counterfactual universes, but in my view an equally valid possibility is that NATO has stopped what is happening in Ukraine from happening in the Baltic states.

Overall the facts don't line up well with the theory that this is a response to NATO expansion, and therefore the US is to blame - it might be a factor, but more serves as a rhetorical justification Russia can use that it knows people in the US and UK can use domestically.

If you're a realist about international relations it's pretty easy to see why the UK and US might see it as in their geostrategic interest to prolong the war, and that might have been a factor. It's also worth noting there was a huge amount of public pressure for both to react. Either way, in their view, a longer war is worth it for a pro-western Ukraine, and Ukraine seems to agree. As for acting to prevent an agreement, that's largely speculation, but either way, the final choice was still Ukraine's.

I distinctly remember terming my searches as questions. I was young and this was back pre Google so I was using Ask Jeeves. Naturally if you're asking someone something you would phrase it as a question, so in my mind it made sense to ask it that way.

Though I agree with you it's annoying, you gotta hate the game not the player. It's Google's fault for valuing things like this in its search results. All the author is doing is trying to get seen. I'd say that if they have to irk a few people like us to get themselves higher on search results, they'd probably judge it as a good trade-off.

You're employing a red herring - the internment of Japanese Americans is not relevant to a security and vetting procedure. Whatever justification they used shouldn't change your assessment of how the specific justification used here bears on the present issue.

I agree there is a problem of China paranoia, and your average Chinese American shouldn't be the subject of racist discrimination. While wanting to reduce this is admirable, national security is not the field to do it. The geopolitical forces shaping this shift are much larger than the national security apparatus - negating it at the expense of security is not their remit and never will be.

Nobody called for racial discrimination. Vetting needs to be done based on potential risks posed by connections (possible or confirmed) to a hostile foreign power that is both an autocratic regime and capable of using its influence to coerce people into committing espionage.

Those same considerations would not apply to Taiwanese Americans.

All western countries dealing with China need to consider their security policy carefully and comments like yours poison the well of debate by conflating racial discrimination with legitimate security concerns.