It seems obvious to me that among two individuals with roughly equal intelligence, the one with the grit, work ethic, etc will generally be more successful since much of what is defined as "success" seems to do with the ability to "apply yourself" and "work hard" and so on.
The trouble is, how do you teach them? And how are those traits related to other external items like wealth? For example, a person of average intelligence who comes from a well-off family may do better in college than a person from a lesser economic status. The well-off person may have their parents pay their tuition, housing and other bills while someone of equal intelligence may have to work a part time job or subject themselves to worse living conditions which can impact their ability to manage a stressful academic program.
Maybe we should cut out some of the academics and instead have every student spend 3-4 hours per week with a cognitive behavioral therapist to unlearn bad habits and learn mental skills for "grit."
With beer specifically, the situation gets even murkier. Some of the political motivation that helped enable prohibition was anti-German sentiment. German-American brewers had achieved significant economic and political power and used to sell a lot of beer through brewery-owned single-brand taverns.
You might argue that these laws had some putative consumer/business competition angle (ie, independent restaurants and taverns not having to compete against brewery owned outlets). Yet it's equally likely it was done merely to restrict the economic power of the German-American brewers by forcing them into distribution agreements.
In Minnesota specifically (I also live here, haven't had the gumption to fight the crowds at the new Surly taproom, but love Dangerous Man, Indeed, etc) I think it's MUCH more about entrenched interests just trying to protect their turf. If you removed the 3-tier requirement here I would suspect that distributors would lose about half their business, easily, perhaps only retaining that part which is governed by Federal law or with customers too small or lacking the ability to manage direct vendor relationships.
I think consumers want variety at retail and bar/restaurant locations, so it's hard to see any manufacturer abusing it. Who would go to a Bud-only bar, anyway?
I've done some work for a local manufacturer and the "3 tier" system isn't that tightly regulated; they have a very tight relationship with a distributor which struck me as a dubious division, but I'm not a lawyer, so maybe its normal.
I would bet that the laws that split manufacturers, distributors and resellers had more than a little of its origins in Prohibition morality politics versus some market control designed to prevent monopoly abuse. Although I'm sure now it's kept in place more for its ability to protect market niches than for any specific lingering notions of alcohol control.
What about west Nile virus as a cause? The starling population here used to be large and not long after west Nile made its appearance the population seemed to drop off substantially.
Although we seem to have a lot of house finches here. I'd prefer more mourning doves and even some bluejays if only for the color.
It's an inherently complex measure (investment) given a simplistic outcome (increase).
I'm not even sure what numbers you would use to measure "investment" and there are probably many complex motivations involving actual long term investment, tax strategies, trailing indicators, etc etc.
Maybe the breadth of deployment and usage of solar and wind has reached the point where enough people are convinced that it represents the future and aren't just doing a price comparison to oil/gas today.
It's kind of the paradox of democracy -- how do you square the rights of a free society against those would use those rights to advocate against them or overthrow them?
That was my first thought too, but then I assumed that maybe these statistics lagged the change in oil prices by decent amounts or perhaps there's some counterintuitive investment or accounting logic to it, like some investors putting more money in as valuations fall (seeing a bargain or long-term plan) or perhaps companies shifting money on paper into "investments" as a tax hedge or a way to claim a higher paper loss.
I'm just making this up, I don't know, but sometimes these things have complex explanations from the alternative universe of money.
Because I'm inclined to be conspiratorial, I am somewhat suspicious that iOS Mail and Safari are written with advertiser-friendliness in mind which leads to them loading mail images automatically and the lack of an adblocking feature (or add-in capability) to Safari.
Yes, you can install a third-party browser like Mercury which can do adblocking but there's no way to change the default browser, which leads to Safari getting used (it doesn't help that Mercury's "Open in Mercury" bookmarklet is broken, the URL getting escaped/parsed wrong when it lands in Mercury).
I haven't seen the wine shop at MSP, but I think the airlines (and airports) have a huge vested interest in some of these "security" rules to the extent they can create a captive consumer who has no choice but to buy from the vendor of last resort.
It'd be awesome if they would just break down and open a liquor store past security specializing in canned beer, half-pints of liquor and splits of wine. But that might cut into the airlines profits.
Worse, airlines have more monopoly control than the NY Times author ever acknowledged.
Even worse, what does unbundling mean in the airline world? None of the "unbundled" options like extra leg room or baggage check make any sense unless you buy a ticket. It's not like I'm going to decide to go out and buy extra leg room on a flight to Dallas or check a bag without buying a ticket on that flight, and there's no way I can purchase those items from anyone else and use them on that flight -- at that point, the airline is a monopoly because they are the only one providing checked baggage to my destination or extra space on my flight.
In many cases things like checked baggage have coercive rules REQUIRING these items to be bought if you want to fly at all or the items are ONLY available from the airline during the flight. If I want an alcoholic beverage on my flight, I HAVE to buy it from the airline -- I can't bring my own booze through security. Sure, I could UPS my stuff to my destination but this really isn't very convenient for most short(er) trips and carry-on has a lot of limitations, some practical and some externally imposed.
Calling airline costs "unbundling" is doing them a huge PR favor. Airlines are just price gouging, plain and simple.
I think that when the History channel got started, there was a lot of low hanging fruit -- traditional popular documentaries available to air for little or no money. These got aired in whole, then sliced and diced and recombined in sort-of-novel ways.
But even I can only watch so much recycled footage of WW II and the building of the Hoover Dam and it seems like once they had exhausted what was out there they just jumped onto the reality bandwagon because it was cheaper than producing actual documentaries.
Given how much underemployed history adjunct faculty there is out there, it's kind of sad they couldn't hire a bunch of them and actually make new documentaries. I have a friend who is just one of those underemployed academic historians and suggested at one time that he actually pitch himself as a producer to the History channel.
Even if the 'new' documentary just recycled existing old footage, a real Ph.D would have a pretty decent idea of who's who in the field and could suggest entertaining faculty to interview on camera and probably cheap ways to combine original footage of historical sites with new interviews to make compelling documentaries.
I share your fascination with Oak Island although I'll admit to being more skeptical about the "artifacts" found in the various digs than I used to be.
For one, the chain of documentation about previous finds up to the early 20th century is a little dubious -- it's not like there was some set of neutral observers who preserved all the finds in one place for posterity and future scientific research. IIRC, much of what was found has been lost and what has been retained is of unauthenticatable veracity.
Two, the running assumption has always been "buried treasure!!111" which has lead to a certain amount of secrecy and a kind of gold rush mentality, which has meant chronically underfunded "treasure hunters" who need to produce something to extend their search funding. Since most previous searches have "found something" it's not hard to see later searchers "finding something" in order to try to keep the project going.
I'm not sure I necessarily buy the idea that there's not some application of money + technology that couldn't get to the, uh, bottom of it, either. It's not like bridges and other engineering works haven't been using caissons since about forever. Any serious attempt with real money to throw at it should be able to build and maintain a large caisson excavation to bedrock and explore from there. IIRC, I think some kind of environmental concerns have also inhibited the use of outright industrial-scale excavation akin to strip mining the entire island.
I think the biggest problem has (and always will be) money -- the geography and geology of the island is such that simple excavating to the needed depths just won't work. Bore drilling is of limited value -- 6" diameter core samples probably aren't big enough to find something meaningful over an area of dozens of acres. You really have to spend huge dollars to move massive volumes of ground, build caissons and prepare to burn diesel by the tanker load to keep pumps running to keep the excavation from flooding. This would wind up being, what, a $20 or $30 million dollar project?
And that doesn't get into the logistical problems -- Google Earth makes it look like parts of the Island are owned by others -- if you were to excavate 40 acres, 200 feet to bedrock, where the hell do you park 12 million cubic yards of overburden?
I haven't watched the History Channel show about Oak Island but I'll admit to being a willing sucker for pretty much anything else, having read a couple of books when I've run across them in used book stores.
But I don't think I've ever heard the buried ship hypothesis, which makes sense. I had always assumed that anything "that shouldn't have been there" found in the digs was more or less a planted item designed to whip up additional money from investors. Since "relics" have been found by every group that's ever dug there, it never seems to stretch credibility for one more relic to be found.
Oak Island is an island off Nova Scotia where people have been digging for some kind of treasure for about 200 years or so.
AFAIK, there isn't anything down the hole(s) that have been dug but supposedly there has been some stuff (coconut fibers, wood platforms, etc) that have been found at various depths that defy easy explanation and suggest some kind of previous digging and burial.
Whether it's total bullshit or not is kind of beside the point, it makes a fun story to read even if the only thing down there is rock and sea water.
HR won't ask you to take one, HR will simply mention them in passing and nudge to the point where an eager applicant will volunteer. Those with negative attitudes towards them simply will be removed from the applicant pool.
What were those priced at? I seem to remember in the early 1990s a DAT deck was kind of the unaffordable Holy Grail of audio recording and a portable DAT deck the unaffordable Walkman.
How often do you actually change the temperature? About the only time I feel compelled to do it is when the outside temperature drops below about -10F; something about temperatures that low allow the periphery of the house to cool off faster than the core where the the thermostat is, making some rooms a little chilly.
However being able to set the thermostat with my phone is excellent.
I'm curious what the value of this is. How valuable is on-demand remote thermostat changing?
Programmable thermostats capable of 4 settings per day and 7 per week are common and cheap and all the ones I've owned going back to the late 1990s have the intelligence to adapt to the time required to reach the set point by the scheduled time (and learn as they go, so they adapt to changes in the outdoor weather). Most will also manage variable holds and one-off changes in temperature and automatically revert to the programmed settings (or not, which is an option).
Not everyone is on a regular enough schedule where a programmable thermostat by itself will line up with a totally random schedule, but then again, I'm not sure what the meaningful energy or comfort differences being an hour or two off an "estimated" schedule would look like, either.
About the only situation where it would be meaningful I can think of is if I set it to hold a temp while I was gone for N days in the summer and I came home two days earlier and didn't want to come home to a hot house. But even when that's actually happened, it's like maybe 4 hours after getting home and resuming the program until the temperature is pretty much back to normal. Even after an hour when it's still warmer than I'd like, the system has tamed the humidity which makes a big comfort difference.
How can a person grow up in such an environment and *not* end up as a conspiracy theorist?
I have a boss who is a Russian (his father was an officer in the Red Army, and I'd guess that party membership went along with that) and it's often amazing how his "management style" often ends up feeling like a parody of life in the communist party. "Meetings" which often ended up being long-winded droning about a bunch of topics, management-by-decree, and when he screwed something up at a client it was amazing how he would go into truth-suppression mode, outright lying and in one case, fabricating "evidence" to deny his involvement in problem.
As maddening as his management "style" was, he was a decent human being and often quite flexible and generous on a one-on-one basis. I just couldn't help but think his entire life had been exposed to both the weird thinking of the Red Army (which is probably not that much weirder than any Army) AND life in the community party and he just didn't know any different. He ultimately hired another guy (native-born American, with more management experience) who took over most of his employee-facing management.
Another friend I related this to had a Russian friend who ran his own company. When I related my story to her she said "Of course it's because he's Russian. My friend figured that out after he had several employees quit and figured out you can't manage Americans like Russians; he hired someone to manage people and it got so much better."
As much as I believe there is value in manned space flight, I'm increasingly convinced that the real key to long term space flight is the ability to migrate human consciousness into machine form. It makes the ship less complex and solves a lot of problems with traveling long distances and some of the social and psychological side effects of relativistic effects.
I assume the idea is that you make more money stealing $1 many times from more people over a year than you do trying to steal all of it from all of it at once.
Sure it takes resources, but does that rationale hold up anymore in an era when $50 hacker boards have Ghz CPUs and gigs of flash? Let alone the kind of CPU, RAM and architecture that could be applied to the problem for business grade let alone carrier grade equipment?
Carriers seem to have unlimited CPU available to do deep packet inspection and inject ads and tracking data into HTTP sessions, but the kind of resources to do egress source IP filtering is "too much CPU"?
It makes me wonder what Africa would be like today if it had remained under colonial administration but had been able to transition to majority local rule over a much longer time period.
I recently read a book called "38 days to Cape Town" about a north-south African road trip taken in the late 1970s. Most of Central Africa they passed through was marginally functional as a civilization, including nearly having to abandon their trip because they were unable to buy fuel at any price -- gasoline stations were abandoned and there was almost no economy at all. They finally struck a deal with foreigner who ran a government rice factory who sold them a barrel of gasoline the factory shipped up the river themselves.
The author was critical of South Africa's apartheid, but claimed that in spite of it most black Africans he spoke to were grateful to live in a stable country that offered at least some kind of opportunity that wasn't living off the bush.
Yes, but, there is certainly a large dose of not-quite-rationality that NK exhibits when dealing with international actors. They don't have the same rule book as everyone else seems to when it comes to how to treat your large, powerful neighbors.
I think there's more than a little deliberate erratic behavior; rather than the weird uncle, I would liken it to the prison inmate whose craziness may or may not be intentional, but it has the effect of keeping more dangerous inmates who otherwise are more powerful from bothering him because they can't predict if "normal" power intimidation will result in a fight-to-the-death response.
A "normal" inmate can be intimidated because they respond predictably to power intimidation and are more likely to acquiesce to avoid a fight. The crazy inmate's behavior is unpredictable, which forces the otherwise more powerful inmate to decide whether the intimidation value is worth the risk of a violent confrontation, even though they may be guaranteed a victory by virtue of strength and group affiliation.
I think this is the kind of rational irrationality the North Koreans actually employ -- it limits the intimidation value of the United States and forces the US into mostly choosing to ignore North Korean bad behavior rather than face the risk of a major war that could escalate into a pan-Asian or global conflict.
Unfortunately for North Korea, this same logic is starting to work against them. Part of their calculus involves support from China as a kind of strategic partner. When China was ideologically communist, it was a reasonable assumption that they would back North Korea in a fight with the United States on ideological grounds. The Chinese even got pretty good at using North Korean unpredictability as a tool for their own foreign policy, winding up North Korea when they wanted something diplomatically from the US and leveraging their influence as a "trade" for their goals.
Now that the Chinese economy (and hence, their highly valued internal stability) is inexorably linked to the United States, the Chinese are starting to reassess their own risk. Is defending North Korea worth the risk of an all-out war with the United States? Even if it doesn't come to that, there are serious internal stability risks associated with even a war contained on the peninsula as it would like result in millions of Korean refugees flooding into China.
Slashdot Mirror
How do you teach grit, anyway?
It seems obvious to me that among two individuals with roughly equal intelligence, the one with the grit, work ethic, etc will generally be more successful since much of what is defined as "success" seems to do with the ability to "apply yourself" and "work hard" and so on.
The trouble is, how do you teach them? And how are those traits related to other external items like wealth? For example, a person of average intelligence who comes from a well-off family may do better in college than a person from a lesser economic status. The well-off person may have their parents pay their tuition, housing and other bills while someone of equal intelligence may have to work a part time job or subject themselves to worse living conditions which can impact their ability to manage a stressful academic program.
Maybe we should cut out some of the academics and instead have every student spend 3-4 hours per week with a cognitive behavioral therapist to unlearn bad habits and learn mental skills for "grit."
With beer specifically, the situation gets even murkier. Some of the political motivation that helped enable prohibition was anti-German sentiment. German-American brewers had achieved significant economic and political power and used to sell a lot of beer through brewery-owned single-brand taverns.
You might argue that these laws had some putative consumer/business competition angle (ie, independent restaurants and taverns not having to compete against brewery owned outlets). Yet it's equally likely it was done merely to restrict the economic power of the German-American brewers by forcing them into distribution agreements.
In Minnesota specifically (I also live here, haven't had the gumption to fight the crowds at the new Surly taproom, but love Dangerous Man, Indeed, etc) I think it's MUCH more about entrenched interests just trying to protect their turf. If you removed the 3-tier requirement here I would suspect that distributors would lose about half their business, easily, perhaps only retaining that part which is governed by Federal law or with customers too small or lacking the ability to manage direct vendor relationships.
I think consumers want variety at retail and bar/restaurant locations, so it's hard to see any manufacturer abusing it. Who would go to a Bud-only bar, anyway?
I've done some work for a local manufacturer and the "3 tier" system isn't that tightly regulated; they have a very tight relationship with a distributor which struck me as a dubious division, but I'm not a lawyer, so maybe its normal.
I would bet that the laws that split manufacturers, distributors and resellers had more than a little of its origins in Prohibition morality politics versus some market control designed to prevent monopoly abuse. Although I'm sure now it's kept in place more for its ability to protect market niches than for any specific lingering notions of alcohol control.
What about west Nile virus as a cause? The starling population here used to be large and not long after west Nile made its appearance the population seemed to drop off substantially.
Although we seem to have a lot of house finches here. I'd prefer more mourning doves and even some bluejays if only for the color.
It's an inherently complex measure (investment) given a simplistic outcome (increase).
I'm not even sure what numbers you would use to measure "investment" and there are probably many complex motivations involving actual long term investment, tax strategies, trailing indicators, etc etc.
Maybe the breadth of deployment and usage of solar and wind has reached the point where enough people are convinced that it represents the future and aren't just doing a price comparison to oil/gas today.
It's kind of the paradox of democracy -- how do you square the rights of a free society against those would use those rights to advocate against them or overthrow them?
That was my first thought too, but then I assumed that maybe these statistics lagged the change in oil prices by decent amounts or perhaps there's some counterintuitive investment or accounting logic to it, like some investors putting more money in as valuations fall (seeing a bargain or long-term plan) or perhaps companies shifting money on paper into "investments" as a tax hedge or a way to claim a higher paper loss.
I'm just making this up, I don't know, but sometimes these things have complex explanations from the alternative universe of money.
Because I'm inclined to be conspiratorial, I am somewhat suspicious that iOS Mail and Safari are written with advertiser-friendliness in mind which leads to them loading mail images automatically and the lack of an adblocking feature (or add-in capability) to Safari.
Yes, you can install a third-party browser like Mercury which can do adblocking but there's no way to change the default browser, which leads to Safari getting used (it doesn't help that Mercury's "Open in Mercury" bookmarklet is broken, the URL getting escaped/parsed wrong when it lands in Mercury).
We will sell them the rope they will use to hang us.
I haven't seen the wine shop at MSP, but I think the airlines (and airports) have a huge vested interest in some of these "security" rules to the extent they can create a captive consumer who has no choice but to buy from the vendor of last resort.
It'd be awesome if they would just break down and open a liquor store past security specializing in canned beer, half-pints of liquor and splits of wine. But that might cut into the airlines profits.
Worse, airlines have more monopoly control than the NY Times author ever acknowledged.
Even worse, what does unbundling mean in the airline world? None of the "unbundled" options like extra leg room or baggage check make any sense unless you buy a ticket. It's not like I'm going to decide to go out and buy extra leg room on a flight to Dallas or check a bag without buying a ticket on that flight, and there's no way I can purchase those items from anyone else and use them on that flight -- at that point, the airline is a monopoly because they are the only one providing checked baggage to my destination or extra space on my flight.
In many cases things like checked baggage have coercive rules REQUIRING these items to be bought if you want to fly at all or the items are ONLY available from the airline during the flight. If I want an alcoholic beverage on my flight, I HAVE to buy it from the airline -- I can't bring my own booze through security. Sure, I could UPS my stuff to my destination but this really isn't very convenient for most short(er) trips and carry-on has a lot of limitations, some practical and some externally imposed.
Calling airline costs "unbundling" is doing them a huge PR favor. Airlines are just price gouging, plain and simple.
I think that when the History channel got started, there was a lot of low hanging fruit -- traditional popular documentaries available to air for little or no money. These got aired in whole, then sliced and diced and recombined in sort-of-novel ways.
But even I can only watch so much recycled footage of WW II and the building of the Hoover Dam and it seems like once they had exhausted what was out there they just jumped onto the reality bandwagon because it was cheaper than producing actual documentaries.
Given how much underemployed history adjunct faculty there is out there, it's kind of sad they couldn't hire a bunch of them and actually make new documentaries. I have a friend who is just one of those underemployed academic historians and suggested at one time that he actually pitch himself as a producer to the History channel.
Even if the 'new' documentary just recycled existing old footage, a real Ph.D would have a pretty decent idea of who's who in the field and could suggest entertaining faculty to interview on camera and probably cheap ways to combine original footage of historical sites with new interviews to make compelling documentaries.
I share your fascination with Oak Island although I'll admit to being more skeptical about the "artifacts" found in the various digs than I used to be.
For one, the chain of documentation about previous finds up to the early 20th century is a little dubious -- it's not like there was some set of neutral observers who preserved all the finds in one place for posterity and future scientific research. IIRC, much of what was found has been lost and what has been retained is of unauthenticatable veracity.
Two, the running assumption has always been "buried treasure!!111" which has lead to a certain amount of secrecy and a kind of gold rush mentality, which has meant chronically underfunded "treasure hunters" who need to produce something to extend their search funding. Since most previous searches have "found something" it's not hard to see later searchers "finding something" in order to try to keep the project going.
I'm not sure I necessarily buy the idea that there's not some application of money + technology that couldn't get to the, uh, bottom of it, either. It's not like bridges and other engineering works haven't been using caissons since about forever. Any serious attempt with real money to throw at it should be able to build and maintain a large caisson excavation to bedrock and explore from there. IIRC, I think some kind of environmental concerns have also inhibited the use of outright industrial-scale excavation akin to strip mining the entire island.
I think the biggest problem has (and always will be) money -- the geography and geology of the island is such that simple excavating to the needed depths just won't work. Bore drilling is of limited value -- 6" diameter core samples probably aren't big enough to find something meaningful over an area of dozens of acres. You really have to spend huge dollars to move massive volumes of ground, build caissons and prepare to burn diesel by the tanker load to keep pumps running to keep the excavation from flooding. This would wind up being, what, a $20 or $30 million dollar project?
And that doesn't get into the logistical problems -- Google Earth makes it look like parts of the Island are owned by others -- if you were to excavate 40 acres, 200 feet to bedrock, where the hell do you park 12 million cubic yards of overburden?
I haven't watched the History Channel show about Oak Island but I'll admit to being a willing sucker for pretty much anything else, having read a couple of books when I've run across them in used book stores.
But I don't think I've ever heard the buried ship hypothesis, which makes sense. I had always assumed that anything "that shouldn't have been there" found in the digs was more or less a planted item designed to whip up additional money from investors. Since "relics" have been found by every group that's ever dug there, it never seems to stretch credibility for one more relic to be found.
Oak Island is an island off Nova Scotia where people have been digging for some kind of treasure for about 200 years or so.
AFAIK, there isn't anything down the hole(s) that have been dug but supposedly there has been some stuff (coconut fibers, wood platforms, etc) that have been found at various depths that defy easy explanation and suggest some kind of previous digging and burial.
Whether it's total bullshit or not is kind of beside the point, it makes a fun story to read even if the only thing down there is rock and sea water.
HR won't ask you to take one, HR will simply mention them in passing and nudge to the point where an eager applicant will volunteer. Those with negative attitudes towards them simply will be removed from the applicant pool.
What were those priced at? I seem to remember in the early 1990s a DAT deck was kind of the unaffordable Holy Grail of audio recording and a portable DAT deck the unaffordable Walkman.
How often do you actually change the temperature? About the only time I feel compelled to do it is when the outside temperature drops below about -10F; something about temperatures that low allow the periphery of the house to cool off faster than the core where the the thermostat is, making some rooms a little chilly.
However being able to set the thermostat with my phone is excellent.
I'm curious what the value of this is. How valuable is on-demand remote thermostat changing?
Programmable thermostats capable of 4 settings per day and 7 per week are common and cheap and all the ones I've owned going back to the late 1990s have the intelligence to adapt to the time required to reach the set point by the scheduled time (and learn as they go, so they adapt to changes in the outdoor weather). Most will also manage variable holds and one-off changes in temperature and automatically revert to the programmed settings (or not, which is an option).
Not everyone is on a regular enough schedule where a programmable thermostat by itself will line up with a totally random schedule, but then again, I'm not sure what the meaningful energy or comfort differences being an hour or two off an "estimated" schedule would look like, either.
About the only situation where it would be meaningful I can think of is if I set it to hold a temp while I was gone for N days in the summer and I came home two days earlier and didn't want to come home to a hot house. But even when that's actually happened, it's like maybe 4 hours after getting home and resuming the program until the temperature is pretty much back to normal. Even after an hour when it's still warmer than I'd like, the system has tamed the humidity which makes a big comfort difference.
How can a person grow up in such an environment and *not* end up as a conspiracy theorist?
I have a boss who is a Russian (his father was an officer in the Red Army, and I'd guess that party membership went along with that) and it's often amazing how his "management style" often ends up feeling like a parody of life in the communist party. "Meetings" which often ended up being long-winded droning about a bunch of topics, management-by-decree, and when he screwed something up at a client it was amazing how he would go into truth-suppression mode, outright lying and in one case, fabricating "evidence" to deny his involvement in problem.
As maddening as his management "style" was, he was a decent human being and often quite flexible and generous on a one-on-one basis. I just couldn't help but think his entire life had been exposed to both the weird thinking of the Red Army (which is probably not that much weirder than any Army) AND life in the community party and he just didn't know any different. He ultimately hired another guy (native-born American, with more management experience) who took over most of his employee-facing management.
Another friend I related this to had a Russian friend who ran his own company. When I related my story to her she said "Of course it's because he's Russian. My friend figured that out after he had several employees quit and figured out you can't manage Americans like Russians; he hired someone to manage people and it got so much better."
As much as I believe there is value in manned space flight, I'm increasingly convinced that the real key to long term space flight is the ability to migrate human consciousness into machine form. It makes the ship less complex and solves a lot of problems with traveling long distances and some of the social and psychological side effects of relativistic effects.
I assume the idea is that you make more money stealing $1 many times from more people over a year than you do trying to steal all of it from all of it at once.
Sure it takes resources, but does that rationale hold up anymore in an era when $50 hacker boards have Ghz CPUs and gigs of flash? Let alone the kind of CPU, RAM and architecture that could be applied to the problem for business grade let alone carrier grade equipment?
Carriers seem to have unlimited CPU available to do deep packet inspection and inject ads and tracking data into HTTP sessions, but the kind of resources to do egress source IP filtering is "too much CPU"?
I'm just not buying it.
It makes me wonder what Africa would be like today if it had remained under colonial administration but had been able to transition to majority local rule over a much longer time period.
I recently read a book called "38 days to Cape Town" about a north-south African road trip taken in the late 1970s. Most of Central Africa they passed through was marginally functional as a civilization, including nearly having to abandon their trip because they were unable to buy fuel at any price -- gasoline stations were abandoned and there was almost no economy at all. They finally struck a deal with foreigner who ran a government rice factory who sold them a barrel of gasoline the factory shipped up the river themselves.
The author was critical of South Africa's apartheid, but claimed that in spite of it most black Africans he spoke to were grateful to live in a stable country that offered at least some kind of opportunity that wasn't living off the bush.
Yes, but, there is certainly a large dose of not-quite-rationality that NK exhibits when dealing with international actors. They don't have the same rule book as everyone else seems to when it comes to how to treat your large, powerful neighbors.
I think there's more than a little deliberate erratic behavior; rather than the weird uncle, I would liken it to the prison inmate whose craziness may or may not be intentional, but it has the effect of keeping more dangerous inmates who otherwise are more powerful from bothering him because they can't predict if "normal" power intimidation will result in a fight-to-the-death response.
A "normal" inmate can be intimidated because they respond predictably to power intimidation and are more likely to acquiesce to avoid a fight. The crazy inmate's behavior is unpredictable, which forces the otherwise more powerful inmate to decide whether the intimidation value is worth the risk of a violent confrontation, even though they may be guaranteed a victory by virtue of strength and group affiliation.
I think this is the kind of rational irrationality the North Koreans actually employ -- it limits the intimidation value of the United States and forces the US into mostly choosing to ignore North Korean bad behavior rather than face the risk of a major war that could escalate into a pan-Asian or global conflict.
Unfortunately for North Korea, this same logic is starting to work against them. Part of their calculus involves support from China as a kind of strategic partner. When China was ideologically communist, it was a reasonable assumption that they would back North Korea in a fight with the United States on ideological grounds. The Chinese even got pretty good at using North Korean unpredictability as a tool for their own foreign policy, winding up North Korea when they wanted something diplomatically from the US and leveraging their influence as a "trade" for their goals.
Now that the Chinese economy (and hence, their highly valued internal stability) is inexorably linked to the United States, the Chinese are starting to reassess their own risk. Is defending North Korea worth the risk of an all-out war with the United States? Even if it doesn't come to that, there are serious internal stability risks associated with even a war contained on the peninsula as it would like result in millions of Korean refugees flooding into China.