You consider the closing of embassies to be a form of diplomacy? I think collecting Assange, someone who clearly believes that extradition will result in his permanent incarceration or death, without any use of force would be...challenging. The Ecuadorian officials may not care so much, but Assange probably will. I admit that firearms would only be necessary if the Ecuadorians are armed. Cowardly American cops would never enter without assault weapons, class III-A vests, tear gas grenades and night vision goggles, and absurdly overwhelming numbers and that's only if there isn't so much as a single.22 pistol or a steak knife on the other side. If the other side has firearms they might just blow up the embassy and drive a tank in. I'd like to believe the British are at least a bit more sane and civilized. All that may be required is 3-6 large, strong, police officers to force their way in and physically remove Assange without harming anyone. At worst, they might need to resort to pepper spray. And no hotheads who wank to martial arts films and get drunk every night beating up their girlfriends.
What do you have against Ecuador? Did some Ecuadorian guy fuck your girlfriend or something? It's a fine place to live. Much better than the shithole that is the US. The UK is much nicer, but too expensive and once you grow tired of the lovely accents, a bit dull in comparison.
Well I guess posting AC is second best. Don't be too hard on yourself. Being stupid doesn't mean you have no value at all. Perhaps you could even move here to the US where you won't stand out as much.
Picture the following: 30-40 British officers of some branch of law enforcement arrive at the embassy. Perhaps they knock and ask or demand to be let in so that they can take Assange into custody. It is the duty of the Ecuadorians to defend Assange because their country has promised him political asylum. They are honorable men and they cannot allow this to happen without at least trying to stop it. They physically block the British officers. Perhaps they are armed. Perhaps, like the Brits, they are fully body armored with at least Class III-A or Class IV vests. I would predict some violence. Perhaps you mean that there will be no violence if Ecuador simply gives up Assange whose protection they have promised. But that would result in utter humiliation for Ecuador. So I think there is a good chance that there will be some violence, not just against Assange, but against some Ecuadorians. If there are deaths would it qualify as an actual war if government agents are fighting and killing each other under orders from their government? That's what I'm wondering. Whatever happens we can only hope that a video, perhaps from security cameras, will eventually be posted to youtube.
So are you or are you not claiming that armed British forces will under no circumstances enter the Ecuadorian embassy uninvited? If this comes to pass will you admit that you were wrong? As far as I can tell the British government seems willing to go to war with or at least terminate diplomatic relations with Ecuador over this and doesn't seem worried about any implications for the safety of British nationals living all over the world. I speak American English. Not British English. So perhaps I have misunderstood the meaning implied by the British statements.
If the UK is not willing to "storm the embassy" then they won't get him back. He has been granted political asylum. Surely this is basic logic. I'm not sure I get the point of all of this arguing over semantics. Who cares what the exact wording is? It is clear that Britain has threatened to use force against the Ecuadorian embassy if they don't hand over Assange. Is this basic fact even in dispute? Because that's what I have been looking for. Some sign that Britain would be willing to back down and allow Assange to become Ecuador's problem.
At this point the only humane and civilized thing to do is to say to Ecuador, in effect, "You want him? He's yours." The British government is acting like a petulant child and a bully and making themselves look like fools. What Britain is threatening may or may not be a violation of the letter of international law, but it sure as hell is a violation of the spirit. Breaking into embassies to retrieve suspects who have been granted political asylum is not considered okay by the international community regardless of what they have been accused of. Which in this case is nothing at all. Sweden claims that they would just like to have another word with Assange. For no apparent reason and without any promise that they won't allow him to be extradited to Guantanamo Bay. Unfortunately for Assange, Ecuador is not exactly Cuba or Venezuela. Is there any guarantee that Ecuador won't hand him over to the US directly instead of Sweden?
The US and Ecuador are not exactly enemies and the extradition treaty includes things like abortion, bribery, bigamy, receiving stolen property, shoplifting something worth at least $25, and perjury. Not exactly a high standard. All the US would probably have to do is find Assange guilty of some sort of secrets act in a military court. Or argue that he "stole" more than $25 worth of state secrets or was an accessory to such theft.
Ecuador is physically closer, but politically farther away than either the U.K. or Sweden. Is this not obvious? What would your choice be? Guantanamo Bay or Quito? Those are Assange's only choices at the moment.
That really doesn't sound like "storming" to me. All from the Guardian live blog.
I see. If you object to the term "storming" then perhaps "invading" or "breaking and entering" or "forcibly entering" would suit you better? I am curious as to what kind of weasel phrases you would introduce to attempt to avoid the idea that heavily armed British forces would break down the door and shoot any Ecuadorians who might attempt to block their path to bravely defend their country against an outlaw state who attempts to substitute violence for diplomacy for even the most trivial of reasons.
Would you feel the same way about a British citizen being kidnapped from a British embassy after being accused but not charged with viewing internet pornography in countries where that is considered a serious crime? You don't have to be a genius to figure out that the act could have long term consequences for the safety of British citizens all over the world. Especially if any Ecuadorian bodies are seen being removed from the building. All it would take is an Ecuadorian with a cell phone hiding in a closet to let the world know about any Ecuadorians killed by the British commandos.
Strength? Wouldn't breaking international law to help deliver a political prisoner to Guantanamo Bay be more a sign of weakness? Does it not make the U.K. just look like a punk/bitch following orders from their U.S. master? While it will definitely court favor with the violent and dangerous U.S. regime, it will alienate the rest of the world and, since turnabout is always regarded as fair, may even lead to loss of life for British citizens living abroad who would otherwise have been able to seek asylum at their embassy. Why would any country respect the sovereignty of British embassies after Britain has demonstrated its utter contempt for the idea themselves?
I hate to disappoint you, but I'm not paid or compelled or compensated by anyone in any way to post on slashdot.
Of course not. However, if you were and you openly admitted to it on a forum with more than 2 1/2 million members, would you risk being fired (or worse) if your superior officer in the "information warfare" US Propaganda division of the Navy found out about it? Surely you don't expect any even remotely intelligent person to believe you.
As far as any free speech issues that Ecuador may have I would guess that Assange would prefer to simply avoid criticizing certain Ecuadorian officials and otherwise live a relatively free and happy existence in Ecuador than spend the rest of his life in an animal cage in Guantanamo Bay being tortured by sadistic sociopaths on a daily basis.
While I haven't lived in Ecuador, I have lived in neighboring Colombia and in general I believe it feels more free on a daily basis than does the US. As a former expat my experience has been that most countries do. Including Cuba, Vietnam, and most definitely Laos. This is something that Americans are in serious denial over. On a daily basis, the US most certainly doesn't feel free compared to most countries.
Although raising issues about Ecuador not being some kind of Libertarian Utopia is a good strategy from a propaganda POV, if only to distract the world from the UK government disrespecting at least the spirit of international law if not the letter and doing an impressive imitation of North Korea, it is actually somewhat off topic. In this particular case Ecuador is acting like a defender of human rights and they should be commended for standing up for such lofty principles even in the face of implied threats of violence against Ecuadorian citizens.
Although the Dunning-Kruger effect was put forward in 1999, David Dunning and Justin Kruger have quoted Charles Darwin ("Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge")[3] and Bertrand Russell ("One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision")[4] as authors who have recognised the phenomenon.
Meanwhile, people with true ability tended to underestimate their relative competence. Roughly, participants who found tasks to be relatively easy erroneously assumed, to some extent, that the tasks must also be easy for others.
Not only that, but I would imagine that overestimating your abilities may make it more difficult to improve, because you already think so highly of your skills. The only thing confidence, whether warranted by your skills or attributes or not, is good for is scoring chicks. Girls are compulsively attracted to confidence whether the confidence is justified or not. If you are not confident you pretty much have to fake it if you want an attractive girlfriend. For everything else confidence just makes it less likely that you will ever improve your skills.
I've often thought that women have a greater tendency to overestimate their attractiveness than men, and I have to wonder if they receive more positive feedback about their looks even if they are rather ordinary looking and less negative feedback because they aren't typically the ones doing the asking. I've certainly met more women who seem to overestimate how hot they are than men.
Straw man alert. Telling someone that they are worthless and will never amount to anything is not feedback. It's more like a value judgement or just an insult or verbal attack. Telling someone that they are doing something wrong OTOH is feedback and often quite helpful for the person being corrected. Ideally such criticisms should be specific and include at least some advice on how to improve.
As a teacher of ESL, I can tell you that your focus on having people correct your speech will not help you get better at speaking.
Counterintuitive. Citation desperately needed. If you are talking about correcting a student for less than perfect pronunciation then I can see how constant corrections would be harmful, but any major error in grammar, vocabulary, or even pronunciation should be corrected immediately before they become habits.
You consider 51 friends to be few? Are you serious? That's way too many. Do you spend 5 minutes a week interacting with each of them? I assume you need some kind of scheduling software to deal with all of them. I have one friend and consider that to be way more than I need. If I found out that a friend of mine had 50 other friends I would stop being friends with him immediately. I would imagine being friends with 51 people must be pretty much a full time job. What a waste of time.
As far as "fake" and "insecure" being related, in my experience, overconfident, arrogant people are much more likely to be fake than insecure people. Also in my experience, confident people, especially in the US, tend to be overconfident about pretty much everything, consistently overestimating all their abilities and personality traits.
Actually if you are a foreigner, the Cuban police will generally be extremely nice and polite to you. How they treat native Cubans is another matter. And, yes, I know this based on personal experience.
IMHO, Cuban cops are much less likely to have been schoolyard bullies. Lots of normal people take the job over there because it is one of the highest paid (legal) jobs in the country and it's mostly pretty easy. A lot of standing around on a street corner occasionally asking people for their papers. They weren't motivated by watching violent cops in movies beat the crap out of people. Cuba has a lot of fucked up laws, but the people actually doing the enforcement are a lot less likely than American cops to be angry, sadistic sociopaths jerking off to torture porn every night and beating up their girlfriends. At least based on what I've personally seen.
After nearly being killed by an American cop, I yearn to live in a country where the police are less violent. Pretty much every other country I've ever lived in or visited would qualify. Note that I haven't visited the middle east, Africa, or Russia. I've heard Russian cops are particularly nasty. Maybe worse than American ones. That's scary.
Exactly. I really wish someone had taught me this before I swore right back at a cop who swore at me. He severely beat me and nearly choked me to death and then charged me with assault and battery against him. I would never have sworn back at a gang leader alone at night with no witnesses and no way to escape. I fell for the whole idea that cops were basically the same as anyone else. That they were still human. Now I realize that most of them are sociopaths who would feel not the slightest remorse over severely beating or even killing a citizen who disrespects their authority in even the slightest way. In other words they are not just gang members. They are unusually violent gang members with no limit to their actions.
Most people I know have never had any serious interaction with a cop. More than just traffic tickets. Like me, they had no idea that a cop would be willing to kill you or put you in the hospital for even the slightest hint of disrespect like swearing back at them in response to them swearing at you first. I consider it my duty to try to educate others about the difference between an actor playing a cop in a movie or on TV and the real thing. I didn't end up going to prison, but I did end up with lingering memory problems from the concussion, a violent criminal record (beating up a cop), and in debt for thousands to pay my attorney fees (even though I took a plea bargain). I do plan to eventually tell my story to the FBI, but not while still living in the same state as the crazy cop. I have no doubt he would come to my house and kill me if I caused him any sort of trouble like that.
Not getting violent with a cop is generally sound advice, but there comes a point when you have to decide if you are a man or a mouse. Consider a situation where an angry, out of control cop is strangling a woman to death right in the street. You come upon the scene. You clearly see that the woman cannot breathe. Her face is blue. The cop's hands are around her neck or he is crushing her larynx with his nightstick. His pressure lets up slightly just for a second and the woman squeeks out, "Help!".
Do you... 1. Walk or run away. It's none of your business. If the cop is killing her he must have a good reason. Maybe she is a terrorist and deserves to die.
2. Film the blue-faced woman dying at the hands of the furious red-faced cop. Try to get a close-up of her right at the moment of death. Don't worry about your own safety as the witness to a murder. The public needs to know what cops are capable of.
3. If you are carrying a firearm, draw the weapon and aim it at the cop's head. Tell him to let go of the woman and to slowly put his hands in the air and not to make any sudden movements or you will shoot him in the head.
4. If you are not carrying a firearm, try to save the woman anyway by tackling the cop long enough for the woman to have a chance to run away. Then attempt to run away yourself, but be prepared to be shot in the back.
In most cases there will be more than one cop present which makes any kind of heroics in terms of either saving the victim's life or just recording the crime to be suicide. The best you can hope for is to take out as many cops as you can before you die.
Huh? The cops are nearly always the ones to instigate the violence. So the 'riot gear' as you call it would already be out in order to beat innocent citizens until they are too badly hurt to do anything but meekly submit to the aggressive cop's authority. The only difference would be that the public would actually be fighting back against the police brutality instead of just doing nothing. Keep in mind that pulling out the "riot gear" wouldn't work so well in states where most citizens were armed to the teeth and wearing class III or better body armor. It would be all-out war in the streets.
So is this weather or climate? Because if it's weather isn't it just the equivalent to having an unusually warm winter in Eastern Europe or something? Did Greenland have an unusually warm winter or an unusually hot summer this year? That wasn't mentioned in the article. Perhaps someone at NASA is in the market for an oceanfront home? If global warming will reduce the market price for oceanfront property I'm all for it.
The main things with cash that people don't like is that government can simply print more of it to devalue it, so holding physical cash for any length of time gradually loses the relative value of the cash, and that cash can be 'lost' due to fire theft etc. and it's inherently hard to secure for that reason.
A government doesn't need to physically print more paper in order to devalue a currency. At least not one with a central bank. The US federal reserve doesn't control the money supply by physically printing paper.
From what I've seen the past few years here in the US more and more dollars are necessary for pretty much everything that I buy. Like gold, a fiat currency is also a commodity whose value relative to other goods and other currencies can rise or fall. I've also noticed the US dollar dropping in terms of most foreign currencies.
It is true that sometimes a rise or fall in the price of an isolated commodity such as oil or gold or copper has nothing to do with the value of a currency. Other times, particularly when a unit of currency buys you fewer of most other goods, it is the change in the value of the currency that is the problem.
Mortgage payments actually benefit from a decrease in the value of a currency. If the value of currency drops faster than the interest rate borrowing money could even be seen as an investment. In terms of goods, you would be able to pay back the lender less than you borrowed. You can borrow 100 widgets and and only pay back 80.
The problem is you first have to show why hoarding is bad and you haven't done that. A stable currency is good for both debtors and creditors because money is a more effective store of value.
With deflation the currency gets you more goods per unit every year. This is good for creditors, but bad for debtors, which is sometimes used as a justification for why deflation is bad since most people borrow more than they lend.
With inflation a currency unit buys you fewer goods every year. This is what most of us are familiar with. This is good for debtors and bad for creditors. Although if the loss in currency value is known the creditors could just raise their interest rates to make up for the drop in currency value.
There are two problems with inflation. One is the unpredictability of it. If everyone knew that the drop in currency value would be x% per year every year everyone could just make adjustments for that. That currency wouldn't work as a store of value though. For people with savings this means you pretty much have to store your money in some commodity that does not automatically lose value every year. This does encourage people with savings to immediately invest most of it, which perhaps is not such a terrible thing, but there is usually risk involved.
I may be biased, but I think highly intelligent scientists are a far better bet than military guys who are only good at following orders. I'd still want maybe one or two aeronautics guys however who would be trained to fly the spacecraft. Even if takeoff and landing are fully automated it is always nice to have the possibility of manual control as a backup.
I was put in a chokehold by an angry cop recently and I was not able to breathe in or out. The hold was one where he lay or sat on my back and pushed my face down into the pavement while keeping his forearm under my neck. I did not lose consciousness however despite my larynx being crushed down preventing breathing in or out for at least 60 seconds. I was actually waiting to lose consciousness but it didn't happen before (I think) another cop finally pulled him off of me and I was able to breathe again. So I guess there are different kinds of chokeholds. Not all of them result in a loss of consciousness. I'm sure eventually I would either have passed out or died. I've also had 2 cases, one from a garden hose and one in a swimming pool, when I actually accidentally inhaled water, where I was not able to breathe in or out for at least 45 seconds. I also did not pass out in those cases.
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You consider the closing of embassies to be a form of diplomacy? I think collecting Assange, someone who clearly believes that extradition will result in his permanent incarceration or death, without any use of force would be...challenging. The Ecuadorian officials may not care so much, but Assange probably will. I admit that firearms would only be necessary if the Ecuadorians are armed. Cowardly American cops would never enter without assault weapons, class III-A vests, tear gas grenades and night vision goggles, and absurdly overwhelming numbers and that's only if there isn't so much as a single .22 pistol or a steak knife on the other side. If the other side has firearms they might just blow up the embassy and drive a tank in. I'd like to believe the British are at least a bit more sane and civilized. All that may be required is 3-6 large, strong, police officers to force their way in and physically remove Assange without harming anyone. At worst, they might need to resort to pepper spray. And no hotheads who wank to martial arts films and get drunk every night beating up their girlfriends.
What do you have against Ecuador? Did some Ecuadorian guy fuck your girlfriend or something? It's a fine place to live. Much better than the shithole that is the US. The UK is much nicer, but too expensive and once you grow tired of the lovely accents, a bit dull in comparison.
Well I guess posting AC is second best. Don't be too hard on yourself. Being stupid doesn't mean you have no value at all. Perhaps you could even move here to the US where you won't stand out as much.
What utter nonsense. What violence ?
Picture the following: 30-40 British officers of some branch of law enforcement arrive at the embassy. Perhaps they knock and ask or demand to be let in so that they can take Assange into custody. It is the duty of the Ecuadorians to defend Assange because their country has promised him political asylum. They are honorable men and they cannot allow this to happen without at least trying to stop it. They physically block the British officers. Perhaps they are armed. Perhaps, like the Brits, they are fully body armored with at least Class III-A or Class IV vests. I would predict some violence. Perhaps you mean that there will be no violence if Ecuador simply gives up Assange whose protection they have promised. But that would result in utter humiliation for Ecuador. So I think there is a good chance that there will be some violence, not just against Assange, but against some Ecuadorians. If there are deaths would it qualify as an actual war if government agents are fighting and killing each other under orders from their government? That's what I'm wondering. Whatever happens we can only hope that a video, perhaps from security cameras, will eventually be posted to youtube.
So are you or are you not claiming that armed British forces will under no circumstances enter the Ecuadorian embassy uninvited? If this comes to pass will you admit that you were wrong? As far as I can tell the British government seems willing to go to war with or at least terminate diplomatic relations with Ecuador over this and doesn't seem worried about any implications for the safety of British nationals living all over the world. I speak American English. Not British English. So perhaps I have misunderstood the meaning implied by the British statements.
If the UK is not willing to "storm the embassy" then they won't get him back. He has been granted political asylum. Surely this is basic logic. I'm not sure I get the point of all of this arguing over semantics. Who cares what the exact wording is? It is clear that Britain has threatened to use force against the Ecuadorian embassy if they don't hand over Assange. Is this basic fact even in dispute? Because that's what I have been looking for. Some sign that Britain would be willing to back down and allow Assange to become Ecuador's problem.
At this point the only humane and civilized thing to do is to say to Ecuador, in effect, "You want him? He's yours." The British government is acting like a petulant child and a bully and making themselves look like fools. What Britain is threatening may or may not be a violation of the letter of international law, but it sure as hell is a violation of the spirit. Breaking into embassies to retrieve suspects who have been granted political asylum is not considered okay by the international community regardless of what they have been accused of. Which in this case is nothing at all. Sweden claims that they would just like to have another word with Assange. For no apparent reason and without any promise that they won't allow him to be extradited to Guantanamo Bay. Unfortunately for Assange, Ecuador is not exactly Cuba or Venezuela. Is there any guarantee that Ecuador won't hand him over to the US directly instead of Sweden?
The US and Ecuador are not exactly enemies and the extradition treaty includes things like abortion, bribery, bigamy, receiving stolen property, shoplifting something worth at least $25, and perjury. Not exactly a high standard. All the US would probably have to do is find Assange guilty of some sort of secrets act in a military court. Or argue that he "stole" more than $25 worth of state secrets or was an accessory to such theft.
Ecuador is physically closer, but politically farther away than either the U.K. or Sweden. Is this not obvious? What would your choice be? Guantanamo Bay or Quito? Those are Assange's only choices at the moment.
That really doesn't sound like "storming" to me. All from the Guardian live blog.
I see. If you object to the term "storming" then perhaps "invading" or "breaking and entering" or "forcibly entering" would suit you better? I am curious as to what kind of weasel phrases you would introduce to attempt to avoid the idea that heavily armed British forces would break down the door and shoot any Ecuadorians who might attempt to block their path to bravely defend their country against an outlaw state who attempts to substitute violence for diplomacy for even the most trivial of reasons.
Would you feel the same way about a British citizen being kidnapped from a British embassy after being accused but not charged with viewing internet pornography in countries where that is considered a serious crime? You don't have to be a genius to figure out that the act could have long term consequences for the safety of British citizens all over the world. Especially if any Ecuadorian bodies are seen being removed from the building. All it would take is an Ecuadorian with a cell phone hiding in a closet to let the world know about any Ecuadorians killed by the British commandos.
Strength? Wouldn't breaking international law to help deliver a political prisoner to Guantanamo Bay be more a sign of weakness? Does it not make the U.K. just look like a punk/bitch following orders from their U.S. master? While it will definitely court favor with the violent and dangerous U.S. regime, it will alienate the rest of the world and, since turnabout is always regarded as fair, may even lead to loss of life for British citizens living abroad who would otherwise have been able to seek asylum at their embassy. Why would any country respect the sovereignty of British embassies after Britain has demonstrated its utter contempt for the idea themselves?
I hate to disappoint you, but I'm not paid or compelled or compensated by anyone in any way to post on slashdot.
Of course not. However, if you were and you openly admitted to it on a forum with more than 2 1/2 million members, would you risk being fired (or worse) if your superior officer in the "information warfare" US Propaganda division of the Navy found out about it? Surely you don't expect any even remotely intelligent person to believe you.
As far as any free speech issues that Ecuador may have I would guess that Assange would prefer to simply avoid criticizing certain Ecuadorian officials and otherwise live a relatively free and happy existence in Ecuador than spend the rest of his life in an animal cage in Guantanamo Bay being tortured by sadistic sociopaths on a daily basis.
While I haven't lived in Ecuador, I have lived in neighboring Colombia and in general I believe it feels more free on a daily basis than does the US. As a former expat my experience has been that most countries do. Including Cuba, Vietnam, and most definitely Laos. This is something that Americans are in serious denial over. On a daily basis, the US most certainly doesn't feel free compared to most countries.
Although raising issues about Ecuador not being some kind of Libertarian Utopia is a good strategy from a propaganda POV, if only to distract the world from the UK government disrespecting at least the spirit of international law if not the letter and doing an impressive imitation of North Korea, it is actually somewhat off topic. In this particular case Ecuador is acting like a defender of human rights and they should be commended for standing up for such lofty principles even in the face of implied threats of violence against Ecuadorian citizens.
Obligatory link to the Dunning-Kruger effect.
Although the Dunning-Kruger effect was put forward in 1999, David Dunning and Justin Kruger have quoted Charles Darwin ("Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge")[3] and Bertrand Russell ("One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision")[4] as authors who have recognised the phenomenon.
Meanwhile, people with true ability tended to underestimate their relative competence. Roughly, participants who found tasks to be relatively easy erroneously assumed, to some extent, that the tasks must also be easy for others.
Not only that, but I would imagine that overestimating your abilities may make it more difficult to improve, because you already think so highly of your skills. The only thing confidence, whether warranted by your skills or attributes or not, is good for is scoring chicks. Girls are compulsively attracted to confidence whether the confidence is justified or not. If you are not confident you pretty much have to fake it if you want an attractive girlfriend. For everything else confidence just makes it less likely that you will ever improve your skills.
I've often thought that women have a greater tendency to overestimate their attractiveness than men, and I have to wonder if they receive more positive feedback about their looks even if they are rather ordinary looking and less negative feedback because they aren't typically the ones doing the asking. I've certainly met more women who seem to overestimate how hot they are than men.
Straw man alert. Telling someone that they are worthless and will never amount to anything is not feedback. It's more like a value judgement or just an insult or verbal attack. Telling someone that they are doing something wrong OTOH is feedback and often quite helpful for the person being corrected. Ideally such criticisms should be specific and include at least some advice on how to improve.
As a teacher of ESL, I can tell you that your focus on having people correct your speech will not help you get better at speaking.
Counterintuitive. Citation desperately needed. If you are talking about correcting a student for less than perfect pronunciation then I can see how constant corrections would be harmful, but any major error in grammar, vocabulary, or even pronunciation should be corrected immediately before they become habits.
You consider 51 friends to be few? Are you serious? That's way too many. Do you spend 5 minutes a week interacting with each of them? I assume you need some kind of scheduling software to deal with all of them. I have one friend and consider that to be way more than I need. If I found out that a friend of mine had 50 other friends I would stop being friends with him immediately. I would imagine being friends with 51 people must be pretty much a full time job. What a waste of time.
As far as "fake" and "insecure" being related, in my experience, overconfident, arrogant people are much more likely to be fake than insecure people. Also in my experience, confident people, especially in the US, tend to be overconfident about pretty much everything, consistently overestimating all their abilities and personality traits.
Actually if you are a foreigner, the Cuban police will generally be extremely nice and polite to you. How they treat native Cubans is another matter. And, yes, I know this based on personal experience.
IMHO, Cuban cops are much less likely to have been schoolyard bullies. Lots of normal people take the job over there because it is one of the highest paid (legal) jobs in the country and it's mostly pretty easy. A lot of standing around on a street corner occasionally asking people for their papers. They weren't motivated by watching violent cops in movies beat the crap out of people. Cuba has a lot of fucked up laws, but the people actually doing the enforcement are a lot less likely than American cops to be angry, sadistic sociopaths jerking off to torture porn every night and beating up their girlfriends. At least based on what I've personally seen.
After nearly being killed by an American cop, I yearn to live in a country where the police are less violent. Pretty much every other country I've ever lived in or visited would qualify. Note that I haven't visited the middle east, Africa, or Russia. I've heard Russian cops are particularly nasty. Maybe worse than American ones. That's scary.
Exactly. I really wish someone had taught me this before I swore right back at a cop who swore at me. He severely beat me and nearly choked me to death and then charged me with assault and battery against him. I would never have sworn back at a gang leader alone at night with no witnesses and no way to escape. I fell for the whole idea that cops were basically the same as anyone else. That they were still human. Now I realize that most of them are sociopaths who would feel not the slightest remorse over severely beating or even killing a citizen who disrespects their authority in even the slightest way. In other words they are not just gang members. They are unusually violent gang members with no limit to their actions.
Most people I know have never had any serious interaction with a cop. More than just traffic tickets. Like me, they had no idea that a cop would be willing to kill you or put you in the hospital for even the slightest hint of disrespect like swearing back at them in response to them swearing at you first. I consider it my duty to try to educate others about the difference between an actor playing a cop in a movie or on TV and the real thing. I didn't end up going to prison, but I did end up with lingering memory problems from the concussion, a violent criminal record (beating up a cop), and in debt for thousands to pay my attorney fees (even though I took a plea bargain). I do plan to eventually tell my story to the FBI, but not while still living in the same state as the crazy cop. I have no doubt he would come to my house and kill me if I caused him any sort of trouble like that.
Not getting violent with a cop is generally sound advice, but there comes a point when you have to decide if you are a man or a mouse. Consider a situation where an angry, out of control cop is strangling a woman to death right in the street. You come upon the scene. You clearly see that the woman cannot breathe. Her face is blue. The cop's hands are around her neck or he is crushing her larynx with his nightstick. His pressure lets up slightly just for a second and the woman squeeks out, "Help!".
Do you...
1. Walk or run away. It's none of your business. If the cop is killing her he must have a good reason. Maybe she is a terrorist and deserves to die.
2. Film the blue-faced woman dying at the hands of the furious red-faced cop. Try to get a close-up of her right at the moment of death. Don't worry about your own safety as the witness to a murder. The public needs to know what cops are capable of.
3. If you are carrying a firearm, draw the weapon and aim it at the cop's head. Tell him to let go of the woman and to slowly put his hands in the air and not to make any sudden movements or you will shoot him in the head.
4. If you are not carrying a firearm, try to save the woman anyway by tackling the cop long enough for the woman to have a chance to run away. Then attempt to run away yourself, but be prepared to be shot in the back.
In most cases there will be more than one cop present which makes any kind of heroics in terms of either saving the victim's life or just recording the crime to be suicide. The best you can hope for is to take out as many cops as you can before you die.
Huh? The cops are nearly always the ones to instigate the violence. So the 'riot gear' as you call it would already be out in order to beat innocent citizens until they are too badly hurt to do anything but meekly submit to the aggressive cop's authority. The only difference would be that the public would actually be fighting back against the police brutality instead of just doing nothing. Keep in mind that pulling out the "riot gear" wouldn't work so well in states where most citizens were armed to the teeth and wearing class III or better body armor. It would be all-out war in the streets.
So is this weather or climate? Because if it's weather isn't it just the equivalent to having an unusually warm winter in Eastern Europe or something? Did Greenland have an unusually warm winter or an unusually hot summer this year? That wasn't mentioned in the article. Perhaps someone at NASA is in the market for an oceanfront home? If global warming will reduce the market price for oceanfront property I'm all for it.
Why does it have to be convertible at any time and place? I think just being convertible is sufficient.
The main things with cash that people don't like is that government can simply print more of it to devalue it, so holding physical cash for any length of time gradually loses the relative value of the cash, and that cash can be 'lost' due to fire theft etc. and it's inherently hard to secure for that reason.
A government doesn't need to physically print more paper in order to devalue a currency. At least not one with a central bank. The US federal reserve doesn't control the money supply by physically printing paper.
From what I've seen the past few years here in the US more and more dollars are necessary for pretty much everything that I buy. Like gold, a fiat currency is also a commodity whose value relative to other goods and other currencies can rise or fall. I've also noticed the US dollar dropping in terms of most foreign currencies.
It is true that sometimes a rise or fall in the price of an isolated commodity such as oil or gold or copper has nothing to do with the value of a currency. Other times, particularly when a unit of currency buys you fewer of most other goods, it is the change in the value of the currency that is the problem.
Mortgage payments actually benefit from a decrease in the value of a currency. If the value of currency drops faster than the interest rate borrowing money could even be seen as an investment. In terms of goods, you would be able to pay back the lender less than you borrowed. You can borrow 100 widgets and and only pay back 80.
1. hoarding = bad.
2. deflation = hoarding.
3. deflation = bad.
The problem is you first have to show why hoarding is bad and you haven't done that. A stable currency is good for both debtors and creditors because money is a more effective store of value.
With deflation the currency gets you more goods per unit every year. This is good for creditors, but bad for debtors, which is sometimes used as a justification for why deflation is bad since most people borrow more than they lend.
With inflation a currency unit buys you fewer goods every year. This is what most of us are familiar with. This is good for debtors and bad for creditors. Although if the loss in currency value is known the creditors could just raise their interest rates to make up for the drop in currency value.
There are two problems with inflation. One is the unpredictability of it. If everyone knew that the drop in currency value would be x% per year every year everyone could just make adjustments for that. That currency wouldn't work as a store of value though. For people with savings this means you pretty much have to store your money in some commodity that does not automatically lose value every year. This does encourage people with savings to immediately invest most of it, which perhaps is not such a terrible thing, but there is usually risk involved.
I may be biased, but I think highly intelligent scientists are a far better bet than military guys who are only good at following orders. I'd still want maybe one or two aeronautics guys however who would be trained to fly the spacecraft. Even if takeoff and landing are fully automated it is always nice to have the possibility of manual control as a backup.
I was put in a chokehold by an angry cop recently and I was not able to breathe in or out. The hold was one where he lay or sat on my back and pushed my face down into the pavement while keeping his forearm under my neck. I did not lose consciousness however despite my larynx being crushed down preventing breathing in or out for at least 60 seconds. I was actually waiting to lose consciousness but it didn't happen before (I think) another cop finally pulled him off of me and I was able to breathe again. So I guess there are different kinds of chokeholds. Not all of them result in a loss of consciousness. I'm sure eventually I would either have passed out or died. I've also had 2 cases, one from a garden hose and one in a swimming pool, when I actually accidentally inhaled water, where I was not able to breathe in or out for at least 45 seconds. I also did not pass out in those cases.