Any good poker book can provide a basic foundation in statistics, probability, and combinatorics that will will be very helpful to them in many ways. Teaching them how the lottery works, or how scratch cards actually work and why they are such a ripoff, might also be helpful.
Then apply their newfound knowledge of statistics in combination with their classes on birth control.
No, point out gaping holes in the most recent papers on the website _you cite_, and assume the others are similarly bad. The cold fusion research is _rife_ with contradictory and conflated claims: you are, in fact, citing several papers with admittedly fascinating results on transmutation for palladium based cold fusion to support the potentially very flawed results of two much more recent papers that use a different technology.
Citing the presence of isotopes does not help the fundamental flaws in the procedure, even if it's working. The palladium, and the deuterium, are far, far, far too expensive to justify their use for energy production of such low yields. 20% energy gain as heat, from hideously expensive deuterium that cost 1000% of that basic energy cost to refine? _THEN WHO CARES IF IT WORKS?_ All of your energy gains are lost in the deuterium refinement!
And don't try to use the palladium experiements, which from reading them are much better papers, to claim that the much sloppier non-palladium papers have validity and therefore you don't need the very expensive palladium and deuterium. It's not a valid conclusion.
Really? Go read the papers. Relying on a high school science fair expo to validate your results is bad enough, but in another paper cited there, on of the authors, Mr. Kowalksi wrote this at http://jlnlabs.online.fr/cfr/ppclkrs/index.htm
> "Our container is an ordinary two-liters beaker."
In other words, the beaker was a beaker, not a Dewar flask. That's amazingly stupid for an experiment to measure thermal production: you would need to measure the actual heat transfer, and you _cannot_ do so reliably with a container that's uninsulated _on the bottom_, even if you have confidence in your actmospheric convection by keeping it in a sealed chamber. Sloppy, sloppy, sloppy work.
This kind of sloppy work is amazingly typical of the papers I've seen making cold fusion claims, and they _are_ cold fusion claims. Renaming Pons & Fleishman's admittedly fascinating original work and claims is like renaming "Palladium" as "Trusted Computing". It sounds better, but it's the same beast.
You mean extremely low yield results that rely on extremely expensive and very tricky to set up setups of palladium and deuterium? Oh, yes, that's bound to represent an economic source of abundant energy.
Teaching real birth control helps prevent losing jobs, especially among the poor and lower middle class, to teenage pregnancy and the massive social burden of child care. Keeping your average teenage mother in school for a few more years, and teaching them that the way to move out of their mom's house is not to have a baby and collect welfare, is a step forward.
I'm not speaking of most teenagers, but there was a particular family I knew with 3 generations of women taught this: they were a frightening group, and badly in need of education I was in no position to provide for their next generation. And they were amazingly expensive to the community: housing, day care so the moms could work, medical costs aggravated by early pregnancies and underage mothers taking poor care of their infants, educational costs for kids with poor home supervision, etc., all added up.
> Well, there are at least a dozen implemented and reproduced means to produce energy that go beyond currently accepted physical science
Name one that is "implemented and reproduced" that is "beyond currently accepted physical science". I'm sorry, but I can't be held responsible to do all the research to discredit such broad and ill-founded claims as you are making.
One can even take another example in your post above. While oil supplies are _certainly_ manipulated for economic advantage, unless there is a major renewable source of _cheap_ oil, the current supply is being exhausted at a prodigious rate, used for both fuel and for petrochemicals such as plastics. Chemically, one can use other hydrocarbon sources such as human feces to generate them, but there is a very serious cost of both energy and manufacturing capability currently used elsewhere. It's not _cheap_.
It could be worse. Does anyone else here remember the 'Site Finder' chaos, when Verisign returned their own sales website domain for all nonexistent.com addresses? As the managers of.com, their behavior screwed up network monitoring tools worldwide, and misdirected huge amounts of misaddressed email to their servers, without warning. Patches were quickly released for every major DNS software package to block it, which is probably the real reason it got dropped: having every DNS server in the world used to the idea that 'I can block the behavior of idiots' is very, very bad for companies like Verisign that have repeatedly misused their position of trust against third parties.
Use 127.0.0.3, and put that in your/etc/hosts as 'dns.localdomain'. This still reaches your loopback address, but avoids some of the potential reverse DNS confusions with 'localhost.localdomain'.
I'm looking at http://www.coastal.ca.gov/desalrpt/dchap1.html, which seems a very reasonable report on desalination efforts. It shows the energy cost, for the best plants, as a minimum of 3500 kWh/Af, or 3500 kilowatt-hour/Acre-foot, or 1.26 * 10^12 Joules/1.232590 * 10^9 cc, or roughly 1000 Joules/cc of water. That's pretty expensive. Saudi Arabia's desalination is quite limited, and yes, they're in a place with plenty of energy (irreplaceably used for this process) and where water is expensive. The maintenance costs for the equipment are also quite high: salt water is very corrosive and tends to destroy the best planned facilities long before their expected replacement dates.
The basic booby problem is where you said "where energy is cheap". That cheap energy simply does not scale: it's a locally effective tradeoff between energy and water, but not every country has Arabia's high energy density and low population. And no, this is not the basis of Saudi Arabia's current agricultural growth. They're still draining the underwater reserves, and expending them: it's still not a sustainable agricultural model.
We saw the same sort of argument for years about cigarettes and cancer. Anecdotal evidence strongly supported the idea that cigarettes caused cancer, but tobacco companies did lie, extensively, about the evidence, and funded both outrageous and subtle campaigns to confuse the facts. Unfortunately, global warming attracts even greater levels of political and fiscal interest because of its effects on farming, fuel use, and population growth.
One, at least, of you examples is correct. Diamonds are hardly as valuable as jewelers make it seem, since synthetic diamonds are now practical. The cartel in South Africa still manipulate its worldwide price, and interfere with other manufacturers or miners worldwide. But water? _Clean_ water, suitable for drinking, industry, and growing crops? That's a resource that needs to be managed carefully, from harsh experience in places where it's less plentiful.
A good example is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspartame_controversy, and the Nancy Markle incident of an elaborate Internet hoax. Even a few people with strong resources and the time to devote to an educational or political campaign can wind up effecting a surprising number of opinions, even when they are eventually discredited.
A computer illiterate or budget conscious CEO or manager can also deliberately block upgrades to core systems that may require man-hours, hardware upgrades, or programmer time to test and integrate the upgrades despite known security risks, judged to be less dangerous than interfering with active services. I've had this happen, repeatedly, and try to be very careful to get my security concerns in writing in the hands of my manager, their manager, and an outside party so that I can establish that I've done my best and was blocked from doing the fixes before things broke.
It's hard on the admins when they're not permitted to to the fix. It's worse when some fool like the parent poster (not you Darkness, but your parent poster) insults you with 20/20 hindsight from thousands of miles away and no budget or other human limitations to deal with. Just try and pry free the money to get a registered SSL certificate so your company's users don't get used to randomly accepting SSL keys.
Ahh. NumLock keys and kvm's, both local and remote, can create similar problems. Some kvm and system booting system combinations activate the numlock setting without actually setting the light on the keyboard display. This is why it's so useful to have a bit of text space _somewhere_ on the screen that displays what you're actually typing, so you can check how your password is actually popping up, as long as you keep people from looking over your shoulder.
It worked on Apple in 1997. Apple agreed to bundle Internet Explorer and spend more work on MS Office integration. If Apple hadn't been led by a band of monkeys trying to type Shakespeare with their stock reports for the previous 4 years and been desperate for money, they could have pursued WordPerfect and the web much more effectively and be far further than they are today.
Oh, my, yes.
Unfortunately, there are constant trickle power losses on most modern cars. Clocks, self-discharge of the very large set of batteries in this case, any active LED or radio devices, etc. will all extend the charging cycle if not outright drain the device, even if it's in the charger. NiMH batteries, in particular, are notorious for self-discharge.
Fortunately, NiMH aren't very common, and even for other portable devices like overpowered phones, it's not really necessary to recharge them as fast as possible. A lot of work goes into making them charge quickly, and underpriced versions of clever chargers may misdetect whether a device is charged. But for many devices, simply having wall socket power available while you're using them is enough to get by in the airport or at the cafe, so USB power can be very effective for that. Just remember that the power is limited before you expect to run things like external hard drives off of USB.
If the yellow is too short, the first car can't reliably stop before being actually into the intersection, even at legal speeds. I've in fact caused a noticeable rear-end smash-up, when I saw an exit at the last minute and turned for it in a truck (with signals and brakes applied correctly, but fairly abruptly). The guy behind me braked, the guy behind *HIM* hadn't noticed and braked far too late and smashed into the middle guy, hard.
You seem to have missed the very common case: Clean software costs so much more, people don't bother to buy it. Vendor fails to make enough sales to pay his own salary and goes out of business.
Well, yes. But that's not a "Linux distro" problem. It's a developer education problem. Some tools, like everything under the direct control of the Free Software Foundation, follows the UNIX File System Hierarchy. Configuration files go in/etc/, user accesible binaries go in/usr/ (particularly/usr/share/man), lock files and databases go in/var/, logs go in/var/log/, home directories go in/home/, etc. Then some smartass comes along and decides they know better than the standard and does things their own way.
Samba is actually an example of this. It was originally written to be in its own directory of/usr/local/samba/, with its own self-contained software bundle. Dan Bernstein's "daemontools" is worse, with its old licensing to prevent forking and its insistence on using "/daemontools/" for everything. So every distro is faced with the decision, "do we override the authors' install tools and wrap it in our own, or do we use our own policy even though it's not what the author tested with?"
The difference between the layers of different distributions is _profound_. It's simply not possible for even an infinitely clever package manager to integrate packages from distinct distributions without building a new distribution: the difference between naming schemes alone, where libraries are published as part of "xorg-libs" or "libxorg" means an incredibly large, hand-built system to resolve conflicts. Even simple differences such as where the HTTPD configuration files reside can cause incredible mixups when you mix components from different distributions. And swapping from an SSH version where the files live in/etc/ssh/ssh_* and another where they live in/etc/ssh_* is begging to disable your network access to core servers.
So no, wrapping package management with another package manager will not resolve these issues.
The classic offense in the USA is "DWB", or "Driving While Black". That's not what they call it, but drive around the wrong neighborhood as a black man in a beat up car scanning house numbers, and you remain far more likely to be stopped by the police or local security than almost any other race or gender. There's been a lot of talk about how such discrimination can be avoided by "profiling", especially for not-very-random security checks, but try actually watching who gets pulled over for ID checks.
Oh, the Soviets had any number of reasons to want nuclear strike capability against the USA. A few of those reasons even involved Cuba itself. (Preserving an eagerly Communist regime in the Western hemisphere was very, very good press. Getting tourists to visit and appreciate that Communist regime could be an island vacation spot with great education and beautiful, tanned, bikini clad women was good, too.
It also doesn't invalid Castro and Cuba's effective defense against their extremely irritated neighbor to the north. The point stands. A small country can do things about a larger country invading, or planning to invade. What is available for one country may not be available to another, but size remains only one important factor, not the only important factor.
The Soviet Union was involved only implicitly in the Bay of Pigs, due to Castro's and Che Guevara's publicly Communist policies. And the Bay of Pigs isn't, of course, directly comparable to the Soviet invasion of Finland as a full military campaign. But the point stands, they were invaded, by a vastly larger neighbor, and repelled it. The neighbor wasn't trying very hard: think about why that was to understand how small countries avoid successful invasions in general.
For another example of a small country successfully repelling invasion by a powerful neighbor, look at Kuwait and Iraq. Getting foreign allies is vital, and effective.
And for the missile crisis, Castro's reasons for wanting the missiles were _of course_ to deter US invasion of Cuba. The US had already tried it once, and gotten their wrists slapped. That's why Turkey accepted NATO or US missiles threatening the Soviets.
Let's also be completely clear: the Cubans hosted numerous Soviet military vessels, for supplies and shore leave and repair, throughout the rest of the Cold War. This gave Soviet vessels with nuclear capacity excellent excuses to be within range of the US, even if nuclear armed vessels avoided docking in Havana to ease US nuclear concerns.
It's because HR usually does not work for the employees, or for the company as a whole. It works for the necessary bureaucracy that is HR. That department's goals often are to commit acts that are decidedly illegal, such as to save corporate money by hiring H1B's instead of American citizens, to discriminate against older employees who might retire and collect pensions, to avoid hiring people with medical problems that will cost insurance money, to protect the jobs of descendants of company founders, to hire menial office staff who will gratefully perform sexual favors for their bosses, or to lie to employment agencies and newspapers by placing false employment ads for positions they have no intention of filling, but merely use to pretend the company finances are good. (My peers looking for work right now are running into that last one quite a lot: once you figure out the positions don't actually exist, it's a good time to warn your stock investor friends that the company is planning layoffs.)
In the course of my career, I've seen HR personnel commit every single one of those acts, with none of the HR personnel at risk for following such policies unless discovered by an outside agency. It's not all HR personnel, or all HR departments, but their loyalty is only rarely to the actual people they're helping hire or manage benefits.
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Any good poker book can provide a basic foundation in statistics, probability, and combinatorics that will will be very helpful to them in many ways. Teaching them how the lottery works, or how scratch cards actually work and why they are such a ripoff, might also be helpful. Then apply their newfound knowledge of statistics in combination with their classes on birth control.
So, what good teacher do you know that teaches chainsaw juggling to blind kids?
A certain level of basic ability is necessary to keep from scarring kids for life.
No, point out gaping holes in the most recent papers on the website _you cite_, and assume the others are similarly bad. The cold fusion research is _rife_ with contradictory and conflated claims: you are, in fact, citing several papers with admittedly fascinating results on transmutation for palladium based cold fusion to support the potentially very flawed results of two much more recent papers that use a different technology.
Citing the presence of isotopes does not help the fundamental flaws in the procedure, even if it's working. The palladium, and the deuterium, are far, far, far too expensive to justify their use for energy production of such low yields. 20% energy gain as heat, from hideously expensive deuterium that cost 1000% of that basic energy cost to refine? _THEN WHO CARES IF IT WORKS?_ All of your energy gains are lost in the deuterium refinement!
And don't try to use the palladium experiements, which from reading them are much better papers, to claim that the much sloppier non-palladium papers have validity and therefore you don't need the very expensive palladium and deuterium. It's not a valid conclusion.
Really? Go read the papers. Relying on a high school science fair expo to validate your results is bad enough, but in another paper cited there, on of the authors, Mr. Kowalksi wrote this at http://jlnlabs.online.fr/cfr/ppclkrs/index.htm
> "Our container is an ordinary two-liters beaker."
In other words, the beaker was a beaker, not a Dewar flask. That's amazingly stupid for an experiment to measure thermal production: you would need to measure the actual heat transfer, and you _cannot_ do so reliably with a container that's uninsulated _on the bottom_, even if you have confidence in your actmospheric convection by keeping it in a sealed chamber. Sloppy, sloppy, sloppy work.
This kind of sloppy work is amazingly typical of the papers I've seen making cold fusion claims, and they _are_ cold fusion claims. Renaming Pons & Fleishman's admittedly fascinating original work and claims is like renaming "Palladium" as "Trusted Computing". It sounds better, but it's the same beast.
You mean extremely low yield results that rely on extremely expensive and very tricky to set up setups of palladium and deuterium? Oh, yes, that's bound to represent an economic source of abundant energy.
Teaching real birth control helps prevent losing jobs, especially among the poor and lower middle class, to teenage pregnancy and the massive social burden of child care. Keeping your average teenage mother in school for a few more years, and teaching them that the way to move out of their mom's house is not to have a baby and collect welfare, is a step forward.
I'm not speaking of most teenagers, but there was a particular family I knew with 3 generations of women taught this: they were a frightening group, and badly in need of education I was in no position to provide for their next generation. And they were amazingly expensive to the community: housing, day care so the moms could work, medical costs aggravated by early pregnancies and underage mothers taking poor care of their infants, educational costs for kids with poor home supervision, etc., all added up.
Again, there is a booby trap in your claims.
> Well, there are at least a dozen implemented and reproduced means to produce energy that go beyond currently accepted physical science
Name one that is "implemented and reproduced" that is "beyond currently accepted physical science". I'm sorry, but I can't be held responsible to do all the research to discredit such broad and ill-founded claims as you are making.
One can even take another example in your post above. While oil supplies are _certainly_ manipulated for economic advantage, unless there is a major renewable source of _cheap_ oil, the current supply is being exhausted at a prodigious rate, used for both fuel and for petrochemicals such as plastics. Chemically, one can use other hydrocarbon sources such as human feces to generate them, but there is a very serious cost of both energy and manufacturing capability currently used elsewhere. It's not _cheap_.
It could be worse. Does anyone else here remember the 'Site Finder' chaos, when Verisign returned their own sales website domain for all nonexistent .com addresses? As the managers of .com, their behavior screwed up network monitoring tools worldwide, and misdirected huge amounts of misaddressed email to their servers, without warning. Patches were quickly released for every major DNS software package to block it, which is probably the real reason it got dropped: having every DNS server in the world used to the idea that 'I can block the behavior of idiots' is very, very bad for companies like Verisign that have repeatedly misused their position of trust against third parties.
Use 127.0.0.3, and put that in your /etc/hosts as 'dns.localdomain'. This still reaches your loopback address, but avoids some of the potential reverse DNS confusions with 'localhost.localdomain'.
I'm looking at http://www.coastal.ca.gov/desalrpt/dchap1.html, which seems a very reasonable report on desalination efforts. It shows the energy cost, for the best plants, as a minimum of 3500 kWh/Af, or 3500 kilowatt-hour/Acre-foot, or 1.26 * 10^12 Joules/1.232590 * 10^9 cc, or roughly 1000 Joules/cc of water. That's pretty expensive. Saudi Arabia's desalination is quite limited, and yes, they're in a place with plenty of energy (irreplaceably used for this process) and where water is expensive. The maintenance costs for the equipment are also quite high: salt water is very corrosive and tends to destroy the best planned facilities long before their expected replacement dates.
The basic booby problem is where you said "where energy is cheap". That cheap energy simply does not scale: it's a locally effective tradeoff between energy and water, but not every country has Arabia's high energy density and low population. And no, this is not the basis of Saudi Arabia's current agricultural growth. They're still draining the underwater reserves, and expending them: it's still not a sustainable agricultural model.
We saw the same sort of argument for years about cigarettes and cancer. Anecdotal evidence strongly supported the idea that cigarettes caused cancer, but tobacco companies did lie, extensively, about the evidence, and funded both outrageous and subtle campaigns to confuse the facts. Unfortunately, global warming attracts even greater levels of political and fiscal interest because of its effects on farming, fuel use, and population growth.
One, at least, of you examples is correct. Diamonds are hardly as valuable as jewelers make it seem, since synthetic diamonds are now practical. The cartel in South Africa still manipulate its worldwide price, and interfere with other manufacturers or miners worldwide. But water? _Clean_ water, suitable for drinking, industry, and growing crops? That's a resource that needs to be managed carefully, from harsh experience in places where it's less plentiful.
A good example is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspartame_controversy, and the Nancy Markle incident of an elaborate Internet hoax. Even a few people with strong resources and the time to devote to an educational or political campaign can wind up effecting a surprising number of opinions, even when they are eventually discredited.
A computer illiterate or budget conscious CEO or manager can also deliberately block upgrades to core systems that may require man-hours, hardware upgrades, or programmer time to test and integrate the upgrades despite known security risks, judged to be less dangerous than interfering with active services. I've had this happen, repeatedly, and try to be very careful to get my security concerns in writing in the hands of my manager, their manager, and an outside party so that I can establish that I've done my best and was blocked from doing the fixes before things broke.
It's hard on the admins when they're not permitted to to the fix. It's worse when some fool like the parent poster (not you Darkness, but your parent poster) insults you with 20/20 hindsight from thousands of miles away and no budget or other human limitations to deal with. Just try and pry free the money to get a registered SSL certificate so your company's users don't get used to randomly accepting SSL keys.
Ahh. NumLock keys and kvm's, both local and remote, can create similar problems. Some kvm and system booting system combinations activate the numlock setting without actually setting the light on the keyboard display. This is why it's so useful to have a bit of text space _somewhere_ on the screen that displays what you're actually typing, so you can check how your password is actually popping up, as long as you keep people from looking over your shoulder.
Underpaid: a lot of us do it because it's fun, too, and we can sleep at night. We're kind of like nurses and teachers that way.
It worked on Apple in 1997. Apple agreed to bundle Internet Explorer and spend more work on MS Office integration. If Apple hadn't been led by a band of monkeys trying to type Shakespeare with their stock reports for the previous 4 years and been desperate for money, they could have pursued WordPerfect and the web much more effectively and be far further than they are today.
Oh, my, yes. Unfortunately, there are constant trickle power losses on most modern cars. Clocks, self-discharge of the very large set of batteries in this case, any active LED or radio devices, etc. will all extend the charging cycle if not outright drain the device, even if it's in the charger. NiMH batteries, in particular, are notorious for self-discharge. Fortunately, NiMH aren't very common, and even for other portable devices like overpowered phones, it's not really necessary to recharge them as fast as possible. A lot of work goes into making them charge quickly, and underpriced versions of clever chargers may misdetect whether a device is charged. But for many devices, simply having wall socket power available while you're using them is enough to get by in the airport or at the cafe, so USB power can be very effective for that. Just remember that the power is limited before you expect to run things like external hard drives off of USB.
If the yellow is too short, the first car can't reliably stop before being actually into the intersection, even at legal speeds. I've in fact caused a noticeable rear-end smash-up, when I saw an exit at the last minute and turned for it in a truck (with signals and brakes applied correctly, but fairly abruptly). The guy behind me braked, the guy behind *HIM* hadn't noticed and braked far too late and smashed into the middle guy, hard.
I was legally OK, but still felt responsible.
You seem to have missed the very common case: Clean software costs so much more, people don't bother to buy it. Vendor fails to make enough sales to pay his own salary and goes out of business.
Well, yes. But that's not a "Linux distro" problem. It's a developer education problem. Some tools, like everything under the direct control of the Free Software Foundation, follows the UNIX File System Hierarchy. Configuration files go in /etc/, user accesible binaries go in /usr/ (particularly /usr/share/man), lock files and databases go in /var/, logs go in /var/log/, home directories go in /home/, etc. Then some smartass comes along and decides they know better than the standard and does things their own way.
Samba is actually an example of this. It was originally written to be in its own directory of /usr/local/samba/, with its own self-contained software bundle. Dan Bernstein's "daemontools" is worse, with its old licensing to prevent forking and its insistence on using "/daemontools/" for everything. So every distro is faced with the decision, "do we override the authors' install tools and wrap it in our own, or do we use our own policy even though it's not what the author tested with?"
The difference between the layers of different distributions is _profound_. It's simply not possible for even an infinitely clever package manager to integrate packages from distinct distributions without building a new distribution: the difference between naming schemes alone, where libraries are published as part of "xorg-libs" or "libxorg" means an incredibly large, hand-built system to resolve conflicts. Even simple differences such as where the HTTPD configuration files reside can cause incredible mixups when you mix components from different distributions. And swapping from an SSH version where the files live in /etc/ssh/ssh_* and another where they live in /etc/ssh_* is begging to disable your network access to core servers.
So no, wrapping package management with another package manager will not resolve these issues.
The classic offense in the USA is "DWB", or "Driving While Black". That's not what they call it, but drive around the wrong neighborhood as a black man in a beat up car scanning house numbers, and you remain far more likely to be stopped by the police or local security than almost any other race or gender. There's been a lot of talk about how such discrimination can be avoided by "profiling", especially for not-very-random security checks, but try actually watching who gets pulled over for ID checks.
Oh, the Soviets had any number of reasons to want nuclear strike capability against the USA. A few of those reasons even involved Cuba itself. (Preserving an eagerly Communist regime in the Western hemisphere was very, very good press. Getting tourists to visit and appreciate that Communist regime could be an island vacation spot with great education and beautiful, tanned, bikini clad women was good, too.
It also doesn't invalid Castro and Cuba's effective defense against their extremely irritated neighbor to the north. The point stands. A small country can do things about a larger country invading, or planning to invade. What is available for one country may not be available to another, but size remains only one important factor, not the only important factor.
The Soviet Union was involved only implicitly in the Bay of Pigs, due to Castro's and Che Guevara's publicly Communist policies. And the Bay of Pigs isn't, of course, directly comparable to the Soviet invasion of Finland as a full military campaign. But the point stands, they were invaded, by a vastly larger neighbor, and repelled it. The neighbor wasn't trying very hard: think about why that was to understand how small countries avoid successful invasions in general.
For another example of a small country successfully repelling invasion by a powerful neighbor, look at Kuwait and Iraq. Getting foreign allies is vital, and effective.
And for the missile crisis, Castro's reasons for wanting the missiles were _of course_ to deter US invasion of Cuba. The US had already tried it once, and gotten their wrists slapped. That's why Turkey accepted NATO or US missiles threatening the Soviets.
Let's also be completely clear: the Cubans hosted numerous Soviet military vessels, for supplies and shore leave and repair, throughout the rest of the Cold War. This gave Soviet vessels with nuclear capacity excellent excuses to be within range of the US, even if nuclear armed vessels avoided docking in Havana to ease US nuclear concerns.
It's because HR usually does not work for the employees, or for the company as a whole. It works for the necessary bureaucracy that is HR. That department's goals often are to commit acts that are decidedly illegal, such as to save corporate money by hiring H1B's instead of American citizens, to discriminate against older employees who might retire and collect pensions, to avoid hiring people with medical problems that will cost insurance money, to protect the jobs of descendants of company founders, to hire menial office staff who will gratefully perform sexual favors for their bosses, or to lie to employment agencies and newspapers by placing false employment ads for positions they have no intention of filling, but merely use to pretend the company finances are good. (My peers looking for work right now are running into that last one quite a lot: once you figure out the positions don't actually exist, it's a good time to warn your stock investor friends that the company is planning layoffs.)
In the course of my career, I've seen HR personnel commit every single one of those acts, with none of the HR personnel at risk for following such policies unless discovered by an outside agency. It's not all HR personnel, or all HR departments, but their loyalty is only rarely to the actual people they're helping hire or manage benefits.