BugBrother

You are allowed to write that in the Western world. Some people in USA and other countries live good lives by writing conspiracy theories about their own countries.

Try to do something similar in China or a similar autocratic state. It might be a problem to write that in Russia today, too. :-(

And hopefully, China will change. I've seen arguments that to get beyond a certain GNP/Capita, countries have to democratize (unless they have lots of oil, of course).

(What scares me, is the possibility with AI and language understanding -- to have a 1984 control state with a working free economy; future history as a foot trampling a face...)

It is not relevant to my point to just say that an invasion of Iran would be expensive. (But you know that, I think.)

It seems that dictators generally need to make enemies out of the world's democracies.

This is so the populations don't start to get ideas about why their junta's steal so much money and they don't have any freedom. "Democracy and freedom are just lies -- the westerners are degenerates which tolerate homosexuality, etc."

So if Iran couldn't antagonize the West for what you consider "relatively unimportant reasons" (e.g. being one of the world's worst terror supporters), they would just try harder. And still be tight with other juntas which also fear democratic influences of their slav... population.

I doubt that life quality is better in USA. But the money is better -- and your local social environment is what decides if you like living somewhere, anyway. (Tell me if you like it. :-) )

A suggested plan, with small steps:

Try the waters with Scandinavia/EU? If you travel by Finland from St Petersburg, you can get an EU VISA, right? Then you can do interviews etc in place. But maybe not for Britain? I think it is easier to move to the EU if a company wants to hire you, than getting a Green Card (disclaimer: I only really know about Sweden and Finland for non-EU migrants). If you don't like it, try USA.

(I would offer you to stay at my place and look for jobs, but I'm not in the North right now.)

That is good, many locals around here don't realize that there are lots of advantages/disadvantages with everything.

But yes, afaik -- if you live in a corrupt place, it is probably best to get out.

Source?

(I don't disbelieve you, I ask for putting it on Facebook. Friday. :-) )

Edit: Ah of course, the subject was washing hands after the toilet -- not "haven't showered in years" :-)

StP. As far as I know... Beautiful? Cultured, with lots of good art/music education? Like half London, but with nature quite close? You won't get similar big city life anyplace in Scandinavia. Barcelona, or something? [Disclaimer: Two short visits to St P, quite long ago.]

I don't really know any "typical" Russians -- most everyone I ever talked to were intellectual, nerd or artistic [Edit: and none of them drank more than me, either :-)] -- but I believe you might find people in other places be less cool and interesting.

But sure, it might be good to get out before the borders are closed again. Russian politicians makes the Swedish cynical hypocritical ones look like angels; at least they aren't integrated with organized crime (afaik). :-(

And good luck. Move when you are young and see other places.

In Scandinavia, most immigrants from Netherlands and Germany I met are the kind of people which spend all free time in a forest or in a canoe on a lake. If nature is important for you, select area carefully in some countries.

Also, if you are from south Russia, be aware of the winter dark in Norway.

Note that Scandinavians are shy, it is a culture historically from small villages, it takes years to get local friends. Finland has most Russian expatriates, afaik.

I'm not sure.

A large part of the Android tablets sold are low end models with bad screens, used for Point of Sale (in taxis etc) or minimal web browsing. Not generally used much per day. (Afaik, statistics for web site access generally support that.)

Well, the iPad owns the tablet app world, Microsoft didn't have much choice. When [/if] Office is released for many of the differing O/S and hardware versions of Android, I'll agree your description have a point.

Edit: Close enough, dragonwriter. I yield the point. (I should have known about this. Also, why is there such a lack of optimized pad sized apps for Android? The phone ones I've seen weren't exactly using the screen area well.)

A very, very EMP-sensitive borg.

On consideration, I was probably trolled.

I pointed out that without rule of law, societies generally becomes clan societies. Out of pure game theory. And discussed why and how we know to avoid that.

You quote part of my description of clan societies -- and condemned humanity.

If you're not a teenager, that is too stupid to be anything but bad trolling.

I assume you're trolling, but will waste a few more minutes:

Game theory is used for evolution too, so you're a creationist?

A longer answer would be along the lines of:

Humans have a wide range of possible behaviours, the trick is to organize society so we get a "nice" place (i.e. it is not "paying" to be non-"nice", please note quotes for complex PhD thesis definitions). If you're not able to see the world, your decision will have harmful effects according to your own morals. In short, your absolute moral judgements is a problem as much as Putin...

(I just wish that there were some way of educating away moral condemnation of people which refuse to understand stuff which goes against their ideology.)

Knowing idealists, in some generations people like you will want to genetically modify people to follow your morals -- Socialist "new human" style. We know how that goes, not only from science fiction.

But I already wrote an answer and got a non sequitur.

Uhh... I voted you up for the first part.

The second part was simply naive. Please consider game theory.

Yours (and mine) moral is from a society with a functioning police force, rule of law and state violence monopoly. Without that, there is a clan society, where your only security is that others (generally relatives) will revenge you. A form of terror balance. Out moral just doesn't work there, since to avoid violence you have to make people believe you are ready to inflict it.

(I am unaware of a third alternative to state violence monopoly and clan societies. There are obviously places in between, with organized crime (south Italy, Mexico?). Please educate me if I miss something basic?)

Let me take an example:

There is no world police since Obama seems to be abdicating USA's partial role, countries now live in an analogue of a clan society (e.g. do alliances for protection from aggression).

Consider how Russia and China are starting the jingoism garbage again. How do you know other countries/species won't?

tl;dr: Don't take your moral instinct for logic.

Antimatter production/storage is an old subject.

This is a book from 1988 by a favorite author Robert L Forward (the worst author from which I regularly bought books in hardcover; I just read them for the physics).

http://books.google.ro/books/about/Mirror_matter.html?id=GS4...

It was based on his report for NASA. I read the review: "He took the giggle factor out of antimatter"(!).

The main point was that if machines were built to create antimatter (instead of Nobel prizes), it wasn't so crazy to produce.

But as people are explaining to you, storage [of "large" masses like microgram] is still not solved. Afaik, at least.

I have to put in another viewpoint here.

How a woman looks decide who I [try to] talk to, but a good sense of humor, intelligence and cool personality will change my "target" quickly.

From what I've seen, this is not unusual for men. (And probably the same goes for women too, I wish I had anecdotal evidence that my "good" sense of humor worked wonders. :-) )

Edit: Other people below said similar things.

Edit 2: How large percentage of relationships (in small/big cities) starts with people you meet online, these days? Is the article relevant?

Edit 3: As a clarification [and answer to removed(/reinserted?) comment]. I reacted to "Contrast that with male perception, if you think a girl is attractive, everything she says suddenly sounds meaningful and important.". It is too much of a simplification. Attraction to women can come from other things than eyes.

A couple of examples:

- I was crazy over a woman that was far from pretty while ignoring a cool woman. (She dumped me after a year, sigh.) Her (irritated) old time friends said she always had a tail of guys.

- I ended up weirdly on a date with a fat woman a while ago, which I realized that we had both misunderstood -- she was way out of my league in "mate value" (I realized that early in the dinner, so I spent the time asking about her really cool work and previous jobs).

This is not common (large "mate value" for women not based on looks but personality, intelligence and so on), but do exist. (And can also be quite obvious, not after knowing someone for months/years.)

>> I also have no problem with people refusing to shake hands with women on religious grounds unless it's a sign of disrespect.

Uhm, my explicit point here is that if the muslims have some of the weird stuff they'll usually have the whole package.

To be clear -- it seems needed -- if someone isn't shaking hands with women then they will almost certainly have lots of attitudes which would make a non-moslem in Sweden almost burned today...

I have no problems with that burning, except the disgusting double standards for different people. The politically correct hypocrisy is even racist -- "those brown can't do better, don't hold them to the same standards as real people".

(A note: What the Swedish politically correct idiots I talked about lack, is a sense of history -- 150-200 years ago the state church in Sweden was as tolerant as the islamists, including most of the weird stuff. Like e.g. not tolerating peiple leaving the religion and forbidding prophylactics. This is totally forgotten now.)

I made a motivated and reasoned argument that Islam obviously have problems with extremism -- and it is in an all or nothing approach, hard to skip parts of the craziness.

I didn't argue that even the majority of muslims in the West are extremists, in e.g. Bosnia they had modern Islam. (But do check statistics in different countries about antisemitism, homophobia, etc. Also, see support for AlQ, before they started to kill too many muslims. Or the high number of votes for religious parties in many/most muslim countries.)

You answered by calling me intolerant and discussed how attitudes hurt yours/others feelings. Those aren't arguments, it is emotions. My girlfriend gets away with that, I expect better on HN.

If you want to move, consider Sweden.

The media there stamp Denmark and Norway as racist/fascist influenced (those are certainly on the top ten lists of most tolerant countries on the planet). The media is at the same time much, much milder about the intolerance preached in many mosques, so they have insane double standards. The Social democrat party almost put an islamist in the party board, until the media for once reacted. But don't worry, it is only religious homophobes and antisemites which are courted for votes, not right wing ones.

(And yes, this comment is certainly enough to stamp me much worse than religious people refusing to shake hands with women.)

You'd fit right in. But the long winter dark is painful.

Re Russia and democracy -- isn't it enough to just note that Putin will never lose an election...?

Equally damning is the media control.

Isn't it patriotic to save taxpayer's money in the USA? Especially for defense spending, so that money can be used to buy more important stuff like DARPA research?

I assume you argue: Someone can accept some strange stuff in their religion -- e.g. that the supreme being and creator of the universe really, really cares about details of financing and diet for a species in a galaxy far away -- but not other stuff, like e.g. slavery and rules for different sexual subgroups (women, homosexuals) of the species?

I also know some muslims. Without witnesses many are about as religious as I am, but most can't do that in public. At an absolute minimum they'd get social problems (ostracism) if they came out of the closet. In worst case, physical danger. Often even their relatives would get problems.

Edit: To give an example [After consideration, I removed this. Sorry, but I can't break confidence and risk that someone identifies my friends -- see previous paragraph. But do Google "enemy property act" for an interesting read, re Bangladesh.]

My original point was that it is harder for Muslims to just throw away the crazy/inhumane parts of their eternal Truths, since they've got better sources than a set of mutually contradictory books/testaments. So the extreme stuff tends to get back into circulation -- see the social control etc from the 2nd paragraph why that is hard to stop, there is a pressure to be "good" (there is some form of race to the bottom of being holier than thou).

The end result is that it is hard to take your suggested third option.

Was this clear enough?

And your last message to me -- right back at ya...

I assume that was humorous?

If you're not trying to be funny or follow some left wing variant, but really argue for a fundamentalist sharia state or similar, then I'll say:

"Have fun with tolerated slavery, oppressed women, maiming of thieves and religiously mandated hatreds. Welcome to the light when you leave the dark ages."

See the "Althing" in that article. It varied over time, later the laws got written down. And, as the article noted, on Iceland people always were too busy surviving to do as much of the usual clan violence.

There are quite a few place names in Sweden with "ting" in them, e.g. "Tingvalla". (I assume it is similar in the other Scandinavian countries.)

I was wondering about similarities to the old "ting" in Scandinavia, which regulated clan feuds, etc.

Afaik, some kind of laws are common in clan societies. E.g. blood price, mentioned in the wikipedia article, was common in historical clan societies. (Famously, in Sweden if you killed someone from "Småland" in "Götaland", it was free. :-) )

How different is Xeer?

So "interest is forbidden" was part of the old christian, muslim and jewish religions?

I've seen it argued that Islam's real problem is that they have too good sources -- it is harder for those followers to skip those of God's eternal commands which don't work in the modern world...

(The most important feature of a working religion -- selective amnesia when rewrit... reinterpreting it? :-) )

Fast for single queries, not for batch geocoding?

So a web query can come from a user of a web service, the external(?) geocoding API can be called -- and the reply can go back to user [applying lon/lat processing] without waiting too long.

(I don't do anything like this for a while, so please apply NaCl.)

I think the word you look for is "tanning". [Not as in sunburnt.]

Is there no "more fast food in USA" hypothesis?

(I.e. a lack of fiber, vitamins or something?)

First... my original point isn't really discussed:

Don't mix up criminal juntas -- which must have external enemies -- with the countries they steal. I don't really care about "rights" for the juntas.

>> Russia, a democratic nation (though exactly how non-corrupt it is can be discussed),

Well, you are unusual.

Few outside Putin's controlled media would describe Putin's Russia as a stable democracy. Most people would probably argue that Russia has never been close to democratic. :-(

>> I'm not sure I really follow. They seem to have a great time intervening in non-NATO countries.

That was a comment on when I wrote: "Not even USA starts wars with (or intervene in) stable democracies."

I wrote "stable democracies"... That is not the same as "non-NATO country".

Was it an honest mistake?

>> No nation should have global military police forces.

I agree with you in principle. But it is really naive.

Our moral comes from living in a country with a working police force (state violence monopoly, rule of law, etc). Before that, there were only clan societies. Then your only security was that clan members would revenge you. And they only did that, if you were willing to revenge them. Our present morals just didn't work.

The world's states today are like clans without a state police. There will in any given area be a bigger and meaner clan doing raiding.

Now, there will be peaceful clans which don't start stuff with other peaceful clans (democracies), but consider China and Russia -- they are bigger than their neighbours and behave like vikings.

You'd certainly see much more problems for the Philippines, India, ex-Soviet etc without USA and NATO...

Point is, we have been better off with USA. No, it isn't perfect.

Would a real world police even be desirable? What would happen if they did a coup? Who could fight against them? Think 1984, history as a foot that tramples a face. (The same as in the old communist states. Which was Orwell's point, of course)

Well, Soviet/Russia is optimized to fight neighbouring countries. That implies more logistics problems than for e.g. USA.

What shocked me was the secrecy about weapon systems, to train people without letting them even see the equipment they would use if the fertilizer hit the fan.

From a perspective from around 40 years ago, there were two cases:

An open society, with quite a lot of research published. And a closed society, which could import the information from the open society (including a lot about weapon engineering) but kept their cards hidden.

before hindsight, it wasn't obvious which solution would work in the end.