That's a pattern among very senior googlers. When they get bored of working, they go to other companies to semi-retire. I'm almost certain this is not going to be any different.
Paraphrasing Bane: "You think Socialism is your ally? You merely adopted Socialism. I was born in it, molded by it. I didn't see Capitalism until I was already a man." :-) Sorry, couldn't resist. You theoreticians crack me up.
By what "external power"? There's some evidence that Germans aided and financed the initial stages of Russian revolution, but its pretty weak, and its effect is unlikely to have been decisive. The revolution was largely a consequence of the war, weaker government, pissed off populace, and the fact that people didn't really know what they _really_ were signing up for. Now that several regimes have gone through the proces, we do very much know where these things end. Except for maybe the folks in their teens and mid-20s who don't study history and therefore might be doomed to eventually repeat it.
These things play out on much larger time scales. And social security is not socialism, all the countries you've listed are firmly capitalist. To quote Wikipedia: "Socialism is a range of economic and social systems characterised by social ownership and democratic control of the means of production; as well as the political ideologies, theories, and movements that aim to establish them." This is the part that never did and never will work. Note that socialism by itself does not guarantee social security of any kind. You can still starve or die of disease. Millions of people did exactly that.
As someone who was born and raised in a communist country, I too "fear" communism, as well as its harbinger: socialism. Unless you're Norway (a tiny country with massive natural resources and an enormous sovereign wealth fund) that shit has been shown repeatedly not to work, and millions of people have died conclusively proving this point. No, thanks.
Edit: folks, before you make fools of yourselves, _please_ read the textbook definition of what socialism actually is. Thanks.
As C++ developers, though, we are a biased bunch. C++ takes years to properly learn and gain confidence with, something we're completely oblivious to since that learning curve is in the past. I concede that for people who don't already know C++, Rust may be a good choice.
I wrote less than 2 KLOC of Go in my life (at Google, because I needed a web server for an internal dashboard, and Java was too much pain), and one thing is for sure: while I did not like the language per se, I did not hate it either, and I was able to get used to it in about 3 days, which is how long it took me to write the code. I literally knew nothing about it at the outset, and I felt comfortable in it after writing less than 2KLOC. I can't think of another high performance language with such a short learning curve.
I've tried Rust and concluded that it solves problems I don't have. I work mostly in C++ (more like C+, I tend to keep my code pretty simple), and with unique_ptr<>s, shared_ptr<>s and judicious use of concurrency primitives I can avoid pitfalls well enough that I maybe encounter a self inflicted concurrency or memory management issue once every six months, if that. And it pays amazingly well, and there's an enormous number of libraries available. That said, when I need a high performance web server, I'll use Go without hesitation. When performance doesn't matter, Python and Flask are pretty indispensable.
Some of it is price of oil, sure. But if you're going to compare to Venezuela, you should be comparing PPP GDP, and not just GDP at exchange rate, which is kinda meaningless. Scroll down to "GDP at parity" here: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=venezuela+russia+per+c.... As you can see, price of oil alone doesn't guarantee that the economy will get any better. And Russian economy did get dramatically better under Putin. I go back every 3-4 years, and the country is barely recognizable now compared to how things were 15 years ago. I could now actually imagine living and working there.
Speaking of Russia (which is the only one of those countries/localities that I can speak for, since I grew up there), I will say that Putin is inarguably the best thing that happened to Russia in the past 100 years.
Great to see there are actual adults ready to take a pay cut and serve the country in spite of maybe not getting the president they like. Far too many people have fallen victim to feigned outrage and pearl clutching, and excluded themselves from the conversation completely. That's not how you effect change, folks. _This_ is how you do it. You go out there and put in the hard work.
I feel like "Asians" is too broad a grouping. I think if we split "Asians" into Indians and the Chinese the stats would be a lot more illuminating. Microsoft, for instance, seems to have a much larger percentage of Indian workers than Google does. It could be because Microsoft hires a ton more contractors (some of which convert to FTE) or it could be something else. In any case, much finer grained stats are needed to gain better understanding.
You will change your mind when you're in your mid-40s. But by then it'll be too late. There's nothing worse (and in the US, more expensive) than a roster of debilitating health problems you're making a downpayment on right now with your lack of exercise and 14 hour sitting sessions.
BT wasn't actually billed as "database" internally, until they had to sell it in Google Cloud where the definition of what constitutes a database is much looser. Inside Google it's known as a multidimensional hash table.
And quite often they're obviously bogus even in mice, especially if the author seems to have a political axe to grind (e.g. anti-GMO, anti-sweetener, anti-herbicide, etc).
Great entertainment for anyone with basic knowledge of statistics: read medical papers. Lots of laughs to be had. Most experiments are bogus. Most conclusions are drawn with little in the way of supporting evidence, often without controlling for obvious confounding factors. Correlation is implied to mean causation. Extrapolations abound, both for concentrations (i.e. if I give this mouse a megadose of X it'll die, hence X is harmful) and between species (mice grow tumors if I give them a ton of X, so humans will too if they consume a tiny fraction of the amount per unit of body weight). Most of it is basically bro science, except expressed in much longer words.
Why wouldn't they? I mean, they'll do whatever DNC tells them to do. Once DNC told them they didn't want Bernie, they decided they want one of the most corrupt candidates in recent history (what a bizarre coincidence, BTW: Clinton Global Initiative is shutting down).
If Zuck plugs himself into the DNC really well (something he has the money and power to do), the rubes can be convinced he's the anointed heir to the throne and "it's his turn". It's not like the Democratic bench is otherwise rich in candidates right now. There's just no way he'd win the election, especially the one in 2020 which will be MMA-like in sheer savagery.
Let me put it in more obvious terms: if he were to run against Trump in 2020, who would you vote for? What's a "possibility" is largely determined by circumstances.
That's why I said "remote" possibility. He strikes me as a fairly ordinary dude with a bit of asperger's who over the course of his entire adult life got his ego inflated by sycophants on a daily basis. As a result he seems to think he's some kind of leadership genius, whereas in reality he's essentially in the same position as Kim Jong Un, except he's much smarter. I don't know if he realizes this and just plays along, or doesn't even see it, but that facade will fall over immediately after he enters any kind of adversarial environment, which is something you kinda have to do if you want to run for president.
Only in the wet dreams of California ultra liberals is this even a remote possibility. To get people to vote for you you need to speak their language, understand their problems, connect with them. Never once have I seen Zuck demonstrate any of those qualities.
Regarding language: you'll surprise yourself. You will have passable French within 6 months or less, and excellent French within 2 years or less, but during the initial 6 months your life will be hell. Your pronunciation will never be as good as that of the natives, though, but if your grammar is all right, no one but complete assholes will mind.
The beauty of NDK is not that it offers a ton of APIs (it does not), it's that it's not overcomplicated and lets you reasonably easily incorporate a lot of the same libs you're already using on Linux anyway, and build them pretty much exactly the same as any other Linux lib, with minimal, if any modifications using tried and true Linux toolchains. It took me much less time and effort to get my stuff going under NDK.
PInvoke would do me no good whatsoever, since my UI needs are fairly limited, and my entire pipeline is basically capture, resize, run inference, and display. Running it through extra layers would only slow it down -- something I try very hard not to allow.
Fundamentally, though, my issue is this: Microsoft pretends to support C++ under UWP, yet when you actually take a look at what's being offered, you see that it's a bare minimum and it's hardly used by anyone. A step off the beaten path and you're on your own since it seems no one is actually using this stuff. Or at least no one publishes anything on the internet. APIs are idiosyncratic, documentation is sparse, tools are crashy (XAML editor), and there's nothing on Stack Overflow. Epic fail.