electronics is fun

You don't distinguish between people who make life better for others, and people who make things worse? Do you care about other people?

Some people just don't have empathy. I feel sorry for them.

Or very selfish.

"The big divide is a) between people who make life better, and b) people who make it worse."

dividing all people into two neat categories isn't congruent with my understanding of the word "empathy"

The only thing more dangerous than a nihilist is the man who has convinced himself he has something of very great importance to do

Zero was invented to separate all positive things from all negative things.

Pssst, Mao and Stalin were not nihilists.

Emil Cioran was a nihilist/philosopher and a very amusing one at that. Ever heard of him? If many people had I suppose he'd think he'd failed at his job.

More likely it was a pragmatic invention to facilitate the mechanical arithmetic of accounting, not a philosophical one. Think of what accounting with Roman numerals must've been like.

I'm pretty sure the use of zero pre-dates the concept that numbers could be "negative" or the idea of the "integers" as being something distinct from the natural numbers

The boy's too stupid to be a knave IMV. Just a hapless fool more likely.

John Bolton has been cackling on Fox over what firms he plans on farming out Venezuela's oil resources to as if this is novel information and not things he's been daydreaming about for years.

I'm sure it will be a splendid little war.

Maybe they can bring in some people who can actually run oil wells and refineries.

Something's gotta happen. Hungry people get feisty.

Give everyone in Venezuela $1000 in US currency.

Are they going to run with the "we'll be greeted as liberators, kissing the troops in the streets and throwing flowers in celebration and stuff"- angle, again? It all seems so familiar from somewhere...

Latin American countries have tried that before themselves, it usually gets them called "socialist" and before you know it some School of Americans-trained assassins and goons are running all around the banana republic in question torturing and murdering civilians who liked it that way.

School of the Americas, rather:

France, maybe. Belgium. Norway. Netherlands.

If the PLA showed up to "liberate" me from the Trump Regime they would not receive a warm welcome from me.

At the very least I would let the air out of their tires and/or direct them to the Dunkin Donuts I know has the lousiest coffee and worst sandwiches of any of the fourteen locations nearby.

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That scarcely absolves America from being anti-intellectual.

John Larkin isn't enough of an intellectual to realise that it was the Russ ians who saved Europe from mass genocide, and that the US intervention to p revent Russian domination of western Europe was largely motivated by a desi re to hang onto them as an accessible market. They certainly didn't prevent the Russian domination of Eastern Europe.

Worked for my maternal grandmother, who ended up wanting to do medicine, wh ich her mother (who had the money) wouldn't consider. One of my uncles (and two of his eight kids) did do medicine, and my parents would have liked me to do it too. My youngest brother did succumb to the pressure, so her gran dkids made her happy (or as happy as she ever got - she was a rather grumpy person).

Her influence may not have been crucial - one of my other cousins (who wasn 't one of her grandchildren) also did medicine and was at last report, a me dical professor somewhere on the east coast of the US.

That's because you can parse the number into its component elements, which is very much a linguistic skill. Word boundaries are used in written language, but they don't exist in speech.

John Larkin is an egomaniac, who cares about other people to the extent that they are willing to flatter him.

He's bright enough to realise that claiming he feels sorry for other people will win him brownie points, but not bright enough to realise that such claims need to be credible to do him any good.

No, that's just snark, or an attempt to paint 'expert' onto every kind of snake-oil sales advice.

Everyone who gets into an airplane is trusting in expertise, by their actions, even if their words don't reflect that.