Bruncvik

Tennis and athletics (track & field). Both watch and play.

The trifecta of 2005 TV shows:

• Threshold
• Surface
• Invasion

The 2005-2006 season was an absolute disaster for new, promising sci-fi shows.

How are you dealing with tax returns? I have a coworker who's a dual citizen, and she tells me that she has to file through an accounting service that costs her an arm and a leg. If she weren't close to retirement, she'd renounce her US citizenship.

Fun fact: In the Old Testament, God first calls himself as El Shaddai, which many scholars translate as "God of the Shaddai people". So, even He doesn't see Himself as the universal gods, just one of many.

Your saliva contains microscopic amounts of toxins. As you swallow, these toxins collect in your body, and eventually they'll reach critical mass and kill you. The amount of toxins in your saliva, and the total amount required to kill you is very individual, so nobody knows which will be their last drop. Still, one day I'll swallow my last bit of saliva and die.

But only spelling or grammar mistakes.

I also use em dashes. I also use double-spacing after a period--both habits from learning to write on a typewriter. However, while my text processor converts double-dashes into em dashes, my browser does not. So, when I see em dashes in a forum post, I naturally become suspicious. It is very rare for me to write a post in a text editor and then copy/paste it into a text area, and I assume this to be true with others as well.

Not OP, but I did the same, when I first realized the US was on a slippery slope towards idiocracy (and, in fairness, I realized it three decades after many intellectuals already warned about it). In my case, I was fortunate to work for a multinational, which agreed to transfer me to a country within the EU, and to take care of the paperwork. Over a decade later, I have citizenship here, my own house, and I feel fully integrated into the local society. And I don't need to worry about college tuition for my kids. They'll have a choice of free education anywhere within the EU, and by the time they're old enough, they may have access to a wide variety of educators who left he US.

I remember when it didn't have a dash. Until people started making fun of the old URL...

I was permabanned from r/worldnews for this, due to racism, so I'm risking the same here. But there is a theory among armchair historians--which I tend to agree with--that Russians had been targets of regressive selective breeding for the past 450 years. Those who display any kind of individualism or independence (mainly educated, intellectuals, etc) have been selectively eliminated from the gene pool: via exile (best case scenario), or through prisons, labour camps or executions. After centuries of this, the share of independently thinking Russians in Russia is far lower than that of native population in Western European countries.

This is very prominent in science and technology: many of the top inventors weren't ethnic Russians, but were born or had ancestry in countries that have been under Russian dictate (and regressive evolution) for a much shorter time period. Sergei Korolev, the father of Russian space program was ethnic Hungarian. Russia "boasts" only 15 Nobel laureates in STEM fields since 1917, and only one of them (Nikolay Semyonov) was an ethnic Russian who wasn't in exile.

All this helps to explain why Russians are so passive in the face of authority. It also points at the fallacy of thinking that we can push them towards accepting western civilization and democracy in the short term. It will take a very long time and a lot of effort to bring them to the moral ideal of Western Europe.

I work for a company with over 150k employees and 50B in annual revenues. My developers need a software tool, which was already identified as critical for our development. Instead of getting about 20 user licenses, each of which costs about $400 per year, and which would cover all our needs, the responsible manager, in his infinite wisdom, got one license, so that users register with it only when they need that tool. We even had a shared spreadsheet as a wait list. The software provider caught on after a few months, and cut us off. The manager got a good rating in his KPI for saving money with his initial decision, and the software provider was blamed for ending our license. Office politics as usual.

Games with the highest replay value for me:

• Civilization 4
• Heroes of Might and Magic III
• Sid Meyer's Alpha Centauri
• TES3: Morrowind
• SimCity 2000