Good Articles That Don't Deserve Their Own Threads

Why would He? Because his fallible creations have gotten newfangled ideas? Nope. Eternal truth doesn't change. The Pope is a mere representative on Earth, and this one's stewardship is in serious question, as the article states.
 
Posters of the golden age of Soviet cosmonauts - BBC News

I am too young to remember much about the Cold War so I always look at these with bemusement such an ideological conflict could persist for so long.

You can't annex the stars. (sorry Cecil Rhodes). Although I suppose the Chinese building their own space station is a continuation of our infatuation with senseless patriotism in space.
 
Tradecraft rule #214: If you're not Agency, don't say you're Agency. They don't like it.

BUSTED: Feds arrest Fox News ‘terrorism expert’ for pretending to be a former CIA agent
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BETHANIA PALMA MARKUS
15 OCT 2015 AT 15:03 ET

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A recurring Fox News guest who claimed to be a long-time CIA agent was indicted and arrested Thursday for not, in fact, being a CIA agent.

Wayne Simmons claimed to have 23 years experience with the secretive federal agency as an “outside paramilitary special operations officer,” CNN reports. He was indicted for using that claim to gain security clearances and a post as a defense contractor advising military personnel overseas.

On his website, Simmons claims he joined the U.S. Navy in 1973, where he was recruited by the CIA,” and “spearheaded Deep Cover Intel Ops against some of the world’s most dangerous Drug Cartels and arms smugglers from Central and South America and the Middle East.”

Simmons also claims he has been a “terrorism analyst” for Fox News since 2002. In 2004, he claims former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld recruited him to join the Pentagon Outreach Program for Military and Intelligence Analysts.

A Fox News spokeswoman told CNN that Simmons was an unpaid guest and never a host for the station, and declined further comment.

CNN pointed out that Simmons had a pattern of making “extreme and factually dubious” claims about terrorism, including a claim in January that there were “at least 19 paramilitary Muslim training facilities in the United States.”

He also denied waterboarding was torture and said that President Obama was a “novice who lacked a spine,” according to CNN.

Officials told the station that there had been suspicions about Simmons’ resume which were stirred when questions were raised with various government agencies about his statements.

As part of the indictment, Simmons is also accused of defrauding a victim out of $125,000 in a real estate-related scam.

If convicted, Simmons could face decades in prison for all counts, including 20 years for wire fraud, 10 years for major fraud against the U.S, and 5 years for false statements.
 
we are so blessed. We had no idea. So blown away by what God is doing through YouTube. ;)

I knew God worked in mysterious ways but I didn't know he used YOUTUBE
 
File this under: Well we all know this but we're not supposed to say it out loud. It not PC.

Entrepreneurs don’t have a special gene for risk—they come from families with money
We’re in an era of the cult of the entrepreneur. We analyze the Tory Burches and Evan Spiegels of the world looking for a magic formula or set of personality traits that lead to success. Entrepreneurship is on the rise, and more students coming out of business schools are choosing startup life over Wall Street.

But what often gets lost in these conversations is that the most common shared trait among entrepreneurs is access to financial capital—family money, an inheritance, or a pedigree and connections that allow for access to financial stability. While it seems that entrepreneurs tend to have an admirable penchant for risk, it’s usually that access to money which allows them to take risks.

And this is a key advantage: When basic needs are met, it’s easier to be creative; when you know you have a safety net, you are more willing to take risks. “Many other researchers have replicated the finding that entrepreneurship is more about cash than dash,” University of Warwick professor Andrew Oswald tells Quartz. “Genes probably matter, as in most things in life, but not much.”

University of California, Berkeley economists Ross Levine and Rona Rubenstein analyzed the shared traits of entrepreneurs in a 2013 paper, and found that most were white, male, and highly educated. “If one does not have money in the form of a family with money, the chances of becoming an entrepreneur drop quite a bit,” Levine tells Quartz.
New research out this week from the National Bureau of Economic Research (paywall) looked at risk-taking in the stock market and found that environmental factors (not genetic) most influenced behavior, pointing to the fact that risk tolerance is conditioned over time (dispelling the myth of an elusive “entrepreneurship gene“).

Resilience is undoubtably a necessary trait for success; many notable entrepreneurs experienced success only after leading failed ventures. But the barrier to entry is very high.

For creative professions, starting a new venture is the ultimate privilege. Many startup founders do not take a salary for some time. The average cost to launch a startup is around $30,000, according to the Kauffman Foundation. Data from the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor show that more than 80% of funding for new businesses comes from personal savings and friends and family.

“Following your dreams is dangerous,” a 31-year-old woman who runs in social entrepreneurship circles in New York, and asked not to be named, told Quartz. “This whole bulk of the population is being seduced into thinking that they can just go out and pursue their dream anytime, but it’s not true.”

So while yes, there’s certainly a lot of hard work that goes into building something, there’s also a lot of privilege involved—a factor that is often underestimated.
 
I can't help but chuckle that people who undoubtedly vote for candidates who increase government regulation are bitching about how only wealthy people can start businesses.
 
fxh said:
You talking to me?
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No, I was talking about the article. I honestly have no idea of your politics. It was the tenured professors from Berkeley sermonizing about how hard it is to start a business if you don't have "privilege". The study and commentary completely ignore the underlying cause - why is it so expensive to start a business? Instead, two people of Ashkenazi descent with a lifetime guarantee of a six-figure job are clutching their pearls and talking about white privilege.
 
Rambo said:
The truth about Sweden's short working hours - BBC News
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I read that a few days ago - maybe before the Jeb Bush barb.

As someone who was raised in a US firm - work all the time, any time is a mantra I'm intimate with. That's why I'm spending hours on Sunday to make my week more manageable. Do I think it's unfair? Perhaps. But corporations never care about people. People may, mistakenly, care about the organisation. But the company never cares about people. That's what the money is for.

I dealt with this in the last decade with the Paris office and I fully know travelling with me in Britain and then sitting at home the following week because you can't work more is ineffective for the organisation.

I'd love to hear the precedent in Asia. From the folks I know from Singapore and Hong Kong, all the time and any time is de jure.

There's no such concept as work life balance. You chose work. 5 days or 4 days or whatever of the week you chose work so stop moaning about it.
 
Fwiffo said:
I read that a few days ago - maybe before the Jeb Bush barb.

As someone who was raised in a US firm - work all the time, any time is a mantra I'm intimate with. That's why I'm spending hours on Sunday to make my week more manageable. Do I think it's unfair? Perhaps. But corporations never care about people. People may, mistakenly, care about the organisation. But the company never cares about people. That's what the money is for.

I dealt with this in the last decade with the Paris office and I fully know travelling with me in Britain and then sitting at home the following week because you can't work more is ineffective for the organisation.

I'd love to hear the precedent in Asia. From the folks I know from Singapore and Hong Kong, all the time and any time is de jure.

There's no such concept as work life balance. You chose work. 5 days or 4 days or whatever of the week you chose work so stop moaning about it.
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I think this is pure GOLD. Fwiffo - talking about working hard.
 
Statisticians have determined the safest hideout for a zombie apocalypse
And no, it's not a mall. Or a pub. And it's definitely not a city.
MYLES GOUGH
2 MAR 2015

If you're influenced by the movies, then you might be inclined to take your chances and head for the nearest pub or shopping mall in order to outwit a growing horde of bloodthirsty zombies.
Your average shopping mall is equipped with all the important first-world amenities we desire. And if the whole world’s going to hell anyway, why not live out your days eating cheap fast food and trying on clothing you’d never be able to afford in real life? And at least in a pub you can get blind drunk while you wait for the inevitable.

But if your ultimate aim is survival, neither option is that good, unless, of course, you manage to discover a pub or mall in the middle of nowhere.

In an effort to better understand the spread of real diseases, a team of statisticians from Cornell University in the US has modelled the spread of a fictitious zombie plague travelling across the continental United States. Their results indicate that the best place to avoid infection is in remote, sparsely populated locations.

The authors say the Northern Rocky Mountains - probably somewhere in Montana or in Canada - would be the absolute best place to hide. But they say a full-scale zombie outbreak in New York City could take a month or so to reach upstate New York, due to geographic distance and a slowing rate of infection, which means you'd have a decent amount of time to plot your escape to the sticks.

“Given the dynamics of the disease, once the zombies invade more sparsely populated areas, the whole outbreak slows down - there are fewer humans to bite, so you start creating zombies at a slower rate,” says lead author Alex Alemi in a press statement.

In their model, cities - predictably - fall fast. Just imagine a zombie attack on a crowded New York City subway. Horrifying, right? But their modelling shows it would take weeks for the outbreak to reach rural communities, and months to reach the northern mountain time zone.

Of course, if movies have taught us anything, not all zombies are created equally. Depending on how freakishly fast they are, or how well they can climb, you may need to revise your estimates.

As explained in the press release: “the project was an overview of modern epidemiology modeling, starting with differential equations to model a fully connected population, then moving on to lattice-based models, and ending with a full US-scale simulation of an outbreak across the continental US.”

The simulation had to account for a population of roughly 300 million people, with each person presumed to be in one of four states: human, infected, zombie, and dead zombie. It tracked the spread of the epidemic by modelling the random interactions between these people - for instance, zombie bites leading to infection, and humans killing zombies, delaying the spread. In the end the researchers were able to pinpoint locations where the disease would take longest to reach.

Even with optimal hideouts, however, the outlook for Americans is pretty bad, should a zombie plague actually materialise.

“We... discover that for 'realistic' parameters, we are largely doomed,” the authors conclude in their paper’s abstract, the full contents of which will be presented this week at the American Physical Society March Meeting in Texas.

It may seem a bit silly to simulate a zombie outbreak, but the US Pentagon and the US Centres for Disease Control have both used zombie outbreak-scenarios to help develop training programs for disaster readiness. And, you know, as a contingency plan for when it actually happens.
 
Yanks - that's where your tax dollars went yea.

And when I was in Georgia, I reckon mine too.
 
That depends on where you live; in most parts of the world the availability of good classical music/opera is limited, especially for the pieces that require large ensembles...
 
Rambo said:
So if I get sneezed on at the bank and contract whatever the piece of filth behind me is carrying, does that qualify me as unsavory?
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No, you'd be the equivalent of an innocent bystander.
 
A legacy of fry-ups and red postboxes - BBC News

"The most important British legacy is doing things properly," a senior Maltese journalist tells me, as we sit over coffee in the heart of the capital, under the stony stare of Queen Victoria. I ask what he means. "Good manners and low levels of serious corruption," he says.

Apparently patronage was not practised here.
 
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