Well,if you think that will make you impervious, enjoy.

It's probably true, or based on something true. A lot of those old processes were very dependent on the mix of impurities at a certain location... you could only make [sword/knife/dagger] using an ore from [some hill/bluff/valley]. They didn't know that at the time, or if they did they had no idea why.

EU to UK is the exception, being an island. The rest of (mainland) Europe sees no reason to monitor the movements of people. Hostile borders (eg EU to south) generate more information. But to assume that all movements generate the same amount of data as an air flight does is false. Dangerously false.

Consider some-American-one who goes to ... CAR for business (of whatever sort), and in the process crosses many borders, then returns to the US. (I ignore the question of who gets fuck ed on the way) Since CAR is a long way from the at - risk areas, he should not raise any alarms.

Beyond one degree of separation, border controls are not effective.

Then indeed that sounds like a low salary. Except that those states without pensions also tend to have low costs of living, so what do I know?

I didn't say there was "sloth". But they run 1 shift and quite literally build them as slowly as is feasible. We don't need the number that they are turning out, but we do need the skill set and facilities.

Depending on where you are employed, government jobs also give you a pension that would be worth around $1 million if you had to buy it as an annuity.

I assumed a retirement age of 55 after working for 30 years to get your full pension. I assumed your salary would not increase over time and that the annuity would track cost-of-living. I assumed half-salary upon retirement, for life, with a spousal benefit upon your death. These assumptions are very conservative and probably seriously understate the real value of the pension, especially if it includes a health benefit.

Wow, cool site. Check out the column from 1939, which is the year Germany invaded Poland, to 1945 when the war ended:
Battleships: 15 to 23 (not amazing, but still impressive given their utility to expense ratio)
Carriers: 5 to 99
Cruisers: 36 to 72
Destroyers: 127 to 377
Frigates: 0 to 361
Subs: 58 to 232

And that is while taking losses the whole time!

Interesting that the 80s re-activation of the old WW2 Iowa-class battleships does not seem to be reflected in your data.

This is exactly right, and is why the US continues to build new nuclear subs at the slowest... possible... rate...

If you are a business, you want your capital returned as soon as possible. If you are a peacetime military, you just want to retain capability in the cheapest possible way. Totally different goals. During WW2, you saw the goals of industry and the military align, and it was kind of breathtaking.

If you are an American and you want to move to Canada, you need to have a job offer first,

Yes. I went through that when I was last working in Canada. And the employer has to prove to the Canadian government that they've advertised the job adequately in Canada.

You've got good skills, I take it? So, this isn't a problem.

and then you still need to take the entrance exam to determine if you will be allowed to emigrate.

Skills, languages, income ... again, this isn't a problem. They waived the languages tests for me (and my colleagues) because we weren't looking for settlement, just employment, but that wouldn't have been a problem anyway. My French is adequate, my Spanish workable (not that I need either very often). My Russian isn't worth much, but I can navigate my way around the country without getting lost or shot, so it's not useless.

Might be worthwhile getting some of those useful rarer skills.

The information is stored in the computer system.

You're missing the point. In some countries (not, I take it, America ; assuming you're American, I think we've had this conversation before) your entry and exit of the country is not recorded. Not on computer, not in stamps in anyone's passport, not in face recognition at non-existant border posts. It's simply not recorded.

For starters, I did (counts ...) 10 border crossings in my recent vacation. Only the ones into and out of the UK generated a border crossing datum. The rest, at best, recorded the movements of a hired car. And at least two of those crossings were in someone else's car. And that is in high-tech modern Europe. Go to most of Africa and there is still negligible border security if you're a person. (there's a bit more security if you're a 30-tonne truck, due to being rather more conspicuous and needing a reasonable road surface).

It's amazing how quickly that happens. I work in an industry where we have a very cyclical business climate, so we have frequent layoffs. It usually keeps the engineering staff pretty top-notch. We haven't had a down cycle since the 2008 crash, so the cruft has certainly built up. I can only imagine what happens at a place like Google where the only turnover is people quitting!

I feel the need to plug the Pandas module for Python. It does a lot of R-like operations on huge datasets. It takes care of time-series alignment and has many other nicey-nices. Basically almost everything you think you need to invent to manipulate your dataset is probably already implemented in Pandas.

Or a gigantic application, like Photoshop or MATLAB, that sits in your "Applications" folder. Have you guys never heard of the term "killer app"??? Am I that old?

I think "app" came naturally to long-time Mac people, since there has long been an "Applications" folder which a lot of (most?) people just called the "Apps" folder. This lingo followed the jump to mobile on the iPhone and Windows people were introduced to the term for the first time. MATLAB has long been an "app" for Mac folks.