Oh, and give blood regularly. Iron toxicity is a real thing.

So doctors still bleed people for their health?
I'm not going to judge since donating blood saves lives, I just find the reason a bit odd.

Only had one cup. And two girls. But that was back in the days of Rick and Roll.

You never learned in school how significant digits work, did you?

True. Never could work out why giving someone two fingers was supposed to be ruder than one.



To be serious it appeared from my efforts with undergraduates that hardly anyone learned about significant digits in school.

The case I'm describing was an actress pretending to be a nurse giving a verbal account of an atrocity - so no such excuse of reality being boring for the camera, and stupidly counterproductive.
It was ineptly done, easily exposed and it made people question real events.
It's the sort of bullshit that breeds 9/11 "truethers" who have worked out that they've seen some propaganda lies and now assume real reports are lies, leading to an inability to distinguish fantasy from reality and some really weird conspiracy theories (the real conspiracy by Bin Laden etc is apparently not enough for them).

N.K. basically has a "business model" of holding up a sign up saying "will not nuke Seoul for food". They send a few shells over every now and again to show it's not a bluff, and that even if it is called they can threaten to trash other cities after levelling Seoul.
That's the first thing to consider before posting something simplistic like the above.
It may be an utter basket case but it's not going away if we ignore it, it will get worse.

And it even specifically says the talks were about Sony and other studios helping them with, what can only be described as, propaganda.

Most likely situation normal and ongoing instead of something new.
Remember that the WMD stuff came out of a PR company. The Kuwait hospital atrocity thing a decade earlier was a performance from an actress - very bizzare since they had real atrocities just as bad that could have been used instead of cooked up PR.

Actually it didn't. The Russians were used to real madmen.

Sort of but not.
I'd say it's civilian American criminals trying to shift the blame to N.K. instead of government employed ones.

Then there's the beatup because pretending that it's OMG! CyBeRwAr turned up to 11 means more funding and empire building for a few people in the FBI and similar who seem to be making noise without adult supervision.

So more the case of "patriotically" waving the flag falsely and rattling sabres than actual false flag.
The downside is such warmongering pricks don't seem to realise that their stupid fake war games may inspire the very thin skinned North Korea to fire shells at parts of South Korea and kill a few people. They have done that every now and again.

The Soviets knew how to screw JFK over, and did it big time with the diminishing offers over the Cuba missile brinksmanship, so would not want to kill him off and see him replaced by someone like Johnson. I'm really amazed that anyone seriously considered that conspiracy theory at all.

without a scratch, and end up three blocks away in a plastic bag)

For some macabre reason there are a lot of hiking trips to plane wrecks. From seeing a few of those it appears that something landing the distance of three blocks away is a fairly normal result for a flight into terrain. It's a very obvious outcome if you think of it.

You've ignored their history of shooting nearly anyone that looks like they may have the ability to use a screwdriver.
I've talked a few times to someone that used to run a business trading seafood from North Korea into China, but at one point she just had to get out or die and not long after that North Korea did not have the ability to feed itself let alone export food. She didn't hear from relatives over the next few decades and had no idea if they were alive or dead. Over the years refugees coming into China knew less and less about what was actually going on in N.K. - the place was/is very compartmentalised. One common theme however was that older people were arrested and disappeared if they were caught talking about recent history when N.K. could feed itself.
The place is an utter basket case. A small country like Botswana is more likely to put someone on the moon than N.K. carrying out a very patient long term hack on Sony.

encouragement of corruption

Or encourages corrupt behaviour.
People resorting to criminal acts to get around new restrictions that were probably not worth implementing in the first place.

I don't know anyone who handles explosives

I'm not in the film industry so I was mentioning a creeping corporate thing. First they tested the shot firers after a few accidents, but now it's crept to any contractor that goes out on site and in some mining companies it appears to be anyone in the city offices below a certain pay level. Given a few recent decisions in some places maybe testing for cocaine and similar should be done at the top instead, but maybe it's just trust fund baby syndrome at work and I can be thankful that I work for several clients instead of directly for them.
Anyway my point is that given the nature of society you are going to lose a few people if you take a zero tolerance attitude, and some of those people may be far more useful than the HR people that are doing the removal. It's intrusive, counterproductive, and mucking about with bodily fluids on an industrial scale while attempting to keep costs low can get very unhygenic. It's also an encouragement corruption, for instance I've got a co-worker that was offered fifty bucks for his urine by a guy that only had to lay cables out in a paddock - no driving or other activities that are illegal while inebriated.

As for (2), that's good news until the union's computers get hacked, but presumably they are both taking more care (since it's part of their "core business") and have a much smaller attack surface.

If the ticket for the last helicopter out didn't cost $1M, would there even be a last helicopter out?

Yes. The guy that takes advantage is not the same one that has the power to provide the helicopter or not.


Things are getting very grey, even almost black here and considering the content of a historically set novel I'm reading I may start mentioning the modern version of pimps hanging around bus stations to recruit likely girls as an example of where your "pure" economics gets rejected by society. Are you really comfortable with that? Have you really considered such implications before posting something like what you have written above? Do you care that I consider you dangerously naive but have been hoping for some sort of insight from you anyway?

Your ire is aimed at something that was well established when Thatcher spoke about it. It used to be supported by the conservative side of politics until it became politically expedient to pretend that an evidence based approach was inferior to gut feeling.

Once again, pretending that experts in a very long established field, well over one century in this case, in some way have nothing that they can assert is real calls into question the idea of expertise in general. That's the road to mediocrity that we are following. First it was denouncing educated clergy versus anyone that could pick up a bible, be loud, charismatic and declare the San Francisco earthquake to be the judgement of God, then it was geologists for suggesting the earth has changed since creation, then biologists for daring to suggest life has changed since creation, now climate scientists for daring to suggest that it hasn't been dry in Texas forever and that changes have been observed. Such loonies made up the numbers and were grafted onto conservative politics and suddenly it wasn't conservative any more. I get that you want to cheer for your team and that all team dogma must be accepted without question, but it does make otherwise intelligent people pushing their politics into other people's science look bad in a variety of ways.
It's become a mindless proxy for politics just like gun control and abortion. The issues are not considered at all, once you've chosen a side the dogma is defined. If voting in the USA was compulsory you'd have more choices, they'd be less polarisation and less need to stick with party dogma on key issues. If that happens less of the posters on this site would look like hopelessly naive idiots with no idea about the issues they say they are discussing.