Um, I was speaking economically. While certainly there is a connection between economics and culture, it's nowhere near as strong as you seem to think it is(nor are the cultures all that different, both are at their core confucian societies). I never said that the Japanese would start selling their bonds, but it's doubtful with a savings rate that hovers around 1%(and with the current stagflation may even fall to below 0) that the Japanese can actually afford to buy new ones. Thats why the bonds may increasingly end up in foreign hands. You simply cannot buy bonds if you have no savings.

The really huge gender skew will also likely limit population growth, because among the younger generations there simply are less females, meaning that even if the current birth rate is maintained, you still will end up with fewer people.

Huh? The bubble burst in 1989, the earthquakes were in 2011, they aren't related.

Because China is on track to end up like Japan, an incredibly moribund economy with a shrinking working-age demographic(the population is barely growing and set to peak within a decade), an allergy to any sort of unemployment, even if temporary, and lots and lots of bad debt. I've been saying this for years, China copied the Japanese model right down to the bad debts. Japan has been creating "roads to nowhere" for decades and it has essentially netted them very little besides more debt(Japan has the highest debt to gdp ratio in the G7, something like 250%, though unlike the US debt most of it is still held domestically...for the moment anyway). China today is Japan circa 1988, lots and lots of exuberance, but the writing is on the wall. It will be interesting to see if China can learn from Japan's mistakes. My guess is no since the CCP knows that their biggest weakness is unemployment, but I guess we will see.

Eating the sun seems like the ultimate "fire challenge"

Are you sure it's a software issue? If you are pushing your minis this hard and don't have sufficient cooling it could very well be that the hardware is shutting down because it's getting too hot....which would be true regardless of your OS choice. If you are doing something like this, a rack mounted server is a much better choice regardless of the OS.

Wow, I didn't realize Jonathan Swift posted on slashdot.

if you use netflix without waiting for buffering, you likly have the bandwidth rate to game remoatly.

I keep on trying, but the black knight who guards the socket on the other end of the moat won't let me plug in my TV.

Let's also not forget "love of pussy" and "love of money". These elites are also often essentially bribed to stay with access to premium housing and often whatever women they want.

Um, have you ever thought that maybe the reason there wasn't any response until June 2014 was because the movie wasn't hyped until then? Do you really think there is someone deep in the bowels of Pyongyang scraping TMZ looking for any hints of a movie that may not be portraying North Korea in a glowing fashion?

Have they ever read "The boy who cried wolf"? You warn people that their local community bulletin board website isn't encrypted enough times and they will probably start to ignore all your warnings. All this would probably do is annoy people to the extent that they will automatically click away any warning window, including when certs are invalid, possibly forged etc. In other words, it will really annoy people and could even be detrimental to security. Maybe if they restricted it to POSTs not GETs, though that may just incentivize lazy developers to use GETs instead of POSTs.....

You are looking at this through your own cultural lens. Take a step back and look at in the context of the broader culture and conditions in which these men live. Polygamy and much shorter lifespans for women has created a shortage of marriageable women in Afghanistan. This coupled with severe cultural taboos on pre-marital sex(in the case of Afghanistan, it's not just a taboo, it's illegal) means that for many men, especially those on the lower rungs of the economic ladder, other men are essentially the only way they can have sex.

This is not much different from any other situation where women are rare to non-existant(prison, the front lines of a war etc). In these situations men often engage in what is referred to as "trade", but of course none of them wants to label themselves homosexual because:
a) homosexuality is taboo and/or illegal where they come from and/or
b) they aren't actually gay, they are only engaging in homosexual behavior because that's all they have available to them.

It doesn't surprise me at all that men in Afghanistan are having sex with each other but not declaring themselves to be gay.....

My former boss smoked weed(at Microsoft of all places) and basically had to write an essay when she applied for her clearance that basically said, "Weed is bad, I won't smoke weed anymore". Sort of a 3rd-grade level punishment but

Yeah, because all those US doctors who got ebola got sick because they were overseeing ebola patients in the mines they were overseeing. Your ignorance is showing, maybe your anti-US hatred is clouding your view of reality.

Yeah, Sony has been making parts for Apple well... pretty much since Apple started making computers. The author is either ignorant of history or just plain doesn't care. Either way a worthless article.