Becareful, you've jumped to a correlation is causation conclusion there.

You can't assume that there aren't confounding factors, what if Japanese Americans simply have a lower crime rate because they have benefitted from government policy such as post internment rapproachment? Or because Japanese have been more disproportionately given green cards for high paying jobs because they come across with higher average skill levels?

I found this graph for example on Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W...

It seems to suggest that Japanese are in the wealthiest average group of people in the US, so maybe the Japanese have the lowest crime rate simply because they're also on average the wealthiest?

It's quite possible that high Japanese wealth in America overrides the impact of poor laws and so you cannot reach the conclusion you have with the data you've provided, there's far more to it than that. Effectively what this means is that the two populations (Japanese in Japan and Japanese in America) could have similarly low crime rates for two very different reasons - the former because of more sensible laws, and the latter because of higher average wealth. It may well be nothing to do with culture whatsoever therefore.

This seems to be somewhat of a misnomer, if you're a rockstar programmer and can churn out elegant effective code faster than everyone else then that by itself is a key factor in being an effective senior programmer because it means that your staff will respect you and will want to learn how you do it allowing them too to become increasingly more efficient.

I don't see how you can scale well if you're not efficient in the first place. How can you teach and enforce efficiency if you don't know how to be efficient like a rockstar programmer to start with?

I also disagree that the more clever you are the more tricky debugging becomes for others- for simple problems they'll write elegant code that's easy to work with regardless. For difficult problems it becomes true but I'm not sold on the argument that the solution is to just not solve those problems because you can guarantee eventually your competitors will, and guess where that leaves you? Solving the problems others couldn't or wouldn't is precisely why the search engine market when from vast plurality of almost identically implemented search engines to Google taking the market by storm and becoming the giant it is today- they let great developers do new things and killed the competition as a result. You can't simply say we'll cut that feature or not solve that problem because the dregs will struggle to debug or maintain it and expect to stay in business for long.

Your argument seems to imply that you believe being a rockstar programmer and a great leader are mutually exclusive, but I disagree, I think the former is fundamental for the latter. You cannot lead effectively if you do not have any abilities that garner you the requisite respect to be an effective leader in the first place. Aiming for mediocrity so that the mediocre do not have to struggle seems to be the fundamental point of your argument and whilst that might seem comfortable in the short term because it means less hassle as a manager I don't think it's viable in the long term.

"The other comments you have put tends to be the actions of less experienced agents."

It's not simply less experienced agents, it's the type of people they are and the type of company they work for. You mention the UK so presumably have some knowledge of UK recruitment agencies, so take Computer Futures for example, they literally just harvest CVs, and throw as many vaguely close CVs as they can at employers and throw as many employers as they can find at candidates. They make no effort to compare suitability, and they also pay no credence to the data protection act. They will never remove your data from their systems and will always spam you over and over long after they have any legal right to do so. They will lie in the desperate hope they can make something stick and they waste a phenomenal amount of people's time as a result- if a candidate is seeking £50k and an employer only offering £40k they'll tell the candidate they're offering £50k and the employer the candidate will take £40k, so each side wastes time in interview, is happy with each other only to find that the salaries just aren't going to come close to each others expectations because of the recruiters lies.

Thankfully I've learnt through hard experience who the good recruiters are, and who the bad are. But fundamentally a lot of the bad recruiters aren't bad simply through inexperience, but that a number of agencies are happy to act outright illegally in some cases to try and make their commission. It's an industry that desperately needs to be investigated by the ICO amongst others because the number of genuinely good recruiters are sadly an absolute minority and law breaking (again especially with respect to the DPA such as use of illegally obtained - i.e. stolen - CV data, unsolicited communications and so on) is rife.

People like you are incredibly helpful and provide an important service. But you're uncommon heroes in an industry that's overflowing with incompetent criminal fucktards.

Or we could just increase the policy of using attack helicopters to hunt down poachers. It's win-win, the pilots get first class training in finding targets in a vast landscape using various sensing equipment, and the poachers are given something real to worry about.

Some poachers have even been using helicopters themselves so there's also ample scope for air defence training there for fast jets and such too.

That way we don't have to worry about them going extinct (and the massive knock on effects to their ecosystem) in the first place. You're killing two birds with one stone- dealing with the poaching problem whilst getting your military some real training that simultaneously does something useful. Far better than classic contrived military exercises that often bare little resemblance to the real thing and just burn resources for not much benefit.

This has been a very successful policy in the countries that have attempted it thus far, and it should be ramped up. Turn poachers from the hunter who hunts illegaly with overwhelming force into the hunted that is hunted legally with overwhelming force and they soon stop.

Honestly I suspect that the amount of kids that would be amazed into heading for a life of science by this alone would make it worthwhile.

Nothing captures kids imagination quite like dinosaurs, mammoths and such so whatever the direct scientific value, the value of increasing the amount of future scientists out there with the inspirational value of doing this is probably greater than anything in history, even more so than the moon landings I suspect.

It wasn't just a transport aircraft shutdown, a SU-27 was shot down at that altitude too and SU-27s don't do equipment drops.

How could NATO ships surveil from the black sea? even airborne radars that surveil from height like the E3 AWACS only has a range of a little over 300km.

I think your little black book of Russian apologism needs updating, rather than accepting the obvious, that Russia has been supplying and firing BUKs at Ukrainian aircraft at altitude in Ukrainian territory (fuck there are even countless photographs and videos of them controlled by the "rebels" aka Russian soldiers out there) you make up excuses for your fascist state that literally make zero sense and don't work.

Are you retarded or something, you think I'm a Russian apologist? Seriously?

Here's the problem with your theory- some of those approval polls for Putin have been done by Western organisations, we're not talking state produced propaganda here, you may want to tell yourself he's not popular but he currently is, the Russian people are part the problem.

The current status quo in Russia isn't like Libya was where the vast majority of the population were happy to see Gaddaffi fall, it's more akin to Nazi Germany in the mid to late 30s where the populace were eating out the hand of a leader that had fed them a bunch of far right populist rhetoric and brutal nationalism. What do you think the whole Crimea annexation was about exactly if not populist nationalism? Crimea is a massive financial drag on Russia - it certainly wasn't about the economic benefits of hijacking an underfunded region dependent on the mainland for water and electricity that it's now been completely cut off from.

I know for the simple minded like yourself it's easier to console yourself with the idea that a large body of people couldn't possibly fall for such twatishness again like they did in the 30s, and that evil can only come in the form of specific individual hate figures and it's no one elses fault, but Putin isn't doing what he's doing and clinging on like he's clinging on without popular support. Absolutely there's a vocal and organised opposition to him that he's tried to crush and that keeps popping back up, but those people are still a minority in Russia - the intellectual few amongst the poor and undereducated many who live and breathe for whatever populist bones are thrown to them.

No that's not according to the Ukrainian army, maximum altitudes on MANPADs are well known. Any defence evaluation organisation can tell you what they are.

How would NATO release radar records? It has no fucking bases in Ukraine nor any radar aircraft operating over it. Why would Ukraine fly aircraft that don't need to fly low enough to be hit by MANPADs low enough to be hit by MANPADs? It's not like your nonsense theory even makes the slightest bit of sense, it's about as stupid a theory as you can get - I mean, you're seriously claiming the Ukrainian military was intentionally flying aircraft at dangerously low altitudes when there was no reason to?

Are you Putin apologists always this retarded? Even just a split second of rational thought will explain why your pro-Russian apologist theory is complete fucking nonsense, but apparently you can't even afford yourself that split second.

Oh wait, you're also the guy that lives in Russia now and guzzles off soviet glory fed to you by RT aren't you? You're the guy who tried to tell me a plastic doll was a child slaughtered by the Ukrainian military. Nevermind then. How are you enjoying your increased food prices and your increased political isolation? Hasn't per chance made you stop and think that maybe you should consider becoming a decent human being yet and stop supporting Putin's fascist slaughters?

Go check the opinion polls, support for Putin is at an all time high. Have there been numerous cases of corruption in Russian elections? Sure, but it turns out that this kind of populist militancy is something the Russian people fall hook line and sinker for such that he now has genuine support.

But so what if those people have guns? Just about every country in the world has had to see it's civilians face of militant dictatorships at one point in history or another- that applies to Britain, the US, as much as it does the arab spring nations or Russia.

You can't sit idly by and let that shit happen and then whine if it somehow comes back and effects you.

What exactly defines good quality vs. bad quality cocoa?

Different species of cocoa plant? or does the way it's grown and dried have some kind of impact on it?

The Russian people largely support Putin and hence this and so why shouldn't they be punished also?

If they have a problem with it maybe they should vote Putin out next time and rise up if he refuses to go?

This is the Russian people's problem as much as it is the Russian elite's. They're as much to blame.

I sympathise with the argument you've made in many cases, especially when targeted at action against dictators. But Putin has popular support, so the Russian people for the most part are ultimately just getting exactly what they've asked for - international isolation.

More to the point this argument is so intellectually bankrupt anyone making it has to be beyond any degree of sanity.

The argument is that the missile can't have been a ground to air BUK because there is no missile trail images so it must've been an air to air missile.

Where the fuck is the requirement for the air to air missile trail images? I haven't seen any of those either.

No they weren't, some were shot down at altitudes that were way too high for MANPADs to be effective.

You have an odd definition of low resolution. A quick Google image search shows as one of the first results a 2000x1345 resolution image at time.com where you'd have to actually be officially blind to not be able to see the shrapnel damage.

Yes you only have to look at where the aircraft was hit by shrapnel (lower-mid front right of cockpit), the aircraft's location and speed in the sky when it was hit, and the type of damage (shrapnel not cannon fire):

1) The original Ukrainian jet claim spoke of a jet following MH17 from behind, but the jet was hit from the front, so this is clearly false.

2) The new claim talks of Ukrainian jet cannon fire from the front, but there is only missile shrapnel damage not cannon damage (nor any other evidence of cannon damage), so this is also clearly false.

3) MH17 was shot down at a location in the sky such that for a missile to be fired from the air at the front of the aircraft the attacking jet and missile would've had to have come from Russian airspace.

So whilst the possibility remains that this was shot down by a jet however unlikely Russia still needs to explain why given the fact it had been shooting down Ukrainian jets in Ukrainian airspace from Russian territory for weeks it managed to acquire any radar data, video of images of this one particular jet. Ukraine has no stealth aircraft.

There seems to be argument that there were no images of a BUK missile trail, but there are also no images of an air to air missile trail either yet this aircraft was definitely hit by a missile launched either from Russian rebel (aka regular) forces on the ground, or from Russian airspace.

If the Ukrainians did this we still need to know how the hell they got deep into Russian held territory, or Russian territory proper undetected and leaving no evidence. That hasn't been provided yet, this evidence is either false (talks of cannon fire, zero evidence of) or makes propositions that require the preposterous (a Ukrainian jet launching a missile from Russian airspace undetected).

I'm half expecting the next bit of Russian propaganda to state this was done by an America F-22 launched from Turkey hence why the Russians failed to detect it as they weren't looking in that direction and don't have any radar data because the F-22 is too stealthy...

I don't know why we're even having this debate in the first place. The Evidence of a Russian rebel/Russian regular manned BUK is pretty solid now, it's far and away the most plausible and most well evidenced explanation (especially given the one missile short BUK scurrying back across the Russian border in the immediate aftermath). The news headline might as well be "Russia still trying to avert blame for it's massive fuck-up" to which we could all reply "no shit!" but I guess that doesn't get page hits.