I'll have to give the Tatiana Nikolayeva version a try. I consider the recently remastered 1981 Gould recording to be by far the one to beat.

Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan, leading arguably the greatest military campaigns of all time, also had more than a smattering of trouble in Afghanistan as well.

There are also serious medical considerations too. For most women, they develop a sudden and serious allergic reaction to gold and diamonds thus suffer from symptoms such as bloating and irratibility.

Move to China. Pretty much their entire political elite for the last 40 years have been engineers.

Uh. That's essentially what I said - one country's business ventures may or may not translate successfully in another country.

FYI - I'm half Taiwanese and have lived in Taipei for years, so I can't really be "racist and narrow-minded" (whatever that means) when I comment about my own culture.

I know of the wedding photos that you speak of. Good luck getting American men to effeminize themselves with heavy makeup and being photoshopped hopping around on clouds and air bubbles while chasing his bride around in a forest or lake setting.

My friend tried to start up something like this and he lost his shirt doing it. Unless you're in a community with a very large Asian diaspora, it's a business doomed to fail based on cultural incompatibility.

You hear a lot of the single-issue types shouting about "get back in the immigration line and do it legally!!" not knowing how convoluted and expensive the whole process is.

Just to illustrate how convoluted, difficult, and expensive the whole process is - there are countless Chinese families from China and Taiwan who pack up their entire families and move to Panama or Paraguay (or any other place with a more liberal immigration quota number for the US), live there for 5-10 years while their kids are going to school there learning English and Espanol, then packing up everything once again and moving to the US when the papers go through. Now that takes some effort and perseverance - and illustrates how difficult the "normal" channels are if people are jumping through hoops like this.

The self-selecting aspect of it is definitely true. While these people are spending 5-10 years in some tinpot Latin American country, they usually end up doing pretty well. I spoke with a few Chinese immigrants in Buenos Aires when I was there and it wasn't unusual for some of those guys to end up owning 4-5 convenient stores by the time they pack up and go somewhere else. You have to be in the top of the food chain to survive in a business-unfriendly, anti-immigration environment where you have zero cultural relevancy.

That's the absolute truth. The ROI is really astounding - some even say $8 for every $1 spent.

Beats paying lots more money to lock up people down the line and to hire more law enforcement.

I'd like to see the "Buffet Rule" get some traction

No reusing plates, aim for the sneeze guard, and no wasting food?

Most people who've lived in Washington state will not up and move to a place like Nevada. Not even with comparable housing that costs less than half of what they cost in Seattle. There has to be a considerable bump in quality of life for people to put up with rain here 10 months out of the year.

And tech centers congregate around research-intensive universities. Bay area, Boston, Seattle, Austin, etc. States with low taxes just don't have these schools.