As a manager she is quite direct in telling people hard truths... And often does.

This reminds me of a conversation I had with a biker colleague who claimed that motorbikes *need* to make noise for their protection. I was like "so cycles should have a boat horn blowing constantly for their protection too ? And electric cars as well ?" He disagreed.

Because many professionals don't work for those that try to sell you something. Most epidemiologists or virologues or others actually work for research centers or non-gov entities and have no money in the game. So yes, I'd trust a WHO epidemiologist any day over someone trying to sell me an "instant flu nasal spray vaccine" or similar; but if they say those work, why not...

Well, if the solution is vaccine-based, no because it *does* train the immune system, and often in better ways than virus exposition. But if the solution is air purifiers everywhere I'd be inclined to agree, the same way as kids growing up in perfectly clean room and never going outdoors often have allergies. On the other hand, having access to clean water may have made us more susceptible to catching the shits when going in third world countries, but I'd take our clean water system and sewers over those of India any day. Dying of dysentery is no fun. Neither is dying of Covid. So maybe I'll let professionals debate this one (and not investors).

Related question. A while back we had a family debate/fight about what the average american does when he has a cold and stuck nose. Here people blow their nose into a paper tissue and throw it away. My sis kept saying that in the US people keep sniffing and every once in a while they snort hard and swallow; which is annoying for those around. I've lived in the US for years but don't remember that. Maybe it's more geographical or more class-based ? What do people do around you ?
My sis was so horrified that she told someone after he snorted: "what if I put your snot into a spoon and gave it to you; would you eat it ?"

This quote was around the time when the right kept inventing 'alternate' facts to justify their antics. It just meant that the left is much more based on facts and the right just makes shit up. Compare wikipedia and conservopedia or whatever it's called for instance.

Indeed:

"Reality has a well known liberal bias." -- Stephen Colbert.

Do we ever place any kind of satellite at the other Lagrange points ? I know about the attempt to get a gravitational detector at L3/4/5, but is there anything currently ?

More likely a coronograph to hide the light from the star and see around it without being blinded.

I used to like Pascal (40 years ago), but then I saw that the strings were within an allocated either 255 or (more recently) dynamically allocated, so in the 1st case you had lots of wasted memory when just storing a few chars, and in the 2nd case, you needed a(n internal) realloc and hence a memcpy every time you add a char to a string. Very inefficient.

I've used it only occasionally on things I knew nothing about (new communication protocols or programming languages I don't know). The 1st two attempts were abject failures: I was trying to get it to write a GreaseMonkey script to modify specific webpages on the fly as I don't know JavaScript. It should have been no more than 2 lines of code (my estimate) but after 8 prompt attempts that were complete failures, it was generating over 100 lines of garbage.
The 2nd attempt was with a very obscure communication protocol, and poorly documented too. I was trying to get it to generate some Hello World and it never generated anything remotely close.
Recently I've used it on things that are more mainstream and it's okay to get started on new projects, to generate demo programs. But after that I do all the coding. I want the bugs to be mine.

Indeed. It is a well known 'secret' that other student(s) took Trumps' finals in his place, paid for by his father. The world would be a much better place if this particular scam hadn't happened. Here on finals they check your identity papers (real ones, not an easily fakeable driver's license).

I have the opposite problem, uBlock Origin seems to completely block the ./ notification page (it's fine on main and article pages though). I don't know how to whitelist just that page.

What you say reminds me a lot of the violent husband: "Look at what you made me do !"
First of all those countries didn't want to join NATO, but the European Union. And even if they want to join NATO, maybe they should have a good hard look at themselves to see why other countries want to put as much distance as possible between themselves and Russia. And nobody said anything about nukes.
As for south american countries, if they want to associate with Russia, good for them, they have every right. And they are far enough !!!

Because it makes your screen all dirty and gives you gorilla arms. Any other stupid questions ? PS: I've been known to punch colleagues who touch my screen after I told them not to.