Carrolade

Part of the problem is intelligence work is usually hidden. There's a survivorship bias problem where people become aware of any failures but aren't aware of successes. While that was unquestionably a very dramatic failure, it's not particularly useful for gauging their effectiveness more broadly.

Historians will hopefully have access to better, more complete information in the future, but we just don't. All we can do is make guesses based on the very limited data we have access to. Leaves us with no actual clue what their real success rate is. All we can say for sure is it's not 100%.

debating the best way to chop an onion

I get their point, but this is one of the few things I've actually never seen debated. Your options are very limited by the shape you want the finished product in.

Thinking about hammering in a screw puts a very serious frown on my face...

Upvote for creativity though.

No clue, I don't know what its mechanism of action is. Probably one of the less-likely possibilities though.

The numbing agent they apply has a very short duration. So usually in my experience when you're feeling the bite, it's not the moment of bite you're feeling, but the moment that anesthetic wears off. They've hung on too long, basically.

So, it could be a difference in the mosquito population, but it could also be a difference in you, either in how quickly your blood can be sucked up by the mosquito, or how quickly the numbing agent gets processed.

You can explore this yourself pretty easily if you ever visually spot one before it bites. You can just let it bite, and then count how long it takes before you feel it. It's not long at all.

Pumped up by huge state spending on soldiers and weapons, as well as by redirecting vital energy exports to the likes of China and India, Russia’s economy has so far defied Western hopes sanctions would push it into a deep recession.

This line is annoying. You think people couldn't predict that Putin would keep his war machine afloat with the huge backstock of cash they had saved up? Of course he would.

The goal is to drain it over time, like any other reserve of resources. Nobody serious about the topic expected the sanctions to suddenly destroy the Russian economy. The goal was to make things more expensive, to apply pressure that would weaken them over time. This is why you haven't seen many Western analysts predicting a swift Russian collapse, because that was not very likely when they had billions and billions saved up that could and would be deployed. The question is: how long can they keep up this demanding of a pace, when they're dealing with finite resources and limited inflows? That second part on limiting inflows is what the sanctions are part of.

Modern war planners mostly know better than to count on everything going well.

To add to this, N Korea also has a huge conventional army, and is a very mountainous country. Lots of soldiers+mountains=very bloody to invade.

This is also why Iran is fairly safe from ground invasion. It's like a gigantic Switzerland, which if you're familiar with WW2 history, even Hitler left Switzerland alone despite kinda wanting to occupy the place. The cost was just too high compared to the benefits, so, y'know, may as well skip it and invade the USSR instead.

tbf, Grant was pretty ruthless in his post-war pursuit of Confederate holdouts. He didn't have them shot, though, they were mostly hung.

The problem is that it is very hard to eradicate an idea violently. It just goes into hiding and bides its time, unless you just want to do a full genocide or something. I mean, it's not like people stand up and volunteer for their own execution when they know certain folks are being executed.

This works, but the quicker method for me was to hold the book over my head, out of my line of sight while I focused my eyes on something a little farther away (a few feet away is fine). Then you can simply move the book downward into your field of vision while refusing to let your eyes refocus. It should be blurry, because you're still focusing past it, despite it being right in front of your face. Then just relax and let your brain do the work.

This method got by far the quickest and most reliable results for me, most pop suddenly into view in just a couple seconds.

I think this method works best because you're using established muscle memory to focus your eyes on an object at a measurable, consistent distance, and then just not letting them change. Removes several variables from the equation.

You'd also need to make it immune to the various antibiotics that work on it. Otherwise it's not particularly difficult to treat with modern medicine.

Pol.is looks interesting. I wonder how many users it has so far.