> When I want my child to really excel in learning, I would force them into kumon - so they can skip a grade
Great - so now they're a year younger than all their peers in terms of emotional resilience. I've seen this play out time and time again, and it is disastrous for them and their ability to build relationships.
Pushing children ripe is never a good idea. If they're ahead of their peers, find other outlets for their intelligence. Teach them new skills, involve them in new hobbies. They need time to grow; education is a journey, not a race.
> If you glass the villages and salt the fields, you even win against the taliban and vietkong.
You may win tactically, but you lose strategically - firstly by demonstrating that surrender is pointless, and secondly by creating a martyr movement across the world.
When you sow fields with salt, the only harvest you should reasonably expect is more blood.
With VM, I've had great success with just quietly introducing it in one part of the system. People quickly notice how reliable and low fuss it is, and from there adoption grows.
It's one of those magical systems you can successfully grass-roots into an organisation with low to very low risk.
> I don't recall him having any impact on the story.
Well, he did rescue the hobbits from the Barrow Downs, and gave Merry Brandybuck one of the swords of Westernesse with which Merry ultimately wounded the Lord of the Nazgûl and thus permitted Eowyn to slay him in the battle of the Pelennor Fields...
You're arguing with people who don't understand the word Parliament in the term "Parliamentary Democracy". Just nod, tut, and move on, it will be better for your mental health.
The unfortunate thing is though that general medical care under the NHS is a complete postcode lottery - if you're lucky enough to be registered with a decent practice you're okay, if you're not you're screwed.
On the other hand, emergency medicine through the NHS is probably just about the best you can get. I cannot sing its praises highly enough.
A channel called Clickspring on Youtube covers the building of a reproduction and also shows a lot of the tooling that could have been used to make it. Well worth watching.
Better than my interview at a Apple, where one of the senior engineers who was supposed to interview me didn't show up - twice in a row.
I'd been recommended for the role by colleagues who'd moved to Apple; I gave them some rather pointed feedback for them to pass on to the hiring manager and moved on.