Yeah, "solving puzzles". If that's the case, surely it can wait - why does it need to be solved at 2 am? Anyway, if you're gonna be a slave for $200k please go ahead, its yo choice.
On call typically means you gotta be online and respond within 15 minutes if paged. That's abusive. If you want a person to do that, then pay them for that. As an example, on call in Amazon works the way I described, and yes it is abusive.
Your second paragraph is spot on. When ever I login I see random sheet contents and equally sheet comments. Give me a resume hosting + job post/search site any day.
Its very easy to understand. Broadly speaking, in any culture you'll find two types of people. 1. Those who question existing systems and accept the historical truths even if it doesn't paint their own identity in good light. 2. Those who will claim that their identity is awesome and will deny or shift blame for past injustices. You can see this literally everywhere.
Irrelevant where the word comes from. You're indulging in revisionism to make yourself look good. Caste system has been in existence for no less than 2000 years.
For a start, do you have a better method? Let us know which country is "not totally corrupt" and why is it so? Checks and balances in any system reduces efficiency and places a lower limit on how bad things can get. On the topic of adding these to the curriculum, I'd say its a good thing, although most of these 12 Xi thoughts are pure platitudes.
Strongly disagree. I am not an American, but I am aware about Hong Kong, but know nothing about, say, Burkina Faso. The reason is pretty simple - HK is going downhill (from my perspective) while there isn't much of a change in Burkina Faso, although I would rather be in HK than Burkina Faso. In other words we react to what we see as "negative change" from our own perspective.
More than half of the countries in existence are poor places to live. Generally if conditions deteriorate in a country it attracts attention - so in Hong Kong people clearly lost rights which they had because of CCP policies. Its not that people willingly ignore Cuba - its more to do with reaction to change which is perceived as negative.
The events in Afghanistan started from Sour revolution, which went sour. That's when USSR was invited to the scene by the Afghan president. So is it east or west that started trouble? In general, its empires that attempt to take of advantage of weak states - be it USSR, US, China. If you go back arbitrarily in time, then, yeah, everyone were barbarians.
Your coworker likely moved in privileged circles and therefore experienced less corruption in their home country. I say this as a relatively rich person residing in a poor country. The poor and lower sections of people here bear the brunt of corruption, while people like me pay money to be shielded from corruption.
The Afghan debacle is vastly different. They have 12th century mindset and there is no way democracy could be established there in 20 years. Mark my words, China will tame them in next couple decades.
History repeats itself because:
1. People reproduce and die. The lessons learnt cannot be transmitted to the future generation in an error free way. Also, any such "lesson learnt" can be questioned. For example, how can be sure that event "A" really happened? Books, images, videos, all can be unreliable. If you cannot for sure say that an event happened in the past, then how can you learn anything from it?
2. I think this is more important than (1). We humans don't want to learn certain lessons due to inherent biases. We may live with these inconvenient "lessons" for short term gains, but given a chance, we want to forget these lessons and start over.
Because of 1 and 2, over generations, history repeats.
For what its worth, I don't think we're in a simulation as such, but in an uncontrolled experiment. Stuff happens here which is ultimately meaningless, but we assign it meaning in the short term.