As we increasingly live/love/marry across nationalities, being very conscious about immigration rules has to become something “normal people” care about and think about.

Rather than blaming the victim it’s a hard truth. Now, I would personally love for this to be different BUT as long as rules on immigration are what they are in many places of the world, we need to consider it when we move/marry/have kids.

For instance, one important piece of advice to people thinking about studies abroad (especially PhD) is to also consider what their particular opportunities for work and permanent residence is in the place they go to. Chance are after many years in a place, you may meet someone or you may want to stay. If you choose a place (say UK a few years ago) that is unlikely to let you stick around, well you may need to be prepared for disappointment.

Furthermore, unless you live in a country where you clearly have an idea of how to get PR then you always need live with the understanding that you may at any point have to pack up and move. This is a reality, and sucks to take in but is the truth. Nothing worse than building a life some place and then 10 years down the line get rejected during your semi annual “visa renewal”.

Engels pre-dates Stalin by a considerable period of time and we can assume Stalin has read Engels. Safe to say its Stalin just paraphrasing Engels.

And, further, Engels is just paraphrasing Hegel.

Kant etc.

Not safe to say at all, no. It is such an obvious thing to say, and such an easy observation, many people have said something of this nature for a very long time independent of each other. The is basically another phrasing of the question: “how many grains of sand makes a pile?”

I’m not impressed by a cheap observation like this, even when phrased in a clever sounding way. I am impressed when people make new observations when this applies, such as when they are able to model a specific macro system that behaves very differently when the number of inputs is increased by a lot, and show how that is useful for our understanding of nature (including human nature).

Hmm, maybe you could write to Engels to tell him just how unimpressed you are?

I suspect that Stalin read that from Engels. I think that is a reasonable suspicion.

That’s not true for the most part in South Asia. Here we have dog populations that are basically native and have lived alongside humans for a long time. So these dog population are not stray pet dogs.

A couple months ago, I was hiking in Nepal. The two of us had lunch at a restaurant on the trail where there was a puppy. One of us pet the puppy, the other fed it.

After lunch, as we continued the hike, the puppy started following us. For 2 hours! At first I thought we'd essentially stolen someone's dog. The Nepali guy I was hiking with explained that the puppy is basically a trail dog.

It soon became obvious that there were many dogs following people, hoping to get food. Eventually the puppy started following someone else who had more food.

We had stray dogs follow us up to Everest base camp! In the snow and cold, they really wanted to get fed.

Then they are the offspring of dogs that escaped or were abandoned long ago. Probably they also took over the population of any related species they can interbreed with.

That's an interesting historical and semantic question.

So there may not be any such thing as a "wild pigeon". Pigeons were domesticated so long and widely that all modern pigeons in the wild may be the feral descendants of ancient domesticated pigeons. But we still view modern pigeons as just a thing that exists out in the world.

If street dogs have been a self-sustaining population for long enough does that change their classification? What if the population of street dogs is older than many of the cities they inhabit? What if the population is thousands, ten thousand years old?

IMHO, the crucial point is whether they are populations that were wild all along (never domesticated) or whether they wholly originate from domestic dogs. But that's hard to say since domesticated dogs might have taken over the first group. Similar to how modern humans are hypothesized to have supplanted Neanderthals and other pockets of ancient human populations.

I’m not sure the exact answer, but one major difference between stray dogs and truly wild animals is that dogs typically can’t survive in the wild, they need to live near human settlements. This sets them apart from wolves (the nearest wild relatives of dogs).

UK researchers can participate in larger Horizon projects if UK is a Horizon members. Much more easy to have joint research projects if the budget can be shared across the project, rather than split up with research outcomes/outputs having to be accounted for across UK/Horizon boundaries. In reality many UK institutions that were part of Horizon projects simply left them or didn't join as partners on applications.

In Sweden there are usually stands where you can pick up sims for free, in airport outside shops etc.

Blue Tokai (and the other specialty roasters - must be at least 5-10 now) is certainly an improvement in the diversity of coffee we get, though pricing is quite high.

However, there has been a good option for coffee beans (and ground if you prefer) for many, many years and that’s Devans in Delhi. Used to be mostly available at INA market but they also started online a few years ago. They are much cheaper than Blue Tokai etc and will provide reasonably freshly roasted beans and ground coffee. No chicory.

I have used Devans before and yes, they were my goto at one point! To my point earlier though: it took a while to find it.

There's a few others I know of. Lately I found shop in Bangalore that gets beans from Coorg. Reasonably priced and decent beans. Ainmane https://www.ainmane.com/. Shop is good. A little more expensive than Devans though I think.

Devan's is a good option though. Malakodu Estate has some decently priced coffee.

There's a website that aggregates all the coffee vendors, but the name is slipping my mind for some reason.

>There's a website that aggregates all the coffee vendors, but the name is slipping my mind for some reason.

Sixteen grams, Somethings Brewing...there are a few of those now.

> every once in a while I find myself picking up a cup of "sugar milk with coffee" on the street.Maybe there's something to it....

I ask for strong (filter) coffee without sugar, and that works reasonably well in Bangalore and Chennai.

We were taught to avoid white mushrooms, as in our area the poisionous ones you might mistake for edible ones are white.

Where I am from (Sweden) many, many people make mushroom picking a regular habit. However, most who do are aware of what mushrooms are safe, which ones to take extra care in identifying (definitely all white ones) and which ones to never pick. Wild mushrooms are perfectly safe as long as you have some knowledge about it. We were taught by parents and on school trips.

Most poisonous mushrooms also don't taste good and make you throw up quickly. (Our bodies have that vomiting mechanism for exactly that reason.)

Of course, most doesn't mean all.

Provided you don't assume that knowledge that works in Sweden works anywhere else in the world.

It doesn't - which is why a lot of people get sick in Sweden every year and it's heavily skewed to people who aren't Swedish. I'm not sure if it's because they lack knowledge entirely, or because the knowledge they had didn't transfer.

Few swedes would pick a white mushroom at all, and most would know that it at least shouldn't be white both on top and underneath because that's deadly.

That fits me, I just wrote a comment saying that while I feel very comfortable picking the standard 2-4 mushrooms in Sweden I would never try and pick a white one even if know we have some edible species.

Isn't Liu his family name?

For consumers India's banking system has seen a large number of fast online payment systems. Yes, they have problems especially in rural areas but for the people that would be target group of Libra they are well served in India. In fact, India and (as far as I know) many African countries have far more advanced digital payments systems for consumers than many European countries.

International transfers are still an issue (at least from India to abroad) but this is largely a regulatory issue on foreign remittance than a technological one.