But we want cheap Ethiopian coffee, if we stop giving the Ethiopians our food production surplus then they might cut down the coffee plantations and grow their own food. You would then end up with expensive coffee and angry local farmers who can not sell their food to the aid programs.

Forgive me for not looking up the full quote. But I strongly object to your suggestion that Africans live in the deserts. Of course there are human population where drinking water is an issue, you mentioned a few places in the US and there are similar locations for cities in Africa. But the idea that Africans live in deserts comes from images from farmlands during severe drought periods or refugee camps from people who have to flee into the barren deserts to avoid racial, religious or political persecution. Somalia, Ethiopia and Kenya is some of the most fertile lands on the planet and some of the greatest food exporters in the world, not unlike the US Midwest or California. And similar to these areas there are occasional droughts when the food harvests fails which can create terrifying images of people living in what looks like a desert.

A lot of aid is aimed at supporting these stupid governments or to destroy the local economy to benefit governments and companies in post-developed nations. When you look into the details it becomes harder to argue that these countries are better with foregn aid.

The Siberian tiger lives almost exactly half way around the world from Scandinavia. It lives on the eastern coast of Siberia while Scandinavia is to the west of Russia. There were other tigers living closer, the Caspian tiger. But this have recently gone extinct due to the vast amount of forests that was converted to farmland in the 19th and 20th century.

Tigers generally prefer large sparse forests and have adopted to these conditions. Scandinavia have a lot of dense forests and mountains which is not the type of area the tiger prefers. So if tigers did at some point push more into Scandinavia, for example from Ukraine, then they would have been out performed by wolves and bears who are much better in those kinds of conditions.

As if the US does not have deserts and as if Afracia does not have jungles.

This actually varies a lot depending on the area you are talking about. Some countries have great infrastructure even outside of cities. Others however are lacking a lot of infrastructure. A lot of this can be traced back to how colonizing nations were running their colonies, and then how the US/USSR were using infrastructure aid to help their warlords conduct their operations in the different African countries and then now how China, Russia and the EU is investing in infrastructure that favors their interests. All this foreign efforts are quite disruptive for the local infrasturcture construction. But again it varies a lot between the different countries and you can not say much general about the entire continent as a whole.

You are talking of Africa as one large entity. Instead it is a huge diverse continent with lots of countries facing different challenges. You have various different natural and social disasters happening at different places on the continent at different times. You have the same thing in for example the US where there are various different aid programs happening all the time, both by FEMA and even foreign aid programs. You have Canadian firefighters working in California fighting forest fires one month and the next month there are Canadian linemen working in Florida cleaning up after a hurricane. A similar thing is going on in Africa where you have drought in a part of one country one year and then the next year IS is trying to take over another country by force.

In a realistic scenario you would expect an attack to come. At least that there is a chance of the attack coming. Of course there are different types of military exercises. But a lot of them take place over a longer period of time and the enemy can attack at any point. A good strategy for the exercise is to avoid attacking at the start of the exercise to allow the defenders to settle into their positions a bit. The exercises also tend to include multiple potential attack vectors, either multiple objects being protected or that the attacks can come from multiple angles. The defenders will therefore not know if their position will be attacked at all. Again a common tactic is to initiate an attack on one vector hoping the defenders will redeploy to this area only to have the main attack come in at another vector. The defenders do not know which is which.

As for the fear of life this is somewhat of an issue. Obviously you can not go around killing people for military exercises. But you can make them lose face. The exercises will have referees who will look at an engagement and tell you the outcome. The exercises is more about movements, tactics and logistics rather then shooting skills. So you can let the soldiers fire a few blanks at each other and then go tell them who won. If a referee is not present the soldiers and commanders will do a fair assesment of the engagement for themselves. Getting "killed" in such a way is a bit of an embaresment that you want to avoid and the next time you will do better.

That being said you want soldiers to be fearless in battle and sacrifice everything for a victory, even their own lives. In fact soldiers tend to be more motivated by war then by exercises. So the problem is not that solders do not fear death in an exercise but that they fear having to go through all the pain of battle without actually winning anything important. Are you willing to march for days in heavy rain and mud carrying heavy gear and eating cold meals only for a general to tell your batallion you did a good job? Are you willing to go thorugh all that in order to defend your country from foreign invaders even though it means you might be killed at the end of it?

The barrel and scope are not parallel. When the scope is perfectly horizontal the barrel is pointing slightly up. So at a set distance from the rifle the bullet will hit what the shooter is aiming for. But the bullet will also drop due to gravity over time so at a distance further away it will also hit. This is why it is so important for the shooter to get the distance right and then set the scope to that distance. If the target is closer then he thinks it is then he is going to hit high, and if the target is further away then he thinks he is going to hit low.

There are many different ways to do this depending on the available technology, cost and the ground conditions. For example we know the ancient Romans had pile drivers on barges which they could use to drive long piles into the river floor that would support the bridge. Some rivers would also dry up for some parts of the year, at least enough to build a bridge. Or the rivers could be partially drained for the construction. But even with these different techniques available the most common was still ferries at river crossings. Bridges are relatively new most places, most of them less then a century old.

When a doctor approves a treatment that just means you are allowed to have that treatment. It does not mean that you need the treatment or that you want the treatment, just that it would not do you much harm. It is up to you to decide if you want the treatment, you might deny it for any number of reasons including the cost. The insurance company can deny to pay a treatment even though it is approved by a doctor claiming that you do not need the treatment or that other more suited treatments are available to you.

For example if you brake your arm your doctor might give you the option of putting it in a cast for two months to let it heal itself or to have a surgery which will make the arm usable in a couple of days. He might approve both treatments and leave it up to you to decide. He might recomend you have the surgery but that is just his oppinion. There are of course more complications with a surgery and the cost is of course higher. The arm is also not going to be the same after a surgery as there will be implants left behind. So you are free to chose whatever treatment you want. An insurance company might say they only cover the cast and not the surgery as their contract only say they cover the cheapest option. However other contracts say they cover the fastest option within reason so they would cover the surgery.

Your home fiber link may be capable of 1Gbps. Your ISP may be artificially limiting this but the equipment is capable of this. The equipment used for the subsea cables are usually capable of 100Gbps. This is because they use better electronics, lasers and detectors. But then they do not just have one of these feeding each cable, they have a number of these transceivers at different wavelengths and use a prism to combine the light in one end and split it up at the other end. So a single fiber strand can connect several of these 100Gbps links across the ocean. They then take lots of these fiber strands and bundle them together in one cable.

For comparison a video stream is typically around 10Mbps. Your home Internet is technically capable of 100 video streams at once. The high speed links used by ISPs are capable of 10 thousand video streams. When you bundle them together with a prism you can get maybe 250 thousand video streams through the single strand. A single cable is then capable of a few million video streams. And there are around 500 of these understea cables so the total capacity of them is over a billion video streams.

You are however right that even that is still not enough and companies like Google (owner of YouTube), Netflix, Amazon, etc. have problems with the slow bandwidth of undersea cables. So they take advantage of the fact that a lot of people see the same videos and will copy the videos to different datacenters all over the world and then people will stream from their local datacenter.

There are several video tutorials out there, a lot of them are aimed at simulator games but are accurate enough. To start with you do not have to use the automation at all. You can fly the airplane using the hand controls just like a hundred years ago. This is usually done at least twice during each flight but not for long. The basic autopilot are made of three different systems, one to keep the heading to a set heading, one to keep the altitude at a set altitude and one to keep the speed at a set speed. This is more like your cruise control and lane guide on a car. On modern airliners these controls are mounted on the glare shield above the dashboard right under the windshield. The heading autopilot is also able to take input from the radio which listens out for radio beacons or from the GPS. So the pilot can tell the autopilot to fly to a place on the map at a set altitude and speed and the autopilot will fly there directly. It can even make an approach on a runway using the instrument landing systems mounted on the runway. The most advanced piece fitted to these airliners is the flight management system. This is similar to a navigation unit on your car. You can program the FMS with multiple waypoints or it can calculate those itself. When you get close to one waypoint the FMS will reprogram the autopilot to fly to the next waypoint. So in theory with an FMS the airplane can fly the entire flight itself.

However there are still lots of things for pilots to do. Airliners are not fitted with systems to automatically taxi the airplane on the ground or take off. There are usually systems to automatically land but these are not as good as humans. In addition there are lots of things like lights, flaps, gears, etc. which is not controlled by the autopilot. So for each step of the flight you need to go through the checklist and set up the airplane manually. And there are also tons of systems to keep a track of and monitor in the air. There are a lot of alarms alerting the pilots when things are wrong but it does not catch all the various conditions and even when an alarm sounds the airplane will not be able to automatically find out why the sensors read what they do and what should be done about it. So you need to constantly monitor the airplane and make sure it is safe at all times, and be ready to handle any unexpected conditions.

Just a note about them using the data. They might not use the data directly as you say. However it is quite likely that they use the data in some indirect way. In the modern way it would be fed to some sort of AI algorithm, and although this AI might not be allowed to disclose the data directly it can still answer questions based on this data. Maybe not so much to non-paying customers but Google does provide a lot of expensive technologies to companies which might be more liberal with other customers data then you expect.

It did take hundreds of millions of years to form. When Earth first formed 4.5 billion years ago there were just a carbon dioxide and nitrogen atmosphere. Then about 3.5 billion years ago the earliest oxygen producing microorganisms came about and we started getting a trickle of oxygen in the atmosphere generated by combining water, carbon dioxide and sunlight. But levels were still low until about 850 million years ago when the oxygen levels in the atmosphere shot up and most of the carbon dioxide was converted to oxygen and organisms. This was right about when the first plants developed, and we started getting multicellular organisms. Since then the plants have been able to maintain current oxygen levels. Or at least somewhere between 15% and 35%. Without plants we would not have oxygen.

The amount of charge you would get from a solar panel on the roof would be negligable. It would take days or weeks with good weather to get enough charge to get to the next charging station. And the weight of the solar panels and charger would reduce your overall milage.

Some years ago before electric vehicles became as common Nissan was pushed into this on their Leaf. They did the math and had worked out that it would not work but eventually gave in to public pressure. However they mounted a smaller solar panel and would only charge the 12V service battery, not the main battery. This did make some sense as it allowed them to stay parked for weeks and months without running out of charge on the service battery.

That is the kind of thing you only do once. The safety harnesses are designed to be survivable, not comfortable.

The 80GB update is replacing 80GB of the existing 100GB game. For example if they update the skin of a character the new skin would replace the old skin, there is no reason to keep both the old and new skin. So the updated file containing the skin of the character would not change size. There would still be only one skin with the same resolution there.

I think you unterestimates the life threatening situations a kid with a spray might be willing to put themselves in to get the ultimate tag. There is an issue with kids breaking into train yards to tag the rail cars and hurting themselves as the cars gets pushed around or by electrocuting themselves on live wires. But most of the larger grafiti higher up on buildings and infrastructure is made by older people in their late 20s or early 30s.

If you put grafiti somewhere which is hard to get to it is less likely for others to destroy the grafiti and therefore it is more likely to stay up for a long time. A lot of the grafiti is done at night when it is harder to get caught and also easier to do invasive things like blocking sidewalks or roads. A lot of the more serious grafiti artists will secure themselves to the best of their efforts with safety harnesses and spotters. They will use properly secured platforms to paint from. If you drive around at night you might confuse them for legitimate maintainance workers.

Less serious grafiti artists might not do all of these safety measures. But they will still bring the tools required for the job and usually a couple of friends. Accidents still happen but not as frequent as you might think.

That is propriatary and therefore kept a secret. There are a number of different checks they do in the backend. Things like getting the exact browser, operating system, configuration and even things like the size of the browser window. They also collect timings and movement of the mouse cursor. And also cookies for social media sites to associate you with your online persona. All of this information is sent back to the operator of the robot check, most commonly google, where they presumably are looking for known fingerprints of robots. If they find something suspecious they will send you additional challenges that is harder then just clicking a button.

A tie is mostly for looks. And it have been a fashion item for as long as we can tell. It did have its origin in the cravat which is a larger piece of cloth but worn in much the same way as a tie. Again we do not know exactly what purpose this was serving initially before being turned into a fashion item. But it could have served similar purpose to scarfs. That is to keep warm during cold days, keep cold in hot days after being soaked in water, keeping the wind and dust of ones face in windy days, protect the shirt from dirt and even clean things with it and generally a utility item with lots of uses. The tie came around in the late 1800s when people wanted smaller more comfortable and cheaper clothing. They did not actually get rid of the neck wear but made it much smaller. So it does not fill much of a practical role any longer, just fashion.

No, but I meant "hard" instead of "easy".

People often underestimate how hard it is to get a better job. You might look in the job ads and see ten jobs you might be interested in promising better terms and better pay. But when you actually start applying for the jobs you might only get five interviews and then only one or two of them offer you a position, at worse terms then you expected. And the entire process might take over a month. It is even worse if they know you are not currently working as they know you are more desperate for a job. So even if you think you can get lots of better offers in a day then your current position it does pay off to stay in your current job and spend some time finding the job you want at the terms you want.

I am not suggesting that kids get their own boat and boathouse. I have lots of fun memories of borrowing the boat of by parents or even the neighbors boat which they have to go fishing, transport things across the lake and through the canal, etc. in order to race with my friends at the time.