I once ran afoul of our UX guy for suggesting that we run our design past a focus group before implementing it. Dude literally said “users don’t know what they want”.

I had a job like that back in the day (circa 2000). I remember one stretch where for a solid month around 50 developers did nothing but call in to Who Wants To Be a Millionaire? to try to become a contestant. Ironically, one web app I wrote for them (with Visual Basic and “Classic” ASP) is still in use today – and it was a front end for a mainframe system that dated to the 1980s, which means that’s still up and running as well.

I always say: when Life gives you lemons, jam them up Life’s tailpipe.

I really think you’re mixing up the famines.

I’m not mixing up the famines. During both famines the USSR was using agricultural products (their only significant export) to acquire industrial capital. The reason I’m talking about the first famine is that we’re talking about Lenin here, who was long dead by the second famine.

The famine in question (early '20s, not the later famine that resulted from de-kulakization) was made much worse because Lenin kept exporting food during it. The Bolsheviks did this because it was their only source of the foreign credit they needed to buy the machine tools and whatnot they needed to ramp up their industrial sector. I wouldn’t call that “war communism”, just straight “communism” as per Marx they felt industrialization was everything.

Interestingly, the only reason the death toll from this earlier famine wasn’t even larger was that Herbert Hoover (of all people) organized an international relief effort that at one point was feeding about 10% of the USSR. When the agricultural situation improved, the Bolsheviks neglected to tell Hoover.

It’s ironic that you say “sarcophagus” because the only reason Lenin was mummified was that King Tut’s tomb had been discovered just before his death. Pravda had covered the discovery extensively and the Bolsheviks decided to capitalize on Tut’s popularity by preserving Lenin’s corpse – in hilariously amateurish fashion, since mummification was not something regularly done in Russia.

How about aristocat anarchy?

People should spend a little time watching The PBS News Hour if they imagine it’s still an alternative to this sort of thing. Yes, it’s aimed at retired liberals, but it has become astonishing seeing how it toes the corporate line and how it sane-washes the stuff Trump and his cronies are saying and doing.

You better Czech yourself before you Reyjavik yourself.

Aren’t most people on a fixed income?

No, most people are on broken incomes.

It’s wild that Kinross seemed to think this was all OK because the girls were ugly.

For the girls themselves, so ambivalent a father-lover-schoolmaster relationship might create certain psychological stresses. But for Kemal it provided the family background he needed, one from which irksome ties of blood were missing, and in which wife and children became in effect one.

This is an aside? Lol “certain psychological stresses”. One could just as easily describe it as a whitewashing. But good for Kemal, he got what he needed!

Ataturk: The Rebirth of a Nation by Patrick Kinross.

Fun Ataturk fact: dude would adopt “orphan” girls (quotes because some of these girls still had parents who voluntarily gave them up), raise them as his daughters, and then start fucking them as soon as they were old enough. And this made him not even close to being one of the worst people in Turkey, as he didn’t participate in the Armenian massacres (in fact he pushed the government to admit the crimes and punish the perpetrators).

You’re thinking of brideprice, which is basically the opposite of dowry.

Yes: Features no original members.

This is technically true, but Yes does still have Steve Howe who was the guitarist on their first hit album (“The Yes Album” in 1971).

Yes for a couple of decades was like the anti-Ship of Theseus. They would go on tour with everybody who had ever been in the band at any point. They even had Peter Banks (guitarist on their first two largely unknown albums) and The Buggles with them.

Actually kind of a cool concept as their studio albums used a lot of overdubbing which was impossible for single musicians on stage to reproduce. Having 17 guitarists means you can do it all.

Also, don’t use the wifi routers provided by Cocmast. Cocmast uses them to provide their xfinity-branded wifi, so as their customer you are literally sacrificing bandwidth and paying their electric bill. I assume all cable companies do this but Cocmast is the only one I know about for sure.

Sir, this is a Burger King.

When I was in graduate school, I used to call the 700 Club’s prayer hotline and talk about my dissertation. To their credit, those people were remarkably patient and would only occasionally attempt to steer the conversation back in the direction of Jesus and his need to have some of my money. “Oh, I don’t have any money. Anyway, it turns out that there’s a perfect correlation between the giving of dowries and engagement in plow-based agriculture.” Completely true but for some reason they didn’t really care.