Tim Palmerston
member of the BTS Army
420 followers
88 following
British communist, Russian translator, universal pain in the arse. I’ve been known to receive cheques from Xi Jinping, George Soros, Joe Biden, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, Vladimir Putin, Donald Tr…
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What ingredient can instantly improve almost any dish when used correctly?
I do not mention salt. Salt does not improve. Salt is necessary. The question alludes to less obvious cooking secrets. Here are a few: 1. Garlic. Without garlic, many dishes do not reach their climax, but too much garlic ruins a dish. Just a little bit. 2. Lemon juice. A few drops of lemon juice improve almo…
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If as President Trump asserts the US has more oil and gas than any other country on the planet, why are oil and gas prices threw the roof in the US?
Free World Market. Anything sucked out of the ground of the US is immediately priced at world market prices because the only thing that’s holy in the US are profits.
What or who stopped the Mongol conquest westwards?
They kind of stopped themselves, though changing terrain didn’t help. The Mongol empire, like many steppe empires before and after, grew quickly in its early days to take over large parts of the plains of Central Asia, and its armies were large enough to challenge sedentary nations in adjacent region…
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Were insects much larger in the Carboniferous and why?
It was already suspected for a while that the high oxygen content of the Carboniferous was not the reason why insects were so large at the time, but now it’s confirmed in this research paper . The Carboniferous Period, 358 to 298 million years ago, has fascinated us with 2.5-meter-long millipedes, 70…
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If we easily could harness up to 98% of the sun's energy, could basic needs of humanity be met for everyone such as food and adequate shelter?
A sufficient supply of energy alone is not going to solve those problems. Building a 100 square mile solar power plant in a suitable sunny desert area on each continent would capture enough solar energy for the entire continent. As a species, humanity could do this without too many difficulties - and…
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Was the land in Canada stolen from the natives?
No the land was not stolen from the Natives. For centuries the peoples of North America have been doing tribalistic ceremonies and rituals so that they magically draw migrants to their lands and completely ruin their ancient way of life and be replaced by satellite TV, casinos and alcoholism on a res…
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What do you think about Sabine Hossenfelder’s new YouTube video claiming virtual particles are real?
I don’t like either Sabine Hossenfelder or YouTube, but she’s correct. Virtual particles are real. There’s no tag on a particle that says “This one is real and that one is not”. You just know that energy, momentum, charge, etc. are all conserved. Quantum mechanics provides a very, very short term loo…
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Is the United States of America a Christian nation? Why or why not?
Yes, that’s why our politicians lecture the pope on religion. This may be hard to understand for some people in other countries.
When they see Christians in the US calling ICE on their neighbors to try and have them deported, it often does not seem very Christian to them. Because they think of the w…
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Irish people seem submissive and happy to hand over their country and culture to Africans and Asians but rebelled strongly against the British. What are the reasons for this?
Choice. The Africans and Asians are invited guests, the British hostile invaders.
Would an animal from the past 500 million years survive on Earth today?
Some animals from the past 500 million years would survive on Earth today, but most probably wouldn’t. I faced similar questions when I wrote my most popular answers on Quora about humans traveling back in time. Except for our metabolism taking us second by second to the future, with the universe cha…
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Are there any black people who speak Russian as their native language, or is that number non-existent?
One of the most famous and greatest poets and added great cultural enrichment to the Russian language was Alexander Puskin whose great grandfather was Abram Petrovich Gannibal (1696–1781) a Russian General-in-chief and once African Slave given to Peter the Great. What a story eh? Wouldn't have happene…
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People who used computers before Windows XP, what are some horrific bugs and limitations that us youngins couldn't even comprehend?
I was a fairly new junior COBOL programmer at the Danish government datacenter—back when computers filled entire rooms and storage came on disk packs the size of washing machine drums. My task? Write a COBOL program to read a large file, process it line by line, and stop at End Of File (EOF). Straigh…
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What is a computer "trick" that in the past was cool, but today is unimpressive and trivial?
Back in 1989 or so, I went to a Usenix conference in Baltimore. They had a booth were they were taking digital pictures of all the attendees, and they were available on an FTP server somewhere. I accessed the net via UUCP back then, so the only way I could get that those pictures was via an email to…
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Despite current events, is there anything positive you can say about Russia?
I can regularly say something positive about any country, provided I know anything about them at all. No matter what Russia does, its history or culture doesn’t just disappear. Dostoevsky’s books doesn’t get erased, Tchaikovsky’s music is still played, you can still watch Eisenstein’s movies. So if…
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What if you saw Atlas holding the world on his shoulders, blood coming from his back, and suffering, what would you tell him to do?
HAHAHA someone read Ayn Rand and thought it was “deep”. Ooh, poor Atlas having to hold up the whole world, I would tell him to shrug! Thus, the dumb title of her dumb book. I will say that the scenario is a perfect encapsulation of the typical MAGA and Conservative ideology. In that it is an entirely…
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If the United States deficit, 39 trillion dollars, can be simply deleted by those who benefited the most from it, shouldn’t that be the end of creating a national deficit?
Well, that is the nature of all debt: Those benefitting from it, those holding the debt, are also those who can ‘just’ forgive it. It is in the nature of the thing.
Why are so many Chinese policies inscrutable? Why impose an export regime on rare earths? No one wants to be dependent on China anymore for anything.
They’re inscrutable because you don’t read Chinese and think everyone else should write their thinking in English? The US has been imposing export regime on China since basically post WW2, and only increasing in recent years. The US has literally embargoed Cuba for l…
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What is the reasoning behind the recent "campaign" against "seed oils"?
Seed oils often contain an unhealthy balance of omega-3 to omega-6 fatty acids. Also, the polyunsaturated ones are more prone to oxidation — whereas something highly-saturated like butter or ghee can go weeks or longer at room temperature without oxidizing. Also, many seed oils are produced through s…
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For decades, the story of Chinese manufacturing was written by others. Western analysts framed it as a tale of imitation, of cheap labor arbitrage, of a nation perpetually one step behind the technological frontier. That narrative is now obsolete, and nowhere is its obsolescence more apparent than i…
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In Star Trek, would the food resequencer or replicator put an end to agriculture on Earth?
Not quite. Replicator technology can apparently produce pretty much anything as long as you’ve got a source of energy and a modest amount of raw materials you can restructure. The raw materials would seem trivial because the replicator can break those down to an atomic level and you can recycle those…
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Why did China intervene in the Korean War, and what did Mao hope to accomplish with it?
Japan killed 35 million Chinese in WWII. They raped, killed, looted, did live human experiments, threw mother and baby into burning furnace for “science”, to test the strength of “mother’s love”, clocking how long would a mother hold her baby up while her feet melted to the burning metal floor. They…
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Why did communism not fall in 1989 also in China, North Korea, and Cuba?
Why did communism not fall in 1989 also in China, North Korea, and Cuba? A2A. Ideological struggle was just one aspect of 1989. The bigger aspect was the gaining of Nationalists. The country leading the break-up of USSR was, shock, Russia, going “muh I don’t give a f*ck about all you troublesome drag…
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How do you explain the moon being hollow yet being a natural satellite?
I’m going to actually give this question a serious answer, despite the fact that the questioner comprehensively misunderstands the situation. After the Apollo 12 astronauts returned from the lunar surface to the Command Module, the now-useless Lunar Module ascent stage was deliberately crashed into t…
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Why is it that old houses are haunted?
We just gained some insights into why some old houses are perceived to be haunted. Most of us can only hear sounds as low as 20 Hz with our ears, but when the vibration is strong enough, we can feel sounds below this threshold with our bodies, and this is behind the new revelation. It turns out that…
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