In my experience, studying mathematics is a bit weird. If you are ready to learn a topic, it's probably the field where you can get top grades with the least effort. But if you can't learn something with reasonable effort, hard work is unlikely to help. Doing something else and trying again after a few months might help.

Undergraduate exams tend to be short. Which means that a perfect grade should be interpreted as "meets the expectations".

You can still probably find some older people in rural Greece who consider themselves both Greek and Roman.

As for ancient Rome, it's pretty famous for elevating citizenship over ethnicity. Much in the same way as the US, and unlike most other modern countries. Assimilating conquered peoples and turning them into Romans was a major factor in their success. Other empires that built themselves around a dominant ethnic group were more short-lived. They had to rely excessively on the favored ethnicity for their military needs. Eventually that ethnic group was depleted due to constant wars, and someone else took over.

Your perspective on national security is that of top leaders, whose opinions are shaped by their interactions with other leaders and policy experts. But in a democracy, legislators often matter more than leaders. Because legislators have to take public opinion (as mediated by the electoral system) into account, their interests tend to be in conflict with the leaders. And then, no matter how convincingly the leaders and policy experts argue for their positions, the legislators often win.

Patria is a poor example, because defense is an explicit national security concern in the relevant laws. Dual use technologies are not. Finland did not treat espionage against Nokia particularly seriously back in its glory days. While there were some attempts to tighten the laws, they met heavy opposition and had to be watered down. Ultimately Nokia was just a business, and there is always a degree of public schadenfreude when big important people fail to protect their secrets.

My point was that there are different perspectives on national security. If everything ASML (or another similar company) knows became public knowledge, it would be bad for its business. It might also be inconvenient to some foreign interests. But would it be an actual national security issue to the host country?

If some forms of corporate espionage are not considered serious crimes, there are other reasons beyond the "best of the best" (whatever that means) migrating to another country. It might be that the people do not consider it a serious crime. And if you are in a country with limited ambitions to influence the rest of the world, that might matter more than the interests of faraway superpowers.

Take Finland, for example, with open list proportional elections. The primary competitors of every candidate are other candidates from the same party and district. In order to win, you have to develop and maintain your own niche. Many politicians leave to become lobbyists or consultants or join a think tank, but it's almost always a one-way street. It's difficult to return to politics after an extended absence, because someone else has already taken your niche (if it's still viable), and money and experience rarely help win it back.

As for the actual question, many European countries seem to consider trade secrets primarily a contractual matter. Revealing private secrets is not a crime, while abusing your position or breaking into a system without proper authorization can be. Prosecutors generally cannot invoke national security without a clear legal basis. Which probably can't be found in matters that are more about Western competitiveness in general than about the security and interests of a specific country.

And it's a consequence of making divorce legal and socially acceptable. Traditional marriage was primarily an economic contract. The wife assumed the responsibility for running the household, and the husband had a lifetime obligation to support her.

But if you stay away from paid work long enough, your ability to get a decent job diminishes. If you want to make being a stay-at-home partner a viable choice in a society, where divorce is available, you need a safety net of some kind. Maybe the working partner has to continue supporting their ex after divorce, regardless of what led to it. Or maybe we socialize the responsibility, meaning higher taxes and welfare benefits.

I've also done a lot of succinct data structures, data compression, and things like that. When you manipulate the binary representation directly, it's easier to connect representation to unsigned semantics than to signed semantics.

Unsigned integers are usually integers modulo 2^n, which gives them a convenient algebraic structure. Whether you find that intuitive or not probably depends on your education. From my perspective, abstract algebra and discrete mathematics are things you learn in the first year of your CS degree.

It's pretty rare to have values that can be negative but are always integers. At least in the work I do. The most common case I encounter are approximations of something related to log probability. Such as various scores in dynamic programming and graph algorithms.

Most of the time, when you deal with integers, you need special handling to avoid negative values. Once you get used to thinking about unsigned integers, you quickly develop robust ways of avoiding situations where the values would be negative.

The human reference genome is ~70% from a man with African and European ancestry who lived somewhere around Buffalo, NY. Most of the rest is from ~20 other individuals in the same area. They were supposed to sequence the samples more evenly, but apparently there were some technical reasons that made them prioritize a single sample.

Software industry has always been plagued by attrition. Some companies pay well and mostly employ younger people. Older employees eventually filter out, either because they have already earned enough and prefer better work-life balance, or due to ageism. And then there are occasional downturns, where many people lose their jobs, can't find new ones, and end up leaving the industry permanently.

People generally prefer careers with multiple viable employers. Not just in the world, but also in the same metro area. That way you are less likely to get stuck in a job you don't like. But if you are an employer with unique requirements. Of skills that take years to learn and that people are not likely to acquire on their own. Then you may need to pay ridiculous money (more like AI than FAANG) to substantially widen your talent pipeline. And if you pay ridiculous money, you risk ridiculous consequences.

The number of homes built by decade was relatively flat from the 1950s to the 2000s. When you adjust for population, it becomes clear that housing construction has slowed down over time. When the supply of new housing becomes scarce, it tends to favor the highest bidders: large single-family homes and financialized schemes such as market-rate rental complexes.