If patiently correcting them is considered "battle" then I guess we live in different universes.

It's greatly worse than an email because it (1) primes the candidate with a false set of a (highly positive) expectations, only to simply (2) gouge very significantly into their time (as with any scheduled video call). The fact that these companies have no grasp of what should be obvious to them -- in particular as regards item (2) -- is central to what's so toxic about the current job application process.

And lo and behold, the fact of two guys stating a certain narrative about those events (then embellished up a bit by the publications quoting them) does not make it so. Even the article you're citing about Arahamiya's version of events isn't so clear-cut about the matter (it says Boris's advice was but one factor among many) as you're making it out to be.

This is why Russia is called "expansionist". Because it likes to expand its territory.

Before Boris arrived to scupper it.

That's not what happened. I know you read some snippet somewhere that made it sound like that's what happened. But simply put, you're being played. And that's not actually what happened.

The US has not released a definitive assessment. Jinping apparently did make some announcement that the PLA should be "ready to" invade Taiwan, but that's not the same as "is going to." And may just be propaganda for the PLA's 100th anniversary.

That's what some say. But how do you know?

Outer Manchuria - including Vladivostok - will be the next target.

Very unlikely, even if Taiwan collapses quickly.

Yikes - you definitely lost me there, man. I'm going to have to let you hash this stuff out on your own.

And are basically talking about something else.

I acknowledge my quote was imprecise.

   In 2022 Ukraine shut down the pipeline to the EU in 2009 and again in 2014

Either that, or that the people concerned about the blockade (and the bombings, and you know, those awful trenches full of bodies and stuff) are just whiny that they can't have "nice things" -- like a world without blatant genocides happening in the open for all to watch, with the support of major Western governments.

What they object to, rather with extremely high (by all appearances intentionally so) number of civilian fatalities. Combined with numerous blatant statements by government officials and public figures in support of a complete removal of the entire population of Gaza.

What is normally called a genocide, in other words.

Sure it changed once they saw the (wholly predictable) actual reality of the war. But the fact that a solid majority supported the debacle at the outset, despite Bush's lies at the time being roughly on par with Putin's lies about Ukraine today (in terms of being transparently BS) -- does tend to support the point the above commenter is making.

If you've been studying the topic for "decades", and then you say things like "they speak essentially the same language" (in reference to Russians and Ukrainians) -- then I don't know what to tell you.

Given the vast discrepancy in turnaround times -- I would seriously start to wonder about the person on your own team who was responsible for cutting out and assigning work to people outside the company.

Who apparently had not even a ballpark idea of how long the task should take. And who perhaps didn't do such hot job of communicating the requirements, now did they. And on top of that, apparently went to sleep on the task of, you know, tracking the status of the project, checking whether the intermediate deliverables (were there any)? actually worked and where up to team standards in terms of quality, etc. And yet they're still on the job, for some reason.

People love to blame freelancers, and they especially love water-cooler tales about how some project (whether by a person/team inside the company, or outside), and then was done by another person/team in a small fraction of the time. But usually there's more to the story.

It "looks like", but only if we glance casually at a couple of articles (or sometimes even just headlines of articles) here and there, without taking the time to, like, actually read them.

Or we pick up random partial factoids (like about the Nuland cable), and we start thinking "Hmm, this would align with [some vastly larger mental model we have the world works]" without stopping to think about what the factoid is actually about, or whether it actually has much of any significance to begin with.

What you have here is article that says "CIA, Ukraine" and you're thinking right way it's about Ukraine being a puppet state. But that's not something the article asserts, or even comes close to talking about as a topic.

Per the Wikipedia definition:

The bogeyman (/ˈboʊɡimæn/; also spelled or known as bogyman, bogy, bogey, and, in North American English, also boogeyman)[1] is a mythical creature used by adults to frighten children into good behaviour.

But you're getting off track here. We were discussing the total package of US support for Israel as a driving factor in the current, grotesque horror we are all witnessing.

And it is the main driving factor. If that support were to vanish, Israel's expansionist adventures in Gaza and the West Bank would grind to a halt in very short order indeed.

But it's clearly the most important. To an extent that it dominates all other factors.