30 years ago a BSc could accept a slightly lesser salary for more wide social-cache and more excitement working on magazine features and still afford a nice home in a nice neighborhood. It was dollar-a-word work at the time. Expenses too if you were good.

Pick any magazine-story-becomes-romance from the 80s, 90s, 00s (e.g. How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days) to relive the glory days.

Now, no science grad could make that choice.

I've lived most my life in very multi-lingual cities and neighborhoods, and it always struck me how some English very expressive short phrases, eg. "Like, no way", were used in other language conversations. Always thought, it was the relative brevity and ubiquity, in the way "C'est la vie" was for awhile in English.

The National Archives gives one pound in 1480 as the 33 days' wages for a skilled tradesman's labour, so I can see why they'd want to join a guild.

See: https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/monetary-policy/inflation/in...

https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/currency-converter/#curr...

The latter is a huge win for making media people want to watch. Same reason all those cable stations segment the screen into four with a face in each corner, or why streamers overlay their gaming with a their face on a webcam. We like faces.

The "problem" story is much cleaner in Qatar though: the migrant worker abuses are alleged in building the venues.

In contrast, China and Russia have complicated problem stories about camps in places people can't visit, or about graft and murky military movements. Tougher for the public to get into. So maybe that's why you didn't see all the stories and posts about them.

So, it could be the US with lots of time and resources messed that up. But more likely, Putin wanted to up the stakes for European countries, saying in effect "forget the sanctions; buy gas from us now, or you never will because I don't need you."

[1] https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/gazprom-nord-stream-... [2] Rough calculation: Nordstream 2 was to double gas deliveries and had 2 pipes.

https://www.behindthename.com/names/usage/anglo-saxon

That is, absent voter pressure, American leaders would support dictators and autocrats at a rate as high as and support free elections as little as Putin. Instead, they support and encourage free and fair elections in countries, like some you've listed, where the outcomes are sure to be bad for American interests.

If the outcomes are bad enough to American leaders' eyes, then the leaders may use covert action, but they cannot use overt actions to install a dictator abroad without risking severe electoral damage at home. Just think about the effort put into trying to create democracies in Afghanistan and Iraq, and how much easier and more stable (for American interests or at least Cheney's) installing an friendly military dictator with 97.7% support in a sham election would have been.

Of course, many Americans believe other Americans don't care enough about democracy abroad, but that suggests at least some do.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/227458612_The_Logic...