Having a job at 16 isn't unusual, and it's entirely possible to emancipate yourself once you do.

My assumption is the ice bath is more for reducing inflammation.

Funny story, I was reading a health book, for high school students, from 1908 and it too recommended cold showers to "exercise your capillaries" now while I doubt that's actually a thing that's possible to do, I too have been on the cold shower train.

I actually prefer to use no hot whatsoever, and I often find myself laughing sort of maniacally before I get in and really enjoy the rush. It also massively cuts down on the amount of time I waste in the shower which is nice for my bills.

You can - though usually stuff of the ar-15 variety needs to come from a real gunshop because the actual demand for such rifles isn't high enough for Wal-mart to justify carrying any/many of them (they're also usually pretty expensive). Wal-mart tends to deal more in hunting/sporting rifles, small gauge shotguns, and muzzle loaders.

Another pretty solid option is to take a small vacation - a big part of addiction is the habit itself - so avoiding places where you typically smoked is a good idea. So, if you've got a day trip or something in mind I'd do it because the new surroundings wont trigger cravings, and your mind will be occupied with new experiences. You'll still have to come home and deal with the habitual behavior, but during the early stages I've seen a lot of success with new surroundings.

When I smoked more regularly I would crave it when I was at home, but never any place else. So when I decided to cut it down to special occasions only, I just peaced out for a few days lol.

Another option that I've seen people use in addiction counseling is to figure up how much money you're going to save in a month by not smoking (I'd figure it's around 20-50$ or more depending on how nice the cigs were and how much you used), and then spend that dollar amount on something you've wanted for a while as a reward once you make it to a certain milestone (a week, a month etc).

Part of it comes with age, once you come to terms with the benign indifference of the universe.

But, the easier thing is just to come up with something else to say instead since you apparently feel the compulsive need to say something. Saying nothing is a good substitute, "oops" is also acceptable in some circles. But in general the easiest way to handle it is never to say sorry unless somebody actually draws attention to your mistake - because chances are nobody noticed/cared.

A vacuum is definitely the way to go for the exterior of the case and the ports that air comes through. Depending on how easy your vacuum cleaner articulates you may be able to use it inside of the case after you ground it to discharge any static electricity. If you happen to have a metal chair you could also just ground the thing by touching said metal chair while you do it lol.

Compressed air in a can seems to be the best bet from there - I've used my air compressor in the garage with EXTREMELY good de-dusting results, but various connections always end up coming loose due to the pressure lol.

A light rub with a paper towel doesn't hurt other plastic parts that may have dust caked onto them (this is particularly bad in the interior wells of fans usually) so extensively that compressed air won't break it loose. I've also used slightly damp towels with alcohol to clean such situations before because the alcohol will flash off in a few minutes so long as you don't absolutely soak the thing.

I've always wanted to use Dr. Feelgood tbh. https://youtu.be/1XHcPYorSJw

Being as I have a 10 year old who has to do a "science fair project" every year, this is literally my go to in different iterations

2 Things.

1. Common materials as insulators.

Get several large plastic containers (or any other thin material will do or even plastic bags), and then get some standard plastic bottles - fill said bottles with water. Wait forever for the tap water in the plastic water bottles to arrive at room temperature.

Place the bottles in the plastic bags or plastic containers and bury them in the same weight of various materials: Dirt, shredded newspaper, sand, rocks, whatever you've got around. Place a lamp over each container for a set amount of time (I shoot for 2 hours because I only use one lamp).

Extract water bottle and see if the temperature has changed relative to a "control" of a water bottle not buried in anything. Make sure the lamp is always the same distance away. Now you've done science.

Second.

Get some kind of quick growing plant, and plant the seeds in an egg carton or some other segmented container (ice cube tray, etc). Water the seeds with different types of water and other liquids and see if anything wacky happens or if the plant dies/fails to grow.

If that's not acceptable, I would just repeat #2 but plant the seeds in different commercial brands of potting soil and see which grows bigger/faster as they often claim to speed or help plant growth.

I've been working like crazy, and I have to go in at 8 am tomorrow because fml? They told me when I hired on so long as I showed up before 9:30 I was good, and suddenly we get all these requests to come in at 9 and 8:30 am? lol.

I'm still pretty upset I can't go to Cali for the LAN, but I'm getting a 6k raise for my financial scheme whose perpetration I will be missing said LAN for :/ So, maybe the universe balances out.

The simplest response is that the territory of the Soviet Union was highly prone to famine anyways (by drought or blight - and as a fellow who lives in an agricultural region lemme' tell you I'd take a drought over a blight) so it's difficult to *actually* determine to which degree Soviet policy was responsible vs. recurring structural problems within Russian/Soviet agriculture itself. Still far less than 60 million or other absurd numbers that came out of the 1950s. Even if you account for millions upon millions of deaths in Ukraine you're still far under the 20-25 that's cited by Western historians (mostly based on guess work anyways).

The whole collectivization question is intensely interesting to me, as Lenin himself was STRICTLY opposed to rapid collectivization of agriculture. His idea was more or less to get small subsets of farmers to willingly agree to collectivize their resources either under government control (Sovkozy) or transitioning existing individual, local, control set ups (Kolkohozy) - there were already areas of Russia where collective agriculture had existed since time immemorial. Testing the two systems to see which was most efficient would commence, and then whichever worked out best would be used as propaganda cases to encourage other farmers to do the same. A downright pragmatic approach. Bukharin, later killed by Stalin, even declared in a speech "Peasants enrich yourselves!" to signal that collectivized or state owned agriculture wasn't a priority for Soviet policy.

Besides, the policy seems logical enough, as after the end of serfdom in 1861, many Russian farmers were in possession of plots of land too small to farm beyond the barest subsistence level. So why not combine them? This happened in virtually every Western society as smaller farmers moved to the cities to obtain work or sold out to larger farms and did the same - the Russians basically wanted to use government policy to affect the same outcome, but didn't have the level of mechanization present in the West, so the agricultural labor force could remain in place for the time being.

The first five year plan, at its outset, planned for a *very* marginal growth in collectivized farms over its 5 year period (less than 12% of all farms). However, the Stalin government decided, after having accepted the plan, that they needed to rapidly collectivize agriculture - for an array of reasons, many of which will probably never be properly understood. This caused massive problems for 2 major reasons (among others). 1.) Farmers with profitable farms *did not* want to collectivize and farmers who had unprofitable farms did. So the state ended up rapidly laden with a tremendous amount of struggling agricultural enterprises, while private individuals who refused to collectivize continued to be OK since they were always as such. 2.) The five year plan didn't allocate *any* resources to accommodate such a tremendous explosion of government owned (or whatever word you prefer to use here overseen?) agricultural enterprises as what Stalin's policies caused within the first 3 years of the five year plan (over 80% of all farms collectivized). Note the plan only allocated resources to cover 12% of all farms and instead they had ~700% of that number.

So, in the end the Soviet government chose to blame the "kulaks" ie, farmers who had profitable farms, for their own failures in agriculture because they decided unilaterally that collectivization was the best policy.

Why did they think that? Well Soviet economists became obsessed with what they called the "scissors crisis" which was basically that, like all Western societies in the 1920s, prices for agricultural goods were rapidly falling world-wide, while the costs of industrial labor were increasing exponentially. As such, farmers got very little for their produce, while factory goods became even more expensive. This resulted in an agricultural crisis as the tools used for modern agriculture became too expensive for common farmers to buy. So, rather than work out a scheme to encourage small, non-viable farmers to move to the cities (like Western countries did) and become factory workers or pay them not to farm at all (as the USA did - to raise agricultural prices), the Soviet government decided to force everybody to collectivize under its umbrella whether they wanted to or not, so that they could set agricultural produce prices to obtain enough money to buy the agricultural equipment they needed.

It obviously didn't work out very well as agricultural production, and exports, fell precipitously in the late 20s and early 30s (the Great Depression played a role here too) and the farm population dropped substantially anyways as people moved to the cities; being superfluous to the success of agricultural production just as they did throughout the West.

Like I said earlier, nobody will really understand all of the factors that played into the undertaking of the "rapid" collectivization of agriculture when the whole Soviet Economy was not at all prepared for such an undertaking; nor was the 5 year plan ever adjusted to accommodate such a tremendous explosion of collectivization. I tend to believe that the upper echelons of Soviet leadership became convinced that collectivized agriculture would produce some sort of downright magical effect on Soviet agriculture, and as a result screwed over a huge portion of their populace. In their defense, collectivized agriculture on such a massive scale had never been tried before - but even still - they were irresponsible to dream as they did and Stalin and all of those attached to him in that time bear the responsibility for their actions.

For the debate topic at large you have an article written by Stalin which was entitled "dizzy with success" which reads in part:

But the successes have their seamy side, especially when they are attained with comparative “ease” — “unexpectedly” so to speak. Such successes sometimes induce a spirit of vanity and conceit: “We can achieve anything!”, “There is nothing we can’t do!” People not infrequently become intoxicated by such successes; they become dizzy with success, lose all sense of proportion and the capacity to understand realities; they show a tendency to overrate their own strength and to underrate the strength of the enemy; adventurist attempts are made to solve all questions of socialist construction “in a trice.” In such a case, there is no room for concern to consolidate the successes achieved and to utilise them systematically for further advancement. Why should we consolidate the successes achieved when, as it is, we can dash to the full victory of socialism “in a trice”: “We can achieve anything!”, “There is nothing we can’t do!”

Hence the Party’s task is to wage a determined struggle against these sentiments, which are dangerous and harmful to our cause, and to drive them out of the Party.

Which is seen by most historians as Stalin realizing his tremendous mistake and trying to slow it down with his personal influence - far too late of course.

You got authentic Marxist thoughts there lol as opposed to my earlier "devil's advocate" posts above. There is a real tendency among young Marxists today to adopt Stalin as a sort of father figure or to ignore him completely as a brute. I'd argue to quote Stalin himself, "both are worse."

The real irony with the Trotsky thing, is that the folks who discovered (outside of the USSR) that Trotsky actually had sought to form some sort of secret political organization in Russia were Trotskyites in the USA who were doing research with the Trotsky papers at Harvard so as to prove that the Show Trails against the "Bloc of Rightists and Trotskyites" were a complete sham. Instead they ended up finding undeniable evidence that Trotsky had indeed sought to create a secret political organization with the express objective of infiltrating the Soviet government. Now, that's not to say that the Show Trails were in themselves legitimate, but I'm under the impression that there isn't a government on the planet that wouldn't react strongly to some secret organization attempting to infiltrate and encourage government officials to leak information to it.

http://oasis.lib.harvard.edu/oasis/deliver/~hou00301

You could likely get some copies of the microfilm (you can google around for the specific letters) through interlibrary loan if you *really* wanted to blow up somebody who brought up the show trials lol.

Get off work at 4 (Tues-Sat schedule), go to the brewery, drink, talk, whatever. Get something to eat. Come home watch movies, etc, talk shit in mumble.

Sunday - Sleep and house chores.

Monday - read and do fuck all after dropping kiddo off to school.

If you've made a firm commitment I'd stick to it, but you can try to modify that in a number of ways.

1. Remain, until such a time as a suitable replacement for you has been found. That way you're free from regret, don't damage your relationships, or screw anybody over.
2. Attempt to modify the amount of time you spend doing things you don't want to do (fewer scrims etc - sometimes that's all that's needed).
3. Tough it out entirely, and then remember how much you hated it the next time you promise somebody something.

Actually Barry most military historians assume the early days of 41' would've been a disaster even without the purges because the Russian Army had grown to absolutely gigantic proportions, so even had there been no purge, there still weren't enough officers to go around, the purges just made it worse, and because the older generals who weren't purged performed so poorly (being mostly hold-overs from WW1). They certainly didn't help, but given the rapid expansion of Soviet reserve forces and men under arms in general, there is no scenario for which the army would've been ready to fight at peak performance in 1941, or even 1942.

A counter-point here is the performance of the Soviet Navy in 1941. The Soviet Navy was very heavily purged in 1937 and continually purged throughout the whole period. But its performance in the early days of WW2 was exceptional. Why? Because the navy had not been expanded all that much, and the existing naval institutions could absorb and accommodate the reserves that flowed in to bring the navy up to fighting shape. The Navy was even asked to perform many tasks for which it had *never* been trained to do, and still performed in those scenarios fairly well (for example most of the Soviet Naval Air arm ended up bombing troops on land, something that wasn't really discussed in the pre-war years or the evacuation of Talinn - which was a disaster - but considering the obsolescence of the Soviet Navy and their complete lack of air coverage, it's amazing they didn't suffer even heavier losses).

I should also point out that when somebody talks about mobilization that means automatic war in these scenarios. Poland's leadership (Second Republic) is often criticized for not mobilizing earlier, but they were restricted from doing so by the French and British because Poland mobilizing its armed forces would've been a defacto declaration of war on Germany (in which Germany could argue it was not the aggressor). Germany had a distinct advantage over the USSR in having already been at war with, and conquered, Poland, Denmark, Norway, France, and Yugoslavia, in that their armed forces were already mobilized and battle tested. Stalin was very clear to *avoid* provoking the Germans if at all possible - even allowing German planes to violate Soviet air space periodically without making too much protest (by international law you could, and still can, shoot down any air craft violating your air space - the Swiss (neutral) actually shot down quite a number of German fighters and bombers during the Battle of France for violating their air space). The Red Army was on high alert throughout April and May of 1941, but after May with no real sign of invasion coming (because Operation Barbarossa had been delayed by the Italian debacle in the Balkans) they actually tamped down their readiness and alert status. It was assumed that an invader wouldn't want to contest with the rain and inclement weather that set in every year around October. They were wrong, and Germany claimed that the Soviets were secretly mobilizing and intended to attack Germany and as such their preemptive war was justified (precisely the scenario Stalin et al had sought to avoid).

Of course, Molotov in his memoirs points out that they had gotten into a kind of group think regarding war readiness with Germany in regards to May being the month - when they should've remembered that Napoleon invaded in June as well - and took Moscow. For the Red Army's part it fully disclosed (though not publicly - publicly they claimed they were invincible) that based on the German Wehrmacht's size and capabilities, and its performance against France (France was roughly equivalent to Germany in terms of men under arms, tanks, planes, etc) the USSR would need until 1943 to successfully perpetrate a war against Germany. The course of the war nearly bears that out, as the German army's victories were few and far between from 1943 on.