She never seemed to do well in unscripted situations. When answering any questions in an interview, even from friendly interviewers, she always seemed to be thinking "what did my staff recommend I say for questions like this?" rather than "I will answer this question with what I believe in".

American public schools suck

Who runs American public schools?

and their Hezbollah affiliation was unclear.

Why would Hezbollah distribute one way pagers to non-members? These pagers weren't for sale on the open market. Hezbollah bought them for their members only.

Hezbollah actually had a good idea to use these pagers instead of cell phones. Cell phones can be tracked, these pagers can't be tracked. Unfortunately for Hezbollah, the IDF has infiltrated the Hezbollah's communications.

Would Russia doing this to Ukraine count as a well executed precise attack?

If Russia were able to plant mini-bombs into the communication equipment distributed to Ukraine's armed forces? Yes, it would be described as a well executed, precise attack.

Armies world wide often "booby trap" equipment or ammunition that they think will fall into enemy hands.

Flashing to pass 'might' have been a thing long ago. When I was taught driver's ed in the 1980s, we were told not to do it, so perhaps it was done in previous decades.

I myself asked "What time of year was the lower photograph taken?" Then I realized I was being dumb, because if either photo was taken in winter time, we would see at least some ice in the water, if not a very large ice sheet.

Russian values? I assume he means rape, murder, theft and rape.

"But from the perspective of a coherent story in a coherent world, ignoring the success in terms of sales, it was cobbled together without a plan, and it shows. It wasn’t until maybe order of the phoenix that she had a plan for how the story would end, and she had to do a lot of hand waving to make it happen."

"But she wasn’t a good writer. She was mid tier at best. So the eventual success of the series got beyond her abilities. While the last book was much better overall than the first few, it still relied on shoddy world building"

Excellent explanation. The first HP book is excellent. It really sucks you in. After book 4, the quality declines and they become slogs to get through.

My father-in-law got a Master's Degree in Computer Science 30 years ago. IIRC, it was heavy in C programming and involved typical CS fare like algorithms, pointers, sorting, data structures, etc. He was a high school math teacher at the time (he's now retired). He took the classes mostly because he enjoyed learning.

I did ok during the Dos/Windows 95 era, but as time went on, he seemed less and less able to solve his own computer problems. He can't even Google a problem effectively (or even remember to try to Google his problem).

Most recently, I had to hold his hand while he bought a new computer at Best Buy and then further hold his hand as he went through, step by step, the Windows 11 installation/first time start up process.

If the US created it in the 1980s, how did a guy in the Congo catch it in 1959?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_early_HIV/AIDS_cases

Could it be that not as many potential serial killers are being born? I believe there is a link between criminality and childhood abuse. Less unwanted kids are being born. Less abuse. Less criminals of all kinds, including serial killers.