They started out poorer though, and the reverse argument can be made comparing Cuba and various Caribbean countries (Haiti and Jamaica in particular come to mind).
I graduated high school in Montréal in 2013. I never had an actually challenging English class, I learnt more watching south park, going to america and reading than I did in school. My friends that only relied on school didn't have the best English either, they perfected it by travelling.
A lot of people go to Cégep in English for this reason too, and it works out pretty well. English is a language you can just catch and learn through immersion, even more in North America where you're surrounded by it. I honestly don't think school is a good place to learn a language. You need to be fully immersed and for it to be a necessity. I learned more spending a weekend in an american household at 8 years old than in a year of English classes in elementary school.
Healthy food isn't very expensive if you're smart about it (it requires a bit of education and understanding nutrition). I live off of rice, beans, spinach, pita bread, whole grain pasta, peanut butter and the cheapest veggies I can find. I spend about 20$CAD a week on groceries.
It's anecdotal, but all of the ex-cons I've met in Canada ended up getting stuck in a vicious circle of drug abuse after getting disappointed about their legal job prospects (around minimum wage), going back to dealing drugs a few months after probation is done and being unable to handle having an almost infinite supply of said drugs. After a couple of years of hardcore drug use there's no way someone would even hire them, so they're stuck on welfare and crime with nothing to do but getting high.
It's easy to make ethics binary when you just stop at what is legal and isn't. If you're the kind to jay walk because you know there's no car so it doesn't matter your ethics are probably a lot more nuanced though.
The panama canal of the arctic won't be the northwest passage, it's going to be the eastern passage over russia. The NWP water is too shallow, badly cartographied, you still risk getting caught in ice and it has very dangerous storms. Shipping companies would rather take a few more days to get to the pacific than take a big risk.
Even with real acid, I always feel like I'm coming up way before the actual effects start to hit. It doesn't help that I usually smoke pot and maybe drink during that time.
Maybe you should aim for something more precise, such as forums about microchips, or keyboards, or soundsystems (there has to be great ressources about those, I have friends who build their own to throw big raves), etc.. I started getting into microbiology and chemistry as I started brewing beer (I'm just here because my roommate is a webdev and I'm interested in entrepreneurship, I can't remember how to code a loop in python and couldn't tell you the difference between AC and DC), and there's nothing great specifically about those sciences. However there are great forums (facebook groups and subreddits in particular, with a good mod team they can be great platforms) for brewing (both professional and home-scale), growing mushrooms, theory behind drug synthesis/purification, and probably a lot more stuff I barely know about.
desalination requires infrastructure, and most of the water needs are in places like the sahel which are super far from the sea, the problem isn't desalination, it's that there's no water in the ground in some geographic locations
I think you underestimate the adaptative capacities of human society. If global warming doesn't exterminate all human life it'll take about one generation for people to get used to it. On the scale of human history a single generation really isn't much.
I'm not the previous commenter but I'm the same. It's because according to everything I heard about paypal if I put money in a paypal account it's a PITA to bring it back to my bank account so I need to spend it.
They're not risking their lives for your country, they're doing it so that american corporations can make more profit.
I highly recommend you read "war is a racket" written by General Smedley Butlers.
I also want to point out that I don't blame anyone who's working for the US military, unless they're like Dick Cheney or something, I understand that people need to make a living, and that a lot might even buy into the big ol' patriotic lie.
I changed my bank's online account password lately because it wasn't a good password, and then I forgot my new password. Resetting my password was a fucking joke, anyone who's acquainted with me and can do a few google searches could get into my bank account if they had my card number. It's not just their hardware, their whole security practices are messed up but they don't care because the federal government insures every account up to 100k.
Except then you're stuck in freezing temperature, with what is probably totally inappropriate mountaineering gear and odds are you've got an avalanche to dig yourself out of.
I've had various infusions with similar effects which has made me curious about seeing more rigorous science done in this domain, so kudos to you. I'm looking forward to reading the rest of that.
My experience working with anarchist friends is that something as simple as leadership creates a certain hierarchy. Obviously if there's nothing formal everyone is pretty cool, but in the organisation of a society and a longer time frame I can see how it can lead to our historical material conditions.