Tempers? Yes, they do, but on the whole they’re rather sweet.

Actually, I’d personally give pride of place to Colombian women for sheer looks.

They do have a pretty spectacular admixture of Mesoamerican and White European genetics down there, for sure. And they have the fiery tempers to match their looks, too, from what I can see.

You must have nerves of still to have learnt C++

Welllllll… there’s a world of difference between knowing the basic syntax and programming style of C++, and actually being able to do anything, y’know, USEFUL with it. I can write very basic C++ programs, functions, and maybe even classes if required to do so. But I am assuredly not fluent in it. My programming languages of choice are VBA, R, SQL, a proprietary language called DBScript, and Python, in decreasing order of familiarity. I can also mess about a bit in JAVA and Javascript if required.

The thing about programming is that once you understand the basic principles and logic of computer code, the rest is really just a matter of grasping syntax. It’s the same with any human language – once you know the grammatical rules and understand them well, the rest is a matter of vocabulary and idiosyncrasies. People say that Russian is a beastly hard language to learn and speak, and it is – but that’s primarily because the rules seem so intimidating to learn. Once you understand and memorise them, however, you quickly realise that Russian is in fact a vastly more logical language than English, and makes much more sense. It’s the vocabulary that is challenging after that.

If you can write a function in one paragraph as opposed to three and still make the command button do what it’s supposed to do, you save more time….to finish off the other gazillion lines on other buttons and then go back to read every line because there was a mistake somewhere in that pile of ‘if thens’.

That is entirely correct. This “small is beautiful” philosophy drives the entire Linux/UNIX operating system and mindset, which is why Linux actually WORKS, unlike the crufty, bug-ridden disaster that is WinDOZE. The programmer that succeeds in writing the most compact code that does the job quickly, is assuredly extremely skilled.

The challenge for most programmers is not in writing compact code, though – it is in writing understandable and clean code. A good example can be found in an archaic and extremely powerful mathematical multidimensional matrix language called APL. You can do a lot with very little in APL – but the resulting code is almost illegible and incomprehensible to most other people.

That is why Python is such an interesting language. It was written by a mathematician, and like most mathematicians, he believes in doing things in an efficient, compact, yet repeatable way. So Python imposes strict rules on syntax and operations and emphasises the use of whitespace to keep code “clean”.

I don’t have an eye for details, but I respect programmers who try to be as creative as possible.

I’m not a hardcore programmer either, but I do enjoy the creativity and flexibility that comes with writing code. It’s actually quite a lot of fun to figure out how to solve a problem and systematise it using loops, structures, functions, datatypes, and classes.

Still, I have to admit that it looked kind of like magic. I could type in words and the programs ‘understood’ them. Even with all the rules about when and where to use certain words, there were still many ways to skin a cat so to speak. I’m still glad I did not become a programmer though. I don’t have an eye for details, but I respect programmers who try to be as creative as possible.

Actually, I’d personally give pride of place to Colombian women for sheer looks. Admittedly, however, de gustibus non disputandum.

Deny, actually. I have to disagree here. Outside of Moscow and maybe St. Petersburg, you won’t find much by way of feminist idiocy in Russia. Women there value themselves and believe themselves to be capable of doing anything – but they want and look for strong stable providers to look after them.

In 4 years of travelling to Russia and working with and hanging around Russians, I have never once met a Russian woman who was a real feminist, UNLESS she happened to be working for a Western company. It’s genuinely hard to explain how Russian women think of feminism, except to say that they generally reject the notion that women are equal to men.

The Russians have a saying: “a Russian woman is strong enough to ride a horse into a burning building”. Yet they still want strong, masculine, yet – and here’s the kicker which is totally counter-intuitive to red-pilled Westerners – romantic men.

Part of this is due to Russia’s history. The catastrophic losses that the Russians suffered in what they call the Great Patriotic War resulted in a nation with a completely screwy sex ratio. Lots of women ended up chasing very few men. This naturally ensured that the most beautiful women would reproduce – which is partly why Slavic women today are so lovely. But today, after the fall of the Soviet Union, those same Russian women now face a population of alcoholic, work-shy, hopeless men who have a strong fatalistic streak in their blood.

This is why Russian women today have such a reputation for being stone-hearted gold-diggers. This stereotype is inaccurate. But it has roots in truth. Russian women do have horrid tempers, and they shit-test like you wouldn’t believe.

Despite all of that, they are still, in my personal opinion, the best women on Earth. They don’t have the family baggage that Asian women do, especially Chinese and Vietnamese ones. They are tough, capable, smart, and independent. Yet they still basically just want a man to make them feel loved and cared for, rail their brains out in the bedroom, and fill them full of babies.

That said – there are several reasons behind Russia’s flatlining demographics. Some have to do with relative female empowerment. Others have to do with the sky-high divorce rate in the country. But the primary reasons have much more to do with the fact that the men die young and badly. A Russian man’s life expectancy is 66 – a Russian woman’s is more like 77. Alcoholism and extended economic hardship have a lot to do with this as well.

Russia is an amazing country, but it is one filled with hardship. The economy isn’t doing well, in large measure because of international sanctions. They have divested away from energy rapidly in the last 10 years, and they have done exceedingly well. But their ability to export their products is limited, and their domestic economy is still pretty small due to their relatively small population.

They aren’t headed for a demographic cliff, unlike China or especially Japan. But they are in trouble, and they know it. This is why Putin signed new laws that make it significantly easier for citizens of FSU republics to get Russian citizenship. I don’t agree with that idea, but the Russkies have to solve their demographic issues somehow. They plan to add roughly 10 million citizens to their rolls this way – let’s just hope that most of them are actually Christian Slavs, not Muslims.