I'm a fan of "when you look at a thing, think who benefits from it".

In this case Facebook.

I just listen to Mozart sonatas. But very nice website. Love the transition effects.

I don't know if you are American or not. But it's funny to see US people saying other countries are "aggressive".

If you don't know about it, they don't need a warrant.

Says NSA.

It's funny because China also thinks the US is doing this.

Looking at the comments, I just don't think you 1st world people know what censorship and propaganda look like...

I agree in principle. However in many situations "buy the best tools you can" is meaningless because one just cannot. Other comments have argued about this better than I'd ever could.

On the other hand, have you consider that maybe it's not the hardware is slow; it's just that the software you are using is just plain bad? Before I had my current desktop which I assembled ~2 years ago, my desktop was a 4790K with 16GB DDR3, which was cutting edge at its time. However it booted up Windows really slowly. After I uninstall the Adobe suite, the boot up time improved by 5 minutes. I haven't been using any Adobe software ever since.

In a similar fashion, when I had my 2011 MBP 15 inch, I once tried PyCharm on it. Guess what, after I fired it up (and waited for the UI to be stable), it needed 30 seconds to react to my first key press.

Of course now most 1st world people have SSDs, but bad software is still a waste of energy (ahem nodejs).

I'd recommend starting from Terence Tao's Analysis I book. It really starts you from "zero" (literally), and constructing natural numbers, all the way to real numbers and integrals, and beyond.

Yes. That's what happens if you tell every child they are the best through their childhood. Now suddenly nobody want their bubble burst.

The other side of the same coin is this: I TA'ed college physics (more like high school physics) when I was working on my PhD. The school was not the best, but it was like top-10 in medical and pharmacy. And a lot of my students were from these departments.

We had to give them a pre-test before final. The final would reuse the same problems. And there were people failing the tests. I didn't understand why; I still don't. I mean it's an A for free, why not take it? Why fail...?

I guess you could say that's because it's not their major, so they don't pay attention. But it's still a required course. They had to retake it and pay real money for it. I also knew for a fact that they did care. Some of them cried when we told them we would not give them "bonus credits".