Society – Page 4 – Hi, I'm Rauf Aliev.

Exploring the Delights of Origin Thai Spa: More Than Just Massage | January 08 2026, 23:48

We bought all this at our Thai massage salon Origin Thai Spa today for $20 — slices of matum tea, Bael Fruit Tea. To the left of it — pandan tea. Also, before buying we tried some hand-made cakes (delicious!).

The salon is staffed by Thai women, all of them elderly, many speak English poorly, but they all know their massage craft very well. We are regular customers there with a membership, and I highly recommend the salon to locals. Thai massage is not for everyone, though, because when done correctly, it is quite painful during the process (but beneficial, and feels like it recharges all your internal batteries).

Exploring Identity and Survival in “Avatar 3: A Journey of Relocation” | January 06 2026, 17:34

After watching Avatar 3, we decided to rewatch the first and second movies. Watched it like it was the first time, but here’s what I thought.

For the family, relocation was an urgent rescue from physical annihilation or forced participation in a war. Moving, they encountered the necessity to “learn to swim” in a new legal, linguistic, and social environment, starting from scratch and losing their former social weight. The feeling of “we are strangers here” is the central emotion. Severance of ties with friends and colleagues, only the “nuclear family” remains as the sole island of identity. Essentially, Jake’s decision to flee to save his children is the fundamental dilemma of any parent in a conflict zone: fight to the end on their own land or leave to preserve the life of the next generation.

Upon arrival, they hardly receive a visa, and permanent residency isn’t promised. But eventually, it becomes clear that it’s impossible to hide from a global conflict geographically. Sooner or later one has to participate in protecting their new “reef.”

Jake’s children and he himself have five fingers, whereas purebred Na’vi have four. Plus, the accent. This is a constant visual reminder of their origin. Even if you are fully integrated, there is always a detail that marks you as an outsider. Your children may become “one of them” faster, but they still carry the mark of “hybridity.”

By the way, in the third part, all the blues already speak English. The Na’vi language was completely displaced by them.

P. S. By the way, it’s interesting that Jake didn’t bring any of humanity’s achievements to the new culture of Pandora at all. I don’t know, the wheel, fire, medicine, some mechanical stuff. Nothing.

Arbitrage Adventures: A Glimpse into Venezuela’s Currency Chaos | January 04 2026, 17:10

I first looked at a map of Venezuela around 15 years ago when you could fly there from Russia for a couple hundred dollars. I studied the map but never used it (though perhaps I should have).

At that time, it was the era of wild currency arbitrage, where the difference between the official bolivar rate “from the TV” and the real price on the black market reached astronomical proportions.

The scheme was simply brilliant: within the country, all airlines were required to sell tickets for local currency at the government rate. If an international flight cost a thousand dollars, it was converted into bolivars at the “pretty” official rate. But if you came off the street with a stack of real dollars and exchanged them at a money changer, the sum in bolivars needed to purchase the same ticket cost just a real hundred dollars, and sometimes even fifty.

The real fun began when intermediaries or acquaintances within the country got involved. You could book a ticket online through a local office, pay for it in bolivars through someone in Caracas, and then simply give them cash dollars when meeting, or transfer to a foreign account. The savings were so absurd that people flew business class simply because it was cheaper than lunch at Miami airport.

But cheap tickets were just the tip of the iceberg, because there was also something known as “raspao”. The state gave every traveler the right to buy a couple of thousand dollars at the cheap official rate on a credit card for spending abroad. Eventually, people bought cheap tickets, flew to the nearest islands, cashed in their currency quota, and returned home virtually rich, having sold these dollars on the black market for many times more.

Of course, this bonanza could not last forever and very quickly ended with a loud crash. Airlines quickly realized that their accounts were filled with millions of worthless-bolivars, which the government flatly refused to exchange for real currency. Planes flew half-empty, although all seats were officially bought out for currency quotas, and the government’s debts to carriers grew to billions of dollars, after which global giants simply began to massively leave the market.

But it worked for a while. I don’t remember exactly, somewhere between 2011 and 2014.

How such a breakdown between the official and unofficial rates lasted so long is beyond comprehension. The government could not quickly abolish the official rate because it supported imports of food and medicine. As soon as they acknowledged the real dollar rate, prices in stores would have skyrocketed immediately (which later happened). Flight tickets merely became a “collateral hole” in the system that everyone used while it was possible.

The Unintended Consequences of Misguided Incentives | January 04 2026, 13:30

About KPIs. In English, there’s a concept called perverse incentive, “a harmful stimulus.” It occurs when you try to quash evil, but the methods become the perfect fertilizer for it. There’s a saying, “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure” (Marilyn Strathern based on Goodhart’s Law).

A classic example is the “Cobra Effect.” In colonial India, the British decided to reduce the snake population and offered a reward for every head. The plan seemed as reliable as a Swiss watch until Indians began breeding cobras on farms for the “harvest.” When the authorities realized they were being duped and cancelled the payments, the farmers simply released the now-useless snakes into the wild. As a result, there were many more cobras than before the program started 🙂

In a similar way, the French in Hanoi battled rats by paying money for severed tails. The city became overrun with lively yet tailless rats: the Vietnamese cut off the “currency” and released the creatures to breed further, to not lose a stable income.

In the 19th century, archaeologists searching for dinosaur bones and ancient fossils paid locals for every piece found. As a result, resourceful diggers intentionally shattered whole, priceless skeletons into small pieces to earn more by submitting them separately. Science wept, but the KPI for “number of finds” soared. A similar tragedy occurred with the Dead Sea Scrolls: Bedouins cut the found scrolls into small pieces to sell each fragment separately.

In the USA, this malady struck infrastructure. When building the Transcontinental Railroad, the government paid Union Pacific subsidies for every mile laid. In Nebraska, engineers, in a single corrupt impulse, drew a huge loop—the Oxbow Route. The extra 9 miles of detour made no sense for logistics but brought the builders hundreds of thousands of dollars “out of thin air.”

But if the “loop” in Nebraska was just theft, then the mistakes of U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara were a tragedy. An aficionado of numbers and mathematical models, he tried to manage the Vietnam War like a Ford assembly line.

When General Edward Lansdale timidly noted that McNamara’s formulas lacked the variable “the spirit and will of the Vietnamese people,” the secretary noted it in pencil in his notebook. And then erased it. He said that if something cannot be measured, it’s unimportant. The main metric became the body count. Officers onsite, eager to curry favor, began labeling everyone indiscriminately as “enemies,” painting an illusion of imminent victory in Washington, while the actual situation spiraled into the abyss.

In science, there’s a radical principle similar to Occam’s Razor— “Newton’s Flaming Laser Sword” (also known as “Alder’s Razor”). Its essence: if something cannot be tested by experiment (or measurement), it’s not even worthy of discussion.

It sounds reasonable for physics, but in life, it’s a direct path to what sociologist Daniel Yankelovich called the degradation of perception. He described this as a descent through four steps:

1. First, we measure only what is easy to measure.

2. Then we ignore what is difficult to measure or requires qualitative assessment.

3. The third step—we decide that what cannot be measured is not so important.

4. And the final step—we declare that what cannot be measured actually does not exist.

And at that moment, we become blind. We view the world through the keyhole of metrics, while in the room behind the door, cobras are bred, dinosaur bones are broken, and wars are lost.

Dreams of Power: Cocaine, Rare Earth Metals, and Unexpected Diplomacy | January 03 2026, 13:40

I slept through everything. What are you betting on 1) all the cocaine is ours now? 2) they’ll release them in exchange for a deal on rare earth metals and oil? 3) Maduro turns up in Saratov?

Celebrating a Quarter Millennium: America’s Semiquincentennial | January 02 2026, 04:19

We pass the marker announcing the start of the sestercentennial, also known as the semiquincentennial. The first term contains sester, which means something on the way from 2 to 3. The second term essentially means half of 5 hundreds. Centennial in both words, of course, refers to hundreds of years.

Navigating the Airline Seat Dilemma: Equality and Passenger Size Policy Changes | December 30 2025, 20:21

As I sit on the plane, I ponder how airlines separate excessively obese people from those not obese enough, and how they make the former pay twice as much. And how does this align with the policy of universal equality and equal opportunities? The issue causes “anthropometric dissonance” – over the past decades, the average airplane seat width has narrowed from 47 to 43 cm, while the average passenger weight has significantly increased. As a result, there emerges a rigid classification of passengers into “regular” and officially recognized “Customers of Size” (CoS).

The main technical criterion separating these categories is the “armrest rule.” If a person’s body extends beyond the outer boundary of the lowered armrest by more than 1 inch (2.5 cm), they are officially recognized as “oversized.” The inability to fully lower the armrest without pain or discomfort to oneself or a neighbor is grounds for requiring the purchase of a second seat.

Until 2025, Southwest Airlines was considered the “gold standard” for large individuals, allowing them to occupy a second seat for free. However, as of January 27, 2025, the rules changed: such passengers are now required to purchase a second seat in advance when booking. If an individual fails to do this and the flight is full, they may simply be denied boarding and offered to rebook to another flight where two adjacent seats are available.

The financial risks now almost entirely fall on the passenger. According to the new 2025 policy, a refund for an additionally purchased seat is only possible if the flight departs not fully booked. Considering that the average aircraft occupancy today is 85–90%, the likelihood that money paid for a “comfort seat” will not be refunded is extremely high.

There exists a “geographical lottery” of passenger rights in the world. In Canada, a unique doctrine of “One Person, One Fare” (1P1F) is affirmed by court. There, obesity is recognized as a “functional disability,” therefore, airlines are required to provide a second seat for free on domestic flights if the passenger presents a medical certificate. In the USA and Europe, no such benefits exist, and comfort is considered a commercial service.

Technically, there is also a “seatbelt rule,” which is the second most important (after the armrest rule) and serves as a kind of “legal and technical barrier.” Specifically, every passenger must be buckled during taxi, takeoff, and landing. If the belt does not fasten, the passenger physically cannot be seated. This isn’t a matter of comfort, but a question of legality aboard the aircraft. If the standard length of the belt is insufficient, the passenger has the right to request a seatbelt extender, which usually adds between 25 to 60 centimeters. The mere request for an extender often gets recorded by flight attendants as a marker of an “increased size passenger.” This is a critical moment. Most airlines globally explicitly forbid the use of two extenders simultaneously. If the length of one standard belt plus one extender is not enough, the passenger is recognized as “oversized” for that seat type. In this case, the airline has the full right to remove them from the flight or demand the purchase of a second seat, as safety cannot be ensured.

Airlines’ main argument for imposing limitations is flight safety. According to EASA and FAA standards, a full airplane evacuation must take no more than 90 seconds. A large passenger, who physically does not fit in the seat, can block the aisle or slow the movement of others in an emergency, therefore they are prohibited from occupying seats near emergency exits. Personally, I think this is just a nice reason to avoid spending extra money.

Identifying “too fat” passengers often happens right in the cabin. Flight attendants have the right to demand that a person undergo an “armrest test” in front of witnesses. If an “encroachment” into a neighbor’s space is discovered, priority is always given to those who fit in their own seat, and the CoS passenger may be removed from the flight for the comfort of others.

Category: Society