In regards to your third paragraph, I would posit the opposite causality occurs as well - in a country where academia is seen as an honorable profession for morally upstanding people, people with integrity are more likely to pursue academics, and as a result there are fewer examples of dishonesty by these same experts [1]. Of course, this dynamic can cause a vicious cycle in any field, politics being a common example.
I think it's easier to be laid-back about immigration here because of how diffusely populated Canada is. I think for the 'cultural mosaic' model to work the different cultures need to feel they have the space to be themselves as well as have edges and margins where they can interact. That is probably a bit easier in a country with the geographic footprint of Canada.
If you're comparing to the US, the US is still sparsely populated by any means. Sure, the metro areas might be crowded. But I've never hear "lack of space" as the reason for denying immigration.
I still credit my academic achievements to my father reading 'Dune' to me as a child, because I was fascinated by the (paraphrased) introduction to one of the chapters:
"Many comment on how quickly Paul Muad-dib learned, but they do not realize that his first lesson was in how to learn, and the first part of that lesson was believing he could learn... it is amazing how few people believe they can learn".
That book is probably the reason I treated learning as a learnable skill rather than an innate ability.
My parents got me my most influential book when I was 4. "What Makes It Go? What Makes It Work? What Makes It Fly? What Makes It Float?" by Joe Kaufman. It taught me that everything has causal inner mechanisms. From then on, I had xray vision and could imagine the inner mechanisms of every object at work.
The conviction that the world, pace certain "intrinsic" limits of the information-theoretic or quantum-mechanical nature, is understandable is a singularly powerful one. It's something lots of people think they believe, but it took me (anecdotally) until I was 9 or 10 to internalise it. The belief that the X-ray vision you speak of exists is enough in many cases for one to "get" it.
I do not mean to start a tangential flamewar, but the ability to accept and be comfortable with not knowing, while at the same time believing that the unknown is not unknowable, is something a certain kind of religious worldview precludes. This is one thing which I realised quite early on that my parents didn't share my beliefs on: for them, there's some underlying agent that chooses what happens in situations that we call random or do not understand:
"I don't know why this happens, but there's no reason why we never should/it's not computable/etc."
"Ah, child, it's time to accept things as they are. When I do not understand, I say God's causing it to happen."
It's a confusing mixture of the different positions one can take on determinism coupled with a sort of complacence I find remarkable.
I recently read about the 'schizotypic' brain type, which was described essentially as having a lower threshold to accept new ideas. I much prefer that term to telling people I'm 'on the schizophrenic spectrum'
The greater tendency towards neuroses I think everyone could do without, but learning meditation young and practicing it consistently seems an effective way of dealing with it.
Those improvements in agricultural technology nearly all require both cheap fossil fuels and cheap water. It seems unlikely both will be available in an era of rapid climate change.
So it seems the big challenge with landing and taking off from the moon is carrying that much fuel. A robotic module on the moon that converts water, carbon and sunlight to rocket fuel should solve that problem.
Is anyone else imagining the mission is going to discretely drop such a module when it's in the moon's shadow or do I just have an overactive imagination?
The problem with the 'energy in-energy out' model is that energy is rarely what we need more of. Food cravings persist for the nutrient one needs most, not just the amount of energy needed. Eating less of a conventional diet does reduce the amount of energy one takes in, but also reduces intake of whatever nutrient the subject was craving in the first place. That's why compositional diets work better for so many people, if the subject gets all the nutrients they need, they won't feel the desire to eat more than that, and consequently won't take in more energy than they use.
TL;DR: Total energy in matters, but watching energy-to-vital-nutrient-ratios in one's food is a better way of ensuring the proper levels of both.
