I think you're parsing it very literally. This was an in person conversation with much less strict rules of construction. 

I took it to mean: there's a lore in the rationality community that criticism is good because it helps you improve, contrary to the general feeling that it's bad because it hurts your reputation. 

It's presented out of order because there's a conversation going on where the speaker only has a rough idea they want to communicate and they're putting it into words as they go, and there's non-verbal feedback going on in the process we can't see.

When I imagine myself in Metz's position I expect he would take this same meaning, and I therefore think it's likely a lot of other readers would take the same meaning. I think the only major ambiguity exists when readers parse it as something different than a transcript.

The story has been picked up by The Guardian now. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jun/06/whistleblower-ufo-alien-tech-spacecraft

Even more effective in my experience is giving them an authentic pleasant greeting. "Good evening officer". For some reason saying sir constantly makes me feel nervous and like I'm ceding too much power. I usually say it once or twice and never in my first couple answers.

The specific words I've found most helpful have been "I decline to answer".

Investigating the methods of Wim Hof may yield some useful data points in this search. His book is painfully long winded and self-indulgent, and I'm only half way through without finding any direct methods, but the separate synopsis of the method I've found through google has thus far proven to be both invigorating and grounding when I've tried it.

http://highexistence.com/the-wim-hof-method-revealed-how-to-consciously-control-your-immune-system/

If you're trying to extinguish an eating habit alter your sense of taste for the period in which it's a problem. The cheap and easy way is with mouthwash. If regular mouthwash doesn't last long enough chlorhexidine mouthwash (marketed as "clinical strength") will alter taste for around an hour or two. This may be useful for intermittent fasting and reduction in caffeine consumption.

What part of this is screwing Kiva? Temporarily lending money then getting it back is what Kiva is for.

What I have taken from this is any time I travel abroad I should get in touch with my stamp investing friend and form a strategy for finding good local deals that have a likely long term value, possibly in other markets, and also I should try to make more friends expert in such collectibles investing for the same reason. I have not concluded I should expect to beat the market without a similar effort.

You should not expect such cards to be reliable.

The reason this is possible is because of the way flash memory is manufactured now: the chips are produced with faults, then connected to a microprocessor that runs sophisticated proprietary algorithms to identify the faulty memory cells and reliably distribute stored files across the working memory cells, and also report to both the manufacturer and consumer the total capacity of those working cells. This way a single silicon wafer produced with imperfections can yield hundreds of sd cards ranging from megabytes to 128gb each.

The scammers you're talking about reprogram the microprocessors on these cards to identify themselves as having a larger capacity, but this isn't so simple as it being connected to a reliable 4GB flash memory chip and reporting itself as connected to a reliable 8GB flash memory chip, rather they're all uniformly connected to highly unreliable 32GB or greater memory chips and correcting the reliability problem in firmware, and there's no telling how the scammers messed with that besides the change in the reported capacity. I would expect any file saved on such a card to have pieces randomized or zeroed over time.