Assadi
Personally, I think the water boiling thing is one of the dumber things they do because, at least in most of the big cities, the thing that is most likely to be wrong with the water is not bacteria and other things that would be killed by boiling your water but rather heavy metals (and, last I checked, boiling my water does not remove lead!).
Also, anecdotally, I've yet to die from drinking from drinking unfiltered Tomsk tap water & never noticed abnormal levels of anything nasty during blood work. I think there is a lot of paranoia about the water system here that has generally been undeserved over the past decade or so.
Again, it's not actually about whether Iran is good or bad. If it was simply about good VS evil, nobody would be standing idly as the Saudis yeet missiles into Yemeni civilians.
The sanctions are a joke. It is all about American political agenda.
The governments of the West are totally chill with regimes that are just as brutal, if not more brutal, than Iran, like Saudi Arabia.
The difference really is mostly just "which side are you on".
As of 2019, I'm fairly happy with Linux on the desktop; usability is really solid, WINE is significantly better than years before, and many games will play perfectly fine with basically no manual configuration thanks to projects like DXVK.
I'm running KDE on Arch. And, I'm definitely happier than I was on Windows.
I ran into this on a couple of legacy CodeIgniter applications that I was rewriting for a small Swedish company and had such a visceral level of shock and disgust when I realised all the production servers contained a publicly accessible ".git" folder.
Worst of all, people had been committing database details. So, not only was the source code for all the applications public, all the user data effectively was too (and, let me tell you, those passwords were NOT hashed properly!).
I regularly say things in public and in public spaces on the internet where my full name and details are attached (e.g., Facebook, VK, etc) that I think to myself "you know, maybe I am pushing this a bit too far". But, as a foreign student, that seems to be more of an irrational fear instilled in me based on the perception we have of Russia back home.
Realistically, unless you're siding with some sort of terrorist organisation, you're generally ok when it comes to the federal government. If you've very blatant about your anti-regime opinions, you might get some attention, but it isn't like you're ever going to get declined a visa renewal or deported or something like that; the most they'll do is watch you more closely.
And, don't get me wrong as well, it would have to be genuine terrorist ties to get you deported. For example, I regularly criticise Russia over their treatment of Oleg Sentsov who is, in my opinion, mislabeled as a terrorist and being treated, honestly, pretty abhorrently. My "terrorist" sympathies and criticism over human rights, however, is not enough to upset the federal migration services.
At the university level, though, I am also very proud of my institution and their commitment to their students. They and the regional government of Tomsk have regularly shown the fact that they're willing to stick up to the federal government in order to protect the students.
I can't imagine American universities are too too different. Maybe I'm wrong. But, it seems like there is a weird anti-higher education culture right now that I don't fully understand.
I really do respect my university a lot for the freedom they give me. The authority here is pretty lax. As long as you get the job done and don't smoke in the dorm, they don't care.
California's can be as high as 13 something percent, I believe (though, I think with the kind of numbers the other guy was talking about, it'd probably be like 6-7%). But, you're right that the property tax is a serious exaggeration. Like, expensive places like Austin are around 2%, from what I remember.
Honestly, SaaS, even if it is operated in your own country, makes me feel gross. I try to stay away from anything I can't self-host as much as possible.