Viewing profile — elgenie

Tomatoes are a New World crop, so those come from the Colombian exchange rather than some sort of thousands-year-old Silk Road trading history.

Looking at Brexit is picking up the story halfway through. About 18 years ago now the Tories thought, incorrectly, that budgetary austerity was the prescription for responding to t…

Also, Andreessen’s wife of two decades attended Stanford. Her billionaire father ensured that their surname (Arrillaga) is plastered all over the campus.

That works mainly because the money comes with a heavily implied threat: don't vote the way we want and the money spigot stops, or even reroutes into the coffers of your opponent. …

In jurisdictions in which there's a large imbalance between the parties the general election is a foregone conclusion; the primary of the dominant party becomes the real election. …

The US tracks six different unemployment metrics plus overall labor force participation rate. You’re talking about U6 and/or labor force participation rate. Just because U3 is the …

Isn't there a great deal of gaming going on with the car disengaging FSD milliseconds before crashing? Voila, no "full" "self" driving accident; just another human failing [*]! [*]…

No code is as easy to maintain as no code. No code runs as fast as no code.

QA efforts can whack-a-mole some issues, but the mismatch of problem and solution is inherent in any situation in which a generator of plausible-sounding text gets pointed at an ar…

Discomfort is present only if you suspect they're a Guesser and thus one of you has greatly misjudged the relationship and social context. If you know or suspect they're an Asker t…

The usual dichotomy / terminology for this stuff as it relates to painting national and business cultures with broad brushes is "high context" versus "low context". In a high conte…

The top five countries in the world by Muslim population are not in the Middle East/North Africa region: Indonesia, Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Nigeria.

They're #4 by population, and the world's most populous Muslim country, but are also only a quarter century removed from a corrupt authoritarian regime. They have very little in th…

This working is a function of density. First, imagining a park at the corner is a huge assumption. Second, if the park isn't within shouting distance of the necessary number of kid…

That feeling of shared societal responsibility probably has at least something to do with the birth rate. Japan is down to just 686K babies born per year from a population of 123 m…

Now consider what's happening to the learning process of the (rather large) subset of current college students choosing to replace that struggle for detailed understanding with LLM…

Spelling things out helps with the euphemisms. Anti-diversity, equity, and inclusion forces turn out to be (gasp) against all of diversity, and equity, and inclusion.

This is an incoherent blog post. 1. The concept of "domestic terrorist organization" not a thing under any US law. Further, there exists no such organization in observable reality.…

You’re attempting to argue that “revisions exist” is somehow strong evidence for the proposition that “no aspect of particular revision X was politically motivated”. That is gaslig…

These are numbers compiled by this administration about a period immediately before Trump imposed some very very very economically stupid tariffs. It's quite suspicious to have suc…

Like 5-10% of the US's total GDP gets wasted annually on the layers and layers and layers of healthcare middlemen… for worse outcomes.

De -densification isn't required; a one-for-one knocking down and rebuilding of a single family residence suffices.

Houses depreciate if there's an adequate supply of newer housing keeping up with the housing demand of the area. If there isn't then the general GDP growth of the area in which the…

Appointing a know-nothing conspiracy theorist doesn't have that exact issue, yes … but in a way where the cure is significantly worse than the disease. You can cultivate state capa…

What is this record of which you speak and what, pray tell, are the penalties suffered by Elon for lying repeatedly on it?