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4000 years old and it's already the Fifth Dynasty. In another professional life I was a classicist, and I thought I dealt with old stuff there, but Egypt is just so impossibly anci…

Except when it wasn't for a few notable decades.

That's simplified history at best. Greek texts were much (much) better preserved in the Byzantine empire, and were lost to the West mostly because people forgot Greek and copies de…

Read Coase's book on the theory of the firm. The short answer is yes, firms are just like gosplan. We put up with them because they reduced transaction costs.

>the corporation has no way to compel me What? A big corp can't hire a couple of goons?

Your comment assumes that Trump/Brexit/Le Pen voters are trying to "do something" with their votes. What if they're just trying to do as much damage as possible, knowing the system…

Maybe the first time I've ever agreed with valuearb.

> The greatest scientific creative genius of recent memory, Richard Feynman I was going to pick apart the whole comment, but then this stuck out at me. WTF? The Feynman cult truly …

It was 3/5, not 2/3, to break a filibuster, and the use of filibusters had been getting to unprecedented levels. The argument above was that constitutional change should be hard I.…

> Don't corporations have growth targets and multi-year plans? Don't they (mostly) have a top-down management structure, where freedom of action and collective intelligence are con…

The occult writer Arthur Edward Waite - of Rider-Waite-Smith tarot fame - used to work for Horlick's, a fact for which he was much mocked by Aleister Crowley.

Local people's congresses are directly elected. Higher levels up to the National People's Congress, are indirectly elected by the level below. So imagine you vote for town council.…

>Is Finno-Ugric a magnet for this kind of speculation? Oh my yes.

Depends on the crop.

I don't know, I was able to understand the initial problem statements, and even a bit of the numbered sub-problems, and I'm a trained classicist pig-ignorant in math.

Name an animal that uses grammar, or something like it.

I have been an emacs user for 16 years now, and I have come to this conclusion as well. I don't - like 99% of emacs users - use advance scripting capabilities. But even if I did, i…

Are Africans smoking more because they have more disposable income? If so, this may be an encouraging trend, in a way.

Before about 1932, karate was written with the characters 唐手 (Tang/China hand). Then it was written with 空手 (open hand) - same sound, different characters.

Awk for a web server? It's been done. http://awk.info/?tools/server

Geniuses come and go, but being able to show up and execute still counts for a lot - in math as elsewhere.

Directory yes, search no.

Buried lede is how far India is lagging. Rural wages "[d]oubling in China in the last decade, tripling or quadrupling in Vietnam. A bit slower in Bangladesh, but still up by half."…