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 the global financial crisis. Eight years of indulging conspiracist nonsense later, their PM decided to hold the Brexit referendum as a means of jangling some keys in front of their voting base and then, perhaps even more dumbly, the party decided to treat the result of a 52-48 referendum as more than advisory.

This 1-2 punch has locked in two lost decades in which the UK's GDP will have stagnated in real terms. Most of their politics in the last decade has been make-believe that what obviously happened somehow didn't, with various scapegoating and culture-war distraction attempts tossed in. Not helping is that they have first-past-the-post individual districts (and way too many parties to be sustainable in that electoral system) that result in their self-defeating hinterlands being over-represented.

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.

But if that all happens, including the opponent funding, and those opponents get routed, then the bluff's been called and the lobby's hand has been found wanting.

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. Primaries still have lower turnout and feature candidates with less name recognition, so the potential impact of money is quite high.

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 measure typically quoted doesn’t mean the others don’t exist.

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 [*]!

[*] Failing to solve the impossible situation FSD dropped them into, that is.

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 area where correctness matters.

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 the discomfort disappears because you say "No" and they say "OK, cool".

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 context culture like Japan people would be expected to code switch between Asking and Guessing behaviors depending on their audience, relative status, social rapport, etc.

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 the way of exported cultural products ("The Raid" films?), are much worse in sports than would be expected based on population, spend relatively little on their military and don't do much in the way of regional power projection, and are growing economically but not remarkably, so there just aren't that many avenues for them to make international news.

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 kids, half of the ones within shouting distance are at parent-scheduled activities, and half of the remainder aren't allowed to brave street crossings because of the six-foot-tall hoods and inattentive drivers of passing ChildMurker1050s, no amount of park yelling will be sufficient.

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 million.