The fewer checks there are on state power the more valuable corruption becomes.

In modern terms I imagine that variety plays into it to a degree. Grains you can use to make a lot of different foods, make animal feed, reduce to corn syrup or ethanol or whatever other products (in the US at least that’s the majority of our corn production) and so on. Even before you get into the question of long-term investments versus immediate payoffs under capitalism (how long does an orchard take to start paying off?) there’s just more varieties of products and a deeper market for cereals.

So I’m not able to provide the kind of proper citations that I want to here, but it looks like there are a few factors here. Most importantly, cereal grains have a very short growing season, which in some instances lets you get multiple crops from the same land in a year. More importantly, it massively increases your resiliency. Like, it you plant an orchard of walnuts or something, it takes a decade between planting and being able to actually harvest, by which time your community has starved or moved along if that was your primary source of food.

Of course potatoes and yams also have a fairly short season, and you do see yams come up as a staple in parts of Africa, for example. But the other big advantages cereals have are in preservation and byproducts. Grain will dry itself out and keep for a long time compared to most other crops, and can be ground into flour, fermented into alcohol, boiled and eaten as raw grain, etc. Potatoes don’t keep nearly as well, going to seed a relatively short while after harvest. Additionally, the threshing process gives you straw in addition to the grains, which can be used as building materials, animal feed, and a variety of other things. Most plants don’t lend themselves to that many purposes as easily, though this is hard (in my inexpert opinion) to judge correlation vs causation on. Did we find lots of ways to use straw because we were already growing grains and therefore had a bunch of straw leftover? I don’t know and I don’t know how to find out, or even if it matters on a broader scale.

However, one specific consequence of this contrast is that in 18th-centuey Ireland the absurdly complex chains of subdivided plots being leased by multiple layers of absentee landlords meant that for most Irish farmers maximizing nutrition per acre was vital for being able to feed their families on the meager lands they could afford to cultivate. This is a large part of the reason why they took to the potato so strongly when it was introduced, and in turn is part of why the same blight that had swept through all of Europe with minimal fanfare absolutely devastated the country. It’s not the only reason, but it was a large part of setting the stage for what happened next.

Anyways, thanks for giving me an interesting question to research instead of doing any of the shit I actually needed to be doing.

Some may find her “cringe” but she’s doing critical work in stopping the sites you use being DDOSed by AI scrapers.

But the effectiveness of the fraud is ironically predicated on people continuing to treat it as gambling.

Community notes have become the one decent feature on Twitter, but not for any of the reasons they were supposed to be.

I wonder why there could be confusion about the chain of command and who actually has what authority. I wonder how that happened, like if this was an easily foreseeable consequence to some kind of earlier action.

The Vatican has been two weeks away from a nulear weapon for the last 20 years, ever since that business with the antimatter bomb at the conclave. It’s a boogeyman they’re using to try and justify continuing the forever war against Italians. I say if they want atomic spaghetti, let em have it.

Did someone tell him that Perun had cut the “here’s why the US doesn’t have enough boats to escort all the traffic through the strait and would need a coalition to have any chance of success” part from his latest video, or is that just a deeply ironic coincidence.

I have never heard of this before and rather than Google it I’m going to decide that if you put 5-10 parallel rail lines to spread the weight you can actually put a whole oil tanker on rollers to drive it across the desert to the other side of the continent.

10/10 no notes

You know, the “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” argument being implicitly extended to cover second-generation immigrants should if taken seriously, imply that these people aren’t actually obligated to follow US law, which presumably includes immigration law. You know, if you go by a text-first originalist interpretation of the constitution and the law.

Machines with a lot of precision parts that need to hold up to the kind of wear and tear either a Marine or a maniacal quilter are capable of dishing out. So many layers of fabric…

Oh wait, there’s one! How could I miss it when it’s got an RCS as big as a 747! In fact, it looks exactly like a civilian airliner. Huh.

Oh well, still a plane so missile goes bwshhhhhhhhhhh

I mean, if you’re talking specifically in context about people with vaginas instead of women then using the gendered term does exclude both women without vaginas and men with them who are probably a relevant group in that context. But seriously how often does that come up for you? How often is the most important part of the woman you’re referring to her anatomy?

And while “females” is probably just as accurate in most contexts it’s also been poisoned with incel vibes at this point and it’s gonna be some time before it can be salvaged for general use outside of specific biological contexts without sounding like you’re about to unload a whole lot of baggage into the thread instead of getting therapy.

So the guys who have been burning almost as much VC money as they have water and electricity in the name of building AGI have announced that they’re totally gonna do it this time? Just a few more training runs man I swear this time we’re totally gonna turn everyone into paperclips just let me have a few more runs.

Not gonna lie, “enforcing the line between ketchup and tomato sauce” isn’t the sort of thing I’d expect the government to be into, but I guess I’m not mad about it?

I think the missing piece here is that B-52 isn’t just a pretty good cargo hauler, it’s a pretty good cargo hauler that we don’t need to buy a whole new airframe to get. Think of it less as “we’re commissioning these B-52s” and more as “hey look we found a way to use all these B-52s we already had” only this just keeps working forever.

I mean a lot of the services that companies are using are cloud-hosted, meaning that especially if you have branch offices or a lot of remote workers a normal firewall in the datacenter introduces an unnecessary bottleneck. Putting the logical edge of your organization’s network in the cloud too makes sense from a performance perspective in that case, and then turning the actual firewalls into SaaS seems much less absurd.

Isn’t this the women that conservatives tried to say was so attractive that her success was somehow anti-woke?

I’m pretty sure based on the structure of the deal between the Onion and the Connecticut families this basically guarantees that the families (and any other creditors I guess) take home less money. Given the amount of money that they’re owed from the Connecticut judgement those families are basically 95% of the beneficiaries of this sale, and the original deal with the Onion had them giving up a huge chunk of what they could be entitled to in order to make sure that the Texas families (who were victimized in the same way but weren’t part of the same suit and got a much lower reward from a Texas court) got $100,000 more than they would have under the next-best offer. So in order for this to end up being a gain the next-best bid would need to either be so high that giving up $1.5 billion wouldn’t be enough to exceed what the Texas families would get, or else it gives the other bidder the ability to cut their bid to basically nothing and in turn reduce the amount that the Connecticut families forgo and the amount the Texas families take home by however much they want.

This is all amateur analysis, but short of rejecting the Connecticut/Onion bid outright for some reason I don’t think there’s any way that this doesn’t put the families in a worse spot. Instead whoever is behind the FUAS bid (widely believed to be Jones’s allies) may get to decide how much to screw the families over.

Edit to fix some numbers. What’s $1,498.5 billion between friends?