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.

I mean that’s just the classic realist security paradox, right? The Iranian regime feels, not without reason, like they need to have a lot of military options to keep themselves safe against both internal and external threats. Those options include missile forces, the nuclear program, the ability to close the Strait of Hormuz, and a variety of regional proxies that can act in their interest and keep their regional adversaries from stabilizing and forming a real threat. However, having all those different security apparatuses makes other nations that have to interact with them (either because they’re also in the region, or they rely on the Strait of Hormuz, or they would also die in a nuclear apocalypse) more likely to feel the need to increase their own security apparatus, which in turn increases the threat they can pose to Iran. Meanwhile the fact that all this investment is going into the military means that there are fewer resources available and less inclination to try and solve problems by other means, making it increasingly likely that any conflict is going to be resolved kinetically, which in turn further reinforces the need for all that military investment.

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.

Given the ubiquity of explosive drones specifically I feel like we need that calendar cartoon with March 2026 being torn off to reveal July 1864

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

Man, I can’t hear the “anti-human” line as anything other than straight Alex Jones shit. Because the enemy wants to massively depopulate the earth in order to serve their satanic master, who is the literal devil.

Anyone remember when Chrome had that issue with validating nested URL-encoded characters? Anyone for John%%80%80 Doe?