I also met some nz government workers teaching ppl how to farm. They said most Mongolians weren’t interested in working with the dirt. Understandable given their long long history as nomads.
Mongolia is an incredibly shitty place to farm outside a couple of valleys with nice microclimates. There's very little infrastructure for the equipment and resources, and any farmers would be competing with Chinese farmers that don't have these constraints and can hit vastly lower price points. Farming is a difficult life in the best of situations, but not doing it in Mongolia is simply common sense.
> They said most Mongolians weren’t interested in working with the dirt.
What a strange statement. Most people in most countries aren’t interested in “working with the dirt” as their full time occupation. Are they supposed to be interested in working with dirt more than other countries for some reason, and not aim for science, tech, education, finance, arts, etc? I just looked it up, and Mongolia’s economy is around 35% mining and agriculture, with 10% of their total GDP from agriculture, which is quite a bit higher than New Zealand, so their statement seems especially ironic. The US and European economies have an even lower fraction of mining and agriculture, and aspire to get away from manual labor, especially involving dirt.
Also don’t forget it’s much easier to grow things in NZ than Mongolia: “the high altitude, extreme fluctuation in temperature, long winters, and low precipitation provides limited potential for agricultural development. The growing season is only 95 – 110 days. Because of Mongolia's harsh climate, it is unsuited to most cultivation.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongolia#Agriculture
Yeah, correct, because it makes more economic sense to herd than farm, for reasons you and I have both given. It doesn’t make sense nor help anything for foreigners to waltz in and proclaim Mongolians aren’t interested, right?
> 10% of their total GDP from agriculture, which is quite a bit higher than New Zealand
Meat was 11% of NZ export income: a huge amount more than the 1.5% for Mongolia[1]. GDP is weird, and comparing sectors or countries is hard. Comparing meat since that's closer to the topic.
> long winters, and low precipitation provides limited potential for agricultural development. it is unsuited to most cultivation
A better comparison is between the South Island of New Zealand and Mongolia. South Island latitude 41S to 47S. Mongolia latitude 41N to 50N. The South Island has "high-country farms" but yes New Zealand farming is far different from Mongolia where the country's altitude is mostly between say 800m and 1600m (along with continental weather). Our agriculture is very different from Mongolia's (and ours is variable: floods in some areas and bad droughts in other areas).
[1] Data: Mongolia Exports of meat and edible meat offal was US$19.73 Million during 2021, Mongolia of total Exports 1324.80. New Zealand had NZD77.2 billion exports, with NZD8.6 billion exports for meat and offal.
> They said most Mongolians weren’t interested in working with the dirt.
(Edit: removed inane opinion). Dissecting a second-hand sentence is pointless. Without more context, we can't know what they meant or what they were trying to communicate or the value of their opinion.
That’s all fair, I’d delete my comment if I could.
> Dissecting a second-hand sentence is pointless. Without more context, we can't know what they meant or what they were trying to communicate or the value of their opinion.
Totally agree. Sharing the second-hand sentence out of context also makes little sense, no? That was the only point I intended to make, and I should have left out the sloppy economic comparison.
The typical way of dealing with "bad people" is to subject them to the criminal justice system (or vigilantism if the problem is bad enough and the criminal justice system is inadequate). This tends to reduce, but not eliminate, the misbehaving.
Improving the ability to track down and prosecute perpetrators tends to result in less anonymity/privacy, so that makes the problem challenging.
Thinking in the long/very-long term, we need to get more innovative with the underlying technology to mitigate abuse. I mentioned this effort https://named-data.net in another part of the thread.
I’ve spent a decent amount of time figuring out to make porcelain tile. The most reliable way to do so and avoid cracking is to use a plaster mold and push slabs of clay into it. Cookie cutter and other slab methods produce too much cracking without heavy duty equipment or maybe a different clay formulation (I’m using standard porcelain which isn’t the easiest material)
As others have pointed out for the authors discussion this fact doesn’t really matter.
However what does matter is that the authors probably is not estimating the average correctly partially due to this bug. If they scaled without fixing their excessive string storage, they would probably find their estimate to be off.
Even with the fix I’d be surprised if the underlying distribution of data per user is normally distributed.
