Part of the reason why in particular English & French settlers saw the local Indians as incapable of building the things they saw is because by the time they were settling these areas, the local Indians were massively depopulated and really weren't capable of it anymore. This isn't the case in the Spanish settlement regions because the Spanish got there so much earlier and actually saw the complex societies in their heyday. Bernal Diaz exploring and conquering Mexico in 1521 was not dismissive of the locals' construction abilities! Mexico did depopulate - it didn't reach the same population as it had in the early 1500s until the mid-20th century - but the plagues didn't hit until the Spanish saw what was there.
The context is more like this: we regularly have internal brainstorming sessions when we run up an interesting or tricky problem, to come up with ideas on how to solve it.
So in the context of an interview, I'm trying to treat the interviewee like a colleague who I'm coming to with a problem I'm having, so we can come up with a solution together. That often involves drawing things out on a whiteboard: not code, but more diagrams to describe the problem. Then we come up with ideas on how to do it, under various constraints that I share.
Usually I have in my pocket 2-3 different approaches that we tried when we did it ourselves, and I'm looking for: can you understand the tradeoffs between these different approaches, do you understand how they work, and are you capable of implementing them to test and cross-compare them?
Scientific computing. We write software to do domain-specific scientific analysis on customers' machines. So we have a diverse set of needs of the specific analyses to do: sometimes we just use algorithms out in the open literature, sometimes we have to develop them ourselves. We've also had substantial work in devops, because we have to release software packages that not-very-savvy academic users can deploy and run on their own wildly-varying machines.
Interviewees are encouraged to use Google, code on a laptop rather than on a whiteboard, etc. Sadly, I only get an hour to interview people rather than a week. But I have had people complain about "completely unrealistic problems unrelated to the real work" when the problem is something I literally had to solve 3 months ago.
I've heard bitching about some of the interview questions our team asks before, but here's the thing: each of those questions is about a problem our team actually had to solve before, reformulated into an interview-style question. Yes, we've had to use Hamming distances, worry about the scaling (N log N vs N^2) of particular solutions, use error-correcting codes, interesting data structures and all of that. Is that most of the job? No, we do a lot of more boring stuff too, but the algorithms and data structures are definitely a part of it. I don't want someone who can only glue pieces together, developing novel tools to solve the problem is important too.
Compare to needle cases, which were similar womens' tools. Most of them were wooden or bone, but rich women would get fancy ones made of bronze, and pretty commonly be buried with them.
Sewing, spinning, weaving, and knitting tools are fairly common grave goods to find in women's graves: spindle whorls, needle cases, bone beaters, etc. As far as wood vs. bronze, almost certainly survivorship bias. The only wooden objects that survive that long are those that have fallen in bogs, where the anoxic environment prevents rot. Normal wooden grave goods will have rotted away by now.
Plenty of people foresaw it. California spent ~$200m on building up a stockpile of PPE and other medical supplies back in 2006, before Brown cut funding for the program in 2011.
I think we're at the point where public mandates are doing more harm than good. I am disappointed that there are so many people pushing back against simple approval of an effective vaccine because they are worried about an unnecessary mandate being imposed.
The risks of Covid to children is, as you say, extremely low. The risk of the Pfizer vaccine to children is even lower.
Right now those "individuals with an underlying complex disability" are not allowed to get vaccinated because the vaccine has not been approved for young children, even with an emergency use authorization.
I think the parents of children with disabilities that make Covid more potentially dangerous for them ought to be allowed to vaccinate their child. Do you disagree?
More than 90% collapse in Mexico from 1520 to 1580, mostly from three epidemics. Starting from ~22m, 8m (37%) dead from a 1520 smallpox epidemic, 12-15m dead (~80%) from a 1545 cocolitzli epidemic, and another ~2m dead (~50%) from a 1576 cotolitzli epidemic. Mexican population didn't recover to its previous highs until the 20th century.
California regulatory requirements basically shut down drivers owning their own trucks: the cheap old diesel trucks aren't in compliance anymore. So there's a lot of scummy leasing arrangements for the newer more expensive trucks.