...and if you had actually seen our ballot for this primary, you'd know that anyone with a semblance of care to know who they were voting for and why constituted veritable weeks of legwork. The governor's race had like 60 people running, not to mention all the judge seats, etc.
You got a bad/dry one. Happens all the time with home grown and less frequently with commercial products. My backyard trees have improved, but only with fairly intensive upkeep.
The flavor coming right off the tree can be truly candy-like given optimal conditions. After tasting the best ones from my own tree, I had the revelation that so many things that are "orange flavored" are mimicking navels specifically.
It's the pervasive theme in the book, but never really given a conceptual grounding further than "this sort of looks like recursion or can be modelled circularly so it's a strange loop". The vagueness of it reveals itself as being "more intuitive", because a vaguer pattern will have more matches. I don't remember Hofstadter digressing on whether these loops work "in reverse" either, which is sort of what the author here is denying. Basically positing that f doesn't have a well-defined inverse.
It's only a little bit comforting that computers still live in meatspace when you consider something like an AI-controlled Metal Gear roaming around though.
The author disclaims that he's not a homeowner at the very end of the article, but these types of pieces steelmanning renting always read to me as thinly veiled pleas of "please exit the market so I can have more".
I'm of course aware of the basis of these documents as an American. However, a lot of the core ideas behind the US' founding were that it was possible to form "a more perfect union". I.e. one where government was done 'right', I.e. democracy. There were certainly anarchists at the time too, but the form of anti-government sentiment we have now seems to be almost pathological; memetic rather than considered.
We also live in an era where the government (federal, state, whatever) is seemingly viewed by many as less a benevolent force to be co-opted, and increasingly as a necessary evil to be thwarted and disempowered. Sure, the time period you mention is right around the heart of the civil war, with all the anti- and pro-establsihment sentiment that came along with it, but these feelings were rather new at the time. Most people were still farmers who valued "getting shit done" more highly than divorced-from-reality ideological barriers. The country was still needing to be connected and filled up.