Fair point. Mainly I agree with the sibling comment: the revealed preference of many people around the world, including many people from the richest countries in Europe, is to move the United States and then settle permanently. I think that means a lot.
Obviously you can also say that the US is geopolitically successful because of its global military and diplomatic dominance, but I account zero value to this.
But the success hasn't ended since the unused land became taken; in fact, the US became a superpower after the westward expansion era. My point is that looking at conditions today, the US still continues to succeed (by some definition of success) and other countries should try to emulate the aspects of the country that leads to that success. IMO one of the big factors is how well immigrants assimilate in the country, and birthright citizenship is a part of that.
I do agree with you that US success in the 19th century was due to many factors that are not relevant today.
Given the US is one of the most (the most?) successful countries in recent human history, shouldn't it be the other way around? Shouldn't the 95% be looking at the US and seeing what to copy?
Texcraft is an attempt to re-implement TeX with a modular/LLVM software architecture. These UIs take the same code in Texcraft that has identical behavior to TeX, and illustrates some of the inner workings of TeX. The lig/kern one is missing instructions :)
I have also found at least one bug in Knuth's TeX recently and am currently writing it up.
Thank for the suggestion, implemented it! Now all suggestions have at least one hyphen and one position where the patterns disagree (one pattern says hyphenate, another to not hyphenate). I discovered you don't necessarily need long words to get "interesting" hyphenation results; e.g. https://hyphenate.dev/zero.
The motivation behind METAFONT is amusing to me because it seems to have some of the same hubris of the most extreme AI proponents nowadays: we can replace art by technology. I'm fascinated with TeX (and have spent a lot of my life rewriting it http://github.com/jamespfennell/texcraft) but I always found the situation with fonts in the TeX ecosystem a bit odd. There are people in our society whose vocation is font design (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Slimbach). But the TeX ecosystem landed in a place where we use fonts created by computer scientists rather than font designers.
Your annoyance is understandable, but it's worth remembering: he is not your slave. He does not exist to do things for you. His providing you with something good for a time does not obligate him to provide it to you forever. Because he is not your slave.
These stories usually have some non-trivial factor that is missing in the article. In this case there's a small visible red flag: the two tourists are British but traveling on B visas, rather than using the visa waiver program. Why? Well according the DHS they both have multi-year overstays in the US.
This doesn't justify the detention they went through. But it also means the lesson of the story is not "random tourists are being detained".
Also, my own take is that the high rent in NYC is sort of proof that the quality of life is high. Or at least, NYC is desirable. People are willing to pay a premium to live there, which is a strong signal of their preference.