Neat read on the whole, but was fun to see how huge the author believes Estonia is:
> When Estonia, for example, became independent of the Soviet Union, some 245 million square miles of collectivist farmlands were simply abandoned.
> When Estonia, for example, became independent of the Soviet Union, some 245 million square miles of collectivist farmlands were simply abandoned.
[now that the joke is explained, feel free to laugh]
But yes, it does call into question the rest of the fact checking.
Some people are just oblivious to six orders of magnitude mistakes, and then go off about "folly, mistake, calamitous hubris, neglect, and plain stupidity" ...
So the already large 24,500 hectare farm became a ludicrous 245 million square mile multi-planetary behemoth.
Reading sq m as square miles is a surprisingly common error in the US, but usually gets caught before production or publication because the result is orders of magnitude out.
But many people are really like this, no notion whatsoever of order of magnitude plausibility. Has to be beaten out of engineering students, but I suppose the majority of the population is untreated.
(LLMs are going to be a lot of fun too)