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.

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orsorna 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

To convert that figure to a more relatable number: the surface area of the Earth is just about 197 million square miles. With such an error I'm having a hard time trusting the article content.

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boothby 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Technically, if you're measuring surface area, it' important to remember that the earth is not a sphere. There's a bit of a paradox measuring shorelines: the shorter your ruler, the longer it gets, because you're able to capture more complex features. Pethaps the authors took an extremely precise measurement of the surface of Estonia, counting everything down to the sinus cavities of dogs sleeping in alleys...

	▲	dmd 7 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Area isn’t notably affected by fractal boundaries. Only perimeter is.

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closewith 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Common enough error in the US when dealing with square meters abbreviated to sq m. Only off but a factor of 2.6 million.

But yes, it does call into question the rest of the fact checking.

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B1FF_PSUVM 2 hours ago | parent [-]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estonia Area • Total 45,335 km2 (17,504 sq mi)

Some people are just oblivious to six orders of magnitude mistakes, and then go off about "folly, mistake, calamitous hubris, neglect, and plain stupidity" ...

	▲	closewith 16 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Assuming this is about Harju, it seems the author read "245 million sq m" and assumed the m was miles, not metres. 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.

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bryanrasmussen 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I mean it's sort of hard to believe anything they say.