Astral Codex Ten

Mexican

9 min read

Mexican

Article

Mexican is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 4 times across 4 issues between April 19, 2021 and December 17, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as “corporate demand for underpriced Mexican farm labor”; “broiling under the Mexican sun”; “fall in corporate demand for underpriced Mexican farm labor”. It most often appears alongside France, Russia, Trump.

Metadata

  • Category: Places
  • Mention count: 4
  • Issue count: 4
  • First seen: April 19, 2021
  • Last seen: December 17, 2024

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Mantic Monday: Grading My Trump Predictions
April 19, 2021 · Original source
I wrote this during a time when people were making extreme claims about Trump’s purported racial policies. Matt Yglesias (then at Vox) wrote that “My guess is in a Trump administration angry mobs will beat and murder Jews and people of color with impunity”. Jamelle Bouie (of Slate) agreed and said we were on the edge of “state-sanctioned racial violence”. Salon literally wrote an article called If Trump Wins, Say Goodbye To Your Black Friends (it was subtitled “A Modest Proposal”, but my impression is the joking part was the suggestion to build a black separatist nation in Atlanta). Vox wrote about how minority kids believed they would be forced to leave the country; therapists were called in to help Muslim kids who believed Trump was going to kill them.
Inline links: wrote that, said, If Trump Wins, Say Goodbye To Your Black Friends, minority kids believed they would be forced to leave the country, Trump was going to kill them
41. Donald Trump remains President at the end of 2017: 90% 42. No serious impeachment proceedings are active against Trump: 80% ***43. Construction on Mexican border wall (beyond existing barriers) begins: 80% 44. Trump administration does not initiate extra prosecution of Hillary Clinton: 90% ***45. US GDP growth lower than in 2016: 60% ***46. US unemployment to be higher at end of year than beginning: 60% 47. US does not withdraw from large trade org like WTO or NAFTA: 90% 48. US does not publicly and explicitly disavow One China policy: 95% 49. No race riot killing > 5 people: 95% ***50. US lifts at least half of existing sanctions on Russia: 70% 51. Donald Trump’s approval rating at the end of 2017 is lower than fifty percent: 80% 52. ...lower than forty percent: 60%
The crisis of the Republican Party will turn out to have been overblown. Trump’s policies have been so standard-Republican that there will be no problem integrating him into the standard Republican pantheon, plus or minus some concerns about his personality which will disappear once he personally leaves the stage. Some competent demagogue (maybe Ted Cruz or Mike Pence) will use some phrase equivalent to “compassionate Trumpism”, everyone will agree it is a good idea, and in practice it will be exactly the same as what Republicans have been doing forever. The party might move slightly to the right on immigration, but this will be made easy by a fall in corporate demand for underpriced Mexican farm labor, and might be trivial if there’s a border wall and they can declare mission accomplished. If the post-Trump standard-bearer has the slightest amount of personal continence, he should end up with a more-or-less united party who view Trump as a flawed but ultimately positive figure, like how they view GW Bush. Also, I predict we see a lot more of Ted Cruz than people are expecting.
Your Book Review: The Wizard And The Prophet
April 30, 2021 · Original source
In college, Borlaug first studies forestry, then gets seduced by plant biologist Elvin Charles Stakman’s personal crusade against stem rust, a fungus that blights wheat crops and, at the time, critically endangered the global wheat supply. After a brief stint as an industry research scientist at DuPont, in the 1940s Borlaug ends up as the unlikely candidate to lead a nascent rust study in Chapingo, Mexico. Borlaug is sent by his superiors essentially to sell the Mexican farmers on the more productive (but still rust-susceptible) American wheat strains. Instead, he takes the underfunded and under-resourced Chapingo project into an unexpected direction: after seeing that rust and variability in growing conditions would hamper any attempt to increase wheat crop yields in Mexico, he begins a series of years-long Mendelian cross-breeding pilots in four different locations of Mexico to find a prodigious, hardy wheat strain that is not only immune to rust, but can survive and thrive virtually no matter the location or growing conditions.
Inline links: Elvin Charles Stakman’s, stem rust
Despite lack of experience, no knowledge of the molecular mechanisms of genetics (which were yet to be discovered), skepticism from his superiors, suspicion from the Mexican farmers, and even Vogt’s attempt to shut the program down, Borlaug perseveres. After years of painstakingly cross-breeding hundreds of wheat strains from all around the world by hand, he finally stumbles on his miracle wheat, which sextuples the yield of the previous wheat cultivars in Mexico and turns the country into a wheat exporter virtually overnight. With Borlaug’s "package" of new wheat (and later, rice), modern synthetic fertilizer, and state-of-the-art agricultural science, a global famine – threatening not just Mexico, but the billions of people worldwide experiencing the post-WWII population boom – is averted, and farmers around the world can now feed orders of magnitude more people with less effort. For this, he wins the Nobel prize and timeless love and admira– ...haha, just kidding. He does win a Nobel prize, but I think it’s safe to say that while some highly educated folks in some niche fields know what the Green Revolution is, outside of a few unassuming places in the Midwest, nobody is going to run into a statue of this guy in their town square.
Inline links: miracle wheat, a few unassuming places in the Midwest
If you look around, you’ll see lots of other COVID-like problems out there that are quietly but inexorably claiming lives and dragging down average utility worldwide – poverty, homelessness, economic stagnation – that Wizards haven’t found good solutions for. I don’t think it’s from a lack of trying; I think we may have hit a carrying capacity limit on our ability to deal with complexity. Systems in the modern world are complex. No, really complex. No, even more complex than that. Consider all of the different systems that interacted to form the giant clusterfuck that is the COVID-19 pandemic response: local politics, global politics, scientific knowledge production, scientific knowledge dissemination, the media, social media, business, regulations, logistics chains. Each of these contain multitudes of factors that no single human on earth, not even the Normanest of Borlaugs, could keep straight in his or her head and "fix" with a single quick hack like a better strain of wheat. And these complex systems aren’t just statically complex – they seem to be getting more complex over time in their interactions with each other. In the 1960s, Borlaug’s new wheat strain was used by virtually all Mexican farmers a year after it was released commercially; if it had been created today, it probably would have sat on a shelf for a decade while various global FDA-like agencies dickered over whether it was safe or not and anti-GMO groups launched a thousand frankenwheat memes; you’d definitely never be able to buy it at Whole Foods.
Inline links: really complex, even more complex than that
Grading My 2018 Predictions For 2023
February 20, 2023 · Original source
The crisis of the Republican Party will turn out to have been overblown. Trump’s policies have been so standard-Republican that there will be no problem integrating him into the standard Republican pantheon, plus or minus some concerns about his personality which will disappear once he personally leaves the stage. Some competent demagogue (maybe Ted Cruz or Mike Pence) will use some phrase equivalent to “compassionate Trumpism”, everyone will agree it is a good idea, and in practice it will be exactly the same as what Republicans have been doing forever. The party might move slightly to the right on immigration, but this will be made easy by a fall in corporate demand for underpriced Mexican farm labor, and might be trivial if there’s a border wall and they can declare mission accomplished. If the post-Trump standard-bearer has the slightest amount of personal continence, he should end up with a more-or-less united party who view Trump as a flawed but ultimately positive figure, like how they view GW Bush. Also, I predict we see a lot more of Ted Cruz than people are expecting.
Links For December 2024
December 17, 2024 · Original source
55: The “fastest growing new religion in the world” is the cult of Santa Muerte (St. Death) in Mexico, with perhaps 29 million followers since going public in 2001. I find it hard to determine its appeal - the entire content of the religion seems to be “if you give sacrifices to an idol of a female skeleton, she will grant your prayers”. It’s not just that this is boring - it’s that it’s absolutely typical replacement-level paganism, and I’d always thought that Christianity beat paganism because it was inherently more attractive. Yet the Mexican youth are turning away from the stodgy boring Catholic Church en masse to worship Santa Muerte. Why?
Inline links: Santa Muerte, Christianity beat paganism because it was inherently more attractive