eesmith

It has been an issue for decades. So what? It isn't like ignoring the topic will make it go away.

The report I read does outline the advantages, starting off in the executive summary, after the AI-generate image, with:

"Artificial intelligence (AI) has become a defining technology of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, moving societies beyond digitization toward the optimization and automation of complex systems. AI systems that learn, perceive, reason, and generate content are now embedded across economies and daily lives, supporting services from translation and recommendations to finance, healthcare, energy management, and transportation."

It later says:

"""... AI enables tasks ranging from data processing and translation to diagnosis, forecasting, and autonomous decision-making. Today, AI can analyze massive datasets in seconds, translate languages, detect diseases from medical scans, forecast climate trends, and power everything from personalized recommendations to self-driving cars.

By executing complex operations at speeds and scales far beyond human capacity, AI is more than just a technological tool—it is a transformative force. It is reshaping economies, redefining labor, and influencing how societies interact with technology and with the planet. As AI’s influence accelerates, so too does the urgency to understand its full impact: not only the promise it offers, but also the profound challenges it raises.

AI is a powerful driver of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR)1, or Industry 4.0—a global transformation marked by the convergence of digital, physical, and biological systems. Propelled by rapid advances in everything from AI and robotics to cloud computing and the Internet of Things (IoT), this revolution is reconfiguring how people live, work, and are governed. Yet while much attention has been given to AI’s capabilities and risks, including bias, misinformation, and automation leading to loss of jobs, far less focus has been placed on AI’s environmental impact.

... The launch of ChatGPT in 2022 was nothing short of a technological shockwave. ... Once a niche technology, AI is now woven into daily life, powering much of the digital world, including voice assistants, search engines, recommendation systems, smart energy meters, and smartphones. The influence of AI is transforming how people work, communicate, access information, and consume services. ... AI is employed in diagnostics, medical imaging, and patient risk prediction—improving speed and precision of care, while reducing treatment costs. ... AI helps forecast demand, manage power grids, and integrate renewable sources into power networks. ... AI is also revolutionizing transportation and mobility."""

Could you clarify how that's not a good outline of the advantages, and elaborate what specifically you think is fear-mongering?

What in this report is making your reduce your trust in UN?

Okay, but this summary of the UN report is emphatically not "only looking at the downside". From the piece:

"“This report is not a case against artificial intelligence, a technological transformation that is improving the lives of billions of people around the world,” said Professor Kaveh Madani, Director of UNU-INWEH who led the investigation team. “It is a call for using it responsibly and addressing its unintended impacts proactively to make it sustainable and equitable.”"

It is impossible to judge of the net benefit is worth the cost if you don't know the cost. More specifically, "The report finds that AI’s environmental cost is being systematically mismeasured."

Its key policy messages even include: "AI within planetary limits is achievable. The report’s central argument is constructive. Capability and stewardship can grow together, but only with measurement, transparency, and shared responsibility across the ecosystem."

You can also see it's not anti-AI by how it argues, for example: "Governments should integrate AI infrastructure into energy planning, water governance, and land-use permitting, and require standardized environmental footprint reporting."

The report itself praises AI even more, calling it "a defining technology of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, moving societies beyond digitization toward the optimization and automation of complex systems", along with an overview of its transformational benefits.

Yes. And two seemingly unrelated things can share deeper similarities.

Since California produces about 80% of the world's almonds, it also means that the global water footprint for almonds is about the same as the global water footprint for AI.

More directly, a global analysis does not mean the AI data centers are evenly distributed around the world. From the article:

"A Bloomberg analysis suggests about two-thirds of data centers built or planned since 2022 are water-stressed regions, concentrated in Australia, Chile, Mexico, Spain, Saudi-Arabia, and the US Southwest (Nicoletti et al., 2025). Within the United States, Texas hosts over 400 data centers projected to consume nearly 3% of statewide water supply by 2030 (Martinez, 2025), in a state grappling with recurring drought conditions and aquifer depletion."

"Corporate sustainability reports confirm this concentration: approximately 42% of Microsoft's water consumption occurs in water-stress regions, and 15% of Google's water use is concentrated in high water-scarcity areas (Barratt et al., 2025)."

Comparing water-stressed regions in California for almond production to water-stressed regions used for data centers does seem relevant.

I agree with your link that the unsustainable use of water for almond farms causes problems, and agree that these problems are quite similar to that of water use for AI, so both should have high scrutiny. Quoting your link:

> Almonds use roughly the same amount of water as total indoor water use in California. This is unsustainable.

> There are simply too many almonds being planted in areas with unsustainable water supplies (minimal to no groundwater, uncertain or no surface water). ...

> We’re not opposed to growing almonds; we’re opposed to growing them unsustainably and taking water away from the environment and our cities. Almonds are a luxury and export crop; approximately 70% of the state’s crop is shipped abroad for the express benefit of a handful of industrial-scale growers and hedge funds.

> Water is a public trust resource, and Californians must regain control of it as they face a future certain to be beleaguered by drought, low reservoirs and over-drafted aquifers. We can't continue to subsidize agribusiness plutocrats with the water ratepayers need for basic survival.

Water for AI also uses unsustainable water supplies, directs water away from the environment and our cities, and is subsidized for big tech plutocrats paid for by water ratepayers. It also sure seems to me that most AI use falls in the "luxury" category.

I'm having a tough time making the few pieces I know fit together.

When Simonyi started at Microsoft there were only 40 employees. He was the head of the then-new applications group, which I normally don't think of as being a programming job, nor one where LoC is all that relevant.

(That's not to say he wouldn't have written any code. The book "Showstopper! The Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT and the Next Generation at Microsoft" mentions that Cutler, the head of the NT project, wrote some of the code, but not much. And Simonyi, like Cutler, was an expert software developer.)

Wouldn't any PM for Word and Multiplan/Excel be under Simonyi? As the head, he could surely say "no" to the request, and even tell the PM to stop gathering that information, right?

Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, Simonyi developed the "meta-programming" software production method in his PhD, which he brought to Microsoft. The meta-programmer does all the design work and architectural decisions, which the programmers then code up. If they get stuck, they take the problem back to the meta-programmer.

The meta-programmer doesn't actually write lines of code, or at least those LoC are much less than what the underlying programmers write, making that measurement even less relevant for someone like Simonyi who, of course, would be a meta-programmer.

Alternatively, since Simonyi was at PARC, just up the road from Apple, he may have known the story and shared it, which got re-attributed, as happens in the game of telephone.

Related story about Bill Atkinson at Apple, reporting -2000 lines of code, at https://www.folklore.org/Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.html . Perhaps that's the one you are thinking of?

It's certainly likely that it happened more than once, but I've not heard a similar one for Simonyi.

I nearly always use DDG in noai mode. A couple of hours ago I failed to find information about the origin of 'click piano' - a setting on my electronic piano - so I decided to try Google Search, only to be hit with the "click here to prove you are a human" then the "select the boxes containing a ... to prove you are a human".

I closed the window rather than waste my time more, which is my increasingly common response to CAPTCHAs.

I'm also seeing issues with Google Scholar. A few days ago I was at the local college library to look up some papers. The same Google Scholar search on the library terminal, reloaded, would bring up anywhere between 3 and 17 citations. I also got CAPTCHA'd on Google Scholar, only to find the CAPTCHA triggered the library terminal's URL filters, which prevents anyone from actually doing the CAPTCHA.

I showed it to the librarians. They had not seen it before. It is, after all, between sessions. The fall term starts soon. I wonder what will happen.

> With the bicycle the Wright Brothers patented the left-hand thread.

I tried to verify that a couple of years ago, at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42709428 . It does not seem to be true.

https://www.wright-brothers.org/Information_Desk/Just_the_Fa... says "Wilbur and Orville were in the vanguard of those manufacturers that offered right-hand threads on one crank arm and left-hand threads on the other" but not the inventors.

I was also able to find earlier uses of left-handed threads for bicycles, like in this 1881 book, at https://archive.org/details/indispensablebic00stur/page/14/m...

"The Centaur Crank is first screwed up to a shoulder on the axle with right and left-handed threads, so that the pressure of the foot tends to make it all the more secure ; whilst, to prevent its loosening by “ back-pedalling,” a slightly tapered conical pin is driven through both crank and axle, and secured with a nut."

Do you know the patent number? I searched the USPTO but found no bicycle related patent by either of the Wright brothers.

So in the country you live in, a shop owner is free to kick out women from his phone store, simply for being a woman. India banned discrimination on the basis of caste back in 1947. Does that something you can imagine with your "third-world brain"?

The US used to use this logic until around 1960. It was a horrible country, at least if you were black. Even if a white person wanted to offer housing to black people, the white person was discriminated against. Collective private action used to reinforce a white supremacist social structure.

That's why we needed laws to require public services be available without discrimination based on race, religion, and various other protected classes.

"A private business can refuse anyone. That's because it is private."

A business may be privately owned while doing business with the public. That is quite different than a privately owned business which operates a private club.

Furthermore, businesses are subject to regulations that private people do not have. This is clear in organization structures like a limited company, where the company is a recognized as being legally distinct from its owners. These companies exist only because the government says so, which means the government can control what they can or cannot do.

It's also clear in places like licensing, where someone cannot simply say "I am a medical doctor" and offer medical services, and in other regulations like food safety, where restaurants -- even privately owned ones -- are held to standards which people don't have when cooking for themselves.

This was a tangent starting with "I find the RealID opposition baffling." at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48983452 .

I oppose Real ID because I don't understand the problem it's trying to solve, and it seems expensive and cumbersome for at least some.

Real ID is a US-only issue, so I interpreted "If you are worried that your tenant might happen to be an illegal migrant" in the US context.

In the US case, quoting https://www.eeoc.gov/national-origin-discrimination :

> National origin discrimination involves treating workers (applicants or employees) unfavorably or favorably because they are from a particular country or part of the world, because of ethnicity or accent, or because they appear to be of a certain ethnic background (even if they are not).

> National origin discrimination can include preferring foreign workers, including workers with a particular visa status, over American workers.

> National origin discrimination also can involve treating people unfavorably because they are married to (or associated with) a person of a certain national origin.

In where you live, and where you used to live, a business can refuse service to a minority group? To indigenous people? What about to someone whose boyfriend is a member of a minority group?

You write 'exercising their basic rights of liking and disliking whoever they want (and consequently making or not making commercial agreements with them)'.

The "consequently" is doing some heavy lifting. In the US you have the basic rights of liking and disliking whoever you want. This is part of the freedom of assembly, which is the US way of saying the freedom of association.

Commercial agreements for services available to the public, however, are interpreted under different rules than private agreements. In the US you are free, under the law, to run a private club which refuses black people, Jewish people, women, and so one. These all exist.

However, if your club is open to the public, then you cannot discriminate on race, religion, or sex.

(Technically the US had federal civil rights laws, which under our federal system only apply to businesses large enough to nominally be involved in interstate commerce. However, state laws essentially extend this to everyone, with a few carve-outs for, for example, a women looking for a housemate and insisting they be another woman.)

Do you live in one of the handful of countries which are not signatory to the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination? Quoting from https://www.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/cerd.pdf

"In compliance with the fundamental obligations laid down in article 2 of this Convention, States Parties undertake to prohibit and to eliminate racial discrimination in all its forms and to guarantee the right of everyone, without distinction as to race, colour, or national or ethnic origin, to equality before the law, notably in the enjoyment of the following rights: ... The right to housing .. The right of access to any place or service intended for use by the general public, such as transport hotels, restaurants, cafes, theatres and parks."

Almost every third-world country is signatory, so it can't be some broad "third-world brain" viewpoint.

There is a tautological issue here - before Real ID everyone had to accept state-issued ids because that's what people had.

How does Real ID guarantee (1), (3), or (4) better than the state-issued non-Real IDs?

Places are not required to accept all Real IDs as proof of age. A bar, for example, may reject out-of-state ids for proof of age for those who look under 25.

Real ID does not prove citizenship (2). Non-citizen residents may have Real ID.

If a Canadian claims to be a snowbird tourist and wants to rent your guest house for five months, and you are worried that he might happen to be an illegal migrant and would risk being deported instead of paying rent next month, how does Real ID help?

He has no Real ID, only Canadian ID.

Note also that the Fair Housing Act prohibits discrimination based on national origin. Landlords must provide equal opportunities regardless of nationality or immigration status.

Your proposed scenario seems like it breaks anti-discrimination law.

Even better, if that person shows you a valid tribal id from a federally recognized tribe, but which is not Real ID compliant, will you rent to him? The feds consider it a valid alternative to Real ID.

That still doesn't tell me what problem it is supposed to solve.

From that link, 'All this keeps the game interesting and fun, taking weeks and sometimes months to complete'.

Some people in the US take longer than that to get Real ID. Like, elderly black people born in the Jim Crow era where birth records simply weren't kept for them. https://www.cbsnews.com/miami/news/florida-woman-says-she-ca... , or a missing 50-year-old marriage record - https://local12.com/news/nation-world/elderly-womans-real-id... .

Are you proving your age for a store or a concert venue for alcohol reasons? Don't people age out once they look over 25? Or do venues check for other reasons?

I've read about the big backlash when a national ID scheme for the UK is proposed, so I presume the benefits aren't all that high.

Like, when you check into a hotel, do you have to show ID? https://www.tripadvisor.co.uk/ShowTopic-g186216-i15-k1095345... tells me that it's uncommon. While in the US, I nearly always have to show ID for an overnight room.

Or, in many place in the US, everyone is IDed for alcohol, even if you are 70 years old, which annoys a lot of people who are clearly old enough to drink. Even better, since US privacy laws are so poor, these ID checks also gather demographic information, identify 'high-value customers', and collaborate with other places to ban people -- rather like the facial recognition systems you all have in the UK.

Maybe Brits want to avoid normalizing more id checks?

It is called "TSA ConfirmID". https://www.tsa.gov/tsaconfirm-id

"If you are unable to provide the required acceptable ID, such as a passport or REAL ID, you can pay a $45 fee to use TSA ConfirmID. TSA will then attempt to verify your identity so you can go through security; however, there is no guarantee TSA can do so."

From https://thepointsguy.com/news/tsa-security-with-confirmid/ :

"TSA agents pull you aside for secondary screenings and to verify your identity. ... After looking me up in his system, [the supervisor] asked me a series of questions only I could answer (previous addresses and that sort of thing)."

The major European exception being the UK, which doesn't issue identity cards and somehow manages. (Apparently Andorra doesn't either.)

You might consider it part of the Anglosphere mentality as Canada, the US, Australia, the Bahamas, and New Zealand don't have national ID.

I've never understood the problem that RealID is supposed to solve.

How is it TSA can accept a Veteran Health Identification Card or photo identification card issued by a federally recognized tribe, and the passports from every country in the world, but not a state-issued ID which is not REAL ID-compliant?

> I’m a strong supporter of the concept that people should pass an evaluation and get a permit to have a child.

Of course that, like literacy tests for voting, will never be gamed.

Okay, so how do you get from 'market-rate housing' to 'luxury apartments'?

FWIW, I'm saving up for an apartment.

As I understand it, the Vienna model has city-owned housing ("government agency"), but also has housing cooperatives and nonprofit housing - the latter two are not government owned, and still have a housing queue. I take it you are fine with the latter?

Just, I imagine, like you are okay with wanting to buy in a new housing project, only to have the developer say that all the lots are bid, but you can do on the wait list in case someone drops out?

If you rent, do you want agency in your living situation, or whatever the landlord deems appropriate for the property?

How disastrous would it seem if your sibling and spouse died, leaving 2 kids (8 and 10), which is too many for your small loft, so you need to move somewhere, but you can't afford to move? Wouldn't you like the government to help you have some agency?

Bear in mind that those conclusions are for a different student population -- country of course, but also age range:

Czech schools: "The new measure, which has been at the center of heated debates in recent months, will apply in kindergartens and elementary schools, most likely from September 2027. ... It doesn't apply, however, to secondary schools, universities or vocational schools."

The Stanford study was based on "more than 43,000 middle and high schools nationwide".

Also, while half of the authors are Stanford research associates, the other half are at other institutions. The publication is a working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research.

And from the preregistration, "Our measure of treatment (i.e., whether a given school has a true phone ban at a particular point in time) is based on organizing sales and shipping data from Yondr (i.e., a company that sells lockable phone pouches)", a company they partnered with for the study.

How .. odd. Is sales data for a single company really the right way to tell if a school has a true phone ban?

The headline is "Socialists should embrace luxury apartments."

Do you think socialists should embrace higher prices for everyone over longer times for everyone?

Even without an explicit wait list, I've been saving money for years and still don't have enough for a down payment to own in the neighborhood I prefer. The price growth seems to match my savings.

And unlike a wait list, I don't have a rough ETA on when I'll have enough money.

It's not like there's only a single price vs. wait list time trade-off. I could live in the suburbs, where it's certainly cheaper, but where commute time increases and local options are reduced.

I think that finding reasonable housing quickly, where you can wait two years until moving into your desired housing area, sounds embraceable.

I don't feel like paying with my money, I don't feel like paying by giving up my privacy, and I don't feel like paying by training Google reCAPTCHA or giving it my attention.

When you say "reconstructing from having read it elsewhere", does that mean you also didn't read the linked-to FT piece?

The "but it’s a single pool" cannot be a correct summary as there are multiple levels of luxury apartments.

Someone with $20 million is rich, and someone with $20 billion is rich, but these are very different levels of rich.

The general argument about the hedonic treadmill is the expectations rise with wealth, but the happiness and pleasure do not. The person with $20 million looks at what a person with $100 million can get, and wants more. This drives the need for ever-more luxury apartments.

There is of course some limit, as $30/hour isn't enough for a luxury apartment. But the affordable apartments get further away, or replaced with luxury apartments, and their middle manager bosses, who want their bonuses, are incentivized to use wage theft, poor working conditions, job insecurity, etc. to extract more profits while minimizing costs. Thus we have the opinion "there are no ethical billionaires", which implies there should be an upper bound to what is acceptable luxury.

rekabis specifically called out the Vienna model, which doesn't follow the same 'easier sell for developers' logic you referred to, because it uses different market incentives, including limited-profit housing associations, to build housing.

I didn't, as I am not a subscriber. My views are similar to rekabis. Could you perhaps summarize the evidence?

I mean, Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism sounds fun and all, but at what cost to the environment? Is it warmed-over trickle-down economics? Why are the progressive taxes on those people so low that they can afford a luxury apartment, and how did they make that money in the first place?

Just how deluxe is "luxury"? Is an extra 25% of living space per person (and a room of one's one) sufficient luxury? Because what I've seen, "luxury" is a never-ending hedonic treadmill as rich people judge their luxury by what even richer people can afford.

Lastly, the FT is the newspaper for the already-well-off, with summer homes in France and fancy kitchens, who likely want comfort that the luxury they have is justified.

I fundamentally do not understand your advocacy.

You started with:

'Am I the only person who thinks its odd that my government (US) thinks its can tell me what time to get up and go to bed?'

How do you have the timezones you want without the government (federal, state, county, tribal, or whatever) still involved in telling you when to go to bed?

You write 'Permanent DST screws things up for the cities that are southwest of me' but you have not explained how that screwing up is all that worth complaining about or changing, when we know of places like Reykjavík which are far more screwed up, with seemingly little concern.

FWIW, that's existed for a while. Source at https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan/tree/master/third_party... with downloadable binary at https://cosmo.zip/pub/cosmos/bin/sqlite3 .

  % curl -LO 'https://cosmo.zip/pub/cosmos/bin/sqlite3'
    % Total    % Received % Xferd  Average Speed   Time    Time     Time  Current
                                 Dload  Upload   Total   Spent    Left  Speed
  100 4845k  100 4845k    0     0  1384k      0  0:00:03  0:00:03 --:--:-- 1384k
  % chmod +x sqlite3
  % file sqlite3
  sqlite3: DOS/MBR boot sector; partition 1 : ID=0x7f, active, start-CHS (0x0,0,1), end-CHS (0x3ff,255,63), startsector 0, 4294967295 sectors
  % ./sqlite3
  SQLite version 3.40.0 2022-11-16 12:10:08
  Enter ".help" for usage hints.
  Connected to a transient in-memory database.
  Use ".open FILENAME" to reopen on a persistent database.
  sqlite>:

> Also unaddressed is how the military will square a program that screens troops for low testosterone with the FDA's stance that testosterone replacement therapy is approved only for men with a diagnosed medical condition affecting hormone production.

Everyone who defended the right of soldiers to skip the COVID vaccine should be even more supportive of the right to skip required testosterone injections which have no medical support or proven operational benefit, right?

Alas, my comment is made with weary sarcasm.

I've re-read it 5 times. I do not see what I am supposed to be seeing.

> Am I the only person who thinks its odd

No. Many people have complained. In the TV show "The Bob Newhart Show" we find that Bob Hartley thinks that talking about the then-recent timezone standardization to be a safe topic with his father-in-law, but the latter finds it very odd and irritating.

> that my government (US)

Time standardization started without governments. Would you rather follow local sun time and railroad time and radio/TV station time, all different? Which time do you follow if you want to call your aunt 150 miles west of you?

> that my government (US) thinks its can tell me what time

How are they preventing you from keeping your own time? How are they preventing people from following the Jewish calendar?

OTOH, if you have jury duty at 9am next Monday, you better be there on government time. But note that when I last served on duty, the county was huge, and some people took an hour to drive in. Their home could well be many minutes off court house time. So how do they determine the right time to be there?

> time to get up and go to bed?

The government has never told me what time to get up or go to sleep. I was never in the military or other organization where the government had that much power over me.

> Before timezones, "noon" was the point where the sun was the highest in the sky.

Which ended up being a problem once fast long distance travel became commonplace. So how do you solve that problem?

> It seems we should

Yes, you've expressed an opinion. I responded by pointing out the known consequences should everyone followed it, based on historical practices.

> with a little more flexibility for rural areas so they can stay on the same time as their closest major population center.

I also pointed out how that can happen in a timezone system, by changing ones listed hours of work/school/etc.

Iceland is on UTC+00:00 year-round (Greenwich Mean Time), to stay in synch with much of western Europe, even though that's at least an hour behind local solar time.

So plenty of people disagree with your opinion, and changing their opinion would be hard.

If everyone follows the same clock, like, now is 12:30pm, across the entire world, then while everyone could also work 9-5, we know that most people like to be awake during daylight and asleep at night, so the local working hours might be 2-10.

We can get an idea of the issues in China, which has a single national timezone instead of 4 or 5 geographical time zones. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_in_China

> Beijing Time users in Xinjiang usually schedule their daily activities two hours later than those who live in eastern China. As such, stores and offices in Xinjiang are commonly open from 10:00 to 19:00 Beijing Time, which equals 08:00 to 17:00 in Ürümqi Time.[17] This is known as the work/rest time in Xinjiang.

Thus, "9-5" would get a name like "work time", or the existing name of "day shift" would have increased popularity.

You can get up or go to bed whenever you wish.

You can say today's date is 27 Messidor Year CCXXXIV if you wish.

The problem is when you want to coordinate events between people following different time conventions.

Timezones as we know it started off as a railroad company invention. Does the London/Birmingham train follow London time or Birmingham time? Does the stop in Rugby use Rugby time?

DST in the US used to be a regional choice until 1966. Coordination became an issue.

"The lack of standardization led to a patchwork where some areas observed DST while adjacent areas did not, and it was not unheard of to have to reset a clock several times during a short trip (e.g., bus drivers operating on West Virginia Route 2 between Moundsville, West Virginia, and Steubenville, Ohio, had to reset their watches seven times over 35 miles)." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_time_in_the_United_...

> with a little more flexibility for rural areas so they can stay on the same time as their closest major population center.

We can do that already. I remember when most of Indiana didn't follow DST. Businesses in Danville, Illinois, near the border followed Indiana time by changing the listed hours of operation during summer.

Speaking of Indiana, 'Attitudes began to change in the 1990s, as Indiana's time zone situation was seen as impeding the state's economic growth. Interstate travel and commerce were difficult as people wondered, "what time is it in Indiana?"' - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_in_Indiana

Having 12:00 noon be when the sun is highest makes these issues reappear.

Do you not consider Roman Catholicism to be part of the European heritage? I sure do.

A lot of Latino Americans and indigenous people are Roman Catholics, so part of European heritage.

I don't understand why you mention "never had blood .. ties" when at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48842245 you reject the relevancy of blood ties. Wouldn't your argument make more sense as just "never had ethnic ties with Europe.

As a reminder, Obama, African-American son of a white woman, once visited Moneygall, where an Irish ancestor lived, and said "My name is Barack Obama, of the Moneygall Obamas."

Lastly, I see you switched from "blood or ethic ties" to "heritage". Could you elaborate on what that means? Must I be Greek inherit some of the intellectual heritage of Ancient Greece? How is my claim to the traditional European liberal arts education heritage any stronger or weaker than that of W. E. B. Du Bois?