Comment by closewith
8 hours ago
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.
8 hours ago
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.
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" ...
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.
Quoted straight from the piece, as written by dude who just made one of the smallest countries around have abandoned farms larger than the whole world ...
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)