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The Anti-Gnostic's avatar

America has always been Diverse! Anglos, Saxons, Bavarians, Martin van Buren, Vito Corleone, you name it. Therefore we need more Aztecs, Arab Muslims, and sub-Saharan Africans.

If anybody reading this got magically popped back to 1850 - 1945 America they'd think they'd died and gone to a Gordon Lightfoot concert.

Hilarious how the giant pothole the researchers had to carefully drive their tractor-trailer-sized load of priors around is the wildly ethnically diverse Global South.

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ShootyBear's avatar

Everyone should get a different surname and then innovation will shoot through the roof!

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Fabius Minarchus's avatar

The Sicilian-Hillbilly similarity was the basis of the Patrick Swayze movie "Next of Kin."

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The Anti-Gnostic's avatar

I've told Middle Eastern Christians that the group they most reminded me of was middle and upper class American Southerners.

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George Kocan's avatar

Great movie. Liam Neison has early role.

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Rob Mitchell's avatar

Patents, eh? My grandmother's family bore a grudge against Thomas Edison, for supposedly stealing one of my great-grandfather's ideas for some part of his incandescent light patents. Whatever the case, great Grandpa King immigrated from Birmingham environs, so his inclusion in Edison's patents would not have increased "Inclusiveness" as now defined.

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George Kocan's avatar

On the basis of my observations, I conclude that Diversity brings division, strife and moral decline.

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AMac78's avatar

Great essay. If Steve ever decides to go to grad school in a STEM field, his Journal Club seminars will be mobbed.

On patent authorship, he writes: "But how was this theorized benefit of diversity supposed to work in real life...? Did Leland Miller, head engineer at the Carnegie steel mill, hear about an old Ruthenian trick for improving the Bessemer process from puddler Jan Kowalski, but diabolically decided not to put his name on the patent application?"

When crafting an application, lawyers pay a great deal of attention to who does and doesn't get listed as an Inventor. Then as now, getting it wrong either way can invalidate a patent. Leland Miller would have been well aware of that.

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