I’m not sure what historians could debate here. The EIC ultimately failed as a business once it became a government—the costs of governing wiped out the profits from the trade monopoly. But the administrative achievements are undeniable.

This is evident from undisputed historical facts. In the mid-18th century, England’s per capita GDP was only about double that of the Mughal Empire’s. The Mughals themselves were an organized, sophisticated, Persianate Empire with a centralized. bureaucracy. The technological advantage was incremental: e.g. iron cannons versus bronze cannons, standardized ammunition, etc. But the Mughals had vastly more manpower and state revenues. In the Anglo Mughal War, the Mughals obliterated the EIC forces with a 500,000 man army. Less than 75 years later, the EIC took over the Mughal Empire with just a few thousand European soldiers. It never had more than 35,000 European soldiers in India. That’s a crazy achievement. It would be like Amazon putting together a private army and taking over the EU.

I love watching the “making of Disneyland” movies they have on Disney+. Really captures the American spirit of just doing stuff.

Ironic, isn't it?

You're just describing junior employees lol.

For small scale stuff, it seems very much like managing a human. I've been using Grok and Claude for some small GUI apps, and it's incredible how accurate Claude in particular is for handling vague instructions.[1] I can take a screenshot of some part of the UI and drop it into the chat and say ("The spacing here looks weird, give me a few recommendations on how to fix it."). You can also say stuff like "make this look more modern and conform to modern AppKit guidelines." You don't have to micromanage it, at least when you break things down into small features. (But that's true of humans too.)

[1] Claude is significantly better than Grok at doing Mac UI app development. Interestingly, Grok is significantly better than Claude at legal research and summarizing/analyzing non-code documents.

The EIC overthrew a gunpowder empire with vast resources and one of the largest militaries in the world with 1,000 European soldiers and a few dozen administrators in London. There's incredible lessons in there, orthogonal to whatever you're talking about.

I'd argue that this is one of the advantages of Anglo and Anglo-American culture that has become eroded over time. I've been reading about the British East India Company and how much discretion employees were afforded in carrying out their work: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/mar/04/east-india-com.... They had like 35 employees in London and managed to take over Mughal India, which was a gunpowder empire with guns, cannons, 4-5x the state revenues and 25x the population of Britain. Pound for pound it's probably one of the most effective organizations in history.

I don't think that's actually true. There's weird historical baggage and whatnot. But if you're running in long mode, it's actually a fairly sensible architecture with useful memory addressing modes.

A lot of people write like that, lol. I call it the "theater" mode of writing--the plot twist comes at the end.

The top income decile in the U.S. works 10% more hours than the bottom decile. Only a bit over half of low-income kids live in a household where a parent works full time.

Baltimore spends more per student than Switzerland.

> As always the children of the rich and powerful get bespoke education... You could call it elegant education for a more civilized age...

Education for more affluent people is often cheaper per student. The benefit richer students have is that, on average, their parents are smarter, more conscientious, etc.