This week on the channel +734K views this week

Rice fields and Cisco orders fill Asianometry's week of miscalculations

Two new essays connect agricultural ambition with business history, as the Indonesia documentary passes 300,000 views.

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Asianometry Story of November 15, 2026Trari Newsroom

Why this story? The channel's weekly summary: what went up this week, what is drawing views now, and where the channel stands among similar channels.

Indonesia’s Mega Rice Failure

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4:59High-yield rice varieties and oil-funded investment helped Indonesia achieve rice self-sufficiency in 1984.
11:58Traditional Dayak farming on shallow peat differed from the mass inland cultivation the project attempted.
14:14Suharto launched the Mega Rice Project despite warnings from scientists and environmental group WALHI.
16:47Canals drained deep peatlands, creating conditions that made the later drought and fires especially destructive.
22:28Abandoned areas remain fire-prone, with canal blocking among the restoration measures.

Asianometry moved from networking equipment to rice paddies across two uploads, with a familiar question underneath: how do ambitious plans go so badly wrong?

"Indonesia's Mega Rice Failure" drew the larger audience, reaching roughly 314,000 views. Rather than starting and ending with Suharto's disastrous project, the essay builds the history behind it: Indonesia's dependence on rice, an earlier achievement of self-sufficiency, then renewed pressure as population grew and farmland disappeared beneath development.

The revealing contrast comes in Central Kalimantan. Asianometry describes the Dayak people's low-impact farming on shallow peat before explaining why that knowledge did not translate into vast inland paddies. Drainage canals lowered the water in deep peatlands, leaving them vulnerable to the fires that followed. Near the end, canal blocking appears as part of the long effort to repair the damage. Infrastructure built to remove water had become infrastructure that needed undoing.

"How Cisco Got Bullwhipped" supplied the week's business-history counterpart, reaching roughly 156,000 views. It remains the channel's second-busiest video right now, followed by the older computing essay "The Lintel Conquest of UNIX". The rice documentary, though, accounts for most of Asianometry's current daily viewing.

Subscribers increased over the week, while daily views are now more than double their usual level. Among nearby educational channels, hoser had a much larger weekly audience and Learn Skills Daily a quieter one. Asianometry's own week belongs to an agricultural detour, without leaving its interest in systems and their failures behind.

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