I'm going to adopt this strategy. If you follow politics people will demand you pick a side which they can then use to attack you. If you just pretend to be stupid, it's harder for them to find an opening. Plus, pretending to be stupid is a lot easier than pretending to be smart, so it'll save energy. What I really need to do is stop posting on Silicon Valley gossip boards.
Regardless of one's opinion on Trump, the media basically switched from Russian conspiracy theories to recession paranoia in the span of about a week. That week being the time of Mueller's presentation to congress.
I couldn't bring myself to even click on those. The media has cried wolf for so long with Trump, if I see a headline saying "Trump to start WW3", I'm just going to think, boy, the NY Times just keeps hitting new lows and not even click it.
Your example of the "media crying wolf" on Trump has left members of his inner circle in jail for lying about their connections to Russia. Hardly "crying wolf".
You didn't see that the man literally drew an extra, obviously out of place circle on the official hurricane projection map to make his previous erroneous tweet seem correct? You're missing out. While the error itself is unlikely to start WW3 or tank the stock market, it certainly does cause one to ask questions.
The Trump admin has been doing that stuff from day one with the "alternative facts" thing. I can't keep up with every unpresidential move these guys make. On the plus side, I did just see Trump just fired Bolton which makes war feel a bit less likely.
If your city has a bike share, try it out for a little while. The convenience of being able to drop off or pick up a bike anywhere is worth the clunkiness of bike share bikes for me.
I have a bunch of Facebook domains in my hosts, but for some reason Firefox 69.0 gets DNS from somewhere else and goes right through. Weird. The other stuff in hosts resolves correctly.
"Set `network.trr.mode` to 2 to make DNS Over HTTPS the browser's first choice but use regular DNS as a fallback (0 is "off by default", 1 lets Firefox pick whichever is faster, 3 for TRR only mode, 5 to explicitly turn it off)."
No luck. I thought maybe it was cached somehow because of the way Facebook is linked from the start page, but so is Reddit, and putting Reddit in the hosts worked. Strangely, the hosts file doesn't seem to be read with Instagram either. I'm not sure what's going on here.
Why don't they just do what the NYPD did to protestors during the RNC? Unroll flexible plastic fencing around the protest and then mass arrest everyone inside the fence.
Hong Kong seriously needs to study US riot control methods. It looks like amateur hour out there.
The rioters are throwing Molotov cocktails and the cops have no idea how to handle it. I’m surprised Eirk Prince hasn’t offered to come on as a consultant.
Those "rioters" appear to be undercover police. They're doing this to give the police plausible deniability.
As a Hong Konger, the problem isn't that the cops are amateurs; it's that the police are currently terrorizing HK residents. If Erik Prince helps them, he should know he's supporting state terrorism.
AGI is becoming like communism in that it seems theoretically possible, might usher in utopia or be really scary, and apparently intelligent people often believe in it. Along that line of thought one can imagine a scenario where some rogue military tech kills 100 million people, and the world moves to ban it, but a small cadre of intellectuals insist that "wasn't real AGI".
I like Apple's approach. When some scammy dev ran to the press with a sob story, Apple would expose all the shady shit the dev was doing. Sorry, but 99% of these whiney stories are the developer's fault. Don't violate the terms of service, and don't be shady. It's not that hard.
Maybe Google can´t do that because they are the ones doing the scummy thing.
I personally know 2 cases of people banned from Google, in one case they were actually infringement (they made an app using copyrighted characters), and in the other it was the same case stated elsewhere - grandmother clicked repeatedly on the ads thinking she was helping her grandson, and he got banned from AdSense forever.
I haven't been following this specific news story, but I remember from my environmental sociology class that fire prevention in forests eventually leads to unnatural states that are then prone to massive uncontainable fires. Have they been suppressing natural fire in this region for too long? If this fire is naturally burning, then isn't the best response to let it run its course unless human lives are threatened?
> Have they been suppressing natural fire in this region for too long?
This is confusing for many people, I know.
Ecosystems tend to increase its complexity with time. From lava field to savanna to forests. This is how it works. Life fills the gaps.
If untouched, forests aim for the higher state of organisation possible, the so called "climax": A big forest, with huge old trees. Plants accumulate water, big plants accumulate big water, plants make water also (Is a by-product of this respiration)...
...therefore the climax is a humid forest of some kind (a rainforest, a bamboo cloudforest, a laurisilva, a scottish caledonian rainforest, a sequoia forest)
A place full of spongy fungus and plants accumulating water, a place that creates its own climate and make rains that collect in streams and then in rivers for the people benefit. They do not need fire to work at all. Wildfires are scarce and self-contained events. Such places would need a lot of energy to start burning.
The young forest is vulnerable to fire. For decades the fire risk increases. This is that people remember, but sadly they do not see the second part. After a thousand years, the risk start decreasing and then the entire area is fire-proof. Wildfires stop often when reaching an old forest.
The tragedy is that before to reach this state of full healing, the forest is burned again BY MAN (>90% of wildfires are caused by man). Is called "necessary management" or "reducing the risk", but life does not need human management. Has evolved to sustain maximum amount of life possible. We need "Management" is another way to say we want "nature explotation". Is the "groundhog day" film with trees.
Nobody is trying to restore it and return the water to Mediterranean or to California because... it would need two or three human generations to show results and it would need much smarter humans.
I’d love to read more on this humid forest climax narrative from any credible sources, it sounds interesting and I don’t know anything about this sort of thing really, but at the same time it’s tripping my “just-so” sensors something heavy!
I bet that you will find plenty of credible sources if you study biology and learn some basic ecology (ecology as science, not as ideology). None of what I'm saying is a secret and is also easily verifiable empirically.
There are also parts of this science that deal with the study of stress in ecosystems. A low or medium source of stress can increase the biodiversity. A mix of healed and degraded ecosystems can provide habitats for different types of life beings. A big source of stress otherwise will distroy all the job done by time and simplify the ecosystem. Moreover, the damage can be so deep that the new state of organisation enters in a loop. The remain is just too flammable to advance and the only species surviving benefit from fire so they need fire to keep competitors at bay, germinate and survive. And they make fire creating flammable structures. Fire triggers water quiting the area and will distroy soil organic structure. Without water the future of the area enters in a reverse path, to savanna, then arid, finally desert. Is happening in California for example.
For climate change figthing purposes, the closer to the ecological climax, the better chance for long-term human survivorship.
Climate change will actively distroy climactic ecosystems also (more hurricans, etc), so the problem is more complicated that "just stop chopping trees and damaging coral reefs with tourist cruises". We can expect a lot of problems and extinction cascades in the future.
A good book that talks about this effect, along with lots of interesting connections between thermodynamics and ecology, is "Into the cool" by Sagan and Schneider
This is not true of the rainforests themselves, but the Amazon region is not 100% rainforest. It also has savannas and drier forests in parts of it (it's a massive region).
These are fires for agricultural land. They're much smaller than natural forest fires but many of them are set at once at the beginning of the season, so it's still a lot of forest on fire.
