I mean yeah climate change is making things worse, but you need three things for a fire; heat, fuel, and oxygen. Climate change can supply the heat, but the decades of ignorant and ubiquitous suppression of wildland fires has supplied a dangerous abundance of fuel in a lot of areas. Really it’s all our fault all around.
That’s so American it’s almost comical
Quantum mechanics works, no doubt about it. What I seriously doubt is the interpretation of what it means. When you get right down to it, it’s just our best most successful attempt to model physical systems we can’t observe with enough detail to tell exactly what’s happening. The whole uncertainty principle isn’t some magic truth about the nature of reality, it’s just a statement about measuring particles by bumping them with other particles. Wave particle duality is an interpretation of the math, it isn’t required for the math to work. Bell “disproved” hidden variable theories and we’ve been working with our hands tied behind our backs ever since, just so we can preserve the comforting fiction that have free will or that it means anything in the first place. It honestly pisses me off because so many scientists just accept the Copenhagen interpretation as truth, to the point that it’s become dogma and anyone suggesting otherwise is automatically wrong. It’s no wonder particle physics has hardly made any progress in the last few decades.
Fire is a natural and necessary part of many ecosystemsm. It keeps parasitic insect populations down, stuff like ticks and chiggers, and some plant species rely on fire to prepare the soil for seeds and even is required for some plants to release their seeds. In dry ecosystems like the western USA it also consumes old dead plant material, reducing the fuel available for future fires and reducing fire severity overall. Many foresters and fire fighters advocate for increasing prescribed burns, essentially forest fires that we light on purpose in cooler and wetter times of the year to consume the fuel without risking a catastrophic fire that is difficult to control. I just think that’s neat.
I was going to make a speed running joke here but it made me sad so you get this instead.
I mean when you’ve got an existential election and the options are a barely functional geezer who will just do whatever his staff suggest and stupid Hitler your choice is going to be a forgone conclusion. It’s not a choice between two shitty candidates, it’s a choice between one shitty candidate and literal fascism. You either want fascism or you don’t. All these “undecided” voters are either hilariously ignorant, closet fascists, or both.
Doubt. These large language models can’t produce anything outside their dataset. Everything they do is derivative, pretty much by definition. Maybe they can mix and match things they were trained on but at the end of the day they are stupid text predictors, like an advanced version of the autocomplete on your phone. If the information they need to solve your problem isn’t in their dataset they can’t help, just like all those cheap Indian call centers operating off a script. It’s just a bigger script. They’ll still need people to help with outlier problems. All this does is add another layer of annoying unhelpful bullshit between a person with a problem and the person who can actually help them. Which just makes people more pissed and abusive. At best it’s an upgrade for their shit automated call systems.
I love a woman who knows what she wants and takes steps to get it <3