California is in the middle of a huge fire insurance crisis. It started with the intentional housing supply restrictions that drove up property prices and rents. In suburban areas, rebuilding costs were mostly increased indirectly through higher wages (as tradespeople and laborers have to make rent.) This sent insurance rates through the roof and caused a wave of policy cancellations. Many insurance companies exited the market altogether [1].
Climate change is also to blame. The firestorms of 2017, 2018 and 2020 broke all records, and were insanely expensive to rebuild after. The typical trigger is a katabatic wind event [2] after a long dry spell. This massively reduces relative humidity (often to 5-10%,) making ignition much easier. Once a fire starts, the wind spreads it extremely quickly. Sustained wind speeds of 50-60mph are not uncommon near mountain peaks.
In 2017/2018/2020, the precipitating events were so intense that the initial responses focused exclusively on helping the residents out. By the time the actual firefighting began, the fires were already enormous.
It's surprising to me that we haven't seriously looked into large-scale sprinkler systems, such as this one deployed in Spain [3]. These could take a major bite out of the initial uncontrolled stage. They could either be deployed in the wild along naturally defensible lines, or at the perimeters of inhabited areas.
They're expensive upfront, but not as expensive as the alternative. They might also reduce the need for prescribed burns.
I remember the smoke hovering over San Francisco, CA during the fires in late 2018. It was the worst I've personally experienced. I had an office job at the time. At the end of the day I didn't want to walk home in such poor air quality, so I ordered an Uber. The driver had been driving in that smoke all day and it caught up with him. Halfway to my home, he opened the door, puked his guts out, canceled ride, ended his shift, and I ended up walking the rest of the way.
That's wild. It makes me wonder how many people know what the circulate internal air button does and if it would be sufficient or not to prevent the above happening for the driver
Potential hiccup: isn't California in a water crisis? So, upstream of all of this is something like, "Dealing with foreign land-owners who are buying up all the water rights on the West Coast in order to irrigate their animal feed alfalfa farms (say that 5 times fast)." Your fire management issue just became an international concern.
Not a hiccup. Why do we care if foreign farmers can feed their animals? We need to focus on us first. They shouldn’t even be able to buy property here until they’re a citizen.
Hi, yes, it's the Arabians and the Chinese. We let one get away with a massive terrorist attack and the other is a nuclear power who we're trying not to go to war with. Remember, our entry into the Pacific Theater of WWII was predicated on a trade embargo.
...But in general, I do agree that we shouldn't be selling out American resources for foreign countries at our loss.
Indeed artificial housing supply restrictions are about 100000000% more important. Alas, a portion of the progressive left was co-opted by the housing barons many decades ago. I believe California voters would be more progressive otherwise.
Here in SF, a good example is the leading progressive mayoral candidate, Peskin. He's basically a housing subversive. He'll pay lip service to it, then sabotage YIMBY efforts. Earlier this year he sponsored an ordinance blocking higher density in parts of his district. The current mayor vetoed it [1] but he got the board to override the veto [2].
The barons originally sold suburban supply restrictions as anti-sprawl measures, co-opting the greener factions of the left. Then they sold density restrictions as anti-traffic measures.
No suburbs + no density = no new housing.
Luckily this unholy coalition has started to crumble a few years ago. A large majority of Democrats is now in favor of more housing.
It's been rather shocking hearing one President candidate push Peskin-like policy (Trump), and the other the policies of Peskin's nemeses (Harris). Of course since Harris is from Oakland, slightly younger, and doesn't come from trust fund money, her background would be more likely to align with fair housing policy than Peskin.
It's really an amazing study in political science. Progressives are supposed to be all about helping the poor, but some were sold a camouflaged dystopia.
To reach utopia - the fantasy goes - we must first travel through a dystopia in which the poor are enserfed by the housing barons, paying upwards of 70% of their income in rent. Unfortunately the dystopia never ends in practice.
Then there's the perplexing question of how real estate taxation got to this point. As the saying goes, a real estate family that pays any income tax at all needs to fire their tax advisor.
And that last point describes a certain entitled developer over the last decade. Obsessively beg not to pay taxes, for example running the old DC post office building after winning a competitive bid, where everyone one else priced in the cost of doing business.
You can't pick up a rock in Italy without technically disturbing an ancient ruin of some kind. It's unsurprising that this might be the case right off the coast too. Still amazing to look at when the water is clear in aerial pictures.
As an aside, historical preservation was used as a pretext for artificial housing supply restrictions in Europe much earlier than in the US. Eventually US property owners caught on. Now any old 20th century box is revered like a Haussmannian mansion in Paris.
> You can't pick up a rock in Italy without technically ...
reminded me of a trattoria in Lecce, where the new owner just wanted to fix the toilet plumbing before its grand opening, but discovered a tomb from a Greek tribe, the remnants of a Franciscan chapel, etchings from the Knights Templar, and a Roman granary.
Who knows, it could've been the best trattoria in all of Italy, but it's another museum now.
That’s a fascinating story, but your framing is perplexing—if it hadn’t become a museum it would have been yet another restaurant and presumably the man was compensated such that he could still have opened his restaurant in another building if he chose? Maybe you meant it humorously and I just missed the joke?
The good news is that this is the final outcome, basically. While the original site did become a museum, the owner bought a building next door and opened up a trattoria there (albeit almost twenty years after starting the dig). https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20190807-a-trattoria-with...
Here in Pisa a decade or so ago the town started building an underground parking almost in front of the train station. The work had to be stopped soon because they found ancient Roman ships beneath the ground, that sank during a storm. After (many) years a museum with these ships opened and the underground parking works could start again, but it took literally years. The museum is small but quite cool tho, but you have to be passionate about it
It makes sense to preserve history, old or less old that is. In pisa I can think of at least two restaurants/cafes that have a partial glass floor with remains of what was there during medieval age
Someone told me (years ago) that any building area in Manhattan must first be screened for Native American burial remains before any work could begin. Not sure if that’s true tho!
Probably the world’s only discount supermarket with a built-in museum.
Due to heavy construction in the last decade, there is apparently now a shortage of archaeologists; if you find something while excavating, you’re going to need one.
I honestly prefer this to the American version, "The governor owns a bunch of real estate that would benefit more from road upgrades than two major rail projects that have been in the works for decades, so he tries to cancel the latter - succeeding with one, delaying the other by 5 years, funneling state funds to Induced DemandLand, and forefeiting hundreds of millions of dollars in free federal grants."
If you're in Maryland, please vote Alsobrooks for Senate.
One powerful man's corruption is at least understandable, albeit not excusable.
I find it harder to put up with when entire neighborhoods successfully lobby for that kind of crap to the detriment of an entire region and then play it off as though it's some sort of win. What really makes my blood boil is when they so thoroughly market their accomplishments like it's some sort of win that their narrative becomes the prevailing narrative.
I find that people who are vocal about such stuff fall into extremes. I guess that's true of extremes in general. They tend to be the noisiest. (The converse isn't necessarily true, of course.)
On the one hand, you have NIMBYs who will block good development for arbitrary and self-destructive reasons, or selfishly support such measures, as long as they're in other neighborhoods.
On the other hand, you have people who redefine "NIMBY" to mean "things I don't like" and use it as a bludgeon to bully and intimidate. So, if a neighborhood doesn't want a loud outdoor concert venue built in the middle of it, then people from other neighborhoods who want the concern venue will call those who refuse in the neighborhood in question NIMBYs. This is ironic, given that they themselves are behaving exactly like NIMBYs: build the concert venue, but not in my backyard!
You speak as if this is just an American issue. If you voted for the railway, whichever governor leads that charge will be part owner in the construction company, the rail company, and the law firm that defends them. And the only reason you'd know that it was possible to vote for him is because the rail company paid for his campaign.
To you first point: that’s one reason why I believe the "there was ancient super civilization before but got completely eradicated" theories don’t make a lot of sense.
The sea level has risen 410 feet since the last glacial maximum. There are likely hundreds of submerged settlements around Europe and the Mediterranean.
True. The counterargument is that if you care about quality, you're already better off with Continuity Camera, so maybe you already view the built-in as just a backup.
A MagSafe charging spot on the back of the monitor would be a nice touch. Charge your phone there and its camera is clipped in place by default.
1/20 is less than my guess would have been. It's interesting that Wikipedia is heavily weighted in LLM training corpuses. Eventually there will be a feedback loop not unlike the one among meat popsicles.
How many covers are better than the original? Would we expect that to be possible with AI?
One might assume that a house.gov URL would imply some degree of credibility. This particular link, however, is closer to something that would be found on the ground of said bat cave.
I'm excited at the prospect of LLMs being deployed here. An attacker only needs to find one weak link in the chain. Eliminating weak links is hard, and might be NP-complete.
However, throw resources at it and you might just make weak links much rarer. Throw a variety of heterogenous LLMs at it, and you might be looking at a large force multiplier.
