It depends on the forest, but there are fire adapted forests that benefit from fire. We’ve completely changed the understory by suppressing fire, meaning the succession of the forest is totally different now. Also many non-native invasive plants, that aren’t fire adapted, are thriving and blocking sunlight to native seedlings. The lack of fire has also made the tick problem worse.

BTW I should mention, when the forest burns often (once every 6-10 years), then you get “good” fires. Fires which are less than a meter tall and quickly move through the leaf litter and scrub layer. Trees are left intact, nutrients are recycled into the soil, new growth of fire-adapted species returns quickly.

If you don’t get frequent fires all that stuff builds up, and in fifty years you get a total conflagration that climbs into the overstory and creates a raging inferno. This is what you see on the news. These are bad and can completely destroy a forest for decades or even centuries.

That’s one kind, and Rust’s “ownership” concept does mean there’s built-in compile time checks to prevent dangling pointers or unreachable memory. But there’s also just never de-allocating stuff you allocated even though it’s still reachable. Like you could just make a loop that allocates memory and never stops and that’s a memory leak, or more generally a “resource leak”, if you prefer.

Rust is really good at keeping you from having a reference to something that you think is valid but it turns out it got mutated way down in some class hierarchy and now it’s dead, so you have a null pointer or you double free, or whatever. But it can’t stop the case where your code is technically valid but the resource leak is caused by bad “logic” in your design, if that makes sense.

My dad survived colon cancer but then any further colonoscopy was denied for five years because it was no longer “preventative”.

Same thing happened with honey. Suddenly Vietnam’s honey exports magically increased to more than their domestic production. Of course nobody cared because it’s all theater.

Last place I was at called them build “masters” for this reason.

Yep, I remember the same. It’s the same phenomenon as beatniks and hippies. They cast a large cultural shadow because of art and media that came from the subculture, but at the time it wasn’t that many people.

Also it’s easy today to forget about the reach of radio. Radio basically dictated what was popular, and even in the 90s there were still regional radio markets that were totally independent. I remember only the rich kids had MTV.

Finally getting a generator. I live in a rural area. Not having a generator was a huge hole in my setup. We also got a wood stove earlier this year for backup heat. I had longer term plans for solar but now it looks like that may be impossible since China makes all the equipment, and it’s already difficult to balance the utility with the expense.

Could do what nuke plants do and have another heat exchanger between the clean water and the water that evaporates, then use less clean water for that loop. If that’s too expensive it just means they aren’t being charged enough for potable water.

Management always wearing the same thing in public appearances is fucking weird. Steve Jobs, Zuck, Todd Howard, probably more I just haven’t noticed. It’s like they’re trying to be cartoons.

I was forced to take 4 years of Latin and I’ve basically reverted to “Salve Magistra, Italia Peninsula Est” levels. It never clicked with me. Every week was a struggle, I was a terrible student, and I remember jack shit. At best it helped me remember the names of stuff in anatomy class, which was actually interesting. I think the way it was taught is the worst fucking way to learn a language, like most 19th century educational theory.

It feels like we are either approaching, or have reached, a point where going zero carbon and straight up dumping unprotected nuclear waste in a population center would lead to less suffering and misery than our current trajectory. Obviously that’s not necessary or even possible, but that the situation we are in is extremely bleak and fixing it at this point probably requires a level of ice cold motherfuckerness we’ve never reckoned with.

High res textures (especially normal maps) and higher quality/coverage audio really made game sizes take off. Unreal’s new “Nanite” tech, where models can have literally billions of polygons, actually reduces game size because no normal maps.

May his staph be golden.

Caesar. [To the Soothsayer] The ides of March are come.

Soothsayer. Ay, Caesar; but not gone.

Good. The other day there was a wildfire near me and I literally couldn’t read statements from the fire crew without making either a Twitter or Facebook account. Every news station, community org, and even the national park service uses one or the other. This is despite the fact they have websites, which apparently only host long term data. Fucking sucks.

Homer, are you still holding the can?

without any account

Did they make this easier? I have a Sage and I had to open a SQLite database file on the e-reader, then flip some flag, to bypass account sign in. But that was a few years ago.

Raw mushrooms are amazing for hunger, and they have a ton of potassium (helps if you are watching your sodium balance).

I wouldn’t be surprised. If the tariffs go through and prices skyrocket the admin will need a scapegoat, and I don’t think “woke” will resonate. My guess is they attack unions. Despite the absurdity of that notion it has a proven track record. Whip up a furor, use it to kill the NLRB. Nothing changes but by then six months have gone by and nobody cares.