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Eh.

There's not much evidence that indigenous Californians were doing any kind of fire management in the California coniferous forests - which is largely what the US Forest Service manages and have been in the news for megafires.

Indigenous Californians lived, overwhelmingly, in chaparral and grasslands near coastal areas and foothills rather far away. There is evidence that burns happened there (mostly burn scars in nearby coastal redwood forests, but also various written accounts by the Spanish).

That said, an estimated 4.5-12% of California land burned annually prior to the Spanish getting here - so whatever wildfire management practices happened still resulted in far more land burning than today and months of smoke filled skies - which matches up with early written accounts.


> There's not much evidence that indigenous Californians were doing any kind of fire management in the California coniferous forests

My impression from the book was that there was. They specifically mention burning in around Yosemite and for the harvesting and health of pines whose nuts were used for food.

Also "Eh" seems somewhat dismissive of a really thorough and well researched book. I'm curious if you've read it.


> That said, an estimated 4.5-12% of California land burned annually prior to the Spanish getting here

What's the source for that? It sounds insanely high - enough to burn the entire land area of California every decade or two if the fires did not overlap (I assume they must have in this model)


They specifically mentioned "grasslands" which covers a range of not forrest type lands, from waist high dense grass to sparser knee high grass bush land.

It's common enough for indigenous people to burn off dry grass ranges every year or two, often in chequered patterns to lessen the chances of wind picking up and fanning a full front across unburnt grasslands.

That's likely the 10% referred to, repeated burning of grasslands along with the livable fringes and common paths of forrest areas.

Add onto that "natural" fires from lightening strikes, etc. Some of these would start in ares with little human management and years of built up leaf litter leading to big burns that reduce large areas to ash on the ground and a few scattered trunks .. many would start in areas that have had fires in past five years or so and would result in "cool burns" through leaf litter, some tree trunk climbing, but essentially leave big trees standing and alive with clear floors for new growth.


Interesting.

Was the smoke less toxic?

With lower populations, the smoke impacted less population?

Is a large part of this the fact that fire supressiondid did not occur on industrial scale?

How comparable is the situation? I've heard that it is possible that california has been abnormally wet for the last 500 years. Could be a case of settling cities on a volcano. Ie: it erupts frequently on a geologic scale, but on a human time scale it is a complete surprise


What does this have to do with the CA budget?

This is about the US Forest Service which manages Federal land. The Federal government owns and is responsible for rather large swaths of California forests.


HOAs often restrict freedom of expression which would not be legal if done by a city government.

The first amendment, however, only protects against government censorship, not private organization censorship so an HOA can force you to paint over the mural on your garage whereas a city government could not*.

Some of this depends on state of course. California, for instance, recognizes HOAs as quasigovernments which imposes some restrictions on an HOAs power to censor speech, but many other states do not.

* Case law on this is actually quite minimal. Local governments do try to ban free speech of course and almost certainly overstep their bounds, but no one has gotten a case to the Supreme Court.


> an HOA can force you to paint over the mural on your garage whereas a city government could not*.

Zoning ordinances (which are the closest analogy to HOA CC&Rs) restrict all sorts of expression but have been held lawful as long as they can be characterized as a time/place/manner restriction. See https://firstamendment.mtsu.edu/article/zoning-laws/ for a pretty good case law overview.


So, dumb question / political hobby horse riding in: if neighborhood restrictions on political speech are considered a time/place/manner restriction, why doesn't that logic also foreclose the majority opinion in McCutcheon v. FEC[0]? How are campaign contribution limits not a time/place/manner restriction?

If money is speech, then me giving a million dollars to a Senator should be analogous to me with a megaphone shouting down anyone who disagrees with me until their eardrums bleed.

[0] The Supreme Court case that invalidated campaign contribution limits and foisted SuperPACs upon us.


Giving money to a person, by itself, doesn’t raise the same sort of immediate quality of life concerns (“quiet enjoyment”) as having someone shout through a megaphone into your ear.

Also, core political speech (and its financing, subject to concerns over corruption) such as electoral or issue advocacy is considered sacrosanct by the American legal system and so government prohibitions on it will receive significantly stricter scrutiny.


For free association to be meaningful the association has to be able to restrict freedom of expression, or kick out those who refuse the restrictions.

Otherwise someone could just shout down any meeting the association decides to have.

So the pertinent question would be, are HOAs legitimate associations in that sense?


HOAs are a creature of state law and only have power to the extent state law confers it. They are not voluntary associations of the sort contemplated by the First Amendment. You can't choose to join an HOA unless you own land that belongs to it, and you can't choose not to be a member when you acquire a property.

Has a court ever ruled on that distinction?

HOAs seem to have withstood legal scrutiny…


Not yet, but I look forward to the day a sensible court does.

Mm. VCs are PE firms.

Andreessen Horowitz, Accel, Lightspeed Ventures, etc. are all in the PEI 300.

PE is a bit more than just firms doing buyouts.


While I have no particular love of private equity firms, Buffett didn't actually say that in that video.

The closest thing he said was that he had seen a number of proposals from private equity funds where the returns were not calculated in a way he would consider honest.


Prop 65 threshold for level of harm is two orders of magnitude below any effect level (not the harm level, effect) which I’d argue creates so many false notices of harm that most people simply ignore them eroding trust in the government.

Indeed the level is so low that under the law, the daily recommended dose of vitamin A for pregnant women would need a notice saying it caused birth defects. They had to ignore the law and add a caveat for vitamin A since not taking it causes birth defects.

If they didn’t pick an arbitrary threshold, ignoring scientific consensus on what dose makes the poison, it would have been far more successful.


I think there was a prop 65 warning on a box of kreg pocket screws (or was it the jig?).

So... how long would the copyright be good for then? Life of the forest + 70 years?

Maybe it it was assigned to a single organism, but it's probably a work for hire.

Activity Monitor counts everything from I/O buffer caches to frame buffers in the "memory used" metric. Add in that MacOS won't free pages until it hits a certain memory pressure and you get a high usage with no desktop apps open.

This also means that cleanly booted machine with 16 GB will show more memory used than a machine with 8 GB.

Apple suggests you use the memory pressure graph instead to determine whether you're low on memory for this reason.


Even Cybertrucks aren't purely 48V and ethernet.

There's a high voltage (800V) rail for high current devices like the AC compressor. There's redundant CAN for communication with things like the motors. There's a host of 12V, 16V, 5V components (door locks, lights, seat motors, etc.).

They did switch many components to 48V, but not literally everything.


How is this better than all the other 48V connectors out there (MX150, MCON, PP, etc.)?

Surely it isn't just that they reduced the number of connectors since one could have just standardized on a subset of mass-produced connectors by molex, te, etc. instead.


I'd like to know this too. Their website claims "cost" but doesn't actually list the costs of the new connectors compared to existing ones.

At least give us some comparisons!


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