Thank you for seeing the question for what it is. Genuinely was wondering if there are good alternatives to controlled burns. If not then of course controlled burns are significantly better than wild fires.
One thought that crossed my mind was if a burn after collecting the debris can be used for energy generation with proper emissions filtering/control etc. That would also offset other energy related emissions. But as someone below writes perhaps the collection and transportation of the debris would take more energy than what this would generate.
Since burning releases CO2 into the atmosphere, are there alternatives to burning? Maybe it's difficult to do something with the vast amount of dry wood/plants, even if one manages to collect them?
Reading that the virus is stable in the air for 3h, you would think that the R0 would be closer to measles, i.e. ~18 instead of ~2. Any ideas why this is not the case?
They regularly give Fentanyl to pregnant women during labor. We know some of it crosses the placenta and enters the baby. Does anyone know why this is OK?
If you decide to retire early (say 50), before medicare kicks in (at 65), then you are on the hook to buy insurance yourself. That's maybe the difference between US and Europe that the above commenter refers to.
Is there a list of Bay Area local politicians voting record/views on housing? Seems like a good first step in terms of organizing to vote for people that are pro building.
The thought provoking contrast presented in the article is camera derived sparse maps with lane lines, road edges, signs etc. vs lidar derived dense detailed models of the whole environment. Any thoughts around why the former is not enough? If it is enough it would certainly be preferable, since smaller in size and likely easier to maintain.
I have called a couple of times and at bare minimum they asked me the zip code I am calling from. Cold logic would dictate that if you are calling from a zip code outside their voting district, they will ignore you. However, imagine you are getting thousands of calls every single day from all over the country. As a human being, can you really stand to flatly ignore that day in day out?
There are two things that everyone concerned should be doing all the time right now, and they're by far the most important things.
You should NOT be bothering with online petitions or emailing.
1. The best thing you can do to be heard and get your congressperson to pay attention is to have face-to-face time - if they have town halls, go to them. Go to their local offices. If you're in DC, try to find a way to go to an event of theirs. Go to the "mobile offices" that their staff hold periodically (all these times are located on each congressperson's website). When you go, ask questions. A lot of them. And push for answers. The louder and more vocal and present you can be at those the better.
2. But, those in-person events don't happen every day. So, the absolute most important thing that people should be doing every day is calling. You should make 6 calls a day: 2 each (DC office and your local office) to your 2 Senators & your 1 Representative.
Any sort of online contact basically gets immediately ignored, and letters pretty much get thrown in the trash (unless you have a particularly strong emotional story - but even then it's not worth the time it took you to craft that letter).
Calls are what all the congresspeople pay attention to. Every single day, the Senior Staff and the Senator get a report of the 3 most-called-about topics for that day at each of their offices (in DC and local offices), and exactly how many people said what about each of those topics. They're also sorted by zip code and area code. Republican callers generally outnumber Democrat callers 4-1, and when it's a particular issue that single-issue-voters pay attention to (like gun control, or planned parenthood funding, etc...), it's often closer to 11-1, and that's recently pushed Democratic congressmen on the fence to vote with the Republicans. In the last 8 years, Republicans have called, and Democrats haven't.
So, when you call:
A) When calling the DC office, ask for the Staff member in charge of whatever you're calling about ("Hi, I'd like to speak with the staffer in charge of Healthcare, please") - local offices won't always have specific ones, but they might. If you get transferred to that person, awesome. If you don't, that's ok - ask for their name, and then just keep talking to whoever answered the phone. Don't leave a message (unless the office doesn't pick up at all - then you can...but it's better to talk to the staffer who first answered than leave a message for the specific staffer in charge of your topic).
B) Give them your zip code. They won't always ask for it, but make sure you give it to them, so they can mark it down. Extra points if you live in a zip code that traditionally votes for them, since they'll want to make sure they get/keep your vote.
C) If you can make it personal, make it personal. "I voted for you in the last election and I'm worried/happy/whatever" or "I'm a teacher, and I am appalled by Betsy DeVos," or "as a single mother" or "as a white, middle class woman," or whatever.
D) Pick 1-2 specific things per day to focus on. Don't go down a whole list - they're figuring out what 1-2 topics to mark you down for on their lists. So, focus on 1-2 per day. Ideally something that will be voted on/taken up in the next few days, but it doesn't really matter - even if there's not a vote coming up in the next week, call anyway. It's important that they just keep getting calls.
E) Be clear on what you want - "I'm disappointed that the Senator..." or "I want to thank the Senator for their vote on..." or "I want the Senator to know that voting in _____ way is the wrong decision for our state because..." Don't leave any ambiguity.
F) They may get to know your voice/get sick of you - it doesn't matter. The people answering the phones generally turn over every 6 weeks anyway, so even if they're really sick of you, they'll be gone in 6 weeks.
From experience since the election: If you hate being on the phone & feel awkward (which is a lot of people) don't worry about it - there are a bunch of scripts (Indivisible has some, there are lots of others floating around these day). After a few days of calling, it starts to feel a lot more natural. Put the 6 numbers in your phone (all under P – Politician. An example is McCaskill MO, Politician McCaskill DC, Politician Blunt MO, etc...) which makes it really easy to click down the list each day.
For C/C++ RTags (https://github.com/Andersbakken/rtags) together with company-mode and fly-check can do jump-to-definition, auto-completion and on-the-fly-syntax-checking. Super easy to use if using cmake as build system.
Respond to this comment if you need pointers on how to set things up.
That was definitely interesting to listen to. Recommend it to others reading this thread. I have personally never met anyone being that passionately dismissive of people working at technology companies. Absurd.
Both of these laws are designed to benefit people who moved here long time ago and make it economically harder for new people to move here. Whether they are landlords, renters or home buyers.
Prop 13 makes new property buyers pay more for property taxes.
Rent control makes new renters pay more for rent.
As long as there are more people benefiting from these 2 laws than hurting, they will be in effect. It would be interesting to see organized efforts in changing these laws.
However, it also seems like due to galaxies further away having a larger expansion speed, typically they are more redshifted.