Arsonist #2

https://www.yahoo.com/news/us/...

Arsonist #1, the big fire

https://www.cnn.com/2026/08/10...

There was also a fire caused by a car crash on a mountain road.

It's normally tinder dry this time of year in the Cascade's rain shadow so it doesn't take much to start a fire.

Look at the good side, people won't have to move south when they retire any more. It will be warm where they already live.

Interestingly enough, on average I run the heat pump in cooling mode about 22 days a year. So far this year I've used it 8 days.

The heat pump is in heating mode from continuously from mid-October to Mid-April. It will be a long time before that balances out up here at 47 degrees North.

Cambridge professors certainly qualify as nerds even if they are not in computer science.

Therefore an article about a plagiarism happy professor getting caught out is relevant here.

Exactly. What percentage of the robots did they recover? What happens to the ones left behind? Are they extracting anything else from the soil?

"What does it mean to design a system to run a GUI package manager? What systems are designed to "run it" and which ones aren't?"

That is an odd way to phrase it. A better way to say it is to "choose a system compatible with the GIU you want."

The current version of KDE Plasma does not run well on an old Xeon with an Radeon RX 560. Cinnamon does run well on that same machine. MATE runs well on a 2012 Mac mini.

As to the "pain of switching", that lasts about a week. Probably less going from Windows to Linux. Mac to Linux wasn't that hard in general but the control vs Command takes some getting used too.

That applies to socialists just as well. The purpose of government is the acquisition and use of power. Who is in charge doesn't change that.

How do they do in the cold? As in below 0 F? If you can manage the temperatures just by opening or closing louvers to control natural convection it will work well residentially. The weight really doesn't matter if it only moves for installation and a changeout once a decade after.

Remote control and monitoring. Multiple wells miles apart, multiple storage tanks on various hills, an office, plus the on-call operator who can check in from home and Management too.

The system I'm on uses radio links from tank to pumps, and a cellular connection to the water board and operators. There is a clear line of sight from the tank on the hill to the pumps down slope but in other systems that is not the case.

Who says the Chinese are playing on a level playing field? See my entry above.

"China set anti-dumping import tariffs of up to 57% on U.S. polysilicon producers (such as REC Silicon and Hemlock Semiconductor) beginning on July 24, 2013 (following initial anti-dumping investigations and rulings announced in July 2013 and extended/reviewed in subsequent years)"

I worked for REC Silicon at the time and yes the Chinese did indeed do that. At first there were work-arounds but those were gradually closed down.

The REC polysilicon plant in Moses Lake WA (20,000 tons/year) is still there and has been shut down since 2019. They tried to restart it in 2024 but it supposedly couldn't meet the current quality standards. There was reportedly some skullduggery about the testing procedure but I can't speak to that as I retired in 2018.

Note that REC was not dumping polysilicon, I am well aware of their cost of production and their sales price. The fluidbed reactors were vastly more power efficient that the Siemens reactors. REC shut those down in 2013 if I remember right. The Butte plant ran them longer producing float-zone grade material until high power costs shut them down too.

The Chinese intend to be the monopoly supplier of PV panels, or at least 90% of them. They will and have done whatever is needed to achieve that.

It's the same policy as they have with rare earths, and EVs. Yes, "It's so cheap!" now, but eventually they will be yanking that supply chain.

This Boomer (Generation Jones at that) is out of range of OTA TV. Also there is no cable service here. And I gave up a satellite over a decade ago.

Hence my question. Someone else posted that OTA TV households are only 14% of the population. So again, what difference does it make?

I understand the reasoning behind wanting the limit, but does TV actually matter anymore?

You left out the limits of vision, as in fog, snow, and deer standing on the side of the road at dusk.

There is where something other than conventional cameras would be helpful.

The line in question is the quarterly profits. That line must always go up.

So if Microsoft uses less of its own AI product (as measured by tokens) then the line for the AI division will not go up.

He was up 80%, now he's down 67%. The miracle of leverage.

Since he was forced to sell obviously that 13% difference was not on his side. Margin calls are a thing.