Dealing with things that will kill us later before things that will kill us sooner is a form of procrastination.

... in five billion years. Which is a good thing, because Mars will be if anything *less* habitable than it is now. To put five billion years in perspective, animals only diverged from our common ancestor with mushrooms only 800 million years ago. Any descendants we may have alive at that point will be less human than a hagfish -- the most primitive vertebrate still in existence.

Well, most *tech* projects fail; if you "probably will fail" rules out funding then very little gets funding. It's not necessarily technical reasons; sometimes the money dries up and it's not your fault. Sometimes you end up making a product that for unforeseen reasons people don't buy it.

Although I dunno on that last point. it kind of "stands to reason" that people would find resurrected mammoth tasty...

I'm sorry to hear about your loss. I hope things get back on track for you soon.

Well, a car sitting in someone's car port isn't particularly fireproof, given that it's sitting on a 15 gallon tank of gasoline. So that tells us nothing.

It's a matter of degree, but if you want to argue what's *possible*, it is absolutely possible to build a "house" (note scare quotes) that can survive this. You just build it like an inside-out pizza oven, with reinforced refractory concrete about a foot thick and clad in fire bricks and maybe those tiles they line blast furnaces with. You might not be able to afford such a house, and even if you could afford it you might not want to live in it, but it's certainly physically possible to build it.

But that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about more incremental steps to improve houses chances. At present it looks like about half the houses in the general area of the fire were destroyed, and it's likely that within a specifica area, complying with recent codes is somewhat correlated with survival. Building codes are designed to trade off costs against perceived risk. Given that this event is going to redefine what "perceived risk" is, it's not much of a stretch to assume fire codes are going to become more stringent. They won't have everyone building Cyclopean stone igloos, so even the new codes won't drop that 50% loss to 0%. But maybe they'd drop it to 25%.

Again that's similar to what happened in the Loma Prieta earthquake: modern reinforced concrete buildings were more likely to survive, older ones built before the 1971 San Fernando earthquake were more likely to fail.

The way economic theory suggests this should be done is that you let people go when their marginal contribution to revenues is less than their cost. So if employing Alice costs you $100,000 and she brings in $100,000.01, she gets to day. Bob who is paid exactly the same but brings in $99,999.99 gets the axe.

The problem is that this calculation, so simple in principle, is impossible to carry out in practice. While you may be pretty sure that someone is contributing to the bottom line, you can almost never quantify it that way. There's guess work.

High performer/low performer is a really poor substitute, even when you can measure that, which you can't always. The highest performer in the boss's pet Metaverse project may well contribute less to the profitability of the company than the lowest performing employee working on brand safety for advertisers.

Absolutely, when a supervisor identifies an employee who is holding others back, that employee should get the axe. But giving every department a 5% headcount haircut isn't guaranteed to do anything good except maybe give you a transient stock price bump. It's something you do when you don't know what to do about your problems.

What, in your view, would competent political leaders have done to prevent the fire? It's not like a politician can repel flames with his mojo.

Housing construction is changing due to climate change. For example in the Florida Keys, where the highest land is just 10 feet above mean high tide, new houses have to be built with a sacrificial first level built of salt water resistant materials, where you aren't allowed to use as living space or storage except for things that are normally kept outdoors. Note how this works: there are architectural and material standards, plus usage restrictions.

California's building codes in fire prone areas are similar: they mandate architectural features and materials and restrict land uses around the home. And it does seem like houses built to code often survived the recent fire when the houses around them were destroyed, although not *always*. The code mandates fire resistant materials, but not resistant to the point where the material can withstand prolonged fire exposure. I suspect *that* is coming.

It is physically possible to build houses that are for practical purposes fireproof, but the code doesn't mandate that because it's too expensive. But I think we'll see steps in that direction, because what we're looking at is the new normal.

Troll or not, there is something to be said for this position. But you need to be willing to apply this position to all parties in a scenario, after all we're not talking about employees *not working*; we're talking about them doing the bare minimum not to get fired. So to be consistent you should also tell the employers to fuck off. They're getting what they paid for, if they want above and beyond they'd better be willing to pay for it.

The statistician George E. P. Box once said one of the wisest things ever said: "All models are false. Some models are useful." There's a model of business that represents a company as a collection of financial assets that hires factors of production to engage in productive activities. Labor in this model is just another factor, like electricity or pig iron. Without question, this is a *very* useful model that throws out a lot of critical detail that will bite you on the ass if you forget it's there. Human beings have agency; they have judgement, free will, and attitudes toward the company. Trying to stretch a human as thin as possible like you would a piece of pig iron, you get the *least* possible out of them rather than the most possible.

Another model of an enterprise that is just as useful and just as limited is that a company is a social institution, a group of people cooperating with each other to achieve some end. In fact the word "company" comes from an old French word that means people who share bread ("com"=together, "pan"=bread). Being at the head of a company isn't just an exercise in managing financial assets. It's also an exercise in leadership.

If the 60s and 70s were a transformative era of American business, it was because companies of the era were led by a generation of men whose view of leadership was shaped by their service in WW2. Yes, their management style was hierarchical, but they also valued and empowered subordinates who showed initiative, adaptability, and teamwork -- things you just can't get from the moral equivalent of an ingot of pig iron.

I think New York is one of the states where cities can't provide Internet services if it would compete with the private sector. Redlining would provide justification for a municipality to set up its own Internet services. As far as I can tell Internet services provided by cities tend to have high user satisfaction. Part of this may be because of lower, more transparent fees.

You can make a reasonable argument that AI training is fair use. After all, it's really just a mechanized version of what humans do. Where do writers get their ideas? There's all kinds of answers they'll give you -- real life observation, experience, even just from the act of sitting down and writing. But one thing they never say, but they all do, is get their ideas from other writers. Writers are readers first; everything they read goes into their (actual) neural net and out comes as new stuff. Everyone who has written a detective story or a space opera is reworking tropes other authors created.

In principle, what an AI algorithm doesn't isn't different. But copyright isn't founded on *principle*. It exists for a specific practical purpose: to incent *human beings* to create stuff. Copyright *assumes* intellectual "property" isn't like real property like land or physical belongings that can be owned for ever and transferred without limitation. It's just a way to make sure creators can benefit enough from their creations to put time and effort into them.

Sure: hoovering up everything on the internet using data centers built with hundreds of millions of dollars of capital is *in principle* the same thing authors do. But *in practice* the effect is potentially very different.

That's the picture you get by extrapolating from every other past wave of tech adoption. The problem is that extrapolation will eventually fail because of some new wrinkle.

I think in this case the new wrinkle might be lowered standards for many of the things humans do. Worse results are acceptable if they're cheaper enough, and we're already seeing this in a lot of AI use by businesses. Unless there's a backlash, this could be the first technological innovation in modern industrial economic history that actually lowers wages.

The prize is getting into your head ... literally. Smartphones monetize your attention, and it's worth a lot of money even though it feels invisible to you. This is about the only way to top that: to have something that's literally glued to your head and doesn't require any overt action on your part.

Based on TFA, which is rather thin, it appears to be an AI assistant device -- similar to the the features AI features some teleconferencing systems have which will write up summaries of meetings for you. The brain interface evidently is intended to allow you to use it without speaking, but the immediate goal appears to be to just get the device to recognize whether you *intend* to use it or not. This solves the problem you would have if you were an iPhone user and had a Norwegian friend named "Siri". Since "Omi" is also a human name (Japanese), they'd have the same problem.

It's always annoyed me that you can't customize the activation phrase for smart phone assistants. It would be easy to do, but I guess it's part of their branding. I guess the next step is to make thought patterns branding too.

Sure, that'll get you over a hiccup in the supply chain. If you had a garage full of toilet paper at the start of the pandemic you'd have been sitting pretty.

That's representative of what prepping can feasibly accomplish for you. It can't do anything about long-term problems -- like civilization collapsing, or having to adapt to climate change. That extended cab 4x4 F-350 is going to be useful for a very limited time in a world without oil refineries. Once you run through that closet full of cans of Dinty Moore beef stew, you're relying someone else fixing whatever went wrong with civilization.

The fantasy of being prepped for the fall of civilization is like the fantasy going to the gym to get jacked. It's true that anyone *could* do it, but for most of us it takes too much time, hard work and dedication for most people to achieve. Sure, a lot of us go to the gym, futz around semi-seriously and really do get a lot of benefit out of it, but nobody is ever going to mistake us for a fitness model. To survive in a post apocalyptic world you need to spend serious time acquiring skills that have little practicality in modern life. Blacksmithing, anyone?

That said, climate change as envisioned by scientists doesn't look like an apocalyptic scenario. It's just going to be very expensive to deal with, and we can reasonably expect many temporary disruptions due to extreme climate events. That close of Dinty Moore could well see you through those. You're still going to have to pay to clean up after though.