culi

It's bad but one thing not often pointed out in this conversation is that about 50% of water used in irrigation for agriculture returns as groundwater. In most other cases, used water ends up in sewers or evaporating

Most desalination plants (at least the ones that are economically viable) focus on brackish groundwater, not ocean water. This contributes to the problem GP is pointing out. California already does more desalination than any US state other than Florida.

But there's a million environmental restoration projects we could be doing right now to increase the water holding capacities of our environments that are simply not being sufficiently funded. The science is pretty well done on most of these strategies while desalination of ocean water is still mostly an experimental technology that is not economically viable.

I think they're trying to point out how little effort is put into environmental restoration that would allow our environment to hold more water instead of having most of our rainwater wash out into sewers. Some of the loss in the environment's ability to hold water is due to large infrastructure projects in the first place. We are heavily draining the landscape and its causing us to lose critical topsoils (some of which took thousands of years to make).

Compared to 200 years ago, water moves around much more but California overall has MUCH less water.

grid maintenance is massive but wildfire liability is a larger problem California faces more than any other state

if only California didn't ban cultural burns in the first place

Amazing what California can achieve when they don't have to deal with constant cease-and-desist lawsuits, eminent domain battles, environmental review challenges, etc (crying in high speed rail)

they're hitting those too to be fair. In South America its a big problem in communities that are really poor. The components of even CCTV cameras are so valuable that surveillance cameras get taken down almost immediately

Related: https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented

That's wonderful but it doesn't affect web-browsing right? If I watch a video with this extension, the transcripts are not gonna be indexed

I said UN report and the Pentagon report. The NYTimes leaked an early Pentagon report but I didn't save the original article. All I have is this quote I saved from it, but when I google it the original article doesn't show up:

> At least 165 people, mostly schoolgirls, were killed. One official cited by The New York Times said, “We are still looking into the strike, but the evidence increasingly points to US aircraft as the source of the school being hit.” US authorities have acknowledged the inquiry but have not officially claimed responsibility.

Any ways I think it's a little obfuscated because the initial wave of airstrikes started at 11:22am and there were 9 in total, several hitting near the school and at least 2 hitting the school directly. All of this happened in less than 2 minutes according to a joint investigation by Sky News and Forensic Architecture.[0] I think that's also the source of the confusion of whether this was a "triple tap" or "double tap"

[0] https://forensic-architecture.org/investigation/airstrikes-o...

Reuters title is literally: "The primary school targeted in the attacks bombed twice, 40 minutes apart in Iran"

https://www.reutersconnect.com/item/the-primary-school-targe...

EDIT: and here's Forensic Architecture https://forensic-architecture.org/investigation/airstrikes-o...

> Mohammad Yazdanpanah, a driver with the local fire department, said: ‘About half an hour, maybe forty minutes after we had arrived at the scene, there were two additional explosions, one after another. At that time there were perhaps one thousand to fifteen hundred people gathered in the compound and around the area. When the first explosion happened, we immediately threw ourselves to the ground to seek shelter. Just a few seconds later—perhaps three or four seconds afterward—a second explosion followed.’

I don't think a third strike is confirmed, but I also think "double-tap" is more of a category meaning "followup strikes to hit responders" so I wouldn't be surprised if 2 followup strikes instead of 1 are still categorized as a "double-tap strike". It seems like splitting hairs either way. We know that the strike caused surviving teachers/students to congregate in a prayer hall. 40 minutes later that was hit as well killing almost everyone

The thing I most struggle with in this domain is recalling information from videos. I watch/listen to a lot of hour+ lectures and I rely on this website deeply:

https://filmot.com/

It lets you search YouTube transcripts. If you could somehow integrate video transcripts into this tool, I would be extremely interested in trying it out

40 minutes almost exactly. The teachers and surviving students rushed to a prayer hall for protection and then US aircraft (not surface to surface missiles) hit the building a second time killing almost every student and teacher as well as first responders

These are all detailed in both the UN fact finding mission and the US' own investigation.

Well that's exactly what happened. US hit the building and many died. All the surviving students and teachers rushed to a prayer hall for protection but almost exactly 40 minutes later US airplanes (not surface missiles) hit the building again.

All of these facts are outlined in US' own internal investigation and in the UN's fact-finding mission.

It's not missiles. US' own investigations show it was hit by aircraft

The first strike heavily damaged the building. Teachers and surviving students rushed to a prayer hall for protection but about 40 minutes after the first strike, a US airstrike hit again and killed all survivors.

A double-tap strike is often legal basis for war crimes already as the primary purpose is to hit first responders and avoid any survivors being saved.

Having offsite backups is great. Not hosting your infrastructure on a military contractor in Saudi Arabia is even better.

The coup was literally armed and equipped by the US. The US provided intelligence, made the plan, did the homework. They even gave them list of targets. Wherever you wanna draw the line, no one would seriously deny that he could've gained power without the US.

The US' strategy to use a proxy to commit heinous crimes against humanity is named after this event. It's called the Jakarta Method.

> This is about the labs just being cool and doing cool shit

The point still stands. Devs like "cool shit". Upper management doesn't care

So much of our economy is local maxima and path dependencies. Plastic is so cheap because it's basically a byproduct of the heavily subsidized oil industry. When we drill for oil we always also get ethane which companies would have to pay exorbitant amounts to get rid of in compliance with environmental standards. Turning it into plastic and other petro products is a great alternative

In a world that didn't do this much oil drilling, plastic wouldn't always be the cheapest option. In fact virgin plastic is often taxed even lower than recycled plastic to encourage plastic usage

Is this still true after the IMO 2020 sulfur regulations? I remember they found out that these ships were producing so much white aerosol clouds that it actually had a really significant albedo effect that reflected a lot of the sun's heat back out. When they were banned it actually temporarily accelerated warming by an estimated 0.05°C bump

> In a war where schools and bridges and aid convoys and bread lines are targeted

Yes but that's clearly not this war. This is a missile war where high-value strategic military targets are the priority. The US and Israel hit some prisons, damaged some hospitals, and ofc killed 168 schoolchildren. They also targeted residential areas to assassinate important leaders. But Iran has not returned that. They've stuck pretty strictly to military targets with very few exceptions

If this was a war where bridges were a target, Iran would not be so successful. There's simply a too limited amount of missiles. Also only 20% of Saudi Arabia has citizenship while almost the whole rest is basically indentured servants. It's not like they could provoke a popular uprising or anything. There's no strategic value in hitting "bread lines"

> I mean clearly the problem isn't AWS as such

I get your main point, but just wanna point out that AWS is one of the largest military contractors in the world. They hold multi-billion dollar contracts from the DoD, USAF, CIA, and more. An estimated $4B a year in military spending goes to AWS

You don't need better missile defense than AWS. You don't need missile defense at all because you won't be a target. 99.999999% of the land has no missile threat on it. You are actively increasing the threat to your business by running it on the same servers that military contractors run their software on.

With other software, devs convince their managers of the importance of using open source stuff in their stack. With AI, it's usually managers choosing what models to use for the devs. The US labs don't need to give a damn how much devs like open source

BRICS just had a New Delhi meeting where Xi pushed a 5-point plan on AI cooperation that centered on open source models

I obviously think this is an oversimplification but I've also slowly come to believe this is basically accurate. Reading the history of the Guatemala coup that the US did and the role the NYTimes played in it is very convincing evidence for this view

western media has a habit of not reporting on atrocities they are complicit in. When the genocide in Indonesia happened (where as many as 2 million were killed) they presented it as liberation from communist sympathizers. Union workers, and people of certain ethnicities or religions that were seen as sympathetic to communism were all put to death. Goodyear Tire company, just 2 decades after the Holocaust, was using labor from death camps for its rubber manufacturing. US corporations in general had a lot to gain from the genocide

Indonesia's dictator Suharto (who was put into power by the US) annexed West Papua in the 60's on behalf of US corporations. Indigenous groups united together to form the Free Papua Movement (OPM) and wage a guerilla war of resistance. The resistance is ongoing and most of West Papua (which is basically a colony) and PNG (which is basically a banana republic) want reunification

Yes this is true but the oil companies are amassing a lot of wealth the entire world is now much much more dependent on the US for oil. Giving the US much more economic leverage. Who ever cared about every day Americans?