C'mon guys, I'm sure we can scrape together the extra twelve bucks to get them to an even 4 million.

Yep, that's why I oppose the extremes of forest management policies. I'm in favor of some amount of logging and clearing because I care very deeply about protecting the forests.

There's a very good chance you're vastly underappreciating some combination of: the size of wildfires, the speed of uncontrolled wildfires, the damage they do, the initial costs to build (including time), the costs of rebuilding (including time), all kinds of other opportunity costs, the population size and distribution in the U.S., and the economics of insurance.

If you're genuinely interested in understanding, I'd start by reading up on the fires themselves, but the short answer is that even if you could get enough people to want what you suggest (hint: they won't), you'd still be stuck with the larger problem of paying for it: trillions of dollars would barely even scratch the surface and you'd need to justify spending that money there instead of funding basically every social program and good cause that anyone has ever dreamed of.

I'll assume you're asking in good faith, so here goes: I already mentioned a few reasons (loss of life isn't exactly something insurance helps with if you're the one dying), but also insurance has to be economically viable to work. Just as insurance companies are starting to pull out of the southeast US due to recurring hurricane damage, the same would happen if we didn't try to prevent property destruction from forest fires, and then basically everyone in those areas would become uninsurable.

So the short answer is that if we want to let nature manage itself, then that means e.g. nobody living in those places and/or we wholesale adopt a nomad culture and don't build much, if anything, that is permanent. IOW, a total hands off approach is untenable.

Great question! The problem is that we want nature to take its course... but only to a point. We interfere to try and prevent loss of life, destruction of buildings and other property, and to keep in place forests we deem desirable (e.g. a national park we find pretty).

So what we're after - and this is why it's a tricky problem - is a policy that lets nature do its thing as much as possible, while allowing us to interfere to meet our "unnatural" goals, and then deal with the effects of that interference in a way that doesn't make things spin out of control.

I didn't call for mass deforestation - maybe you were replying to a different comment?

One of the reasons the western US has such a problem with wildfires is that those lands have been somewhat mismanaged for decades, and one of the big examples of mismanagement is the prevention of clearing out growth that should be cleared out. Thus, when the fires inevitably come, they are far worse because you have thousands of miles of very dry fuel.

Similarly, many previously healthy forests are being overrun by destructive beetles and other invasive bugs. Again, uncleared old growth is a major factor.

All of this has grown into a vicious cycle too: natural, managed burns are good for the long term health of the forests. They help stop the spread of invasive bugs and burn off a lot of dead fuel before it turns into an unmanageable bomb. While the state and federal teams do try to allow natural burns to happen, they often have to aggressively put out the fires sooner than is ideal for the natural ecosystem, because the massive amount of unconsumed fuel means greater odds that the fire can get out of control.

We've all seen the horrors of too much logging, and I'm 100% against that. But if you truly care about the environment, then there is actually a decent amount of logging that can happen that is appropriate, helpful, and probably required. Just like a blanket green light on unlimited logging would be terrible policy, any blanket ban on logging is equally bad in the long term. Hopefully whatever policies they settle on will allow for the right balance to exist.

What's amazing is that Spotify has about 9000 employees.

More amazing still is that they have that many employees and yet they can't - even after over a decade of pleading by their customers - implement basic features like remembering your spot in a playlist.

At my kids' school, they renamed 'homework' to 'homeFUN'. I really appreciated the school district's attempt to develop cynicism in kids at a young age.

Maybe, I might have misunderstood what the OP was referring to.

In certain scenarios, you have to pay Epic for the engine, and if you use their distribution platform you have to pay for that. You can use UE but not distribute on Epic (and presumably you can distribute on Epic and not use UE), but if you do both, you get a discount in the form of the engine fee being waived.

Getting a discount for using multiple things from the same company is a pretty well-established practice and not inherently anti-competitive.

Setting aside for a moment the tradeoffs between WFH and being in the office, these announcements always sound like they were written by people who have never actually built or invented anything whatsoever. Any bits of truth in the argument are undermined by this vibe that they don't actually know how things like software development occur.

"We've studied it and found that to make a cake, you really need a bowl. Like, you put stuff in there and then a cake happens, and the bowl is really important. We're strongly in favor of bowls."

ERNIE-ViLG --> e-EvilGrin

It seems like this could easily lose on appeal. The student isn't being forced to give up their privacy unilaterally, they are choosing to submit to testing protocols in exchange for the convenience of taking a test from home. If they'd rather not let the testing department scan for obvious signs of cheating, they can travel to campus or to a test proctoring facility.

Yeah, net result will be that students at state schools will have to travel to campus or to an approved proctoring facility, while students at private schools can continue to take tests from the convenience of their own home.