Fire in Los Angeles is looking real bad. People panicked and left their cars behind to flee on foot, there’s huge numbers of abandoned cars on roads (cached). They’re using a bulldozer to move the cars out of the way (cached). Someone who didn’t manage to evacuate uploaded video (cached) from what looks like the middle of the fire. I really hope they’re ok, it looks very bad. Ryan Petersen recommends the Watch Duty (cached) app to track the fire in real time. The state insurer of last resort, FAIR, has 6 billion in exposure (cached) to this fire, if FAIR becomes insolvent, we all pay for it (cached). Finally, there's an article from October 2024 arguing that insurance rates are too high in the LA hills, citing a house that one commenter points out (cached) appears to be the center of the current fire.
If you’re wondering what’s causing all these fires, there’s extremely high winds, seen in this video they’re sparking against a nearby tree.
Yes, but also I suspect it’s because fast food pairs well with drive thru ordering.
Flotsam and Jetsam
– Lawsuit may actually force the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to do its job and approve reactor designs (src)(cached)
– Oh look who is arming Houthi rebels in Yemen to shoot at Red Sea shipping lanes. I’ll give you one guess (src)(cached)
– When comparing GDP to figure out who would win a war you need to make very different assumptions about exchange rates, and which things are actually valuable. (src)(cached)
– If we actually bought Greenland, the Jones Act would absolutely wreck them, as they’d no longer be able to import much from the US. (src)(cached)
– Russia is admitting that it’s them cutting undersea internet cables, saying that they’re doing it to hurt Europe. Maybe Europe should do something about this? (src)(cached)
– A company announced that they got transplanted cells to work without immunosuppression, very cool! (src)(cached)
– “If 20-25 year olds are able to get housing, the probability of having a child goes up by 33%!!! 🤯” (src)(cached)
– Learning to ride a bike has gotten better ever since we invented a new way of teaching kids how to ride a bike: training wheels are not useful. Here's an excerpt of Lars Doucet's explanation of learning to bike without pedals (cached) first. It's obvious once you see the explanation why training wheels don't work as well. (src)(cached)
– Justin Trudeau learned when he was young how to do a stage fall down a staircase, and continued to use this trick even when he was Prime Minister. (src)(cached)