> With less rain, the plants in the area rely more on the snowmelt for water, leaving less water to make its way into the nearby streams. Decreased rain also means sunny skies, which encourages plant growth and water evaporation from the soil.
Logical next step: remove the vegetation for more human population!
"What if we took the people and businesses from the places with large rivers and continental climates, and put them in a sun-blasted hellscape that these native gentlemen keep telling us cannot sustain life?" - American policy from 1840 to now
I think the global north doesn’t really line up with human instinct in a lot of ways. Climate, day length pattern, vegetation.
I guess somewhere in Africa should per perfect? I doubt the humans who split off and went north have had their instincts change enough to not prefer that sort of climate, and that explains the draw to sun rich areas. Not to mention those who left that region much more recently.
It’s interesting that I haven’t seen any groups with a Darwinian Zionism, so to speak. An ancestral claim to the region where humans evolved.
It seems unlikely that climate-zone preferences motivated the prehistoric spread of humanity, as that would require both a knowledge of the possibilities and the means to exploit them. More likely, people settled where they could support themselves and moved when that no longer was the case, either from micro-climactic changes or population pressure.
Large-scale migration into the arid parts of North America and elsewhere was first facilitated by the development of the technology to use deep aquifers.
Other way around. Humans and pre-human hominids evolved in a more confined region of the world for an extremely long time, and they left recently enough that they still instinctively prefer the climate of that region.
Prehistoric spread was driven by other factors that were more important than climate preference. But that doesn't eliminate climate preference, and all else equal humans will act on that preference.
Oh, I see, I think: you are saying that we have preserved a preference for our ancestral habitat, and that has motivated recent migration into arid areas? Maybe so; we still have some physiological adaptions for warm climates.
When it comes to agriculture in the desert, which is still the major reason why the snowpack shortfall is a matter of concern, the motivation seems more economic: crops grow very well in sunny climates, so long as you can give them adequate water - and we could, for a while, but probably not sustainably.
Modern humans came frome the Ethiopian plateau right? So low of 75F high of 80F sort of thing. High altitude equatorial. Bogotá is similar but cooler. As is Quitó. Much of coastal Europe and west coast North America is a decent approximate.
Coastal Europe has considerable variation and the west coast of North America even more so, but what is of more relevance to the snowpack issue is that most of the lower Colorado basin is quite unlike what humanity's home was like prior to our global spread.
I don't know, I love the northern flora, too, Rattlesnake master, moline, dogwood, black-eyed susan, blazing star, echinacea (purple coneflower) and so many more.
I think emotional attachment does form to what is familiar within our lifetimes.
But what is a more typical "dream" desire by the average human? To retire in a northern forest, or to retire on a tropical island? Where do people typically vacation, when the surroundings and how they feel are the primary focus? Do the very wealthy, who can do whatever they like, usually spend more time in the woods or in the tropics? Did Ellison and Zuckerberg buy large swaths of temperate forest? Etc.
I am only using very wealthy people as a reference because I think they are a good proxy for hedonistic values, which I believe are rooted in human instinct and what worked in the ancestral environment.
You can’t delete these instincts, you can only bury them.
I'm not arguing, but again, nuance. I don't know that it is human instinct, my understanding is that diseases like malaria and the heat (no A/C) meant European colonizers avoided a lot of the warmer places and moved inland to the mountains where it was cooler.
It might, instead, be a cultural influence?
I feel like I am being pedantic, though. Apologies for that.
For better or for worse, the global north's where most of the land and resources are, along with the majority of human civilization.
Also, as far as climate, day length pattern, vegetation, etc., I don't think moving back to, say, the Midwest (particularly the lower part) would be screwing most people. Alaska? Sure. Kansas City? Day lengths are pretty normal there.
Lol, you forgot "let's move to Arizona because I have allergies, and then plant all of the plants that caused my allergies in the yards and parks, and plant lawns, with all of these things not being native to the climate/drought resistant".
I too like nice weather, but it's getting to the point that the summers over large parts of the US are as harsh as the midwestern winters everyone wants to avoid.
I suppose it depends upon what you mean by sustain life. If somebody is hooked up to life support in a hospital for the rest of their life, does that mean their body is able to sustain life or does it mean the hospital is able to sustain life? That is somewhat similar to what we are talking about. All of this technology is wonderful to introduce stability, to get us through the rough patches, but a permanent dependence upon it is questionable.
As for that native gentleman, I'm not sure what the situation is down south, but the prairies of Canada and the Northern US have been known to have dry spells. The 1930's were particularly bad, but apparently early explorers returned conflicting reports about the habitability of the prairies simply because of the variability in precipitation across the years. Of course, aboriginals would have knowledge of that since they inhabited those lands for time immemorial. I have even seen suggestions that those who lived in the regions were nomadic since they had to follow the food (which, of course, had to follow its own food). This is in sharp contrast to those who inhabited other parts of the Americas, who were settled.
It can't sustain 40 million people who all want a pool, a grass lawn, freshly-grown fruits/nuts/vegetables, air conditioning, large-scale manufacturing, golf courses, etc.
Like I said, it is literally sustaining this as I type this comment. You just don't like the consequences (the Colorado river isn't making it to the ocean).
Perhaps it is, but that's not sustainable. Every ecosystem has a carrying capacity. We're coming closer and closer to that for the Southwestern US. It won't be pretty when we reach it.
I actually couldn't care less whether the Colorado makes it to the ocean. I have two major rivers in my city. There's plenty of water without having to fine people for using water on the opposite of their odd-even day. The heat during the summer is uncomfortable but it's usually not an imminent threat to human life after an hour of unhydrated exertion.
> Every ecosystem has a carrying capacity. We're coming closer and closer to that for the Southwestern US.
The limit of carrying capacity is the limit of sustainability. If the system is coming closer to the carrying capacity, the current state, having 40 million people with lawns, is sustainable!
If your argument is that having 200 million people with lawns is unsustainable, say that! But that's not what you said.
It's not just lawns; you're being purposefully obtuse.
There are already towns in California experiencing spells of not having any potable water [0]. We've pumped so much water out of parts of California that some land has dropped almost 30 feet [1]. Wildfire season in the southwest, including California, is now longer and more severe than it once was [2]. Arizona has passed resolutions imploring Congress to investigate diverting water from the Mississippi River out west [3] which is almost guaranteed to cause serious political confrontations.
So, no, the current state of things and the projected growth isn't sustainable. When you're honestly considering the idea of building a continent-wide aqueduct system to keep golf courses in Phoenix playable, you're better off packing up and heading back to the Midwest and Northeast to repopulate towns that have infrastructure we already bought and paid for decades ago.
I'm still working with my accountant on that, so I don't have the final figure. I'm expecting the taxes to be relatively low due to expenses that I had to amortize in the last couple of years:
That’s true. Everywhere I’ve worked has been evil in one way or another. Amazon is no exception. It also has its bright spots. For now I am willing to disagree and commit.
Sure, my point is that only a googler would even consider this kind of breaking change as a sensible option. People in the real world with regular code tooling would reject the proposal before it got started.
The analogy to Angular that others have made is spot on. It's not just first-mover disadvantage. Google has particular blind spots for certain pain points, like deprecating APIs. Also q.v. Google Cloud.
There was a lot of fraud done by businesses with these loans, so maybe they already profited and this is a clawback? But an unfair one to non-fraudulent businesses…
LexisNexis data analysis performed by the reporters at KCRA showed that California paid out at least $32.6 billion and counting in fraudulent disability and unemployment compensation during the pandemic.
Compilers have soooo many heuristics. And a lot of it looks like a chess or Go game: You have a list of 100s of AST optimization passes (possible moves) that preserve the semantics of the program but you have limited compute with which to run iterations of these passes. What order and combination of these should you use?
This is known as the "phase ordering problem". Despite the super-exponential (even unbounded, because phases can be repeated) space, I think this is more tractable for certain subsets. For example, in sea of nodes compilers, like HotSpot, Graal, and TurboFan, forward dataflow analyses that do reductions (i.e. always make the graph smaller and/or cheaper) can be combined into one mega-pass where they positively interact each other. The problem is that some problems are not forward data flow problems and some transformations are not simple reductions. Also, some phases make use of type information which can be destroyed or obscured by lowering.
today, learned heuristics have a couple of pitfalls that make them hard to add to such systems
1. they are usually hard to run efficiently
2. they are usually hard to explain
The former is definitely changing with low precision formats like fp16 and useful coprocessors that can do matrix multiplications efficiently (M1, Intel). The latter hasn't been developed much and unless you're just training a model to memorize the entire space the heuristic operates in, it can be scary to trust it on unseen data.
Most interesting cases don't really look like this. The heuristic is applied to the user's code; it's not a one-time knob in the compiler. If it were, then you would likely be able to afford an exhaustive search to pick it & wouldn't need ml.
The analogy I'm making doesn't especially apply to compilers, which have human defined defaults in the first place.
What I've found is that it's important to not run the ML model then use its output as the default state. Have a human, heuristic choice as the default state.
Also, they are not stable. I.e, if you have a fast program and you change a tiny detail, it is not guaranteed that the program remains fast. Also between versions of the compiler.
Which you should use are often unknowable because it's often about how the code is driven by the data - you need to know the characteristics of the data to know how the code will behave, only then can you meaningfully talk about picking a 'better' heuristic.
Analogy: otherwise you're just optimising the design of a car. But optimising it for what? speed, efficiency, reliability, price, weight, carrying capacity... You first need to know how it's expected to be used.
I guess local inlining might sometimes be an unconditional win, but even then only under specific circumstances.
(disclaimer: I know something but am not an expert)
Logical next step: remove the vegetation for more human population!