cowboysauce

Uranium isn't the issue. A long half-life means that it's only mildly radioactive. Prior to being irradiated in a reactor, fuel rods can be manually handled safely. The majority of radiation being emitted currently is coming from fission products like Sr-90 and Cs-137 that have half-lives of decades.

> However, it is going to be hard to leave the PNW because I love hiking and backpacking.

I'd argue that the desert southwest is a great place for hiking though you obviously have to plan around the extreme temperatures. But the mountain ranges tend to be significantly cooler and a viable option in the summer. The big downside, more for backpacking, is that you either have to: carry all your water, stash water ahead of time, or refill at springs that may be unreliable.

Sure, ski towns have always been dependent on tourism. And the 5000 sq ft mountainside mansions have always been unaffordable for most people living there. But the difference is that there used to be affordable housing for the people who live and work there full time. Short-term rentals have massively changed the financial calculus.

> “There are a lot of cities asking themselves this question,” says Goodman. “Are we a city anymore or are we just Disneyland?”

This really resonates with me. I grew up in a ski town in Colorado. My family still lives there, but every time I visit I feel how soulless and fake the area has become. It has abandoned any sense of being an actual town in favor of becoming a de facto amusement park. Something like 80% of the houses in the area are empty for most of the year and large numbers of workers either live in their cars, are packed like sardines into employee housing, or commute long distances. Development is inevitable, but the decline really picked up after the arrival of short-term rentals. Consequently, I refuse to use services like AirBnB when I travel anywhere.

Roughly 40% of the United States is public land and there are national parks larger than some European contries. Sure, it's not freedom to roam, but you still have access to significantly more public land living in the United States than you would living in the UK.

I'm curious, where are you seeing this? At least four people are dead and hundreds had their lives ruined in the aftermath. I'm struggling to think of a crime with a similar number of victims that has been posted here and people have been sympathetic towards the perpetrators. There was that Hans Reiser message that was posted recently and I saw a good number of comments saying that he was an unrepentant psychopath who deserves to be in jail. And he "only" killed one person. I see people calling for reform and rehabilitation for things like drug possession, but never for crimes of this magnitude.

There is an electrical variant of the effect, it just hasn't been well tested experimentally.

Right, but pairs of particles aren't relevant. The effect occurs for any particle that interacts electromagnetically. And the magnetic field is the curl of its potential.

The article's description of the Aharonov–Bohm effect seems kinda misleading to me. It's not that particles are being affected by a field that's not there, it's that the particles are affected by the electromagnetic potential, which can be non-zero even though the field is zero (the two are related through some simple equations).

> So apparently the AI found some shortcut for doing the actual computational work. That is also surprising as weather is a chaotic system. Shortcuts should not exist.

Why do you say that shortcuts should not exist? Even very basic statements like "falling pressure and increasing humidity indicate a storm is coming" are generally valid. I've done a little bit of storm-chasing and I'm able to point out areas that are likely to experience severe thunderstorms based on a few values (CAPE, dew point, wind shear, etc). I'm sure forecast meteorologists have even better skills. Are those not shortcuts?

No? I think it's rude to be excessively loud so I don't, especially not at night. I don't see this as really any different than "Does no one here cut in line?".