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.
Yeah, I have only hiked day trips in Nevada and Arizona in the Summer. I definitely want to try at least an overnight trip in the cooler months or at the higher altitudes. It is on my list of things to do.
> “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.
It's also very visible in central Lisbon, even in a short period of time from the first time I visited friends there (around 2010) to now the whole centre has been hollowed out and mainly inhabited by tourists, or digital nomads/rich foreigners. You can see a clear divide where the AirBnBs end and the real city begins between the neighbourhoods of Alfama (touristic) - Penha França, when you look at buildings and notice new sets of double glazed windows all around you know those are STRs, then walk a few more blocks into Penha França's area and there are almost no new windows on buildings.
It's actually sad to see it transformed, I'm not against tourism at all because of course I'm a tourist as well but this kind of tourism just seems to hollow out entire neighbourhoods and instead of a lively and vibrant city life you just see tons of tourists looking at their maps at every corner, rolling luggage up and down onto these apartments.
The good news is that when we throw the tourists out, we get to keep the double glazing!
Unfortunately STRs have put lots of money into the pockets of the otherwise not very cash rich middle classes in Portugal, so it is hard to get them to vote to turn the money taps off, even if it means their children can no longer get rooms above their favorite downtown coffee shop while studying. Much easier to blame digital nomads / rich foreigners / poor immigrants, and vote for Chega.
At the risk of sounding insensitive, I know Lisbon is going through a big change at the moment, but this isn’t a short term rental problem. This is a big city developing to the next stage problem and this is Lisbon’s version of it.
London, New York, Paris, Madrid, LA, etc all became too expensive for locals at some point in their history. Lisbon is next up and in a few years there will be other cities this happens to.
I’m not saying it’s right but it seems, inevitable?
Its not inevitable. In Lisbon's case, could have been preventing with legislation controlling airbnb saturation. Which is now in place, and will likely save Porto from the same dystopia.
Sure, this version of the problem could have been avoided with legislation but something else would cause it. Let’s take Porto as the example, automotive industry in the region grows suddenly, people move to the area, buy and rent property in Porto which drives up prices and drives out locals.
Which is basically what happened in all those other cities I listed and whatever the requisite industry is.
Theres a quantum leap difference between growing industries and tourism. Tourism is an inequality industry, where the owners of the hotels/homes for rent make everything, and the staff makes very little to nothing. It is almost the worst industry you can have in a developing country.
Perhaps Lisbon (and PT in general) should focus its efforts on levelling up its economic activity in to higher value areas. The time I’ve spent in PT all people talk about is the negative impacts of tourism and not improving the wider economy. There seems to be a very conservative mindset.
But that’s probably from a thin slice of exposure.
The country de industrialised way too early (I would argue no country should ever de industrialise to begin with, but that's another cup of tea entirely) And now has created lots of low quality jobs in the tourism sector through mass tourism and benevolent expat laws to people from richer countries.
The whole thing is a tragedy, but it helps those with capital already (homeowners in central Porto and Lisbon have likely seen their capital 3x to 10x) so the government let it happen.
The whole 2nd tier of the eurozone is completely in tatters anyway. Spain, Portugal, Italy and Greece. The eurozone doesn't work when there are two tiers of countries in it. Joseph Stiglitz had a great book about it.
Nah, I don't behave like the other asshole tourists, I don't use AirBnB, usually go to cities and towns where I know people so I can stay with a local and enjoy the underground, get lost in the cities without checking maps in the middle of where people pass by going to work.
You don't know me, don't assume, you're just being an asshole.
You don't get it. It's worth destroying these towns to get as much tourism money as possible, because with all that money, the rental owners can finally retire to a nice quiet ski town somewhere.
From ca. 1976 I remember an article in the Straight Creek Journal, beefing about what the writer called "candy-ass towns", the archetypes probably being Aspen and Vail.
> 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.
Anytime someone would complain about Hollywood, I would just mirror the same sentiments. It is an amusement park now, and most Angelenos (and probably Southern Californians, in general) rarely go there unless an out-of-state friend insists on seeing the Walk of Fame.
When was Hollywood not an amusement park? The 1923 Hollywood Land sign, advertising a housing tract feels like a sign that it was already an amusement park by then. I grew up in Orange County and had no desire to ever go to Hollywood; Disneyland was just as fake, and much closer. :P
But that industry is soooo massive, and such a huge economic force, and is kind of built on the idea of Constructing Fantasy, so it _makes sense_ that the Hollywood neighborhood is like this.
I have no numbers to back this up, so feel how you will about this comment, but I’m sure the STR economy does not create much more than income for the single homeowner, and makes it _harder_ for these sudden AirBnB boom towns to build an economy beyond more than renting rooms.
See, it should be the reverse. The employees and locals should own homes and the visitors should be packed into hotels or other purpose build facilities.
There would be tremendous pressure for any given town in the world to defect from that strategy and capture a lot of the high-end skiing visitors. That makes it virtually certain that one will and capture the disproportionate revenue and meals/lodging/services tax revenue as a reward.
Thus, laws and regulations, as per TFA. Limiting competitive options is the point. Anyway it's a suicide pact so if there are no state-level regulations and a town decides to try to take a bigger share of the tourism dollars, the town dies and is eaten from the inside-out by tourism. It will still exist, but it will become a less and less desirable tourism location for many.
State-wide laws don't help you much when Jackson Hole, Tahoe, Deer Valley, and Aspen are all in different states (and Whistler and Mont Tremblant are nearby in another country).
Are skiers visiting Aspen primarily from within Colorado or outside? The ones who have to fly in anyway, they can pretty easily fly into a different resort that gives them the resort experience rather than the "packed into hotels" experience.
hasn't this been the nature of ski towns for decades? they've always been tiny communities with transients and tourist booms and lots of rentals, resorts, cabins, etc.
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.
Yep, there was the South Park episode from 2002 (Asspen) that does a shot of the housing development, and the sign for it says, "A time-share community." -- even then it was a long-recognized trend of how the ski towns turned out.
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.
This is where statistics can really blind you, a majority of that is out west. Major population centers are on the coast. So you would still need to burn jet fuel to get there in a reasonable time frame.
The majority may be there, but there are still many scattered throughout the country.
FFS, there's a National Park in New York City: Gateway National Recreation Area. At least I hope it's still there: used to go mountain biking there a long time ago.
Most of my vacations in the last several years have been to do with state parks in the Southeastern US. We've been to several in Georgia, Alabama, and North and South Carolina. In a lot of these cases, we would stage at one park (or in some cases, not-a-park) for several days and go out to another place or park each day.
I've lived in Georgia for most of my 40 years, and most of these parks I had never heard of until we went there. I think almost every single one has been a really good experience. And it's very affordable for my family of 5. We don't have to go far. They're all a little bit different.
I've seen Yosemite, and the Grand Canyon, and other sites of note in the US. They are really neat, and can be worth the trip. But I'm pretty sure at this point that I'll never even see everything that my home state has to offer in my lifetime, so I'm pretty content to stick to reasonable driving distance.
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.
Would they even notice it though? Normal bolides of similar energy happen fairly frequently (see https://catalog.data.gov/dataset/fireball-and-bolide-reports for an example). And even if they did, would they interpret it as a hostile act when similar events happen naturally without ill effect? It would mean the "attacker" posses the technology to accelerate materials to appreciable fractions of c while simultaneously not knowing that the impacts wouldn't do any damage to the target.
Should we similarly be afraid of making radio broadcasts lest our intended recipients interpret our beaming of energy as a hostile act? A somewhat similar concept is actually mentioned in the novel Blindsight. You could even go full Dark Forest and say that we're a threat simply by existing all the while brazenly advertising our presence through the oxygen in the atmosphere.
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).
Some argue that it's neither a non-local interaction (the test particle being affected despite no field in its region) nor that the interaction is caused by the four-potential, which would then be physical and more fundamental than the field tensor. On the contrary, it may just be an artefact of the semi-classical treatment that is normally done: classical theory for the fields, quantum one for the test particle. See this, for example: https://arxiv.org/abs/1110.6169
So to be simple you're saying the field is the slope (or actually gradient) of the potential. So if it's constant (but high) there is no slope, but significant potential, like being on a mesa. And that difference in potential rather than slope affects the paired quantum particles?
Kinda. The magnetic field is the curl of the vector potential. If the vector potential is nonzero but curl-less then you get zero magnetic field, but the particles’ wavefunctions still feel the vector potential.
(Specifically, the phase of the wavefunction is affected; obviously nothing observable about a single wavefunction could be affected in the absence of a field, via the correspondence principle. But when you have two electrons, that phase difference does show up in their interference pattern.)
I think I understand the Aharonov–Bohm effect for magnetism, but I don't understand how you can have the branches at different gravitational potentials without the packets experiencing a field somewhere when they branch/join.
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.
> 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?
