How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the LLM part 1-- coding

I used to ask, only half-jokingly, how any of us learned to code before Google.  I went to grad school in the mid-90s, so I'm old enough to remember that literal bookshelf of not-very-helpful SAS manuals.  Getting a straightforward answer to a basic coding question often seemed insurmountable.  You can imagine, then, the revolutionary impact of the internet and various online resources.

The advance represented by LLMs has been comfortable. While I would never consider using one in a situation where I needed the kind of background and understanding that comes from a textbook or course, in terms of straightforward "how do I code this" questions, I can no more imagine Googling the topic or turning to an online forum than I can imagine digging through that old stack of phone books (I just can't stop dating myself in this post).

Out of perhaps excessive caution, I never give ChatGPT any real data or metadata. The tables I rename something unimaginative like "A" or "B."  For the fields, I try to use something that would fall in the same general category.  For example, Buyer_ID might become SSN.  There are no doubt countless examples of social security numbers in the LLMs' training data, and pretty much all of them treat it as a unique identifier. 

It does have limitations and will get some examples wrong, particularly if you let things get too complex, but if you can keep things bite sized and be absolutely clear with your logic, the LLM performs remarkably well. I don't know if this makes up for the huge environmental cost of building these models and it certainly doesn't balance out the damage generative AI has done, but if used properly, these are remarkably useful and powerful tools.

Listen to the last three minutes of Thursday's Marketplace

Kai Ryssdal's closing statement is a template for how non-partisan mainstream journalists should frame this moment. Measured and objective, but refusing to flinch when accurately describing the situation we find ourselves in. 

Marketplace is one of the very few news organizations that emerged from the past few years with its reputation not just intact but enhanced. The list is embarrassingly small. Lazy and craven journalism has become the norm, which is especially tragic at a time when we really need journalists to step up and do their jobs..

In defense of LLMs, they are considerably more polite than the typical 9th grader

 Andrew Gelman recently shared the following from Gary Smith:

I [Smith] tested OpenAI o1, Copilot, and Gemini Flash, along with DeepSeek, on a question about Tic-Tac-Toe . . .

I’ve deleted much of the superfluous fluff that LLMs tend to generate from the excerpts below:

Gary:  I’d like to discuss a new version of tic-tac-toe called 90-degree tic-tac-toe.

OpenAI:  That sounds intriguing! What’s the twist in “90-degree Tic-Tac-Toe”? Does it involve rotating the board, or is there some other mechanic that changes the gameplay? Let me know the rules or your idea, and we can brainstorm or refine it together!

DeepSeek: Sure! 90-degree tic-tac-toe sounds like an interesting twist on the classic game. Could you explain the rules or mechanics of this new version?

Copilot:  That sounds intriguing! 90-degree tic-tac-toe adds a new twist to the classic game. Tell me more about it. Are the rules different? How do you rotate the board? I’m excited to hear how this version shakes things up!

Gemini:  I’d love to discuss 90-degree tic-tac-toe! To get us started, could you explain the basic rules of this new variation?…I’m excited to learn more about this unique twist on a classic game. Let’s dive in!

Gary: It is still a 3×3 grid but the grid is rotated 90-degrees to the right.

OpenAI:  Interesting concept! By rotating the grid 90 degrees to the right, you’re visually changing the perspective of the classic 3×3 Tic-Tac-Toe board. The gameplay itself might remain the same, but the rotated perspective could create a novel experience for players.

DeepSeek: Ah, I see! So in 90-degree tic-tac-toe, the 3×3 grid is rotated 90 degrees to the right….This could be a fun twist because the rotated grid might disorient players initially, making it harder to spot winning opportunities or block opponents.

Copilot:  That sounds like a fun twist on the classic game! By rotating the grid 90 degrees to the right, it gives players a fresh perspective and challenges them to think differently about their moves.

Gemini:  This rotation doesn’t change the core concept of getting three of your symbols in a row, but it does significantly alter the strategy and how players approach the game.

Gary:  Do you think it would be better to rotate the 3×3 grid to the right or to the left?

OpenAI:  If you want the game to feel approachable and intuitive, rotating to the right might be better. If you’re aiming for a twist that makes players rethink the game and adds a subtle layer of complexity, rotating to the left could be the way to go. Ultimately, it depends on your target audience and the experience you want to create. You could even experiment with both directions and see which feels more engaging during gameplay testing!

DeepSeek:  If the goal is to make the game feel fresh while keeping it accessible, rotating the grid to the right is likely the better choice. It maintains a natural flow for players while still offering a new visual perspective. However, if you want to introduce a bit more novelty or challenge, rotating to the left could be an interesting alternative.

Copilot:  Both options could bring their own unique challenges! Most people are right-handed. However, rotating it to the left could add an extra layer of difficulty and make the game more unpredictable.

Gemini:  Some players might find it more intuitive to mentally adjust to a rightward rotation, while others might prefer a leftward rotation. You could even experiment with both directions to see which one feels more natural or enjoyable to play!

Gary:  Which will be more difficult for expert players?

OpenAI:  To challenge expert players and make the game feel fresh and complex, a left rotation would likely be the better choice. It disrupts their ingrained patterns, encourages more active thinking, and raises the game’s difficulty level.

DeepSeek: For expert players, rotating the grid 90 degrees to the left (counterclockwise) is likely to be slightly more difficult than rotating it to the right. Here’s why:

Breaking Muscle Memory: Expert players are deeply familiar with the traditional grid layout and common winning patterns. Rotating the grid to the left disrupts their mental map more significantly than rotating it to the right, as the transformation is less intuitive.

Copilot:  For expert players, rotating the grid to the left might prove to be more challenging. Here’s why:

• Unfamiliar Rotation: Left rotation is less common and could disrupt their established strategies, requiring more adaptability.
• Strategic Complexity: It may force players to think several moves ahead, recalculating their strategies continuously.

Ready to test this theory in a game?

Gemini:  Breaking Habit: Long-time tic-tac-toe players might have deeply ingrained habits and strategies associated with the traditional grid orientation. Overcoming these ingrained patterns could require a brief period of readjustment.

One of the problems with the current large language model discussion is that, while there are loads of brilliant people in the conversation, very few of them have taught ninth-grade math. K-12 teachers (at least the better ones) are used to thinking about answers not just in terms of being right or wrong, but in terms of what we can infer about the underlying thought processes that produced an answer.

We previously discussed the example of the alarmed toddler who rushed to tell their parents "Anna hurt Anna-self!" when their sister fell down the stairs. The statement was wrong -- it showed confusion over when to use a noun versus a pronoun -- but it also demonstrated the child's correct grasp of how "self" worked.

By comparison, LLMs' mistakes are often notable for their out of nowhere quality, like the infamous "There are no countries in Africa that start with the letter 'K'. The closest is Kenya, which starts with a 'K' sound." This one is a bit like the evil, or in this case stupid twin to Anna-self. The words are strung together correctly but reveal a complete lack of underlying comprehension.

LLMs don't have "thought processes," and approaching them as if they did will not lead anywhere productive, but that doesn't mean we can't get some insights, perhaps even do a little reverse engineering, from those "wrong" responses.

Smith said that though these LLMs had curiously similar responses, they "almost surely" did not see tic-tac-toe rotation in their training. This is technically true, but they probably did see some discussion about similar modifications of the broader class of other abstract strategy games. The go-to example for this class is, of course, chess, and you'll notice that if you take the responses and substitute that game for tic-tac-toe, almost all of the answers seem perfectly reasonable.

[Assuming it hasn't been done already, it might be interesting to conduct some experiments on how changing perspectives on the chessboard (such as playing from the opponent's side) affects strategy and style of play. You probably also want to consider skill level and age, especially when looking at how quickly players adapted to changes in orientation. The great YouTube engineering channel Smarter Every Day built a bicycle which turned left when the handlebars turned right and vice versa. One of their findings was it could take months for an adult to master the reverse steering and afterwards it was extremely difficult to go back to normal bikes. Kids, on the other hand, could make the switch far more easily.]

Giving an appropriate for chess/absurd for tic-tac-toe answer  strongly suggests that when the training data is thin with respect to a particular prompt, the LLM will use data from a more general class to generate a response. Nothing especially surprising about this – – it's more or less what you'd expect – – but it does explain why this approach generated such absurd responses in this specific case.

This is a good moment to step back and remind ourselves of the constant effort we have to make to avoid anthropomorphizing AI in general and large language models in particular. LLMs can generate responses that seem uncannily human, but we have to keep reminding ourselves that the underlying processes are completely non-analogous. Any meaningful conversation about the applications and limitations of these systems has got to start and stop with that fact.

People think about the attributes, patterns, shapes of things but more importantly they think about things' purpose, causality, functionality, history, motivation, and the stories we can tell ourselves about them. Generative AI at its current level of development works almost entirely with the first group. Sometimes this allows them to come up with responses that seem to be "thinking" about the latter group, but these can be explained as regurgitations.

Most of the absurd answers we get from generative AI come from it not having any capacity to deal directly with how and why. You can find AI pictures of automobiles with wheels perpendicular to each other or of campfires inside tents because how a car works or a fire behaves is factored only indirectly into the process.

The algorithm only looks at patterns in the training data. They may have fixed it now, but recently at least one of the big LLMs would give you a detailed and very familiar sounding proof arguing that the square root of four was an irrational number. It's not difficult to see how this happened – – the training data must have countless examples of the wonderfully elegant demonstration that the square root of two is irrational. It's possibly the most famous proof of all time – – but no human who understood the proof would try to apply it to four.

Likewise, there are extensive discussions in the training data about how changing the orientation of something visual would affect the way people perceive and work with it. In all of those cases, however, the generally unstated reason for the change is that the thing being reoriented would look different after the transformation. If that's not true, then all subsequent discussion and analysis is absurd. It calls to mind the old joke about the coach who promises to turn his losing team around 360°.

In the aftermath of a disaster that took a great human and environmental toll, your first response should always be to loosen regulations and lower safety standards

[And yes, I realize that, despite being an urban apartment dweller who doesn't have a backyard, raising these issues will get me labeled a NIMBY, but as a former high school teacher, I've been called worse.]

From Mark Ryavec, president of the Venice Stakeholders Association, former legislative analyst for the city of Los Angeles, and Chief Deputy Assessor for Los Angeles County.

Governor Gavin Newsom is misguided in issuing an executive order to expedite rebuilding houses in the Pacific Palisades without first examining what happened there and applying lessons that may be learned to reform building codes and significantly increase the capacity of the local firefighting water system.

The governor recently issued orders to relax Coastal Commission permit requirements and environmental review for new construction as long as the replacement building is not more than 10% larger or taller than the original.

If the city of Los Angeles agrees, this will allow property owners to more quickly start rebuilding – with the same building materials and lax fire safety requirements that failed to protect over 10,000 homes.

I grew up in neighboring Santa Monica and know the community’s built environment from regularly hiking in the area.  The majority of homes that were destroyed employed stucco for their exterior walls.  Just a cursory online search reveals that standard stucco can only withstand extreme heat for about one hour.  Thus, without a change in building codes, the governor is proposing to allow the use of the same building material that failed spectacularly.

There should be an examination by a city commission of experts to determine if standard stucco should be allowed, or limited to blocks that are a half mile or mile away from wilderness areas that are likely to be again overgrown in the next five to ten years with flammable grasses and chaparral.

In some of the few homes that survived, a fiberglass filament was added to the stucco mix, which boosts its ability to withstand heat.  Another design element that was successfully deployed in some homes that withstood the fire are lumber and plywood that was coated with fire retardant during the framing stage.  The city should consider making these mandatory.

There are other building materials, such as tilt-up concrete panels, full dimension 4-inch bricks (as opposed to thin brick veneer), 3-inch-thick stone walls, and metal, which when properly installed, withstand extreme heat for at least four hours, enough time for all surrounding foliage to burn out, leaving the house standing.

Asphalt roofing shingles, which contain a significant amount of petroleum, do not well withstand fire, and should be banned in favor of Class A fireproof installations like terracotta or concrete tiles or other fireproof materials.  Similarly, the juncture of roof eaves with exterior walls is one of the locations most vulnerable to fire, so the city must adopt a requirement that these areas be properly sealed with fireproof material. 

We saw this sort of thing after the Camp fire obliterated Paradise, an unexamined rush rebuild as if that could somehow undo the tragedy. These pushes are usually accompanied by calls for resolution and even defiance. "We won't let the fires beat us!" as if they were some terrorist organization trying to break our spirits, instead of a natural force not as predictable as the tides but every bit as inevitable. The forests of the Santa Monica Mountains will burn again and when they do, the successors of the politicians who insisted on doing nothing to address the underlying problems will give heartfelt speeches empathizing with the latest generation of victims and pledging to make mistakes all over again.

The rich and famous of Southern California have always loved living in isolated spots with gorgeous mountain views, and it has always been a bad idea

 We'll be coming back to this excellent story from the LA Times on the history of catastrophic fires in the region and how we keep ignoring the lessons we ought to be learning from them.

‘Built to burn.’ L.A. let hillside homes multiply without learning from past mistakes by Jenny Jarvie

On a hot, dry November morning in 1961, flames from a trash pile on brushland north of Mulholland Drive were picked up by Santa Ana winds and swept across the canyons of one of Los Angeles’ wealthiest enclaves.

The apocalyptic scenes that played out — of Hollywood celebrities fleeing and clambering onto their roofs — captured the world’s attention like no urban conflagration in history. Actor Kim Novak and Richard Nixon, then a former vice president who moved to L.A. to practice law, wielded garden hoses to soak their wooden roof shingles. Actor Fred MacMurray enlisted studio workers from the set of “My Three Sons” to evacuate his family and help firefighters cut down brush around his Brentwood home.

When the blaze reached the mansions of Bel-Air, thermal heat lifted burning shingles high into the air and 50-mph winds hurled them more than a mile over to Brentwood. By nightfall, the Bel-Air fire had destroyed 484 homes, including those of actor Burt Lancaster, comedian Joe E. Brown and Nobel laureate chemist Willard Libby. 

After firefighters extinguished the flames, socialite and actor Zsa Zsa Gabor, wearing white kitten heels and a string of pearls as she clutched a shovel, dug through the rubble of her Bellagio Place home for a safe with jewels.

The Bel-Air fire became known as the “the big one,” the event that forced everyone in Los Angeles to reckon with the dangers fire posed to their coveted hillsides.

In response, L.A. officials ushered in new fire safety measures, investing in more firefighting helicopters, new fire stations and a new reservoir. They also outlawed untreated wood shingles in high-fire-risk areas and initiated a brush clearance program to create defensible space around homes.

But they did not stop building on fire-prone ridges and canyons.

And there was no major push to radically rethink how they built. Over the next half a century, new housing tracts filled the wildland interface. And a succession of larger and more deadly fires swept through the region. But all the safety improvements prompted by the Bel-Air and subsequent fires could not outpace the escalating threat from new development and climate change.

The massive blazes that engulfed Los Angeles hillsides communities Jan. 7, destroying 16,000 structures and killing at least 29 people in and around Pacific Palisades and Altadena, have prompted a new reckoning on how so many L.A. homes came to be built on land so vulnerable to fire and how, or whether, they should be rebuilt.

It’s a crossroads the region has found itself at before when the power of fire left us reeling.

“California is built to burn — it’s not unique in that — but it’s built to burn on a large scale and explosively at times,” said Stephen Pyne, a fire historian and professor emeritus at Arizona State University.

“You can live in that landscape, but how you choose to live will affect whether that fire is something that just passes through like a big thunderstorm, or whether it is something that destroys whatever you’ve got.”

 

F&A costs and why they matter

This is Joseph.

So on Friday afternoon this new policy dropped, to take effect Monday morning. Like many things in the new world, the lack of any delay before implementation creates an immediate sense of crisis. It seems almost naive to think back to the days where the Administrative Procedures Act was applied to major new changes. 

Now what this new policy means is a little complex. When the US government funds research, they attach the costs for facilities and administration as a negotiated percentage of every dollar of direct costs. This is a strange way to pay for enforcing federal regulations and building electricity, but it has the advantage of being both simple and easy to administer. It causes some oddness -- grants focusing on data analysis don't require animal research ethics infrastructure and so averaging these expenses across all grants can lead to some hard to explain corner cases (in both directions as the F&A costs on a primate center may seem shockingly low). 

So the real impact of this measure is a large and profound cut to the universities that host research activities. So some of this might return in increased numbers of awards. I might not be surprised if there was a spike on off-campus research given the odd decision to make the level uniform and international institutions will be quite happy with the doubling of the current 8% F&A rate for international awards. The comparison to the much smaller foundation grants is also challenging, as very small amounts of funding can have less generous F&A terms so long as the funding is a small piece of a greater whole and there is no comparison of allowable expenses and/or regulations to be followed (which can make a large difference). 

There is a lot of confusion as to whether this is a change that can be done via executive order. But the bottom line is that it is a large and immediate cut to institutes of higher education intended to maximize pain by eliminating the money with flexibility. Is it possible that the current F&A is excessive for at least one institution of higher education, somewhere in the United States? Sure, in some case or at some margins it is likely as the NIH is a big place. Is an immediate cut from ~60% to 15% (all at once without warning) a good policy? No. No it is not. 

"Sadly ecstatic disaster porn, with superficial coverage of causes and no interest whatsoever in solutions"

 Another more-relevant-than-when-we-ran-it post.

Wednesday, July 13, 2022

Why do serious journalists keep talking about good fires?

Because they work.

YOSEMITE NATIONAL PARK — Last year and the year before, in an unprecedented environmental disaster, wildfires in California’s Sequoia National Park and nearby national forests roared through treasured sequoia groves in the Southern Sierra Nevada, generating flames hundreds of feet high and killing nearly 20% of all the giant sequoia trees left in the world.

But the Washburn fire burning now in Yosemite National Park, licking around the edges of the roughly 500 giant sequoias in Mariposa Grove — some over 200 feet tall and more than 2,000 years old  — so far hasn’t killed a single one of the massive old-growth trees there.

A big part of the reason, experts say, is that park officials completed 23 projects at the grove since 1971 to thin brush and set controlled burns to remove dead wood and vegetation that had built up over more than century of fire suppression.

That left less dead material on the forest floor, and fewer shrubs and small trees like firs that can make fires burn hotter. As a result, the forest was restored to a more natural condition, experts say, similar to the way it would have looked centuries ago when lightning strikes and burning from native tribes sent low-impact fires through the Sierra every 10 years or so.

With a few notable exceptions (ProPublica, Reveal, Marketplace, NPR), the national coverage of the California wildfires has been, terrible. Sadly ecstatic disaster porn, with superficial coverage of causes and no interest whatsoever in solutions, which is especially unforgivable because this is one of the few crises where we know what we need to do.

Liz Weil from her definitive ProPublica piece on the subject:

Yes, there’s been talk across the U.S. Forest Service and California state agencies about doing more prescribed burns and managed burns. The point of that “good fire” would be to create a black-and-green checkerboard across the state. The black burned parcels would then provide a series of dampers and dead ends to keep the fire intensity lower when flames spark in hot, dry conditions, as they did this past week. But we’ve had far too little “good fire,” as the Cassandras call it. Too little purposeful, healthy fire. Too few acres intentionally burned or corralled by certified “burn bosses” (yes, that’s the official term in the California Resources Code) to keep communities safe in weeks like this.

The best graphic I've seen on the wildfire crisis comes from National Public Radio, which just seems wrong

It's like when you learn that one of the biggest stars of the golden age of radio was a ventriloquist. 

This All Things Considered story was part of a superb series on the rise of Western mega-fires and the pictures below do a great job driving home the central point of this discussion, a point which is straightforward and is agreed upon by all the experts and yet which still manages to evade most of the journalists covering this issue. 

Good

Bad

The wildfire crisis is not that we are having too many fires -- we're actually having too few -- but that we're having too many bad fires and not enough good ones. The lack of the latter is the primary cause for the growing frequency of the former.

Barring imminent loss of life, our policy should be to do everything we can to promote conditions for good fires then let them burn. That has always been a difficult call, but building more houses in these areas makes it much harder. This doesn't mean we should or even can stop building in wildland-urban interfaces, but it mean we have to get serious about where we prioritize development.

Some relevant background on Musk and Twitter

Picking up from Joseph's post last week.

 As previously mentioned, no journalist has risen to the moment of the second Trump term like Josh Marshall. His take on the ramifications of Elon Musk's role as de facto co-president has been particularly sharp.

From Talking Point Memo:

This is a paywalled article at Wired. But it makes a pretty good case that the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) is now basically being run at its highest levels by people installed by and working with Elon Musk. In other words, “DOGE” seems to be calling the shots at OPM, even though it’s run by people who aren’t even federal employees. Most of these people appear to come from Musk’s various companies. Wired declined to publish the names of two of the people because of their age. One graduated from high school last summer.

Some of this is already known. The nominee to run the agency, Scott Kupor, is a partner at the Andreessen/Horowitz VC firm. They’re aligned with Musk politically. So that’s consistent with the rest of the story. But it seems the upper echelons of the agency has already been stocked with a mix of Musk’s people and Republican operatives, notwithstanding the fact that this is a federal agency which is usually made up almost entirely of career staff.

This afternoon OPM sent out an email to civilian government employees offering them “buy outs” if they resigned from their jobs in the next 10 days (by February 6th). This has been reported by the Post and I’ve also received copies of the email directly sent to me by TPM Readers. (If you’re a federal employee: send me all the information/documents you have. We can also arrange to communicate through an encrypted channel.) The legal basis of these “buy outs” is dubious at best – though we need to learn more about that. It also seems highly questionable under what authorization the administration is dramatically trimming the entire federal workforce without any congressional authority. That said, the spending freeze already takes the administration fairly brazenly outside of its constitutional authority. But the whole picture comes into clearly view if this is being run and planned by people reporting to Elon Musk. This is essentially what he did when he took over Twitter.

 In many ways, Twitter was the first major company that Elon Musk actually ran. He did start and manage a couple of abortive attempts during the dot-com boom. The first was one of those non-entities that got absorbed by deep-pocketed players. The second was an ill-conceived online bank (the original X) that was fortunate enough to merge with the company that had just developed PayPal. The combined company went through several rapid leadership changes, with Musk briefly at the top, but you can’t say he truly ran the it.

He used the windfall from the sale of PayPal along with funding from other investors to establish SpaceX, but the people actually in charge were highly respected aerospace veterans. They sometimes let the money guy wear an engineer’s cap and blow the whistle, but no one, including Musk himself, really thought he was running the train.

It is important to remember that SpaceX is over 20 years old, and the man who founded it was only starting to become the Elon Musk of today, only beginning to get a taste of unprecedented fame and hype that he would increasingly come to buy into over the next couple of decades.

While Tesla does give us a sense of the man's management style, it’s still Musk with guardrails. With the takeover of the company, prompted initially by resentment over the praise and attention being lavished on one of the actual founders, Elon did expect to be in charge. However, the management structure quickly evolved to limit the damage he could do, up to and including his direct reports telling employees how to maneuver around the office without walking past the CEO in case he was in a mood to randomly fire people.

Twitter is the first time we got a chance to see how a fully formed Elon Musk, unconstrained and unwilling to compromise, would run a multi-billion dollar company. It's not surprising that DOGE should follow the same playbook.

And there's no reason to expect the outcome to be any better.

p.s. To get an idea just how badly the current combination of inexperience and incompetence may play out, take a look at this follow-up from Marshall: Musk Cronies Dive Into Treasury Dept Payments Code Base (this one's really bad).

Criminalizing solutions -- an extreme but informative case

 We talked about this when it happened back in 2022, but the story has only grown more relevant.

 Forest Service employee's arrest after fire crosses onto private land sparks larger debate
TONY CHIOTTI Blue Mountain Eagle

When Rick Snodgrass approached Grant County Sheriff Todd McKinley, he thought the sheriff was there to help him.

According to Snodgrass, he’d called for law enforcement to help control aggressive traffic and to deal with harassment his crews had been receiving while implementing a prescribed burn on the Malheur National Forest in Bear Valley, about 7 miles north of Seneca.

That burn — called the Starr 6 — had since jumped the fireline, and now there was active fire on both sides of County Road 63, where Snodgrass and McKinley met: the prescribed burn operation on Malheur National Forest land to the north of the road — now flaring up in gusts of wind — and an uncontained slopover on private land to the south. The crews under Snodgrass’ direction were now attempting to quell one fire while holding the reins on another, with tempers, smoke, wind and now traffic adding to the dangers to his crew.

But instead of assistance, what Snodgrass got was arrested.

When the sheriff cuffed Snodgrass, it is thought to be the first time a U.S. Forest Service firefighter has been arrested in the course of performing their job.

Snodgrass, the “burn boss” on the day’s operation, was taken away from the scene and charged with reckless burning, a Class A misdemeanor that carries a maximum penalty of a year in jail and a $6,250 fine. Before it was contained, an hour after it kicked off, the spot fire burned an estimated 20 to 40 acres of private land owned by members of the Holliday family.

 ...

“I think in a lot of parts of Oregon, it’s just a very real experience for federal employees to have a lot of hostility towards what they’re doing right now,” said Christopher Adlam, a regional fire specialist for Oregon State University’s Extension Service. “I’m not saying that people don’t also appreciate firefighters and thank firefighters. But it’s a pretty common thing in some parts of Oregon for federal employees to face hostility.”

...

If you use the phrase “controlled burn” in the vicinity of firefighters operating a prescribed burn, you will be corrected.

This is fire. You don’t control it. The best you can plan for is to manage it and be prepared if the fire has other ideas.

Adlam points out that spillover fires like the one that happened in Bear Valley are rare occurrences but can still have a huge impact on people. “I think that, the last 20 years, we’ve had one other occurrence of a burn crossing over from federal land onto private land in Oregon,” he said.

The Malheur National Forest supervisor notes that the spillover was quickly brought under control.

Not only was this a horrible precedent, it also made the situation far more dangerous.

It has also stirred the ire of wildland firefighter communities, who fear this development will set a precedent and only complicate an already difficult and dangerous job. And in these groups’ online conversations, it is clear many believe that the arrest created a situation on the ground that may have added to the real risk faced by fire crews in Bear Valley.

“One of the huge watch-out situations in any fire operation is a transition in leadership,” said Trulock. “And that’s when it’s a plan to transition in leadership. This was obviously unplanned. What I would say is there were definite heightened risks because of that action. Until leadership can be reestablished under a new person, then everybody is distracted because they know something happened. And so it created a huge distraction in the middle of what I would consider is a relatively high-risk operation.”

Adlam, the Extension Service fire specialist, agreed.

“The burn boss’s role is never more important than at the moment where something happens that is not part of the plan,” he said. “If you cut off the head of an operation before it’s finished, how is that supposed to be leading to a positive outcome?”

For no particular reason, I felt like reading up on the Smoot–Hawley Tariff today

From Wikipedia:

The Tariff Act of 1930 (codified at 19 U.S.C. ch. 4), commonly known as the Smoot–Hawley Tariff or Hawley–Smoot Tariff,^[1] was a law that implemented protectionist trade policies in the United States. Sponsored by Senator Reed Smoot and Representative Willis C. Hawley, it was signed by President Herbert Hoover on June 17, 1930. The act raised US tariffs on over 20,000 imported goods.^[2]

The tariffs under the act, excluding duty-free imports, were the second highest in United States history, exceeded by only the Tariff of 1828.^[3] The Act prompted retaliatory tariffs by many other countries.^[4] The Act and tariffs imposed by America's trading partners in retaliation were major factors of the reduction of American exports and imports by 67% during the Great Depression.^[5] Economists and economic historians have agreed that the passage of the Smoot–Hawley Tariff worsened the effects of the Great Depression.

 

"You say you want a revolution" repost -- I missed one

 This definitely should have made the list:

Johnnie Tallent is a callous young mod who lives with his elderly, invalid grandmother, Alice. Lazy and unmotivated, Johnnie dedicates most of his time to taking care of Alice to remain in her good graces so that he can inherit her small fortune and valuable house after she dies. He spends what free time he has with his girlfriend Jill Standish, an even more callous travel agent.

Jill encourages Johnnie to take active measures to accelerate his grandmother's death, so that the two of them can get married and retire on Alice's fortune. Together, the two concoct a plan to induce a heart attack in Alice by gaslighting her, effectively murdering her yet leaving no evidence of the crime. To this end, Johnnie slowly begins convincing Alice that London's twenty-somethings, feeling that the elderly have become a drain on society, are planning a youth revolution, with the goal of either killing the elderly or placing them in internment camps. Johnnie manipulates Alice's access to newspapers and television, using stories and footage of protests to further convince her that the youth revolution is growing and becoming progressively more violent.

To further enhance his story, Johnnie and Jill cover the wall outside Alice's bedroom window with ageist graffiti. After several weeks, Alice grows paranoid and reclusive, and her health seriously deteriorates. Finally, Jill uses her position at the travel agency to schedule a large parade to pass by Alice's house one afternoon; that morning, Johnnie tells her that the revolution has begun, and that rioters are going door-to-door looking for elderly people to kill or intern. When the parade arrives, Alice, already in a panic, suffers a heart attack. Johnnie allows her to die before calling an ambulance.

 

 

 

Monday, March 7, 2022

"You say you want a revolution"

This was going to be part of an upcoming post but I decided it worked better freestanding. 

Back in the late sixties there was a surprising popular genre of apocalyptic dystopias inspired by fears of the youth movement. Countless examples in episodic television (three or four from Star Trek alone). The 1967 novel Logan’s Run (but not the 1976 movie which dropped the political aspects of the story). Arguably films If and Clockwork Orange (though in this case, not the book, which is more a part of the post-war panic over juvenile delinquency). Corman’s Gas-s-s-s. Certainly others I’m forgetting. 

Though not the best in the bunch, the most representative was Wild in the Streets.

Wild in the Streets figures prominently in Pauline Kael's essay "Trash, Art, and the Movies": [emphasis added]

There is so much talk now about the art of the film that we may be in danger of forgetting that most of the movies we enjoy are not works of art. The Scalphunters, for example, was one of the few entertaining American movies this past year, but skillful though it was, one could hardly call it a work of art — if such terms are to have any useful meaning. Or, to take a really gross example, a movie that is as crudely made as Wild in the Streets — slammed together with spit and hysteria and opportunism — can nevertheless be enjoyable, though it is almost a classic example of an unartistic movie. What makes these movies — that are not works of art — enjoyable? The Scalphunters was more entertaining than most Westerns largely because Burt Lancaster and Ossie Davis were peculiarly funny together; part of the pleasure of the movie was trying to figure out what made them so funny. Burt Lancaster is an odd kind of comedian: what’s distinctive about him is that his comedy seems to come out of his physicality. In serious roles an undistinguished and too obviously hard-working actor, he has an apparently effortless flair for comedy and nothing is more infectious than an actor who can relax in front of the camera as if he were having a good time. (George Segal sometimes seems to have this gift of a wonderful amiability, and Brigitte Bardot was radiant with it in Viva Maria!) Somehow the alchemy of personality in the pairing of Lancaster and Ossie Davis — another powerfully funny actor of tremendous physical presence — worked, and the director Sydney Pollack kept tight control so that it wasn’t overdone.

And Wild in the Streets? It’s a blatantly crummy-looking picture, but that somehow works for it instead of against it because it’s smart in a lot of ways that better-made pictures aren’t. It looks like other recent products from American International Pictures but it’s as if one were reading a comic strip that looked just like the strip of the day before, and yet on this new one there are surprising expressions on the faces and some of the balloons are really witty. There’s not a trace of sensitivity in the drawing or in the ideas, and there’s something rather specially funny about wit without any grace at all; it can be enjoyed in a particularly crude way — as Pop wit. The basic idea is corny — It Can’t Happen Here with the freaked-out young as a new breed of fascists — but it’s treated in the paranoid style of editorials about youth (it even begins by blaming everything on the parents). And a cheap idea that is this current and widespread has an almost lunatic charm, a nightmare gaiety. There’s a relish that people have for the idea of drug-taking kids as monsters threatening them — the daily papers merging into Village of the Damned. Tapping and exploiting this kind of hysteria for a satirical fantasy, the writer Robert Thom has used what is available and obvious but he’s done it with just enough mockery and style to make it funny. He throws in touches of characterization and occasional lines that are not there just to further the plot, and these throwaways make odd connections so that the movie becomes almost frolicsome in its paranoia (and in its delight in its own cleverness).

It's easy to be dismissive of these fears fifty plus years later, but the revolutionary rhetoric of the movement was often extreme and was punctuated by the occasional bombing, bank robbery, etc.

But probably the biggest mistake people made when predicting the impact of the sixties youth movement was taking them at their word, believing that their commitment to radicalism (or even liberalism) would outlast the end of the Vietnam War. The post-war generation would change the country, but I doubt anyone in 1969 would have guessed how. 

 

I promised we'd get back to the goats.

Let's be honest. The main reason I'm posting this is because it's a fun story and we don't get many of those in the wildfire thread. That said, this NPR piece (part of their excellent reporting on Western wildfires) does hit on some important ongoing issues with the larger story.

Class. 

As with the housing debate, everything you read about California fires has an essential economic subtext. These goats can do wonderful things for the land around your community, not just reducing the risk of fire, but removing some of the nastiest plants imaginable, but you'll notice that it is the wealthier neighborhoods that can and do take advantage of this. A similar issue came up recently in Pacific Palisades where wealthy poverty owners brought in private firefighters help save their homes and businesses.

 

Scalability. 

A few months ago I was having lunch with an engineering professor and the conversation turned to the possibility of using biochar to dispose of forest waste. On the surface, it would seem to be a wonderful idea. You not only get rid of fuel for future wildfires; you also, in effect, remove carbon from the atmosphere and put it in a stable form where it can stay for hundreds of years, but try as we might, neither of us could see anyway to scale the process up to the massive levels we would need to make a dent in the problem in the immediate future.

Tools like grazing or mechanical clearing are very probably more scalable than biochar – – controlled burns almost certainly are – – but we are talking about millions upon millions of acres and as far as I can tell the only solution that can be applied at that level is simply letting more fires burn whenever possible.

 

Indifference (and in some cases, open hostility) toward solutions. 

Though we probably can't clear out more than a fraction of the tinder that has built up in these forests over the past one hundred plus years, these goats provide us with a wonderful tool, particularly in and around wildland urban interfaces, with virtually no real downsides. Why aren't we moving forward on this as aggressively as possible and putting some real money behind it?


In California, wildfires are prevented by crews of unlikely firefighters: goats
August 10, 20235:00 AM ET
Vanessa Romo
 

The end of a quiet residential street in Glendale, Calif., is just one of many battlegrounds in the state's annual fight against wildfire season. And it's being waged by goats.

About 300 of them are spread out along the foothills and steep ridges of the Verdugo Mountains, which loom over multi-million dollar homes at the end of a cul de sac. The goats are busy chomping away on the dried-out vegetation that's exploded after this year's drought-busting rains.

Seemingly oblivious to the 94 F heat, the animals are hard at work devouring several acres of dead, yellowed grasses, scrubby bushes and cactus, as well as some of Southern California's most invasive plants, including star thistle and black mustard.

...

Even after more than a decade in the business, [Michael Choi, the owner of Fire Grazers Inc.] is still confounded by how the goats make such easy work of an array of prickly and painful plants.

"It's mind boggling that they'll even eat star thistle, considering it's so painful to grab," he said. "It's invasive. It just spreads everywhere. And if you try to weed whack it, you wind up getting poked in the face and then all over the body. But goats will come up to that and they'll just eat it up because it tastes good to them."

Choi's company is busier than ever this year after the drought-breaking rains of this past winter. The downpour led to more growth, which has led to greater demand. That, Choi said, has extended his season by a couple of months, from March through what potentially could be the early weeks of October.

...

And in a few hours, Choi will be transporting the group to their next job in Rancho Palos Verdes, another wealthy enclave surrounded by tough-to-climb terrain. It's one of about five sites the company has going. So far, Fire Grazers Inc. has been contracted by the cities of Torrance, Hidden Hills, Westlake Village, Orange County and even private homeowners with sprawling estates in Beverly Hills and Calabasas.

...

If it were up to [Patty Mundo, vegetation management inspector for the Glendale Fire Department], she'd lease the herd for a much longer stretch, she said. The city owns about 500 parcels of land, and with the budget that's allocated to fire prevention — $62,000, plus another $14,000 specifically for the goats — they can only afford to clear a fraction of it every year.

...

As it stands, Mundo said the goats have saved the city precious financial resources. Brush crews are far more expensive because they rely on power tools, which need fuel. "They have to use heavy equipment like chippers. And sometimes they have to take the vegetation to a landfill. So that's just an added cost," she said. There are also additional fees to remove poison oak, which is common in the Verdugo Mountains.

In contrast, all the goats need is water, mineral and salt blocks, and a large Anatolian shepherd dog to ward off coyotes. They can also climb up steep mountainsides, eat the poison oak and work under the blazing sun without suffering from heat stress or heat exhaustion.

...

Lynn Huntsinger, a professor of rangeland ecology and management at the University of California, Berkeley, noted targeted grazing works best when it's used in combination with other wildfire reduction measures, especially prescribed burning.

"In an ideal world, we would have used goats or sheep or even cows, after the big fires we've had in recent years," Huntsinger told NPR.

That would have had the greatest impact in eliminating noxious and invasive plants, because the animals would consume any regrowth of the unwanted vegetation, she explained.

And even in places where there has not been a fire, regular grazing routines over time can eventually exhaust the root stock, preventing them from resurfacing and permanently changing the biomass of the space. That's for the better, according to Huntsinger.

A bit of a brisk start to the new administration

This is Joseph.

Well, this news has caused no end of concern today. I am not sure exactly what is happening and it seems like everybody is guessing. That seems to be a common theme this week. 

The good news is that it seems Elon Musk is getting ready to rescue us. It fills one with confidence when news media has these issues with reporting the names of office holder in important public positions of responsibility:

Wired declined to publish the names of two of the people because of their age. One graduated from high school last summer.

The good news is that this might be the end of the gerontocracy. The bad news is that it might be a bit longer than usual before we get a sense of what is happening. But, one way or the other, I think it definitely isn't great for morale among people who rely on government programs. 

We are also seeing the Twitter playbook being repeated for staff:

So at least Mr. Musk has experience with implementing this type of human resources strategy in a large and complex organization. I will leave it to Mark to opine on how likely that is to help, as Elon Musk is more his wheelhouse than mine. 

We'll come back to the Goat Fund Me proposal later

As we have mentioned before, the reporting of NPR along with Propublica, Reveal, and Marketplace looks really good in retrospect. Perceptive, prescient, nuanced. This 2019 piece is if anything more relevant now than it was in the aftermath of the Camp Fire. It also presents a strong counterargument to the party line of the New York Times et al with respect to developing areas such as La Cañada Flintridge.

Dan Efseaff, the parks and recreation director for the devastated town of Paradise, Calif., looks out over Little Feather River Canyon in Butte County. The Camp Fire raced up this canyon like a blowtorch in a paper funnel on its way to Paradise, incinerating most everything in its path, including scores of homes.

Efseaff is floating an idea that some may think radical: paying people not to rebuild in this slice of canyon: "The whole community needs some defensible space," he says.

Residents would get expanded green space for recreation and a vital safety buffer to help protect Paradise from future fire calamities. "We would work with either landowners on easements," he suggests, "or looking at them from a standpoint of some purchases in here."

...

Encouraging people to have an evacuation plan and create a 100-foot buffer of "defensible space" around their home — what firefighters have traditionally called basic wildfire preparation — are definitely important, [retired Cal Fire director Ken] Pimlott says.

But it's not enough. He would like to see the Paradise tragedy spur broader discussions about where people can safely live.

"Certainly I'm not advocating a ban on building in the urban interface. I think that obviously people are going to move and [there's] landowner rights, all of that," he says. "But at the end of the day we need to be looking at every development at every home and seeing if we can mitigate all aspects of [wildfire] before we build. And if we can't, then maybe we have to make a decision that that's not the right place."