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Spokane is in the Eastern arid region of the state.

What an absolutely pointless thing to get pedantic about. Put "spokane washington" into Google images and tell me if that looks like a desert to you.

https://maps.app.goo.gl/Yud6EFprZeaVDaeQ6

This is the view outside of Fairchild AFB, which runs the training course in question.

Wikipedia reports that Spokane has a Mediterranean climate, as does Kohgiluyeh and Boyer-Ahmad province where this F-15 is reported to have been shot down.


It's sad how quickly this comment thread went from someone talking about their experience at SERE to... this.

On the contrary, as a European who only associates Washington State with the rainy Seatle I found the reality check rather enlightening.

WA has a crazy collection of microclimates. Ho oh rainforest, alpine at the various mountains, Yakima desert, mild and wet near Seattle, dry plains in the east of Cascades, etc.

Asperger’s spans the continents! It’s inspiring.

They're also wrong. The geographic center (around Ellensburg or so) is also in what is known as Eastern WA (east of the Cascades).

Spokane is Eastern Washington, the college in Cheney is literally called Eastern, its just not a desert.

Spokane is not desert. Even surrounding territory is more plains. Some desert military training happens at Yakima much further west.

If this behavior actually is a prevalent issue, then there will be many fines that add up. If Google doesn't rack up many fines, then this problem is evidently rare.

A lot of renewables have intermittent generation. If daytime electricity demand is already saturated, adding more solar panels increases capacity but doesn't increase generation (or to be more specific, it doesn't increase generation that actually fulfills demand).

Unless you add battery storage, which is increasingly the case:

https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2026/02/25/solar-and-storage-to-...


Adding battery storage is very costly, and batteries degrade with each cycle.

What is going on?

> The teen suicide statistics do not lie.

Teen suicide rates in the US are lower now than they were in the 1990s.


This doesn’t paint the entire picture. Suicide rates peaked in 1990 and then declined to its lowest point in 2007 from there the rates started rising again.

Like all metrics, they fluctuate over time. But they've remained pretty for decades stable at around 10 per 100k per year. The recent rise doesn't really coincide with social media adoption. By 2008, >80% of teens were using social media. If social media adoption was driving the increase in suicides, we would have started to see a rise in suicides around the early 2000s, reaching it's peak around 2008. But that adoption of social media by teens was coupled with a decrease in suicides. The more recent rise in teen suicides occurred during a period of largely flat teen social media adoption (because nearly 100% of them were already on social media by the end of the 2000s).

This idea of teen suicide painting a clear picture about the impact of social media just isn't borne out by the data. And lastly, people ought to remember that teens have the lowest rate of suicide among any age cohort.


> If social media adoption was driving the increase in suicides, we would have started to see a rise in suicides around the early 2000s, reaching it's peak around 2008.

I think there is a logical fallacy here. Social media has not remained stable since 2008. For one thing, 2008 social media used the chronological timeline. For another, it didn't show "recommended" (or sponsored) content in your feed. There was no TikTok. Facebook was relatively new and MySpace was not even really feed-based as I recall.


Facebook moved away from chronological timelines as default in 2011. YouTube added "recommended" videos tab in 2007.

Right - but these were also not "hard cut" dates. They are a couple simple examples of the evolution of social media that continued (and continues) to occur.

The platforms continue to optimize for engagement (i.e. addiction.)


There is a claim that it's not social media on its own, but social media on smartphones that's responsible for a decline in child/teen mental health.

The world is bigger than the US.

Anyway you can go on HN and deny there is a problem but you will lose public opinion and crucially the voting booth.


The fine was levied in a US court.

Not quite. If it's widely known that bot impressions aren't being filtered out, then people are less likely to place ads with Meta.

Sure, but tutoring involves learning and improving the skills at hand. Meritocracy doesn't mean equal opportunity, it means candidates are evaluated equally without regard to superficial characteristics like appearance. A meritocratic test will award higher scores to test takers that can read and analyze passages faster and solve math problems more reliability. Whether those test takers possess that ability innately, or built up that ability through loads of studying doesn't alter the fact that it's a meritocratic test.

Of course candidates that study more have an advantage. But that doesn't make it non-meritocratic. That'd be like saying a marathon isn't meritocratic because some people spend more time training.


Sure, but tutoring involves learning and improving the skills at hand. Meritocracy doesn't mean equal opportunity, it means candidates are evaluated equally without regard to superficial characteristics like appearance.

Of course candidates that study more have an advantage. But that doesn't make it non-meritocratic. That'd be like saying a marathon isn't meritocratic because some people spend more time training and conditioning.



Is it legal to carry firearms concealed in Northern Ireland? It's not the presence of guns in a guns safe that makes policing more dangerous, it's the fact the a sizeable chunk of the American public is actively carrying firearms.


Yes, at least for personal protection weapons. And, obviously, the unlicensed users (ie. members of dissident gangs) won't care whether it's legal or not.

PPW holders will be people who have had specific, verifiable threats made against their lives - so will often be people with links to violence, terrorism, or criminality. And, obviously, the unlicensed users are criminals by definition.

So, on balance, the average weapons owner in NI is probably more dangerous than the equivalent in the US. I do agree that it's hard to make anything more than a very general comparison between the two very different situations, however.


Google tells me 2,700 in Northern Ireland have authorization to carry firearms privately.

By comparison in my county in Washington state, there are 114,000 active concealed firearm permit holders out of a population of 2.3 million. And this is a liberal, fairly urbanized region.

We're talking ~50x the rate of people carrying firearms legally. Of course data on criminals carrying weapons is not so transparent, but it's suffice to say that American police are much more regularly encountering people with firearms.


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