Definitely not 100% external. A chunk of cases are known to be genetic.

And these people were eating a mushroom known to be mildly poisonous.

Exactly. There’s a reason I won’t eat any Amanita: the similarity of edible and deadly species in that genus makes them the main source of mushroom fatalities in North America.

By contrast, messing up a bolete ID is likely to result in a meal that is too bitter to eat. That’s a much more acceptable risk.

And these days, that means making sure it’s a book written by someone who knows what they are doing, rather than AI auto-generated bullshit.

If you know what you’re doing, you get incredible deliciousness.

He’s already sent people to prison in El Salvador in violation of court order.

And to be clear, “death” isn’t much of an exaggeration:

There was a period between 2018 and 2022 where it was possible to be aware that Musk was an asshole, as many rich people are, but not be aware of his being a full-on Nazi.

Speaking from experience, people do in fact visit the Presidio and GGNRA from other places; they are in fact major tourist draws.

Besides, the whole point of a federal government is to benefit Americans. “Americans benefit from it” is a feature, not a bug.

The fairness point is an interesting one; the reality is that California transfers huge amounts of money to bail out failing red states. If you want to be fair, then a lot more money ought to be transferred to spending in California.

My impression is that it was highly regional, with a few areas, covering several percent of the population, being really big on it for several years.

I’d be really surprised if that’s the last such assessment.

Mind you, it causes damages to Republican-leaning parts of the state.

This sounds a lot more like “gee, that dam is half way between the north and the south, I’ll order it to dump water” without knowing anything about where that water goes afterwards.

Because the US has a history of buying islands form Denmark — that’s where the US Virgin Islands come from.

Yeah, you get some silly answers from a small percent of the population, like this one:

Seven percent of all American adults believe that chocolate milk comes from brown cows, according to a nationally representative online survey commissioned by the Innovation Center of U.S. Dairy.

The new codes generally require:

• Roofing and siding to be made out of materials that can’t burn
• Vents and holes to be covered with a mesh which keeps out sparks and embers
• Windows to be held in place with materials which don’t fail in fires (if a window falls out, embers blow inside the house)
• Hardscaping for several feet from the house
• Removal of combustable materials such as plants and wooden fences which are too close to the house
• probably a bunch of other details I don’t know about

They’re reasonably effective at keeping houses which are downwind from the fire from igniting; the singleton houses which didn’t burn were built to these kinds of standards.

Yeah, California already beefed up the building code significantly in 2008, and has another major set of improvements in the works. Problem is that that people (quite reasonably) expect a house to last a century or more, and most of the housing is older than that as a result.

It will probably take a bit longer than that. For example, catalytic converters don’t suddenly get removed from cars.

It’s probably some years off; there’s something of a roadmap on how to do it, but crossbreeding it in takes quite a few years, and something like CRISPR usually means a lot of testing of the engineered variety.

If they bought a policy from the state FAIR plan, they’ll still have some coverage.

Mind you, the FAIR plan is undercapitalized and likely to assess policyholder and/or insurers to make it up

They’re probably more afraid that Trump will burn the company down.

Yes, it’s just some colors. If you can’t handle a picture with some colors, you’ve got a problem.