The reduction of precipitation from clouds affected by desert dust can cause drier soil, which in turn raises more dust, thus providing a possible feedback loop to further decrease precipitation.

The effect of dust on cloud properties is to inhibit precipitation,

The impact of pollution on these clouds is sufficiently strong to completely shut off precipitation from them.

Although we haven't had a lot of precipitation, what we have received has been able to move into the soil profile because there's been no frost line to contend with.

Time has a different meaning for me, and these events that seem so monumental in the moment will one day be nothing more than a line in a scroll. These humans are but letters to be inked into history. A hundred years from now, I will be free. I will have forgotten their names and faces, and the struggles they have will not matter. Time has a way of burying things, shifting like the desert and swallowing entire civilizations, erasing them from map and memory. Always, in the end, everything returns to dust.

The fact that there's a shakeout in the first generation of companies associated with it [the Internet] clouds the issue, but it is a tremendous productivity booster, ... The leading companies will benefit long-term.