tly just because of extra use of coal or just coal in general, not the extra. So here's what's interesting if it's true. Oh, and by the way, the number of people who are dying from pollution has been dropping year to year, and the drop in those deaths is being attributed to the closing of coal plants. But now the coal plants are not only not closing, they're reopening and going wild.

So what would happen, and this will be the fun thing to watch, what would happen if the deaths from pollution keep dropping while the use of coal is unambiguously up? What happens then? Would you like to make a prediction? Do you think that the mainstream belief that the reduction in coal plants has caused a reduction in mortality, do you believe that that will reverse because the use of coal reversed and there doesn't seem to be any other mitigating factor such as clean coal or anything like that?

I'm going to make you a bet. I'm going to bet that the mortality rate drops even though coal use goes up. And I don't know that I'll have an explanation for why. I just think that it's a little too easy to say, oh, coal use went down, mortality went down. We don't really live in a world where we're that good at correlation. So I'm just going to say I think there will be a mystery coming up.

All right. In other news, you know, filmmaker James Cameron, and he says he's been asked to write a new movie, a Terminator movie about the future, but he can't write things about the future or it's hard because the actual future will be too close to what he calls science fiction. So for example, if he wrote a movie today in which let's say the machines became sentient, that could actually happen before the movie hit the screen, which is really a weird problem for a writer to have. It's like no matter what he says, oh, the robots will be running all the, oh wait, that actually will happen in three years. So that's a pretty interesting take.

I don't know if he's right. The counter to that is that I've told you this before, but if you're a subscriber, you'd have to be a Dilbert Reborn subscriber. So if you're seeing Dilbert that I still produce every day and you're seeing behind the paywall, you can see it on X behind the paywall or you can see it on the Locals platfo