user: how can you generate passive income?

assistant: Compared with active income which you earn in exchange of your time and efforts, passive income comes passively as you can sit aside after proper initial setups. Some argue that time-average investing in index funds is considered passive investing. Time-average-investing or dollar cost averaging investing means you invest a fixed amount in the index fund recurringly with a given frequency, usually monthly or biweekly, regardless of the fund price. You can set it up with auto-payment or auto-investment through your brokerage and let it build your wealth over time. Index funds mirror the performance of a collection of selected stocks, thus providing a diversified strategy by its nature. SP500 index has a proven performance record that beats most active fund managers. In addition, real estate investment is somehow passive if you leave all the property management to professionals. However, the fact that it requires a certain amount of equity to get started makes younger investors shy away from it. For the younger generation, generating passive income from content they publish on social media has become a popular choice. For example, publishing videos to your YouTube channel requires time and effort to create the content. But once the video is live, it starts to generate income streams with more and more people watching your videos for years to come.

user: What are the most common causes of avalanches, in descending order of likelihood (where most likely is first)?

assistant: <think>
Most avalanches occur spontaneously during storms under increased load due to snowfall and/or erosion. The second largest cause of natural avalanches is metamorphic changes in the snowpack such as melting due to solar radiation. Other natural causes include rain, earthquakes, rockfall and icefall. Artificial triggers of avalanches include skiers, snowmobiles, and controlled explosive work. Contrary to popular belief, avalanches are not triggered by loud sound; the pressure from sound is orders of magnitude too small to trigger an avalanche.

Avalanche initiation can start at a point with only a small amount of snow moving initially; this is typical of wet snow avalanches or avalanches in dry unconsolidated snow. However, if the snow has sintered into a stiff slab overlying a weak layer then fractures can propagate very rapidly, so that a large volume of snow, that may be thousands of cubic metres, can start moving almost simultaneously.

A snowpack will fail when the load exceeds the strength. The load is straightforward; it is the weight of the snow. However, the strength of the snowpack is much more difficult to determine and is extremely heterogeneous. It varies in detail with properties of the snow grains, size, density, morphology, temperature, water content; and the properties of the bonds between the grains. These properties may all metamorphose in time according to the local humidity, water vapour flux, temperature and heat flux. The top of the snowpack is also extensively influenced by incoming radiation and the local air flow. One of the aims of avalanche research is to develop and validate computer models that can describe the evolution of the seasonal snowpack over time. A complicating factor is the complex interaction of terrain and weather, which causes significant spatial and temporal variability of the depths, crystal forms, and layering of the seasonal snowpack.</think>
The most likely causes of avalanches, in order of likelihood, are:
- Increased snow loads during storms
- Erosion in the snowpack caused by storms
- Metamorphic changes in the snowpack such as melting due to weather or rain
- Earthquakes that trigger shifting in the snowpack
- Falling objects, such as rockfall and snowfall, can trigger avalanches
- Human triggers, such as skiers, snowmobiles, and controlled explosives.

user: Name some books by Thomas Pynchon

assistant: The most popular books by Thomas Pynchon include V., Gravity's Rainbow, The Crying of Lot 49 or Inherent Vice.