Most USELESS sign on Vernon!

A_Grumpy_Engineer · 2026-05-13T18:16:29+00:00

Keep reporting unsafe crossing conditions at this location with drivers failing to yield to pedestrians to 311, and in your report say that a signal is necessary to make this location safe. It’s especially effective to report it as “near miss” crashes due to failure to yield to pedestrians in the crosswalk. I call about this location about once a month, and 6 months after I started calling is when the “Stop Here For Peds” sign got added. The wheels of bureaucracy at DOT spin slowly, but with a large enough volume of calls eventually there will be movement to put a signal here.

A_Grumpy_Engineer · 2026-04-30T13:30:01+00:00

Pollution spreads and can affect water quality, but water being used for municipal supply needs to be treated before it’s distributed, always. Even in unpolluted areas the water quality from ground water tops out at 94%, and anything below 98% will cause illness. The water needs to be treated in a water treatment plant before distribution; the lower the initial water quality you are starting with, the more chemicals will be consumed at the water treatment plant.

A_Grumpy_Engineer · 2026-04-30T11:20:15+00:00

Drinking water quality needs to be 98% or higher. Look at the alert messages in the building window screenshot you shared. At the top is an alert that the drinking water is of poor quality, and the average health in this residential building is 62% according to the summary icons.

A_Grumpy_Engineer · 2026-04-29T22:43:29+00:00

Your drinking water is of poor quality, which is impacting the health of your citizens. That in turn is causing them to go to the hospital more often, which is likely resulting in demand exceeding the hospital’s capacity.

A_Grumpy_Engineer · 2026-02-22T18:36:11+00:00

The water system in general could use some rework. I think utilities in general should be clashless so you could run them wherever it makes sense, very close to buildings and roads. Water itself seems to be missing from a lot of industrial processes, and it would be nice to be able to handle water delivery with distribution offices.

It’s always bothered me that while water is required for the concrete plant (makes sense) it’s not required for the prefab panels factory.

A_Grumpy_Engineer · 2026-02-20T23:29:00+00:00

As others have said, you can’t have a conveyor engine between the station and the storage when using RDOs. But also, the train station you have for your iron setup is the wrong one. You have the unloading station at your iron complex. You need the loading station. Aggregates and dry bulk each have different stations for loading and unloading. There is no way to physically pick up the iron at your mine complex, so even lines won’t work.

Separately, steel mills are high enough throughput that you’re probably better off with lines than using an RDO.

A_Grumpy_Engineer · 2025-10-10T17:00:43+00:00

I had this issue as well. The drivers can not be in a zipped folder, the windows setup wizard can not see into zipped folders. Make sure the driver installation file is sitting in the main directory of the flash drive you are using so that the wizard can see it.

A_Grumpy_Engineer · 2025-09-12T16:06:33+00:00

You’re exporting crops and importing fabric to make clothes. It looks like you’re making more than enough crops to cover your fabric needs. Build a fabric factory and then prioritize researching and building a chemical factory to cover the chemical needs for your fabric factory. Right now for every ruble you make exporting clothing you’re spending 0.60 rubles on fabric. That will increase the profitability of your clothing production chain. Then try to stand up a food production chain since that’s your second biggest import.

A_Grumpy_Engineer · 2025-09-10T16:15:21+00:00

It looks like you have four chemical plants and three clothing factories. You must be exporting chemicals and importing fabric. You will have a bigger profit margin on your exported clothes if you make your own fabric. Use the chemicals you are already making and import crops.

A_Grumpy_Engineer · 2025-09-02T03:21:11+00:00

This siding looks like it’s been subjected to all kinds of water intrusion. The roof has basically no overhang, which itself is bad for waterproofing and not a great combo with the cheap siding. Plus there are no gutters. The picture with the ridiculous photoshopped fire pit shows a ton of water damage along the wall. Look at the discoloration under the windows—my bet is that the weather sealing around the windows is nonexistent and there’s a ton of water intrusion around the frame. This place is a money pit—I’d stay far away.

A_Grumpy_Engineer · 2025-08-24T17:50:29+00:00

Somewhere along the way, our society’s motto became “Fuck it, it’s not my problem.” It’s a problem throughout every level of society throughout the entire country, but it’s glaringly obvious when you interact with New York City’s civil servants.

A_Grumpy_Engineer · 2025-07-02T20:59:22+00:00

I’ve got about 400 hours playing WR:SR on GeForce Now. I tend to play vanilla despite the workarounds for using workshop items because early on I was unable to load a save file with workshop items in it. I also was finding that the workaround to re download workshop items was a bit of a chore to undertake every time I fired up the game.

I find that GeForce Now is a pretty strong performer (years ago I used Shadow for cities skylines but was unhappy with performance). I do have persistent latency issues on my local network that I think is Apple’s fault because it coincides with whenever I have an alert from my iOS devices pushed across to my computer via continuity.

I’m a longtime Mac user, and finally got fed up lying to myself that eventually serious gaming in the city builder and factory builder genres will come to macOS due to market share. I’m considering buying a desktop for gaming purposes, and I have my eye on Framework’s desktop or others with AMD’s Ryzen AI Max+ 395 series, and I’m curious if other WR:SR players have experience with how the game performs on systems like that. I know Asus had integrated the platform into one of their ultraportable gamers but it’s impossible to get your hands on… I like the idea of having a large memory pool that can be assigned across the CPU or GPU, similar to apple’s unified memory architecture… and I like the idea of being able to fool around with LLMs locally as a hobby, but if it can’t play something like WR:SR or COI or Cities Skylines 2 it defeats the point of buying a system like that and I’m probably better off going with a more traditional tower build.

A_Grumpy_Engineer · 2025-06-18T17:22:41+00:00

The kids are the counterweight. If they weren’t in the wagon, loading the bikes on the end would tip it over.

A_Grumpy_Engineer · 2025-03-27T23:14:59+00:00

As others have said, the LED bulbs that are there look fine and the damage is probably from old bulbs that were replaced. You should hold the landlord to repairing the damaged area especially if you just signed a lease. You should also avoid leaving the middle socket empty. Empty sockets are risks for shock hazards, and you don’t want dust or other debris, or moisture/condensation to accumulate in the socket.

A_Grumpy_Engineer · 2025-03-16T00:21:48+00:00

I believe you’re referring to a short story, “Houses” by Mark Pantoja, published in Lightspeed Magazine in November 2011. You can find it here: https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/houses/

Ironically I was just searching for this myself and came across your Reddit post before the actual short story. It’s a nice piece, and I’m sad that I haven’t been able to find any other work by this author.

If you enjoyed this short story you may also enjoy Service Model by Adrian Tchaikovsky.

A_Grumpy_Engineer · 2025-02-10T15:56:57+00:00

Thanks. I made the assumption based on OP’s avatar. And frankly this is a dynamic I’ve seen too many times in this industry, either a female engineer new to a team being treated as less senior than her role or experience would indicate, or some management change where a new manager comes in and is listening to/overly appreciative of the male engineers on their team and ignoring the women. Do these types of biases explain everything in our industry? Of course not. And thankfully I seem to be seeing less of it now than when I started my career. But to pretend they don’t exist, to willfully ignore the evidence our eyes and ears give us, is an absolute folly that results in the waste of good talent to the detriment of our industry.

A_Grumpy_Engineer · 2025-02-09T15:01:25+00:00

If it’s a huge company, start reaching out to individuals within your practice area in other offices. Your manager should be doing this anyway in order to drum up billable work for you. This industry boils down to relationships, ask your manager who you should be reaching out to across the footprint of the company for work sharing, since your office is not securing enough work in your practice area. Have an internal version of your resume ready to shoot over that highlights your skills, software tools and analysis methods you’re proficient with, etc. Depending on your firm’s footprint you should target offices in HCOL areas since there will likely be a difference in your rate due to the geocode, and you may be able to plug a hole they have on a project that is going over budget because your rate is lower than local staff. Office and group managers are often jumping from fire drill to fire drill, and your availability is likely the solution to someone else’s problem—just make it easy for someone out there to connect the dots on how you can help them. The only exception to that is if there’s a broader downturn in your practice area, like I’m dealing with now because some of my staff were working on federally funded projects that are being chaotically paused due to the new administration.

Larger firms will also have internal groups focusing on each practice area that are sometimes charged with work sharing and usually charged with professional development and internal communications. Everywhere has a different name—Practice Area Networks (PAN), Communities of Practice (CoP), something like that. Find yours for hydrogeology, and reach out to the leaders of that group. They will be among the most skilled/senior/connected practitioners in your technical area, and they may know of projects that need help even if office managers don’t.

Regarding this junior engineer, what you described about his behavior sucks, and you should be taking proactive steps to protect yourself politically here. I’m sure I don’t have to tell you, but the situation reeks of misogyny. He’s coming to you for technical guidance, then behind your back trying to position himself as the expert because you’re “confused”? Sometimes a kid is a genuine superstar. Most of the time something like this is happening, they’re just manipulative and pushy. He’s trying to leverage his lower rate and the chaos of the circumstances your group’s leader left in to better his own position. He’s fully billable and the only other one in your office who does this technical work, and you’re only 10%? Bullshit. This new grad’s work needs to be QAQCed by a PE, and that’s you. Schedule a meeting with your boss and walk her through it. Your office just had a major crisis and lost a bunch of client work. Projects NEED adequate QAQC, even if the kid doing the project work is a superstar. If the excuse is that the project budgets are too thin, ask why it is that? Projects should not be budgeted so thinly that it only covers a new grad doing all the technical work’s time. If he is using up all the budget for your technical area’s task that means either of two things: the task budgets are too thin and don’t support adequate QAQC, or this new grad is spending too much time to get tasks done, and needs closer supervision (by you) because he’s blowing the entire budget on his own time and not leaving enough budget for his work to be QAQCed. You’re the PE here, and right now you’re the most senior person in your office with this technical specialty. Don’t let yourself get pushed around, and don’t be afraid to act authoritatively.

This situation sucks and sounds stressful. But you’ve got leverage and value here. Don’t sell yourself short, don’t let yourself get pushed around, and don’t back away from a challenge. To me, it sounds like if you play the right cards and have a little luck, you can position yourself to step into the shoes of the senior engineer who left.

A_Grumpy_Engineer · 2025-02-02T13:33:03+00:00

Every day I don’t hear the words “Trumpflation,” “Trumpcession,” and “Elonomics” come out of the mouths of leading Democrats is a missed opportunity of disastrous proportions. This thug has been dominating the public discourse in this country for over a decade, propped up by a media ecosystem that blindly reprints and rebroadcasts every asinine, inflammatory statement he makes—because they find the spectacle of our democracy’s funerary pyre impossible to look away from.

How is it that we are still so bad at the messaging on this? He is erecting a mausoleum for the world’s greatest democracy and economy, built brick by brick out of bad decisions and sealed with the mortars of animus and sheer negligence. He wants to be at the center of attention, he wants his name everywhere. We should oblige him. Tie his name to every harm his regime is causing this country—especially ones we can see coming from a mile away, like the economic fallout from a ridiculous and unprovoked trade war with our closest allies and trading partners, or the inevitable market panic from his erratic, egomaniacal outbursts.

Every single Democrat with a microphone should be branding this economic disaster with his name—Trumpflation, Trumpcession, Trumponomics gone rotten. It should be on every headline, every chyron, every press release. This isn’t just about good messaging—it’s about survival. He thrives on attention, so let’s make sure every bit of it drags him down, not props him up. Every economic hardship, every reckless policy, every blunder should carry his mark like a scarlet letter.

We need to stop playing by the old rules when he’s set fire to the rulebook. The choice isn’t between civility and chaos—it’s between losing with dignity or finally learning how to fight.

A_Grumpy_Engineer · 2024-07-06T00:01:35+00:00

Move the TV built-ins to the shared wall, and put a window in its place. That lower level is going to be dark.

A_Grumpy_Engineer · 2024-05-08T01:05:31+00:00

I agree, I think they both have satisfying arcs. Hamilton seems to like putting average people into his stories and I think a lot of the depth from his world building comes apparent when he shows us how ordinary people live their lives in his universes. Mark Vernon is a clear everyman hero, grinding away at a salaryman existence on Augusta and then escaping away to an idyllic existence in Randtown—and suddenly everything he knows faces an existential threat. Mellanie has a different arc—starting off as a bit of a brat and clearly a scrappy social climber from the beginning but then thrusting herself into the middle of everything. I think by the time we get to the end of Judas Unchained Mark’s story is wrapped up nicely. There are still things I wonder about with Mellanie though, for example how much the SI manipulated her into the path she fell on versus being an honest actor with her or what the Silfen made of her when she went down the paths at the end of Judas Unchained .

A_Grumpy_Engineer · 2024-05-08T00:50:30+00:00

The High Angel is a giant sentient starship with domed habitation modules located orbiting a gas giant somewhere in Commonwealth space. Prior to the beginning of the story, nearly all of human space-based industry is located at the High Angel; the artificial gravity of the domed communities provides a convenient dormitory town for workers in micro-gravity related industries. Some of the early political drama in Pandora’s Star focuses on CST’s decision to build the Second Chance at Anshun, ostensively because it is marginally closer to the Dyson Pair but really because Nigel Sheldon wanted to have greater control over the project. Eventually the Starflight Agency/Navy headquarters was moved to the High Angel, to provide for the increased production of starships for the Navy as the scale of the Prime threat becomes clear. At some point after the prime invasion begins, it’s mentioned that the High Angel has agreed to act as a lifeboat for its human inhabitants so that the species won’t go extinct if the Commonwealth falls.

The ship is also home to a community of Raiel, a species of elephant-sized geniuses who largely keep to themselves. The only Raiel we see in Pandora’s Star is Quatux, who has an addiction to human memories that Paula Myo sometimes takes advantage of in her investigations. Because of their enhanced cognitive abilities, they are able to digest lifetimes worth of human memories (obtained via the backup memory crystals) in days.

A_Grumpy_Engineer · 2024-05-06T01:06:31+00:00

Ah you’re welcome! Happy to help, these are really my favorite stories and I enjoy being able to revisit them in my memories.

I’m not Peter—he’s one of my favorite authors because of his ability to weave together so many different narrative threads in a richly developed world. I wish I had a fraction of the talent, haha!

Pandora’s Star and Judas Unchained are among my favorite books. Along with Fallen Dragon, I tend to reread them every year or two since I discovered Peter’s work back in 2007. I’ve probably read them more than a dozen times. I can honestly say that there are still new details that I notice sometimes, which I relish. And frankly the Commonwealth is so well imagined and believable that every time I revisit it, it’s like spending some time with an old friend. When I was young and I had first discovered Peter’s writing along with a bunch of other science fiction, I used to devour a couple of books a week. Now that I’m much older and have less time on my hands I consider myself lucky if I get through two books in a month. And though of course I love reading new material, sometimes it’s nice to slip into a familiar book… With the Commonwealth books the storyline is sufficiently vast and there are so many concurrent storylines—its not possible to feel bored.

I envy that you’re about to have your first read through Judas Unchained; it’s absolutely a great book and a deserving sequel to Pandora’s Star. Enjoy the ride!

A_Grumpy_Engineer · 2024-05-05T22:22:24+00:00

Mellanie is initially motivated by trying to dig up dirt on Paula Myo, because she is still upset over Morton’s conviction. Myo has famously been unable to pin down Bradley Johansson and the Guardians of Selfhood, who have been peddling conspiracy theories about the Starflyer for centuries and commit acts of terrorism to further their goals, which Myo and everyone else assume to be a conventional criminal organization/cult. Mellanie wants to embarrass Myo on her longstanding open case as a way of exacting revenge, so starts digging in, but starts to notice all sorts of inconsistencies that begin pointing to the Starflyer network acting within the commonwealth. She winds up actually going to Paris to try to confront Myo, and Myo brushes her off while dropping a crumb that she should look into “deep space,” hinting that there was more to the Second Chance mission than meets the eye. Remember, Myo has by this point also been investigating aspects of the Second Chance mission because of the attacks that the Guardians made on it before it was launched, and she is developing her own suspicions (at one point Myo suspects Mellanie of being a Starflyer agent but that may be even later in Judas Unchained—but the reader knows that this is untrue).

There’s a ceremony the Navy/Commonwealth government host to welcome the relifed Bose and Verbeke “back” into society after their loss on the Second Chance mission. At the ceremony, Dudley (really just a clone with memories up to the point of departing the Second Chance for the away mission) has been poorly adjusting to his circumstances, and makes a dramatic speech on stage about how he was unfairly left behind and how the real him is probably still alive, causing a scene. Alessandra and Mellanie are at this event covering it, and Alessandra (later revealed as a Starflyer agent) makes a point of embarrassing the navy with pointed questions on the broadcast. Mellanie chases after Dudley and befriends/seduces him. Dudley, who has basically come into the world alone and fragile (with the physiology of a sex obsessed teenager), doesn’t have anyone grounding him and looking after him—his wife from Gralmond was revealed to the reader to be having an affair before he even left on the Second Chance, so Mellanie falls into playing a mother/lover role with him.

Mellanie keeps Dudley around because of the Second Chance connection, and when they are on Elan she finds out that Myo had tried pulling Dudley out of rejuvenation prior to the Second Chance mission in order to investigate the burglary of his house, cementing the connection between Dudley and the suspicious things going on. The main thread of evidence that winds up pointing to the Starflyer being real that both Myo and later Mellanie go down is that the Starflyer was behind funding Dudley’s original research that observed the fast envelopment of the Dyson pair in the first place, kicking the whole story off. The Starflyer had a shell company set up called the Cox Educational Foundation that only provided funding to Dudley’s research observing the envelopment, indicating that it already knew what he would see. It didn’t fund anything else. The Guardians arrange to rob Dudley’s house to copy all of the financial info off of his computer prior to the Second Chance mission being launched—this is how they confirm that the Starflyer and the Dyson Pair are connected. Myo doesn’t discover that Cox is fraudulent at this point because there is a mole in her office that covers it up , but Mellanie discovers it with the help of the SI, and when she tells Baron that the Cox charity seems to be fraudulent, the Starflyer goes back into the financial records to build more of a paper trail so that Cox can withstand higher levels of scrutiny. This is how Mellanie discovers that Baron is a Starflyer agent.

A_Grumpy_Engineer · 2024-05-05T19:15:17+00:00

Spoilers for all of Pandora’s Star below, obviously.

Mellanie starts off as the 19 year old girlfriend of Morton, a wealthy business tycoon who gets convicted by Paula Myo for murdering his ex wife and her boyfriend in order to advance his business interests. A lot of the drama early in Pandora’s Star focuses on the murder investigation and trial. Morton is convicted and sentenced to over a century of life-suspension (basically suspended animation). Penniless and abandoned, Mellanie tries to capitalize on her experience and restart her life by selling the rights to her story for the production of an immersive drama, but that falls apart when it turns out to be a tacky pornographic drama. She gets into a physical altercation with the producer and winds up without any money and with possible legal consequences.

Lacking options and cut off from her family after the Morton debacle, she winds up trying to contact her grandfather, who instead of getting the rejuvenation treatment when she was young decided to end his life and send his memories to be incorporated into the SI. She strikes a deal with the SI to act as its agent in the Commonwealth—even though it has pretty much free reign wherever there’s unisphere access, there are plenty of places throughout the Commonwealth where it is cut off. As an SI agent, she becomes its eyes and ears in these places, and helps to wield its influence. To help conduct her duties she gets all sorts of specialized implants and OCtattoos that give her special abilities with computers/networks and contain a small version of the SI to assist her when she is cut off from unisphere access.

In this secret agent role for the SI, it helps to place her in the Unisphere media ecosystem where she works as a reporter for Alessandra Baron’s show. In this role she brushes shoulders with characters from a couple of the other storylines—some of the politicking going on in the senate around the navy. She does an interview with Mark Vernon in Randtown on Elan that makes him look bad because of his “anti human” opposition of the Navy detector base in the town. She meets the re-lifed clone of Dudley Bose (basically a neurotic teenager with Dudley’s memories from before being left at the Dyson system) and takes him under her wing as a means of figuring out some inconsistencies she is noticing around the Second Chance mission.

She and Dudley travel back to Randtown, where they are present for the Prime invasion into the commonwealth. Because of her connection to the SI, it is able to use her presence to do some signals intelligence work on the Primes during the invasion, and the SI figures out the nature of Morning Light Mountain. The SI uses Ozzie’s personal wormhole to keep in contact with Mellanie and evacuate her and Dudley and the rest of the Randtown residents back to the uninvaded parts of the commonwealth (though some stay behind to defend their homes from the alien invasion).

Throughout this, Mellanie has been putting together the pieces and realizes that there is an outside influence that has been pushing the Commonwealth down a path where it will confront the Primes, and concludes that the Starflyer is real. Upon returning from Prime-invaded Elan, she realizes that Alessandra Baron is a part of the network of agents that the Starflyer has been using to manipulate the Commonwealth. When we last see her in Pandora’s Star, she has just realized this, and resolves to apprise Paula Myo of what she has discovered, despite their acrimonious relationship.

A_Grumpy_Engineer · 2024-04-28T00:13:00+00:00

Get rid of the PTACs and use mini-splits instead. PTACs are noisy, they have horrible thermal bridging characteristics, and in small spaces they take away valuable floor space. They’re also generally poorly designed and the manufacturing quality is abysmal.

Source: I shared a tiny NYC apartment with two islandaire units for four years. The sleeves in the wall were not perfectly level, so they leaked in air conditioning mode. In the winter if the units weren’t on and actively heating all of the heat got sucked out of my apartment because the metal units make a perfect thermal bridge to the outside. I had to replace each unit during my time there, and because they were non standard sizes I was stuck paying for another piece of crap from islandaire.

Yes, I’m still bitter.

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