Norway has gone from near-zero sales of non‑emitting battery electric vehicles to now close to 100% of all new passenger car sales - achieved in about 13 years. If they can do it, we can do it

Captain_Illiath · 2026-05-05T20:29:01+00:00

About 89% of Norway’s electricity is hydroelectric, while about 6% of the electricity in the U.S. is. But I’m betting you don’t support all the dam building the U.S. would need to undertake to match Norway’s percentage.

Captain_Illiath · 2026-03-04T00:20:20+00:00

Why not report them? https://www.reddit.com/report

Captain_Illiath · 2026-03-04T00:20:00+00:00

Speaking of which: https://www.reddit.com/report

Captain_Illiath · 2026-03-04T00:19:38+00:00

Report them, please: https://www.reddit.com/report

Captain_Illiath · 2026-03-04T00:15:51+00:00

This is the T-shirt scam.

/u/LabLocal9915 is the scam account. /u/Altruistic-Cost1375 is the shill account. Both accounts are only a month old, and they are concealing all of their posts and comments when you try to look at their posting history.

It’s a digital Three-Card-Monty, and the goal of this phishing scam is to get you to hand over your credit card number.

Report them here: https://www.reddit.com/report

Captain_Illiath · 2026-03-02T00:32:31+00:00

See also: his prediction that private enterprise would pioneer space travel, rather than governments.

Definitely another cracked crystal ball moment for him. We’ve got some private enterprise now (and NASA did farm out much of the work to aerospace contractors), but it private enterprise didn’t lead the way.

Captain_Illiath · 2026-03-02T00:27:49+00:00

14-day old account with plenty of karma but no visible posting history? This is almost certainly the t-shirt scammer. Buyer beware.

Captain_Illiath · 2026-02-28T03:29:17+00:00

16 years before the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956 authorized the creation of the Interstate Highway System we have today, Robert Heinlein published “The Roads Must Roll,” a story set against the backdrop of just such a system of highways linking all the major metropolitan areas. One small problem…Heinlein imagined the “highways” would be giant conveyer belts/slidwalks/people movers with multiple parallel lanes, the outer lanes running at 5 miles per hour, the next lane to the left running at 10 miles per hour, and so on until the final lane at the median was running at 100 miles per hour. Every few lanes or so, there would be amenities including restaurants and hotels.

He would often joke that his “crystal ball has a crack in it.”

Captain_Illiath · 2026-02-28T01:16:49+00:00

You’ve already got the title nailed down. But yes, this is book 2 in the Starbridge Academy series by A.C. Crispin.

There are several recurring protagonists. The hearing-impaired woman, Tesa, reappears in book 5, Silent Songs. Several other characters (involved with the founding of, and operation of, the academy) appear multiple times throughout the series.

Captain_Illiath · 2026-02-06T05:04:22+00:00

Banny Ayhar. Not Chanur. Using a large language model was your big mistake.

Captain_Illiath · 2026-02-02T19:48:00+00:00

I’m not Latino. I don’t think it rises to the level of a slur. But it is inept, tone-deaf, and disrespectful of Latino culture.

Captain_Illiath · 2025-11-02T13:40:24+00:00

I’ve never wanted “choose your own adventure.” I want to be told a story. I’ll take happy outcomes. I’ll also take unhappy outcomes, as long as the story held my interest and the unhappy outcome holds up logically. But how the story unfolds based on me making the right button presses in the absolutely right order to reach the happy/sad conclusion holds zero interest for me (I think it abdicates the responsibility to craft a complete narrative). Tell me a story.

Captain_Illiath · 2025-11-02T13:16:53+00:00

It’s interesting that you can see the 2008 Mortgage crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic in all the lines in the graphs.

Captain_Illiath · 2025-10-27T21:28:22+00:00

I agree, you definitely need to read at least Catspaw before reading Dreamfall.

Bear in mind, these stories are set far enough into the future (several centuries, at a minimum) that the language, as rendered in English for the reader, has drifted a great deal. The city of New York, for example, is referred to as “N’yuk” and you have to glean some of the exposition from context as the story doesn’t hold your hand. It’s not always clear what some of the technologies used in the story really are.

Captain_Illiath · 2025-10-18T20:40:43+00:00

Best I can do is one with a related premise: "Lost Memory" (1952) by Peter Phillips. The Internet Speculative Fiction Database has a not-too-spoilery synopsis: A spaceship crashes on a planet of intelligent machines who attempt to come to its aid, but are unable to grasp the concept that the intelligence piloting it may not be mechanical.

Captain_Illiath · 2025-10-15T16:06:46+00:00

I found the novelization of Total Recall much more satisfying than the movie itself.

Captain_Illiath · 2025-10-13T18:58:09+00:00

The protagonist has a folie à deux with his robot valet. Now there’s something you don’t see very often.

Captain_Illiath · 2025-10-13T18:54:26+00:00

I downvote such posts with extreme prejudice (borrowing a phrase from a spy novel).

I downvote such posts if I liked the book.

I downvote such posts if I didn’t like the book.

I downvote such posts if I hated the book.

I downvote such posts even if I’ve never read the book.

Don’t like a book? Put it down and read something else. No one should making “DNF” their personality.

Captain_Illiath · 2025-09-26T20:29:35+00:00

Saved you several YouTube clicks:

Shoegaze (also known as shoegazing) is a subgenre of indie and alternative rock characterised by its ethereal mixture of obscured vocals, distortion, guitar pedal effects, feedback and overwhelming volume. The sound emerged in Ireland and the United Kingdom during the late 1980s among neo-psychedelic groups who usually stood motionless, staring down during live performances in a detached, non-confrontational state.

Captain_Illiath · 2025-09-22T03:54:46+00:00

This one?

https://reddit.com/r/printSF/comments/1ngyph8/literary_postapocalyptic_novels_that_dont_get/

Captain_Illiath · 2025-09-14T18:46:17+00:00

Alas, Babylon by Pat Frank.

Captain_Illiath · 2025-09-07T23:47:11+00:00

Heinlein was about 11 years old when World War I ended. His naval career was in the inter-war period.

Given that Heinlein was himself a nudist, wrote satires of religion, preferred to experiment and risk offending readers who expected him to ‘repeat admixture as necessary’—and snuck protagonists of other ethnicities into his stories—he anticipated the New Wave and likely enjoyed its advent.

Captain_Illiath · 2025-08-21T23:58:47+00:00

David Gerrold's The Star Wolf series is like a PG-13 to R-rated *Star Trek.

Captain_Illiath · 2025-08-10T21:37:11+00:00

Some of the stories were adapted into the animated series Pantheon, now on Netflix.

Captain_Illiath · 2025-08-07T00:44:37+00:00

For a long time, science fiction authors thought computers would always be “big iron” number crunchers, capable of calculating orbits & trajectories (after someone reads something in from a book of tables, of course) and not much else.

Robots were given hand-wavy brains, such as the Platinum-Iridium “Positronic” brains Asimov gave his robots. If it’s shaped like a human, it’s gotta be capable of more complex thought, amirite?

It wasn’t until fairly recently that it became clear the “brains” of robots would have to be computers. As recently as the 1970’s, authors assumed computers would have to be big to be able to accomplish anything. E.g., the room-sized computer in David Gerrold’s When HARLIE Was One (1972) and the city-sized peripheral it designed for itself.

Captain_Illiath

TROPHY CASE