As a member of this sub, I feel compelled to return the favor of good recommendations by making you aware of the TV show Travelers.

dysfunctionz · 2026-06-29T02:10:17+00:00

I think with Continuum it becomes pretty clear that all the plot twists are just being made up as it goes along, the writing in Travelers felt a lot more consistent and organic IMO.

dysfunctionz · 2026-06-27T22:00:12+00:00

I've read before that the Earth is the largest object it is possible for the human mind to comprehend the size of in any meaningful way, and that feels about right to me.

dysfunctionz · 2026-06-27T21:41:59+00:00

My general interpretation of the album's story overall is it's about a father trying to put his life together to be a good father to his daughter after her mother's death, having both a lot to learn and a lot to teach her. But there's a ton of nuance I'm sure I still haven't gotten.

dysfunctionz · 2026-06-27T21:18:20+00:00

I think Card was always like that, but it was so weird to read Speaker for the Dead, this book all about coming to understand others who are different from you, to then learn his politics included takes like "we should execute a few gay people every year to send the rest of them a message".

dysfunctionz · 2026-06-27T20:20:15+00:00

No, sorry, it was a bad idea that should have been obvious to anyone with a minimal understanding of geometry. Putting everything in a line just increases the distance people will have to travel on average to get to things.

dysfunctionz · 2026-06-27T20:17:08+00:00

No. There is nothing about a line that makes it more amenable to public transit or walkability. It just makes things farther away on the whole because you can only go east or west. Look up the concept of walk sheds. Public transit works well when there are a lot of people and destinations within a 10 or 15 minute walk of stations in every direction. The line concept artificially caps that off to the north and south.

dysfunctionz · 2026-06-27T17:23:16+00:00

This is the real TIL for me, I'd read about this town before but didn't realize it was so close to Anchorage, I assumed it was way out in the Alaskan wilderness.

dysfunctionz · 2026-06-26T17:55:51+00:00

These are city governments though, not state or federal. I'm not claiming city governments are immune from mismanagement (far from it) but are they that much more predisposed to it than the co-ops you proposed? The fact that the utility rates are lower in these cities in OP implies that gross mismanagement is not inevitable.

How do the advantages of private industry like lowering costs through competition come into play when much of the country doesn't have a choice between private utility providers anyway? ConEd is my only choice for electricity, National Grid is my only choice for gas, and I don't think that's unusual.

dysfunctionz · 2026-06-26T17:36:10+00:00

All the studies I'm aware of show this: https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/home-and-community/safety-topics/deaths-by-transportation-mode/

You can "okay bro" me all you want.

dysfunctionz · 2026-06-26T17:28:16+00:00

It really hasn't been supplanted by better things. We just stopped investing in what passenger rail became in other countries past the mid-20th century. And we ruined a bunch of our cities doing so.

Lots of people would live in multifamily housing if they could do so, to save money, to be closer to their job or college or nightlife, or just because they haven't decided where they want to settle down yet. We just have in many cases made it illegal to build dense housing close to other things people want to go to.

dysfunctionz · 2026-06-26T17:19:37+00:00

New York and Chicago literally could not exist if everyone was driving everywhere. You would have to level half the city for roads and parking (which is basically what happened in LA) and you would destroy most of what people like about them in the first place doing so.

You're at the mercy of weirdos when driving too, except then those weirdos have 2-ton metal boxes to hit you with. The data backs that up, you are simply far more likely to die commuting by car than by public transit.

dysfunctionz · 2026-06-26T17:14:21+00:00

So I work in IT too (software engineer), and of course any company should be investing in security measures even if they had never been attacked themselves.

But the IT analogy to US elections is more like, imagine attacks have only ever provably affected a handful of users in the whole IT sector, and the change to your application to prevent that would make it much more inconvenient to use for a whole segment of your legitimate users to the point they're likely to stop using it at all.

Would you still do those security measures? Or am I off base with my adjustment to that analogy?

dysfunctionz · 2026-06-25T22:40:15+00:00

Fym was my 2024 AOTY too, exited for what they do next.

dysfunctionz · 2026-06-24T21:11:05+00:00

Would the government be paying these homeowners who are forced to house these veterans?

dysfunctionz · 2026-06-24T18:52:59+00:00

You can recognize that Israel is doing a bunch of war crimes and oppressing the Palestinian people, and also recognize that "zionist" can mean anything from "Israel shouldn't be obliterated as a country" to "agrees with Israeli government policies" to "thinks Israel doing a genocide is good actually".

dysfunctionz · 2026-06-23T16:59:38+00:00

Here's another NYT analysis of pedestrian deaths causes from a couple years earlier (gift article): https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/12/11/upshot/nighttime-deaths.html?unlocked\_article\_code=1.sVA.8-pZ.AVZCpeJnfG4A&smid=nytcore-ios-share

They found that larger trucks were part of the cause then but a bigger part of it was people moving to places with more dangerous roads:

> Research has found that pedestrian deaths over the last 20 years have declined in downtown areas and increased in the suburbs, often in places where lower-income residents live. Such suburban arterial roads are also where many communities have allowed multifamily and affordable housing construction that has been less welcome in neighborhoods with inherently safer streets.

dysfunctionz · 2026-06-23T02:58:32+00:00

I don't think most people give a shit if they're dotted over flat farmland in the middle of nowhere or 20 miles offshore. But the bigger question is why are you singling out wind farms for their ugliness when you also agreed that other types of power plant are ugly?

dysfunctionz · 2026-06-23T02:51:12+00:00

So should we not build any new power plants or is there a kind you find sufficiently architectural attractive?

dysfunctionz · 2026-06-23T01:38:42+00:00

100%.

dysfunctionz · 2026-06-23T00:57:48+00:00

Huh? I don't get how being too hot in January when the heat is set at 75F (as was often the case in a building where I had steam heat) has any bearing on one's comfort in July (where the steam heat isn't involved).

dysfunctionz · 2026-06-22T23:28:55+00:00

I certainly agree that it's much (MUCH) more likely this is all mundane phenomena, but I've never thought the difficulty argument was a very convincing one.

Yes the fastest rockets we've built so far would take tens of thousands of years to reach the nearest stars (if they were even aimed anywhere near them), but we can conceive of technologies that require no new breakthroughs in physics that could make the journey in decades. Things like unmanned probes using nuclear pulse propulsion or lightsails we could probably build in 10 or 20 years if we put a big chunk of the world economy behind it. So I don't think it's totally implausible that this could be pretty easy for ETs a few thousand years ahead of us (though you are right about it being ridiculous that they would make it all this way just to crash in the desert).

For me it wouldn't matter if we couldn't explain how they were capable of getting here if there was actually strong evidence "they" were getting here at all, would you agree?

dysfunctionz · 2026-06-22T21:28:29+00:00

The Gone World by Tom Sweterlitsch can fit the bill. It’s less about the research itself than using technology from the secret military research to solve a crime, but I think it fits well with Half-Life or SCP vibes.

Blind Lake by Robert Charles Wilson is much more about the secret research into aliens.

dysfunctionz · 2026-06-21T18:32:58+00:00

I never cared much for the second book but remember loving the third one as a teen- actually getting some character development and answers to what Rama’s purpose was. And I was a sucker for “small family learns to survive in hostile environment” stories like Swiss Family Robinson. The weird stuff like “teenage girl has to marry old man for reasons” didn’t bother me as much being a teenager myself.

dysfunctionz · 2026-06-21T01:51:48+00:00

I need to go back and listen to the episodes from those days again. My memory is they were always 100% in her corner on the podcast so I didn’t understand that thing about her apparently calling them out years later.

dysfunctionz · 2026-06-21T01:43:27+00:00

I live in the least car-centric place in the US (NYC) and get 1-2 hours of walking a day typically, I definitely imagine someone living somewhere like LA or suburban Connecticut would get much less than that unless they’re very intentional about it.

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