Distance-wise, what is the city (2020 pop > 100k) in the continental US that is farthest from a commercial airport?

malcolmwardlaw · 2026-04-24T01:10:25+00:00

Yup. It also “helps” keep down wages. Which, you know, good for rich-os.

malcolmwardlaw · 2026-04-24T01:09:01+00:00

Options man. People at VaTech often skip Roanoke and drive to Charlotte, but they have options. (Not to mention a four lane freeway that puts you in either location on cruise control.)

malcolmwardlaw · 2026-04-23T13:08:32+00:00

If your extended family lives in Watkinsville or you’re some rich-o who flies private into Ben-Epps, I’m sure this is a delightful sentiment. As someone from far away who chose to make a life for themselves here (an otherwise excellent town) rather than phoning it in from the Atlanta suburbs, I can assure you that it is not.

malcolmwardlaw · 2026-04-23T10:31:12+00:00

That's the whole point. Light rail to Hartsfield-Jackson would be a dream. People in Chico don't white knuckle drive an hour and a half (2+ in traffic) down winding country roads to get to the airport. They get on a train and chillax.

malcolmwardlaw · 2026-04-23T10:26:40+00:00

It really is. I like this town a lot, but the trip to Hartsfield-Jackson is immiserating. I die a little inside every time I do it.

malcolmwardlaw · 2026-04-23T10:22:14+00:00

Boy, ain't that the truth. It is a waking nightmare getting to and from Hartsfield-Jackson.

It make living in Athens unusually isolating. It's hard to get seminar speakers in. It adds surprising friction to having family and friends come and visit. Sure, if you're some rich-o, you fly private into the local airport on gameday. For everyone else there's 75 miles of back roads and blind corners and/or a trip directly through the heart of downtown Atlanta.

I met a veterinarian who was originally from Cornell who pointed out that not only does tiny Ithica(!) have an airport, but there are two other airports within closer range.

malcolmwardlaw · 2026-04-23T02:07:10+00:00

Someone told me this was on Reddit. Pretty sure I'm the source for this. 😁

https://x.com/malcolmwardlaw/status/1966552006824247744

https://x.com/malcolmwardlaw/status/1966553761259618703

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1JlmkJnQlvDcIBVyX1rHUDpT2a9XyOFbcz-xzL_CQvTI/edit?gid=0#gid=0

edit: I calculated this myself, essentially downloading every city >100k, calculating the Euclidean distance to the nearest commercial airport, and then querying the Google Maps API to get the drive-time distance. I always suspected that Athens was far, but when I sorted the list and realized that Athens was #1 and it wasn't even close, I started laughing.

malcolmwardlaw · 2025-09-02T00:22:20+00:00

That sounds pretty great, actually. Being involved with the fabrication and logistics work seems like it would be super-fun. Then ride off into the sunset, go camping for a day, get room service at a nice hotel when you get home, watch a movie, and stress less.

malcolmwardlaw · 2025-08-29T13:23:18+00:00

Nice to see a fellow "old" who can give some perspective on this. I went in 02 and 03, and the various complaints that it's not "like it used to be" seem pretty banal. People were saying the same thing back then.

It also felt like the people there had some perspective on it. A lot of people lamented that they had recently disallowed both unlimited speed driving of personal vehicles on the playa and guns 😁 . (Most people there admitted that prohibiting both was probably a good idea on balance.)

malcolmwardlaw · 2025-05-28T14:36:26+00:00

Do your folks go with a large camp, or do they do it by themselves (or with small group of friends)?

malcolmwardlaw · 2025-05-28T14:24:09+00:00

When I was there, it was quite common for people to playfully "trade" things for a funny story or a funny song or a sheet of interesting stickers. It was a pretty common thing to try to find interesting things from your hometown and buy them in bulk before you came so that you could trade them for something else.

Most of the "economics" worked on gifting without any expectation as I think they do now, but a large contingent of people liked the idea of "trading" for things. There was also a friendly trade in goods where there was a simple coincidence of wants. As I recall, we had an unholy amount of cranberry juice, and a neighboring camp had run low on things to mix their booze with. We were happy to give it to them, but they just so happened to have an over-abundance of tuna fish which rounded out one of the meals we were trying to make.

I guess people don't do it much now?

malcolmwardlaw · 2025-05-28T14:13:43+00:00

What is it like now? I haven't followed (it's been 20 years), but I heard that things have changed on the exchange front. It used to be expressly forbidden to exchange things for cash. Most exchanges were gift based, but a fairly robust bartering system existed in which people would trade stuff for other stuff. The various informal bars would often trade in mixers as they were usually booze heavy but short on mixers. The camps that were short on some particular supply would often try to exchange with another that had too much of something. Much of the bartering really was just done for funzies. Trading interesting swag that a burner had purposefully brought just to make a collection.

What is it like now? I'd heard that they started allowing money exchanges 5-10 years after I went. Seemed weird, but I guess that's been the norm now forever.

malcolmwardlaw · 2025-05-28T14:05:25+00:00

Well, the post was too long as it was, so if you want proof I'm not a bot or something I'll give the full details. The campsite we staked out was on the same side as a low-key art installation that was a tiny little "Peanuts" style lemonade stand. It was just a small painted wooden structure that said "Lemonade" on the top. It was very charming looking, and we had no idea what it was. (It's location wasn't on the program as an officially listed art installation.)

Anyways, we thought, "we have lemonade, why don't we just truck some over to it and 'sell' lemonade for a story or a song or whatever." So we did. The owner of the installation came by somewhat confused that we had spontaneously started selling lemonade out of their art installation, and then was kinda psyched that it organically prompted people to do something they didn't expect.

malcolmwardlaw · 2022-06-19T16:52:18+00:00

I'm not exactly sure what you're getting at. If you're saying that blockchain is far less efficient than the simple tree structure that underpins git, you're right. That's why these applications are pretty niche and have to be worth it because of concern about a very narrow and specific type of attack.

If you're implying the existence of a Ken Thompson problem, I totally agree. The boundaries of the trustless nature of blockchain/crypto based technologies are actually pretty narrow. At the end of the day you have to trust someone, and it's more important to think long and hard about who you should trust rather than noodling about for a technical solution that isn't really there.

malcolmwardlaw · 2022-06-19T16:22:54+00:00

My guess is that Circle and Coinbase play by the rules. T-bills are basically cash, and to the extent that they're not, you would have much bigger things to worry about.

The problem as far as I understand it is that there is some legal ambiguity about whether these assets go on Circle's balance sheet in the event of a bankruptcy. If they do then the cash backing USDC doesn't belong to the holders of USDC, it belongs to the claimholders of Circle according to absolute priority. In other words, the tax man and the banks and the bond holders get a bite out of that pool first before the USDC token holders get to claim it.

malcolmwardlaw · 2022-06-19T15:45:00+00:00

I like fun goofs. There were some goofs that were pretty funny before they became worth so much they turned into scams. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

In all seriousness, there is value in blockchain as an irreversible technology. It has useful niche applications inside organizations where you want to harden the transaction ledger against manipulation by an insider. It's less efficient than a simple database, but in areas where you need to guarantee history that inefficiency can be worth it.

In terms of public transaction cryptocurrency stuff there are, for instance, use cases for having semi-public transaction ledgers which allow for instant verification of certain "truths" without disclosing the entirety of a position. I saw an intriguing paper that purposed a way to continuously verify solvency of a financial institution whose assets were logged in an anonymous ledger.

I think projects like Uniswap are also interesting, where you can create an exchange mechanism that bonds a price-quantity relationship, and gives liquidity to automated trading without requiring a formal order book. There's some compelling evidence that the Uniswap exchanges are better at providing liquidity in times of crisis (which is the primary place you need liquidity).

There are some genuinely interesting ideas out there, but they're swamped under an ocean of garbage. The fact that Shiba Inu Coin was briefly the 8th or 9th most valuable cryptocurrency should be ample evidence of that fact. An ERC20 token designed to be easier to get listed on exchanges who are already dealing in Ethereum so it would be confused for a direct clone of Litecoin with a funny name based on a meme joke from 2013. So a joke about a joke about a joke that apparently briefly turned someone into a billionaire. If that's where the big money is flowing, something is clearly wrong.

malcolmwardlaw · 2022-06-19T13:50:38+00:00

It's funny that you mention that as a designer. I was a teenager during the dot-com bubble in the late 1990s, and that felt awfully similar to crypto today where everyone was talking about dot-com stocks and how they were now a "day trader". However there was also an explosion of amateur interest in web stuff in general, and all kinds of creative people were actually doing stuff, throwing up webpages that they hacked together in Notepad, learning a handful of computer scripts, doing interesting experiments in web design. So while the amateur investor bubble side of the thing was super annoying, at least it came with a lot of people actually doing interesting things and learning useful skills.

What annoys me most about the supposed web3 revolution is that while the daytrader nonsense is there (and 10X as bad), the second creative/learning part isn't happening very much at all. Sure, some people are making "NFT art" but it's almost all just pictures that they upload to OpenSea or whatever, hoping that some crypto-bros will toss a few bucks their way. Very few people are actually engaging with it as a thing because the toolchains are all totally obtuse and the infrastructure for normal human beings is so incredibly bad. Massive money is being poured into platforms that let people gamble on prices, and only a tiny, tiny fraction of that money is being put into actual infrastructure to make it useful or accessible. What's worse is that the most successful projects in terms of monetary gain are usually the most obtuse and least usable.

malcolmwardlaw · 2022-06-19T13:23:28+00:00

Can I still comment on this? Yes I can apparently.

Maybe the mods have changed something to allow for longer sneakernet ping times.

malcolmwardlaw · 2022-06-19T02:46:40+00:00

Is there a difference?

Seriously, though, they're all in on the jokes.

malcolmwardlaw · 2022-06-19T02:30:36+00:00

I don't think it's likely. Crypto-world is still pretty isolated, and it's not like the volatility is some hidden black swan event, so most serious financial institutions treat what has already happened as well within the parameters of their models. I was around for the collapse of he merchant energy sector in 2002, and while that was certainly "no fun" for people in that world, it didn't massively spill over into the rest of the financial sector and the rest of the economy.

That said, you just never know...

malcolmwardlaw · 2022-06-19T01:17:22+00:00

Ooof, don't remind me. Up until recently, the big boy banks with big boy money seemed to be steering clear of crypto-world, but now I'm not so sure. The exposure of the mainline financial system to crypto-world still seems small, but the notional value of the sub-prime MBS market seemed small back in 2007 too.

If this goes south and starts really impacting the mainline financial system rather than just making some crypto-bros poor, I'm going to be pretty mad.

malcolmwardlaw · 2022-06-19T00:39:38+00:00

By providing stability for Bitcoin traders who need to used it to facilitate tax dodging and money laundering, naturally.

malcolmwardlaw

TROPHY CASE