I love the ring world series until all the furry porn. He really should've stopped before coming up with rishing.

I have a tattoo of the tree ship yggdrasill.

The consul's tale should be required reading for anyone working in the tech field.

given these facts that I have already laid out, which terrorist has the blue handlebar mustache?

Those people were "everyone's self-sufficient, so only a few people down on their luck need the state" folk. They didn't realise that loads of people wouldn't be like that if they didn't have to be.

Heinlein's alleged libertarian shift. In the 1940s Heinlein was mentioned as a Social Credit supporter which implied he was always on the libertarian side of Socialism. Social Credit was the American party killed/disrupted by the red scare that believed in a UBI and universal health care. His posthumous published but first written novel "For Us, The Living" is even a wonderfully naive paean to UBI and credits a Social Credit party for its enactment and ensuing utopia.

Heinlein formally disowned some of those ideas, but did so under the duress of the McCarthy era and the Red Scare. Yet he also kept writing about them, just somewhat cloaked. Both "Stranger in a Strange Land" and "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" are some of the most Socialist books I've ever read, if you assume the first person narrators are for the most part bloviating Vonnegut-esque patsies (rather than the author stand-ins they are often read to be; Heinlein seemed to clever for that). "Stranger in a Strange Land" is entirely about community effort and Socialism. It contrasts interestingly with "For Us, The Living" in part because cynicism seems to have been the big shift and Heinlein can no longer imagine America leading the charge towards Socialism and invents a dead Martian race to do it. "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" is often credited as a deeply Libertarian book, but I think a lot of that is misreading the narrative and not paying attention to especially the second half of the book, which is entirely about AI-lead worker's strikes towards the goals of unionization. The first half sounds like a Libertarian dream and the narrator character describes it in lush terms that make it sound so, but plot is about overthrowing that and building a much more Socialist Moon together. Heinlein even comments about that misreading in "The Cat Who Walks Through Walls" which intentionally begins on a Moon like the one people reading the first half of "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" seem to love, dialed up to 11 to better make it a grungy harsh Noir place for a classic gumshoe-for-hire to live, and eventually through world hopping the main character does happen to stop by "Mike's Moon" (Heinlein actually names his timelines based on the first man to step foot on the moon, I'm feeling to lazy to look this one up, but this timeline is also prominently known for a Moon AI named "Mike") after the events of "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" and it reads a lot more Socialist and lot kinder than the protagonist's Moon the book started in.

A lot of modern Libertarians wouldn't expect a crossover boundary with Socialism like Social Credit, which is one of the problems with claiming politics is a spectrum or plane (there are more useful curves where ideologies meet than that), and a lot of modern Libertarians don't trust ideas like UBI and universal health care and don't trust things like unions again this century (despite having past pro-worker/pro-union perspectives), so it is easy to claim that Heinlein shifted over 20 years. But also, if Heinlein was a Social Credit + Libertarian throughout his life, the rest of politics shifted so much around Heinlein that he may have stayed in exactly the same place and it looked like he shifted.

I think his writing certainly shifted, but I think towards cynicism and anger and frustration after WWII and especially after the Red Scare, not necessarily towards deeper Libertarianism.

I also think there are lessons there for modern Libertarians, too. There are modern Libertarians feeling receptive to talking about ideas like UBI again as something that can have space in Libertarian conversations. There could be room in American politics again for a party like Social Credit that can be a coalition between Libertarian values and Democratic Socialist ones. The Libertarians could find better creative allies than destructive tendencies of "the far right". Talking about Heinlein's books isn't a bad place to start those conversations.

I took it many times, it didn't feel particularly dangerous but you had to pay more attention than on a regular moving walkway. What ultimately killed it was reliability, availability was too low. With more deployed I guess the kinks would have slowly disappeared, but the market just doesn't seem to be there.

Not sure but I think I read a while ago that they were removed due to unreliability (it's a while since I've been there myself).

It was very clever how they did the acceleration/deceleration - the "tiles" of the walkway fit together in such a way that each could slide on top of the next one, and at the two ends the tiles would gradually slide closer together (decelerating) or further apart (accelerating).

That's been tried. Never Stop Railway, 1924.[1] The drive system is a variable pitch screw between the rails. Large screw pitch between stations for fast travel, much tighter pitch in stations for very slow movement along the platform.

Never tried again with that kind of drive, although there are park rides where the loading platform moves. This requires safety devices and staff to prevent people jams at the end of the platform.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EX_MlWL7YKM

And you can only hop on/hop off a cable car at predetermined locations. To keep average speed high, those tend to be spaced relatively far apart.

I’m not sure about the “takes a lot more space”, and I definitely doubt about the “costs a lot more money”. Using outdoor escalators as proxies, I suspect outdoor moving sidewalks will need lots and lots of maintenance. If you want to have some guarantee of service you’ll also need multiple sidewalks side-by-side.

Moving sidewalks are worse than cars. At least with cars if you want to cross in the middle of the block you might find a break in traffic where you can do it. The moving sidewalk blocks crossing the street (except at intersections) 100% of the time.

That’s the case for many/most mechanical assemblies with wear parts.

I installed a new steering box in my Jeep a few years ago - or at least, I think that’s the name of the component, but it seems wrong to my ear. The part that converts rotational motion of the steering wheel into linear motion in the steering components for the front wheels.

Anyhow, it was very tight. Not only was there no play, but I could tell it was taxing my power steering system more than normal. It took about a year for that to level out, and another 2-3 years for it to feel “normal” again. Another ~5 years and it would have exhibited perceptible “play” in the steering.

Because you'd have teeth rubbing out all through the course, which would eat them through very quickly, or you'd have to add toothed rollers throughout the course which would increase complexity tremendously.

Reading a book is being productive. You can also write, work, or nap. In contrast driving is the biggest waste of time in a persons life. I feel so strongly about this that I’d accept a vastly smaller house just to minimize time travelling. Second best to that is not driving so that I can make use of my time.

I ride the train kind of recreationally. Not just to ride it but to go into town, have a coffee and check the scene, then go back, so basically recreational.

I think a lot of the non rush hour usage is like that.

The train itself is pleasant off peak - table, wifi, I drink coffee and websurf. It's a bit squished in during rush hour though.

Fun is good and all, if you enjoy it I won't argue. I enjoy a sunset myself from time to time. However most people are not enjoying in the moment. They want transportation only for the purposes of getting someplace so they can get something else done (or enjoy something else). Fun is good, but not everything is fun. I need to get home from work so I can get supper done in time for the evening activities (by coincidence I've been asked to make my homemade pretzels tonight - that takes 2 hours so I need to get home as soon as work is done)

Spice is fine - but you still need to get places and that is the primary goal of most cars. People who have the car/motorcycle for fun only nearly all have some other vehicle they use as the "daily driver" to get places. I might take a train on a sunday drive myself once in a while.

The majority of uses should be for people trying to get someplace. If the trip is also fun that is a bonus, but if it is only fun but otherwise worthless (that is something else is enough better) your system won't get many riders.