The issue with electrifying rail networks is that it’s very expensive and modern diesel-electric locomotives are already over a hundred times more efficient than trucks. So while it does reduce emissions to replace a diesel locomotive with a fully electric train you’re far better off getting hundreds of trucks off the road and adding one new diesel-electric locomotive!

The major theme of the film is awakening from a false consciousness. It’s an existentialist picture. This leaves it open to any of countless interpretations unrelated to gender. I think many more people have interpreted the film as Christian with Neo in the role of Jesus and with some of the names of characters and places having biblical themes. The film’s actual depiction of gender is rather conventional, including the action girl trope shown by the character Trinity.

Taken together, these two details make it very difficult to support the Wachowskis’ claim in the text. If anything, the opposite could be argued.

But how long was it, how much more of this would they have to endure, or could they endure? The breathlessness of the air was growing as they climbed; and now they seemed often in the blind dark to sense some resistance thicker than the foul air.

As they thrust forward they felt things brush against their heads, or against their hands, long tentacles, or hanging growths perhaps: they could not tell what they were. And still the stench grew. It grew, until almost it seemed to them that smell was the only clear sense left to them, and that was for their torment. One hour, two hours, three hours: how many had they passed in this lightless hole? Hours - days, weeks rather. Sam left the tunnel-side and shrank towards Frodo, and their hands met and clasped, and so together they still went on.

At length Frodo, groping along the left-hand wall, came suddenly to a void.

Almost he fell sideways into the emptiness. Here was some opening in the rock far wider than any they had yet passed; and out of it came a reek so foul, and a sense of lurking malice so intense, that Frodo reeled. And at that moment Sam too lurched and fell forwards.

Fighting off both the sickness and the fear, Frodo gripped Sam’s hand. ‘Up!’ he said in a hoarse breath without voice. ‘It all comes from here, the stench and the peril. Now for it! Quick!’

Calling up his remaining strength and resolution, he dragged Sam to his feet, and forced his own limbs to move. Sam stumbled beside him. One step, two steps, three steps - at last six steps. Maybe they had passed the dreadful unseen opening, but whether that was so or not, suddenly it was easier to move, as if some hostile will for the moment had released them. They struggled on, still hand in hand…

— J.R.R. Tolkien. Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers

Uber is different because you use an app instead of calling a person on the phone to order a cab. Furthermore, with an Uber you don’t even have to talk to the driver because they already know your destination.

DoorDash is similar: you use an app instead of placing an order over the phone. This is meaningful enough that many people switched to it even when their favourite restaurant already had delivery because they didn’t want to talk to someone on the phone.

Now that sounds really interesting! I saw the movie Yojimbo recently and that one depicts a Japanese village full of lawlessness and banditry, but that was set during the samurai era. My impression of Japanese villages today is that they’re rather idyllic places, albeit boring and lacking job opportunities (hence the exodus to Tokyo).

I will check out those authors though. Thanks for the info!

The bigger question is why? And is it universal or is it specific to some places and/or some times.

Like I doubt small Japanese villages are hotbeds of murder. At the same time I fully believe American small towns have a lot of murders. So it’s a pretty strong claim to leap to the conclusion that small towns cause murder.

But they’re not wrong. Look how many people use Uber instead of calling a cab. Look how many use Doordash instead of calling to order from a restaurant. Look how many use self checkout instead of going through an ordinary cashier lane.

People don’t want to interact with each other anymore. They don’t want to make phone calls with strangers. They don’t want to deal with strangers in person. They just want to push a button and get whatever it is that they want.

I think this is some kind of mass stress response to the alienation we all feel from living in modern cities. Of being sequestered into suburbs and having our lives regimented into school/work schedules. We’ve lost the sense of community we had from when we used to live in villages and walk around to get places and we knew everyone around us.

One of the biggest life lessons I learned was from watching the show Breaking Bad. I think we all have a natural disgust / aversion to evil people. While it’s important as a social function for protecting communities from bad actors, it harms our ability to understand evil.

That’s the key. Understanding evil and how good people descend into it is the best way to protect ourselves from walking down that path. It starts with recognizing that bad circumstances and unaddressed feelings of resentment and perhaps a sense of entitlement all contribute to our ability to justify and rationalize our own actions internally.

Hitler couldn’t have carried out the Holocaust without the help of millions of German citizens who rationalized in exactly this way.

Or you’re Putin looking side-eyed at yet another traitorous regional governor!

TIL: the primary function of balconies is murder!

Don’t you know the Dewey decimal system?

The more money they have, the less happy they are. They’re addicted to making money, to watching the line go up and to the right. They’re addicted to trying to destroy the competition and buy them out, to consolidate more and more and more.

They are right when they say that wealth isn’t the key to happiness. They’re riding the bull and they don’t know how to get off.

We’d all be sitting on the back porch, enjoying an ice cold ginger beer at the end of long summer day!

More people ought to learn about the programming language concept of namespaces. Generalize from that and you realize that every domain of discourse has its own namespace of words that have different meanings from those same words outside the domain.

My favourite is math which has loads of wonderfully generic-sounding terms such as rational, irrational, radical, real, imaginary, complex, group, ring, field, category, set, operator, element, and unit which all have radically different meanings from the everyday senses of those words.

Hey if I could sell a million copies of a game for just a dollar each as my cut of a bundle, well I’d be a millionaire!

What’s stopping Russia from importing gray market gaming devices and repurposing them for drones? How are these embargoes even supposed to work?

North American cities don’t build a lot of roads. Instead, they build stroads. Stroads are the worst of all worlds: ugly, noisy, unsafe, polluted, congestion-causing abominations.

The question is: did Disney commission the Percy Jackson series or did Rick Riordan shop around for publishers like a traditional book author and happen to get picked up by Disney?

It’s the Texas sharpshooter fallacy writ large. You can always pick the winners after the games are written. The hard part is picking a winner of a game beforehand.

Those are books published by Disney written by established individual authors. They’re not gang-writing books the way they make movies.

You have to include the risk of not succeeding. Without high graphical fidelity to differentiate yourself, you’re forced to compete on gameplay alone. Large companies like Nintendo do not know how to make hits reliably. That’s why Nintendo keeps recycling old franchises.

Look at all of the indie games that no one plays. There are thousands and thousands of developers out there making games. The vast majority of them never succeed. It’s just like trying to become a New York Times best selling author. Notice how Disney hasn’t cracked the novel as a medium. That’s why they spend all their money on big budget Star Wars and Marvel movies and TV shows.