I totally agree that I love the variety of options! But I would be very happy if one of the options was that we get filler/bottle episodes for a few weeks per season, but every season is 26 episodes long. They could just spread the budget for 10 episodes across all 26, and make the VFX less… shiny.

(Of course, I don’t actually want actors to be worked to the bone like they were in the 90s…)

A pretty cool episode. Top takeaways:

1. I’m going to miss Captain Ransom. I think it would have been fun to have a season or two of him. Only Discovery has had the balls to hand over the Captain’s chair to another during its main run, and I think that is a good thing.
2. Starbase 80 is now set up as a new DS9-style show. A starbase guarding a dimensional portal. God I hope that happens. I just hope they pull off the ensemble cast that made DS9 such a classic.
3. I hate the tease for Rutherford x Tendi, it’s so mean to tease it in the finale :'( But really it’s so cute.

Plenty more I missed of course.

Rewatching in preparation for the finale, and I keep feeling that the voice of Curzon Dax sounds quite similar to the voice of Odo in DS9. I’m quite aware that Rene Auberjonois passed away not that long ago: may he rest in peace. And I guess he was voiced by Fred Tatasciore (Shaxs), which I can hear too. But I keep hearing Odo which is really nice.

Yes.

I have an air compressor which is powered by the 12V DC outlet in a car. They are quite cost effective and easy to buy. I use it all the time to refill my tires. Much better than some odd exhaust pressure solution.

Lol

But it’s actually not that bad… It’s not good beer but whatever it is, it’s nice 🙂

It can be both, and I’m not sure I see the distinction. It’s a coping mechanism, and that’s not actually an awful thing.

Growing up in church, nobody was creating hypotheticals and then trying to explain it using religion. It’s just not what it was about. But I guess if you brought up babies with cancer, then yeah the “mysterious ways” argument would have been a prime cop out to avoid challenging faith too much.

Most commonly, people just wanted to know how to handle the (typically less hyperbolic) challenges in their own lives. They believed they were good and faithful and didn’t understand why God would allow bad things to happen in their lives. Ultimately the “mysterious ways” line was just a coping mechanism, that came with advice to search for the silver linings, and think about past challenges and how they resolved, as evidence of the mysterious ways. Of course it also served to avoid challenging their faith too.

At the end of the day, religion has its very bad elements that I won’t defend. But it’s silly to ignore that for most people, they’re looking for ways to interpret life in order to find meaning, or maybe cope with struggles. For myself, I’m not religious, but if I were trying to help a friend dealing with something difficult in life, I would still encourage them to look for silver linings and to reflect on past challenges. Not to use it as evidence for some god working in mysterious ways, but just to give them perspective to realize that they have the strength to overcome challenges.

People aren’t misunderstanding the issue. Third party cookie support is being dropped by all browsers. Chrome is also dropping them, but replacing them with topics. Sure, topics is less invasive than third party cookies, but it is still more invasive than the obvious user friendly approach of not having an invasive tracker built into your browser. No other major browser vendor is considering supporting topics. So they’re doing an objectively user unfriendly thing here. This is the shit that happens when the world’s largest internet advertising company also controls the browser.

I think the core issue here is that you believe that it should be common and accepted for individuals to decide whether traffic rules “make sense” and ignore them based on their own individual assessment. I think that’s absurd.

“Impeding traffic” is quite the euphemism for “forcing people to slow down and drive the speed limit.” Call it what it is, a mild inconvenience that you wouldn’t even experience if you were following the rules that you’re upset about people breaking!

And the people who are “speeding but still being safe” do impact others too. It makes it much more dangerous for drivers doing the limit to merge into the left lanes in case of stopped vehicles, slow trucks, and merging traffic.

Honestly I was thinking more like 100mph

I remember doing that for my first (and only) time on the empty highways outside Salt Lake City in the early morning. It was exciting to try but fully concerning. I couldn’t imagine doing that around other vehicles.

It’s my belief that the people that jump on the highway and get 3 lanes over and just squat there not passing anyone that cause most traffic issues.

I mean, I think it’s clear that those are the people who cause the most issues for people who want to break the speed limit. And I fundamentally don’t believe you have the right to speed on a highway, and shouldn’t complain about missing out on opportunities to speed.

Like, I’m not saying left lane squatters are driving correctly, they should be over in the rightmost lane. But also all the other drivers, including you, should be going the speed limit. Why does one arbitrary rule about lane positioning matter so much to people, while the arbitrary speed limit is fine to ignore? Real talk: they’re both arbitrary rules. If you’re breaking the speed limit: SHUT UP about the lane squatters.

Speaking as a person who does the limit (65 locally) in the right lane, sometimes the second to right lane in case there’s a lot of entering/exiting traffic… 120mph? What? The fuck?

Humans aren’t designed to react to things at that speed. You need insane following distances to drive that speed safely. With all that extra following distance you don’t get much more throughput (vehicles per unit time). But what you do get is a ton more fatalities, because at that speed, when you meet stationary objects, all you can do is hope you had your affairs in order. No amount of crash safety tests help there.

I gotta say, that if you’re the person who’s so frustrated about people driving the speed limit on a highway, you’re the asshole. Like yeah, sure, they should be in the rightmost lane practicable. That’s annoying, but it slows you down by a few mph for a minute or two and that’s it.

If you want to move at 120+mph safely to your destination, take high speed rail. If you don’t have that in your region, start complaining.

Or, alternatively narrow and calm the road, because something is wrong with it. If a 20mph limit is set, there’s probably a good reason, but it’s not good enough to just put up the signs, you need to make people feel uncomfortable driving more than that on the road via calming measures.

Street level is not the same thing as “among car traffic”. For instance, there’s a stretch of the N-Judah in SF between Embarcadero and 4th & King which is on street level, but in fact it is in an entirely separate right of way, where it is illegal for cars to drive. And unlike other places in SF where it’s illegal for cars to be (like bike lanes, bus lanes, Market st), people actually respect that. So it’s entirely possible to avoid the private car right of way. If you can avoid intermingling with cars, and you get signal priority, then you’ll go faster than cars, because you’re not stuck in traffic and you don’t need to wait for the lights.

The issue is that in this segment, I haven’t noticed much in the way of signal priority. The N, which is far more important than any private car on those intersections, has to wait when it really should just sail through intersections, because the signals knew the N was coming and changed ahead of time.

I know that this can be achieved more or less with BRT, but it seems absolutely silly to put in the rails without having a dedicated right of way, and yet that’s what the majority of SF’s above-ground light rail is. IMO, if there’s light rail on the street, either it should be car free, or the railway should have curbs surrounding it to prevent intrusion from cars. Full stop.

With the caveat that this only applies to my city, San Francisco… I prefer buses. SF horribly mismanages its “trams”* where they run at ground level through the streets. They must follow all stop signs and traffic rules. They don’t even get signal priority. So it’s a quite jarring experience to get into a train underground, exit the tunnel to the street, and begin stopping every block and waiting at red lights.

Fact of the matter is that, if you’re going to be treated like a car, it’s better to be more maneuverable as a bus. Buses can avoid double parked cars, and have a fighting chance of squeezing through a gridlocked intersection. With a bus lane, they can use it but they don’t have to, where’s trams are trapped in a traffic lane (frequently the centermost lane) while idiots make (frequently illegal) left turns.

* Muni light rail - K, J, L, M, N, T, F

The cable cars are quite different from trams, they hook into a cable under the ground to get “dragged” along, they’re not moving under their own power. Makes them quite expensive to construct and operate, and you can hear the cable noises a block away even when there’s no cable car nearby.

I mean they’re also iconic and loads of fun to ride, but I think there’s a reason people don’t go installing new cable cars.

The answer is to use a car. Ideally the smallest and most efficient one that fits your common use cases.

Fuck Cars is not anti-rural but it’s more applicable in urban and suburban places, where your essentials are within a few miles and there are viable alternatives. There are areas where cars can’t be avoided, and nobody is suggesting you never leave your house.