Larry Niven called them slidewalks and I've always been sorry this terminology never caught on.

The things I took away from reading Niven was transfer booths. The world has homogenized because information and people were transmitted instantly one from corner of the globe to another.

Ooohhh boy.

I loved the conservation of momentum "hack" for those teleportation booths. Go on, everyone who hasn't read it, see if you can guess how he dealt with that.

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

If you want to see this idea taken to the next level, you should read Dan Simmons' Hyperion Cantos. ;)

I have a tattoo of the tree ship yggdrasill.

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

I consider the whole Cantos as a great book on ethics and empathy.

Funnily, every syncthing node on my network has a Farcaster folder.

Maybe I should read it again sometime.

In the UK, Singapore and maybe other countries with British influence, they use the word travelator, which I find quite cool as well.

Just like an escalator, but without the escalation!

so assuming inner sidewalk moving at 100 mph, next outer at 95, and each moving at 5 per less, when big muscular terrorists placed on s-100 carrying a big cardboard box filled with nails and throw it as quickly and hard as possible so that the box of nails open up over s-75 at what velocity are the nails raining down on pedestrians on s-75?

Assuming that these terrorists are relatively fast runners, being in good shape, and they decide to exit the walkways on the other side, how far on the other side will they be in relation to the nail rain on s-75 they caused.

Two planes are headed towards new york. The first is descending into the city at 805 miles per hour. The second 846 miles per…

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

what color was the bike the ape was riding, when the terrorist with the blue handlebar threw his nails?

The North Pole.

Oddly I’m pretty sure a strong guy throwing a rock really hard at someone without the walkways would do way more damage. Nails at those speeds just aren’t that dangerous because their momentum is so low and they aren’t particularly sharp.

Everybody carries a gun in Heinlein stories, so those terrorists will be quickly dealt with by armed citizens, thus confirming the superiority of Libertarianism.

In 1940 when he wrote this Heinlein was a New Deal Democrat supporter of Franklin Roosevelt. He was an active progressive who had recently worked on Upton Sinclair’s socialist “End Poverty in California” campaign. His libertarian shift was 20 years in the future, in his fifties.

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.

Thanks for that scholarly and thoughtful comment. The intro to The Roads Must Roll is an example of that complexity. It starts with a labor union meeting arguing for the workers to strike, and then a counter argument that could be an unacknowledged contribution from Ayn Rand. And this was from the presumably progressive early Heinlein.

I'd like to be there for a debate between 1940 Heinlein and 1980 Heinlein. I wouldn't be surprised if that event is scheduled for the Howard family reunion at the end of time and Time Enough for Love.

Which, to be fair, is also a Socialist utopia couched into a lot of Libertarian jargon/perspectives (to well beloved to mock extremes such as the way that society handles, say, the "Extreme Libertarian" approach to the incest taboo).

Compared to doing that from a moving car?

Pedestrians would likely not be hit, because few would want to walk there with a 75mph headwind in the first place.

The headwind wouldn’t be that bad because the people ahead of you are dragging some air with them.

Now I want to learn to use the CFD kit and figure out what it’d be.