treats the audience like real adults capable of complex thought
Absolutely! Here’s one of my favorite examples of that (spoilers, obviously):
spoilerMon Mothma picks her husband up from some kinda party. We’ve been told repeatedly by this point that she suspects her driver of reporting to the ISB. She accuses her husband of gambling, and makes a big scene about wasting money. Right after that scene, it cuts to the driver reporting to the ISB and the ISB guy saying that this might explain her money trouble. At no point was there dialogue about Mon Mothma’s plan to mislead the ISB and come up with an explanation they might find believable. We’re just presented with who knows what, the action, and the reaction. There’s no need for a monologue about her plan if you trust the audience to put the pieces together themselves.
You skipped Andor. In my very subjective opinion, it’s the best thing in the star wars universe since the OT.
The writing is razor sharp, the themes are serious and heavy (how does radicalization happen? What does living under a fascist empire feel like for the average person? What does it mean to be a rebel? How much are you willing to sacrifice?), and it really explores the very early rebellion.
It’s also a great looking series, with lots of practical sets and effects, and it doesn’t retread any familiar planets so they can do cool things with world building.
What kind of public transport? And how is it implemented? The devil is in the details for this stuff.
Free bus tickets do nothing if the buses are stuck in traffic with no bus lane so often that people go “fuck it” and take the car anyway, because it’s more convenient.
Free metro tickets do nothing if the routes don’t go where people want to go.
Free train tickets do nothing if the trains don’t leave frequently enough to have options and/or are stuck waiting for freight trains to pass.
There’s any number of non-monetary reasons that public transport might suck, but there are solutions for them.
In the short term, there’s also a lack of capacity. Fares function as a limiter on the number of people using it. Too many people for your capacity? Raise prices. Spare capacity? Lower prices.
This can be solved by increasing capacity, but it takes time to figure out what the capacity necessary actually is and then buying more trains/buses and hiring/training drivers.
Yup. I’m of the opinion that cars inside cities need to be much more heavily regulated. I believe that the quality of cities would be improved hugely by providing cheap & plentiful parking on the outskirts with solid transit links into the city, and taxing people to the moon for parking inside, with very few parking spots.
This would keep cars where they make sense: inter-city and rural. Keep them out of my dense urban environment, and keep the roads free for service vehicles, buses and ambulances.
He didn’t say he wanted to kill someone at random, he just said he hadn’t decided yet. Reads to me more like he has a shortlist of enemies and he wants to take some time off to kill one of them
Completely agree that these kinds of threads end up being more a popularity poll than anything more actionable and usable. Everyone has their own opinions and preferences (which is great!), but that can end up being extremely overwhelming for a newbie.
I actually disagree on what the biggest difference is. For the average everyday user, the biggest difference is the desktop environment. Having a desktop environment that the user finds intuitive, easy, and is stable is by far the most important thing.
When it comes to distros, I am a boring man with a boring POV: I just want the thing to work with as little fuss as possible. Consequently, I’m on Kubuntu. KDE is rock solid, and Ubuntu is what I’m used to.
If/when my OS ever breaks down hard enough to reinstall, I’ll probably install Fedora Workstation.