josefsomething that makes me feel surprisingly emotional is stories about some kind of 'system' which successfully does the job it was designed to do and significantly helps those in danger. compared to people, a faceless and technical process nevertheless accomplishing an altruistic or even heroic act seems like a miraculous event to me. the idea that the world contains elaborate rube goldberg machines built by people you'll never meet, which may one day save your life, is really weird and powerful
technomancy@jk when I was visiting Hong Kong I was puzzled to see "slope registration" plaques absolutely everywhere
I wrote it off as a bizarre bureaucratic quirk, but after I left I went to look up what it was for
apparently the city was ravaged by deadly landsides until at one point in the 1970s they just decided they had enough and that landslide deaths were preventable, so they established a well-funded geoengineering office that catalogued and reinforced every slope on the entire island
they just straight up said "no one has to die from this" and made it happen, and it works; the last landslide death was in 2008
it seems like such a simple thing but I admit I was awestruck by what they did
Tim Ruppert