$185 billion to basically build the CTA
$185 billion to basically build the CTA
Great piece by my colleagues echoing the same sentiment. The historical commission is abusing its power by accepting a hostile landmark study that will slow down both housing and historical preservation. www.bostonglobe.com/2025/09/02/o...
There's no story. Can we create a story? It's mostly just a bad headline, the story itself is bad. A few weeks ago I said something similar. But Kraft has proven to be such a uniquely bad candidate she might outperform the poll.
Gotta love that the chairperson of Right Path California just happens to be chairperson of the Republican Party.
Galaxy brain would be to provide homes for the homeless but no we can't do that.
On NPR's Up First podcast, I explained why CLEAR -- the line-cutting service masquerading as a biometric company -- is a pox on American airports.
Pre✓ basically said "if you're a reasonably adept frequent flier, we'll let you skip most of the nonsense, and incompetent travelers, for $16/year." Saves time and money for travelers and TSA. CLEAR adds exactly nothing, costs more, and complicates the system unnecessarily. A pox indeed.
I had a website (RIP tsastatus.net) which I started in 2010 when the use of full-body scans at airports was completely random yet easy to bypass. (If you forgot how dumb it was: www.schneier.com/news/archive...) Pre✓ started in 2013 and fixed *most* of this. I shut down TSAstatus a few years ago.
I also can't figure out a business model which pays 3 people to stand around and chauffeur someone through a queue every few minutes. Maybe it's a jobs program?
Thing of it is, Pre-check is a good example of the government, eventually, fixing a broken system (airport security was much worse circa 2012 than now). There is zero need for CLEAR unless they create long lines for pre-check.
They're trying, though. At the pre-check in SEA (no line) there was an open ID checker I went up to. "I'm CLEAR only," he said. "Our contract with CLEAR requires a CLEAR-only staffer." Someone ought to FOIA that.
Just give them precheck.
Veterans have an obligation to reject this kind of chum being tossed into the water. Republics don’t lay down laurels for eternity, soldiers just want to go home. Warriors demand this trash and mere garrison states provide it. The U.S. can be better. It’s a superpower to reject putrid nostalgia.
Somewhat parallel: for several years (2012-2019ish) a lot of "small luxuries" (taxi rides, food delivery, etc) were heavily subsidized by VC to the point that they were practically free. Eventually the piper had to be paid, but people got anchored on low/no prices.
Westerly, Charlestown, Richmond and Hopkinton should, based on the performance of the railroad and rampant NIMBYism towards ever changing it, be ceded to Connecticut.
the DOJ atty (& 2x Harvard grad) who suggested Harvard showed "wanton indifference to antisemitism" once wrote a paper from the perspective of Hitler & expressed admiration for Mein Kampf stunning reporting from @hilaryburns.bsky.social @talkopan.bsky.social www.bostonglobe.com/2025/09/02/m...
The real crime here is the facial hair. He needs a shave (although he'll probably miss a patch).
Neuroscience reveals listening to audiobooks activates the same brain regions as reading print. The key difference? Reading demands more attention and can improve comprehension for complex topics.
Without looking I believe there are hills there.
Two photos from the same neighborhood :)
Humidity: Average dewpoint 57.2˚ Only lower dewpoint July *or* August was Aug 1982 (55.9˚) since hourly data was recorded in 1969. Averages … Jul 61.7, Aug 61.3
We're not in a drought—yet—because the spring was quite wet. But we could certainly use some rain.
August weather in Boston: 70.6˚ (-2.0˚ from 1991-2020 average), coolest August since 2008, coldest Jul/Aug month since July 2009. Summer (JJA): +0.5˚ Precip: 0.83", driest since 2007, T 4th driest Aug on record. Annual Precip ~3" behind average. Summer: 5.16 (normal 10.39) @universalhub.com
Heading off Cape looks fun
Wouldn’t be a Labor Day without the best union public service announcement ever made (parody or real) youtu.be/_3mw49mk_x0
For crying out loud, New Hampshire EZPass … don't send out spammy-looking emails when my credit card expiration date is upcoming (horrors).
Oh it's *terrible* branding
A play in two acts
The best “counter-protest” would just be a bunch of people biking back and forth there.
Protest against Bike Lanes on Washington Street Pilot in Newton, Mass being organized on Tuesday Sept 2, "planning being kept quiet to avoid a counter-protest by the biking community" From r/bikeboston
Good job Dearborn.
What about if you cheat?
Golf is working? That’s literally all he does.
If you had told me in 2012 that Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign manager would be posting like this 13 years later i would not have believed you
It's probably a lot cheaper to pay drivers for 1300-passenger trains than automate it entirely.
WE CAN NOT LOSE THE WAR ON ALLSTON CHRISTMAS
WAR IS PEACE
donald the dove
So good to hold onto.
And now baker and his ilk have to choose between voting for a woman and a Jew. Sounds like a borat joke.
Tap water and spindrift will both quench your thirst. We choose tap water.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZOu...
You could look at trips by neighborhood and bike type: citibikenyc.com/system-data It would be cool if they would also show it with the user's home ZIP code but that might be a bit too granular.
Yeah this is their season, locally at least, but I've never seen them. I am running low on salsa verde :)
August should also wind up as the lowest humidity July or August month since the 1980s! Note that the standard deviation of dewpoints for winter months is ~5˚ (DJF), for summer months ~2˚ (JJA).
Updated to 8/25 (day 237) … On July 19 we were running 90 SDDs ahead of average (and about the 5th most humid in the past 50 years), but a dry end of July and cool/dry August has brought us back to average and the least humid summer since 2019.
How is the golf at Bernie’s this time of year?
If you ever see tomatillos there let me know!
Gotta stay in the news on the long weekend somehow
Live free or die!
He's "off the grid" with Peter Thiel.
Old Soviet joke for today: A man walks into a newsstand every day, looks around, and leaves. After a long time of this, the owner says “Can I help you find something?” “I’m looking for the obituaries.” “The obituaries are in the back of the newspaper, comrade.” “Not the one I’m looking for.”
Boston’s future lies in our hands. We can move forward with confidence if we have a mayor who understands our needs & shares our values, and that’s why I support @wutrain.bsky.social unreservedly & enthusiastically. #mapoli #bospoli
Wait the Shrewsbury murderer was found not guilty of two things he was pretty clearly guilty of? www.bostonglobe.com/2025/08/29/m... That ought to be the story here.
It should have been this one but without the DD www.reddit.com/r/vexillolog...
ASMAD is a cool database and someone should use it to be more robust, i.e., showing travel times between stations, without querying and parsing.
If you broke it down further between stops (NYP-STM, STM-NHV, etc) and then added the fastest segments I bet you'd get down closer to 3:15. 2155 south is scheduled at 3:35, others are 3:40+ NB is all 3:43+ (and regionals have even more padding)
The fastest NYP-BOS (where trains can make up time with lots of schedule padding going north) in the past 13 months is 3:25. Regionals have made it in <4h. Data via ASMAD juckins.net/amtrak_statu... parsed in google docs docs.google.com/spreadsheets...
My grandmother, later in life, would say "what could be schlecht" as her languages merged.
Too much padding in that schedule.
God: no Israel: what Alon said Christians: keep it to yourself Muslims: keep it to yourself Afterlife: no The universe: is expanding. Brooklyn is not Bagels: pumpernickel, thick cream chese Veganism: in moderation Halakha: no Yiddish: ?וואָס קען זײַן שלעכט Tattoos: I don't get it, but you do you
Et tu Maura?
Caved would suggest she had morals to begin with.
No notes
Given the 20 point swings in specials there, she must have seen some really bad internal polling.
Skiers:
Acela departures are down significantly since 2019. There are only 7 per day from BOS right now, 10 NYP-WAS. Before Covid it was 10/17.
Newman: I mean parcels are rarely damaged during shipping. Jerry: Define rarely. Newman: Frequently.
Given egg prices these days that’s cheap! (That said getting lunch with Shirley is a choice.)
He is so whiny.
What about one of those MAGA flag code violations? How do you feel then?
I've been saying since about October 10 that this is an ESH situation and maybe we shouldn't all choose sides and yell in the streets about complicated things we don't know about.
Everyone wants to find a villain and as usually it's an ESH situation.
I agree with Jeff Jacoby: these bike lanes are for the birds. @universalhub.com
... in Deal 1, you profit by $10, but X profits by $20. In Deal 2, you lose $10, but X loses $20. Which deal would you take?
I should have put this in the post below that there is no validation or documentation required if you do select high-risk. It just lists the CDC high-risk categories. So do with that what you will.
That's just rush hour (also why on God's Green Earth is this not a north-up map? This isn't Melbourne!)
But … bikes! Maybe I should get a job working 20 hours a week and complain that I can’t make money.
Vital context: I live a block from this donut shop and it's never open. For example, monday morning I walked by at 7 and not only was it closed but nobody was parked out front. You'd think a struggling donut shop would be open for morning rush hour instead of complaining about bike lanes to the news
If your business is so fragile that one parking space will collapse your bottom line, maybe you have a shoddy business model.
How we fix this and what it would mean for services, like the MBTA’s Providence Line: Twenty minutes faster for end-to-end runs for commuters, and speeding up the Acela and NE Regionals by reducing congestion and schedule conflicts for Amtrak — transitcosts.com/momentum/
I guess the grand jury thought it was funny
You'll never get more people out of cars when they look out their window and see the buses stuck in traffic right alongside them. Now, have dedicated transit infrastructure where buses are flying past gridlocked traffic and then you'll see change. It's pretty damn simple.
Or the worm ate more on one side than the other.
Can't wait for Jeff Jacoby to write next week "my colleague got what he was asking for" www.bostonglobe.com/2025/08/27/m...
Jon Lovett’s face when LA City Councilmember Imelda Padilla said she forced an affordable housing project to go down from six stories to three stories and add in EV charging spaces
Like bitch & moan about Dems. "Oh they didn't forgive all the student loans like they said they would, they only battled through a half dozen different policies & court cases to forgive a large portion." How's that sound now? All the things pundits spent last year saying. How do they sound now?
About the same view today. Building in the background is still Malden High.
Photo of Main-Ferry-Salem St in Malden when BERy was laying track, probably in the 1910s, via www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=... Building in the background is Malden High. @universalhub.com
WaPo had a quote from some local pastor who rushed to the scene to see if he could "help." '"I wanted to see if there was any people I could pray with," he said.' Imagine being the sort of person whose first response is to rush into make this about your religious bullshit.
Religion is weird and very paternalistic if you think about it for more than like a few seconds.
I don't get it, Amtrak bought a made to measure design in the Avelia Liberty but the windows still don't align with the seat pitch? Why?
I like how one of these is a meme. Very cold, snowy Very cold, snowy, but in another share of blue!
@dkathunt.bsky.social
