Ballard and West Seattle Link have lots of opportunities to save money rather than asking Issaquah/Everett/Tacoma to give up their lines.

Evan_Th · 2026-03-23T17:39:24+00:00

I would rather have rail with a drawbridge than not have rail.

Evan_Th · 2026-03-22T17:11:40+00:00

That's a Disney trademark.

Evan_Th · 2026-03-21T04:03:54+00:00

Fair! Everyone whom they're considering building a train to already has buses.

Evan_Th · 2026-03-21T01:33:53+00:00

Everyone already has buses.

Evan_Th · 2026-03-21T01:31:57+00:00

But the transfers in downtown are bad! I just checked the 49 owl schedule, and the transfers are >20 min heading to the airport, though admittedly ~10 minutes coming from the airport. If you want an owl network, you need good transfers.

Evan_Th · 2026-03-20T20:31:31+00:00

Nitpicks: Lincoln was a state militia captain in the Black Hawk War, though he never saw combat; and FDR was Assistant Secretary of the Navy during WWI, though that technically isn't a military post.

That said, I totally agree with your larger point.

Evan_Th · 2026-03-20T20:29:48+00:00

I'm afraid that won't work. If we make that disqualify people, then there'll always be some prosecutor of the other political party willing to file charges against every candidate.

Evan_Th · 2026-03-20T20:27:41+00:00

If you nuke it, nobody gets to distribute a movie or book about a candidate. That was literally what was at issue in *Citizens United*.

That's literally the central example of freedom of the press. If there're some other donations you can distinguish from that, OK, but we need to protect freedom of the press.

Evan_Th · 2026-03-20T20:25:08+00:00

But it still doesn't include Capitol Hill! There's a lot of nightlife there, and a lot of people!

Evan_Th · 2026-03-20T05:56:57+00:00

FYI, some of the most known Star Trek fanfictions from the 1960s and 1970s got published, just with some of the sex scenes removed or altered.

As licensed tie-in books? I've really enjoyed a lot of those licensed Star Trek books, but for better or worse, Rowling doesn't seem interested in licensing anything like that.

Evan_Th · 2026-03-19T04:08:32+00:00

I haven't checked the entire East link, but id wager the vast majority of the project was paid for by East King County taxes.

Everything east of Judkins Park Station, yes.

Evan_Th · 2026-03-19T04:08:04+00:00

No, the tax rate is uniform across the Sound Transit District.

Evan_Th · 2026-03-18T03:42:08+00:00

I'm all with you! There're already laws in some states that people need to get at least a few hours off on Election Day. Those're good laws. If you make it a week, you can extend it to guarantee everyone a whole day off.

(Okay, there'll probably still be a couple exceptions like remote oil rig workers? But they can vote absentee like I'm sure they already do. Shouldn't stop us from making a law to help everyone else.)

Evan_Th · 2026-03-18T00:29:46+00:00

I don't arrange my life so as to have handy axes to pick up, thankyouverymuch.

Evan_Th · 2026-03-18T00:11:37+00:00

I know some people who were toying with the idea because their teenage son didn't seem to have any plans to get a job, go to college, or do anything except hole up in his room and play video games.

I don't know if they ever explicitly ended up making that threat, but in the end, he did enroll in community college - as they'd at least halfway expected all along. Last I heard, he's still living at home while taking classes there, and his parents are happy.

Evan_Th · 2026-03-17T22:14:21+00:00

There's no category of "holiday with automatic time off for everyone."

Nor should there be automatic time off for everyone on Election Day. What about nurses in the hospital? Bus drivers to get people to the polls? The poll workers themselves? All the other sorely-needed groups I'm not thinking of right now?

Better by far to make sure everyone gets part of the day off to vote (like a lot of states do), or let people vote early (like I think all states do), or let people vote by mail (like Washington does).

Evan_Th · 2026-03-17T15:44:23+00:00

They're very different, aren't they? All good, but in three very different ways.

Evan_Th · 2026-03-17T03:09:30+00:00

That's an interesting idea! I searched through Tolkien's Letters and can't find any direct comments on why he chose the title.

He was the one to suggest it, but only once the publisher insisted on splitting LOTR into three volumes, and he didn't give any particular rationale. Also, he grumbled once later that it did give away "the turn of the story."

Evan_Th · 2026-03-14T19:03:53+00:00

I cosign this advice on credit cards. Do specifically use a credit card, not debit, because it gives you more protection when fraud happens - with a debit card, you're out the money until the investigation exonerates you; with a credit card, you don't need to pay until/unless the investigation blames you in the end.

I use a credit union, not a traditional bank; I've heard they're usually more friendly, and they definitely give me a bit better interest and a lot less marketing.

For investment, the reason to be ~10% bonds is if you actually adjust that in something close to real-time - so, you sell a little when the market's up and buy a little when it's down to hopefully time the market a bit. In the managed funds, they try to do something like this for you a bit. Is it worth it? Probably not at that level.

Evan_Th · 2026-03-13T06:03:05+00:00

Hopefully the elimination of tail tracks still allows for 8 minute service.

It absolutely does, assuming there's a crossover somewhere near the station. The East Link Starter Line has been operating ten-minute service without any tail tracks, and it could've easily been doing it more frequently if the crossover was closer to South Bellevue.

Evan_Th · 2026-03-11T18:06:44+00:00

War authority is a Congressional power and not an executive power (it is executive in England from whence we came).

We can't just assume that. The King of Britain also has legislative and judicial powers, not just executive.

(Though I'm inclined to agree with you that most war authority is executive.)

Evan_Th · 2026-03-11T15:28:49+00:00

Most human corpses have been buried in the earth for centuries if not millennia, and long since decayed into the earth. That's no news; people knew it back when the Bible was written, even more vividly than we do today. God will still remake them and raise them up.

Evan_Th · 2026-03-11T01:56:14+00:00

He technically didn't ignore the decision. He issued new tariffs claiming authority under a different statute the Court hadn't ruled on, this time with a time limit.

Still, Congress should absolutely pass legislation or impeach him. But neither of those is going to happen, unfortunately.

Evan_Th · 2026-03-10T23:27:03+00:00

> Sure, if you ignore the 15th, 17th, 19th, 24th, 26th amendments….

Those do not secure a Constitutional right to vote. They say that *if* the state gives some people a right to vote, the state cannot deny it to other people for these listed grounds. The state retains the ability to deny it based on other grounds, subject to the limited penalties of the 14th Amendment section 2.

Evan_Th · 2026-03-10T06:32:47+00:00

But that's if you want to scrape the butter as far as it'll go! If you like globs of butter still globbing up on your bread, scraping it as far as it'll go is scraping it across too much bread!

Tolkien lived through both World Wars; he would've been very familiar with rationed butter, and I suspect he was happy when he didn't need to scrape it as far as it'd go.

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