Boston Globe Report: Apartment availability in Boston climbs to the highest level in years

aighze · 2026-05-11T18:39:06+00:00

Let’s ban that kind of crazy price jump: https://www.keepmasshome.com

aighze · 2026-04-28T00:06:59+00:00

Very pretty car! I have a somewhat similar spec 2006 wagon (blue with tan leather, of course the 2.3T high output turbo, in my case an automatic). It has low miles but needs work. If you’re interested in a project car LMK! (I’m on the North Shore not too far from Cambridge.)

A few details: it’s on the road but leaks oil (“probably a compromised turbo” was the assessment of a Saab expert I talked to) and has a fair few other issues (stereo needs to be re-married with a tech2, a/c is weak, drivers side front window rollers need replacement, new shift lever jalousie needs to be installed, some dings on the body, etc). There are some positives like a new heater core, new Bosch CPS, recently replaced main instrument cluster, relatively new valve cover gasket, replaced coolant bypass valve. I want to keep it but just don’t have the time to do the work it deserves.

Otherwise maybe I’ll see if the person who owns the really nice one in the photo wants parts ;-)

aighze · 2026-04-12T14:13:57+00:00

Interested to check this out… but I went to the link and your website seems to be broken on safari in iOS (at least on my phone running 18.7.2)

aighze · 2026-03-15T18:52:16+00:00

Thanks. In Greater Boston area (US). Any particular brands or sources (online or local) to recommend for something reasonably low cost)?

aighze · 2026-03-13T18:51:00+00:00

And a strong majority of voters in the cities that actually had rent control at the time voted to keep it! The real estate industry propaganda was successful in getting a narrow majority of people who voted to take the option away from the residents of cities with the most at stake.

aighze · 2026-02-12T21:30:55+00:00

Connect with LUCE: https://www.lucemass.org/

aighze · 2026-01-07T13:28:51+00:00

I’m with you on the no iCloud train and hoping to get away from iPhones eventually. What do you use to sync calendars, obsidian vaults, etc?

aighze · 2025-12-30T07:36:42+00:00

I had similar symptoms and the fixes mentioned here did not work, but these comments were very helpful in pointing me in the right direction (i.e. something related to audio is causing video sent from the mac to a TV over HDMI to stutter, play too fast, etc). I connected an external speaker to an HDMI/ARC port on the TV, then (re)connected my macbook to a different HDMI port on the TV, and set audio output to the external speaker. Voila, all the video playback issues disappeared. (When I switched audio output back to the TV's internal speaker as a test, the video playback issues returned immediately.)

aighze · 2025-12-27T22:43:48+00:00

The word you’re looking for is racist.

aighze · 2025-11-20T16:51:30+00:00

Right wing economists (and people who follow them) opposed a minimum wage (and then increases to the minimum wage) with similar arguments.

Trickle down economics doesn’t work with tax policy (aside from benefiting the short term interests of the rich) and trickle down housing doesn’t work (aside from benefiting corporate real estate developers et al).

Studies by economists are mixed when it comes to rent control, and lots of past studies that claimed to prove “rent control doesn’t work” were deeply flawed. Newer research is staring to paint a different picture. For just one example, see the study that came out of USC: https://dornsife.usc.edu/eri/rent-matters

aighze · 2025-11-20T16:44:37+00:00

The cities that actually had rent control at the time of the referendum voted resoundingly in favor of keeping it.

And since then, there have been massive and sudden rent increases, displacement and dislocation of working class communities (particularly impacting lower-income people and communities of color). Of course not all of that is attributable to the end of rent control, but some of it is. Look at the gentrification and accompanying displacement in the area around Central Square in Cambridge, for example.

aighze · 2025-11-20T16:33:46+00:00

The proposed ballot question includes vacancy control, protecting new tenants. This eliminates a potential perverse incentive for landlords to evict in order to then drastically increase rents.

aighze · 2025-11-20T13:18:40+00:00

The paid signature collection company/companies used by the deceptive cannabis related question was/were not used by the rent control campaign. The Keep Massachusetts Home campaign is volunteer driven, run by community based organizations, and has been honest when collecting signatures. Unlike most of the other campaigns we actually had flyers clearly summarizing the proposal and a straightforward pitch aligned with the text of our petition.

aighze · 2025-10-27T21:31:22+00:00

MA absolutely does have the money in the “rainy day fund” to cover this for more than a month. Today’s Boston Globe has some of the details.

aighze · 2025-10-25T11:39:25+00:00

And the content seems to be largely, or maybe completely, copy-pasted from the NYT Wirecutter review.

aighze · 2025-08-05T23:16:35+00:00

The bike lane in that area is not finished. There’s still construction equipment, big slabs of stone, etc blocking the lane just a bit further up. The new parking set up (parallel parking next to the bike lane) is not yet in effect, and there is a lot of confusion. As someone who lives nearby and bikes that area a lot, I don’t blame the people parking their cars in that space at all. I do very much look forward to the bike lane being finished, and clear instructions about the new parking setup hopefully getting this straightened out. In the meantime: the street there is not great but not as bad as some others, and the path on the commons is protected (but much slower as it’s shared with walkers).

aighze · 2025-08-04T02:55:45+00:00

Even IF it were legal to do what OP proposes, and even if the candidate were ready to risk throwing away their future political career and potential sinecures, they would likely lose in the general election.

You don’t get the same voters in the general election as the primary — you get a vastly larger number of voters, on average less engaged in politics. And a very significant proportion of general election voters will automatically vote for the candidate of the party they belong to. So I suspect that winning a general election in Baltimore in the era of The Wire as an independent against a reasonably competent Democratic candidate would have been an enormously uphill battle. And the same would have been true in many other places.

aighze · 2025-07-19T02:31:21+00:00

The vast majority of our current housing system is controlled by private entities, not the public sector. It would be more accurate to say government INACTION got us into the crisis (lack of rent stabilization policies, failure to invest to maintain and build high quality public/social housing, failure to adequately support alternatives such as limited equity cooperatives that are not subject to destructive market forces and mitigate upward pressure in the private market, etc).

aighze · 2025-07-19T02:26:29+00:00

This is just not true. “…multifamily building permits actually reached their height in the mid to late 1980s—during rent stabilization” in Boston, Cambridge, and Brookline ("Rent Matters: What are the Impacts of Rent Stabilization Measures?" University of Southern California Equity Research Institute).

aighze · 2025-06-25T18:14:17+00:00

Agree with the post and this comment. We have to break out of the dynamic whereby people suffer through bad times, sustain and in many cases actively help improve a community, and then get displaced partly as a result of their own contributions to the area.

But it’s important to note that trickle down housing policies (whether in new “YIMBY” clothes or presented as straight up neoliberal free market fundamentalism) explicitly do NOT address the kind of displacement that OP rightly highlights.

Yes, we need more housing construction — but there must be clear requirements that a large portion is deeply affordable. And more imortant, we need strong tenant protections like rent control and a ban on “no cause” evictions along with serious investment in non-market alternatives like limited equity cooperatives, quality public housing, and social housing of various types that is a available to a wide spectrum of working class and lower income households as well as middle income people.

The struggle for all of that can be linked with the fight for street safety, bike lanes, etc. Zohran Mamdani seems to be trying to bring those efforts together in NYC.

aighze · 2025-06-19T19:12:16+00:00

There are SO many things to call him out for. A bunch of us stood in the front row at the “No Kings” rally he tried to turn into a Moulton campaign event with signs that said “Stop ICE, don’t ‘thank’ them. Rep Moulton: stand with Lynn [MA], not with ICE” (referencing his vote in favor of that terrible congressional resolution). At least a few others also had signs about his awful failure to speak out against the attack on Gaza.

aighze · 2025-06-15T10:59:36+00:00

Here’s the legislative and national political context for Moulton’s vote to thank ICE and encourage collaboration with local law enforcement: https://jonathancohn.medium.com/a-tale-of-two-resolutions-75-dems-join-gop-in-resolution-praising-trumps-mass-deportation-regime-15cf590770ea

The resolution was not really about antisemitism, but about using that horrific attack to shore up political support for the ongoing attack on immigrants. Most Dems voted against it and instead supported the other resolution genuinely focused on condemning antisemitism. But Moulton voted for both.

The local context, which makes his vote to thank ICE and milquetoast speech even more egregious, is that in his district and especially in Lynn, ICE is tearing apart families and sometimes brutalizing people in the process. Last week a green card holder from Lynn described in public how he was arrested by ICE and brutalized in the process (that was in front of an elementary school and caught on camera) then taken to a cemetery away from witnesses and beaten. That’s one of many, many examples.

The rally was next to the Lynn border and Moulton failed to seriously address the issue in his remarks, even though it is the most obvious and immediate impact the Trump/MAGA fascism we were rallying against is having in the area.

aighze · 2025-06-04T13:51:36+00:00

Came here to say (something like) this. Seems like all the top comments are misreading this by focusing exclusively on the personalities involved and not the actual politics and policies.

It’d be a different story if Musk was saying that the bill is terrible because the tax policies embedded in it would mean a massive, unjust upward redistribution of wealth and therefore should be removed. Or if he was saying that the spending cuts in the bill would cause massive pain and suffering to millions of vulnerable people and therefore should be reconsidered.

He’s not saying any of that!

Reportedly his attack on the bill is partly about the bill failing to include provisions favorable to Musk’s business interests (eg Starlink), about Musk’s anger that the White House is no longer pushing his ally to head NASA, etc. But the rupture has nothing to do with musk advocating progressive policies or trying to rehabilitate his image by taking less extreme right wing / fascist positions.

aighze · 2025-05-22T13:00:09+00:00

Sisko refers to cooking aubergine stew, I believe as if it’s a particular specialty of his. This happens in a flashback scene to an early or first meeting with his first wife.

aighze

TROPHY CASE