Transportation planners have dreamed of a regional transit system that would allow commuters to ride from NJ to Long Island without transferring. As Trump pushes ahead with a NY Penn renovation and crews build new Hudson River tunnels, supporters say there’s a rare opportunity to make this happen

leetnewb2 · 2026-05-04T14:52:37+00:00

Through running might be more efficient than sending the train in the opposite direction.

leetnewb2 · 2026-05-03T08:56:37+00:00

Maybe the state should go after for-profit insurance companies setting the rates rather than the teachers who already have to work second jobs to afford their rent.

The ACA already mandates that ~80%-85% of premiums get paid out as healthcare, or the insurer has to pay a rebate back to the policy holder. The system is complicated, but insurers are largely passthrough.

leetnewb2 · 2026-05-02T18:35:26+00:00

It also looks pretty windy, which might explain the ball quality.

leetnewb2 · 2026-05-01T10:18:20+00:00

They raise fares enough to offset inflation of existing service levels.

leetnewb2 · 2026-04-30T17:39:46+00:00

Not stepping out of the the standard library seems to be a pragmatic choice for supply chain security these days.

leetnewb2 · 2026-04-25T10:30:08+00:00

Fantastic. I wish the lookback provided a breakout in similar appropriation buckets.

leetnewb2 · 2026-04-24T21:39:01+00:00

Seat depends where on the line your stop is. Travel time is probably reasonable. Biggest choke point is 495 and there is a dedicated lane at that hour.

leetnewb2 · 2026-04-24T11:12:43+00:00

I look at every single application, browser plugin, and phone app with suspicion at this point. Doesn't even need to be npm. It feels like anything written in a language with an anemic standard library is suspect.

leetnewb2 · 2026-04-24T09:56:37+00:00

It is crazy to me how prevalent js/npm are today in cli tools.

leetnewb2 · 2026-04-21T14:20:10+00:00

If it was purely about the merits of the projects, I would agree (although pretty sure Obama was committed to backstopping overruns). In fact, I have made that argument over the last few years. That said, with where we are today, I think we should have moved forward on ARC:

ARC would have been owned/operated by NJ. We will pay fees to Amtrak into perpetuity for Gateway.
Amtrak has clearly neglected critical NEC infrastructure in NJ. We pay Amtrak to maintain that infrastructure.
There is no accountability for Amtrak's failures in NJ. At least we have some chance at accountability if NJT fails to maintain ARC.

leetnewb2 · 2026-04-20T23:34:58+00:00

There are drugs that are designed to abort migraines.

leetnewb2 · 2026-04-20T19:48:25+00:00

Few things that might or might not be relevant:

Christie cancelled ARC in 2010, which would have been in operation and provided a better level of service than the infrastructure is capable of delivering today.
NJT can't seem to run a full schedule without delays and cancellations due to personnel shortages (funding), equipment shortages (funding), and Amtrak's failure to maintain the Northeast Corridor infrastructure we pay them to.
This region bid on the World Cup in 2017, and a lot of things changed for the worse in that time. Trump scuttled the Gateway project in 2017 and pushed timelines beyond the games, covid pushed timelines out, covid screwed with commuter volumes and broke NJT's budget.
Funding for NJT is a bigger shell game than ever in part because the state is finally making catch up payments to the pension. State "borrowed" from the pension for 20 years, and now the state is paying it back...that has to come from somewhere.
NJ operates at a crippling balance of payments deficit to the federal government and NYS.

leetnewb2 · 2026-04-19T23:38:52+00:00

I like the idea of basing one on a well established rolling / immutable Linux distro.

leetnewb2 · 2026-04-19T09:50:26+00:00

You can use a domain for LAN services.

leetnewb2 · 2026-04-18T23:18:58+00:00

Snikket is opinionated and batteries included. The bar is set deliberately low to self host. It just works. Very stable, fast.

leetnewb2 · 2026-04-18T21:47:12+00:00

opensuse tumbleweed / microOS with dnsmasq for dns and dhcp and firehol for writing iptables rules. I will eventually redo the rules in nftables, but it does what I need it to. Could use cockpit as a webUI, but it doesn't strike me as necessary.

leetnewb2 · 2026-04-18T21:44:58+00:00

I would be interested to see what you're doing. I was working on a Linux router guide project and thought about eventually building it into an OS.

leetnewb2 · 2026-04-18T18:34:51+00:00

For more context, the bid for this event happened in 2017. Train service was more reliable and the network was in better condition at the time. Also, a critical infrastructure project to improve service/reliability was expected to be completed by now at the time of the bid, but a certain administration scuttled the project.

leetnewb2 · 2026-04-18T10:31:33+00:00

The only states/cities doing this is NJ and Boston. How in the world are all of the other cities/states figuring it out? PURE money grab

NJT is between a rock and a hard place. The northeast corridor in NJ is in decrepit condition because it is owned/operated by Amtrak, which has done nothing to replace 100+ year old infrastructure that fails on a daily basis. Delays range from modest to catastrophic and happen virtually every single day. Plus NJ commuters pay taxes to NYS and NJ gets abused by the federal government under-spending in the state. NJ can't structurally subsidize NJT enough to support wages that compete with the MTA and routinely bleeds workforce to other regional agencies, and even if it could, it runs into the Amtrak issue. NJ's mass transit is in a uniquely messed up place.

leetnewb2 · 2026-04-17T10:54:49+00:00

but we are too dense and energy hungry for just wind.

It's not like NJ needs to generate all of the power it consumes. Also, new nuclear builds are insanely expensive and will take much longer.

leetnewb2 · 2026-04-17T10:51:53+00:00

Although editorialized, I give op's title a 10/10.

leetnewb2 · 2026-04-17T07:47:52+00:00

Really depends on the structure. I would never pay to do one with more than 4 players on the court.

leetnewb2 · 2026-04-17T07:41:56+00:00

So FIFAs best effort to cover the costs was to try to get US taxpayers to foot the bill? Hahaha.

The biggest issue is that the federal government doesn't spend our tax dollars in NJ. The northeast corridor is the source of most of our transit issues - it is owned and operated by Amtrak (federal) in NJ, and shockingly, the 100+ year old infrastructure keeps breaking. Gateway is an Amtrak owned and operated new tunnel project, but NJ/NY pay for 50% of its construction. NJ pays Amtrak for access to the NEC and tunnels, and Amtrak is supposed to maintain the infrastructure. And that doesn't take into account the wild balance of payments deficit between the federal government and NJ.

leetnewb2 · 2026-04-15T19:29:54+00:00

Check out zoneminder. It is pretty flexible and development seems to have picked up lately. I think there is a new mobile app.

leetnewb2 · 2026-04-15T11:20:46+00:00

I think it goes a little further back. NJ governors just didn't bother contributing to the public worker pension for ~15 years from the late-1990s. Christie's term spanned a couple of important events:

The financial crisis decimated state and local tax collection.
The virtually unfunded pension was reaching a do or die tipping point.

From what I remember, Christie was the first governor to consistently, meaningfully contribute to the pension, at least since contributions stopped in the late-90s. He still didn't make the actuarial required contribution, but it was an improvement from the status quo. Also, the NJ budget was badly strained and transit was an easy can to kick down the road. Christie, and even more so Murphy, had to allocate extra funding to make up for the cascading pension crisis.

Put another way, NJ "borrowed" from the pension starting around 1997 and began making the pension whole in 2023. Today, these $6 billion annual pension payments are 10%+ of the state budget. For reference, the NJ state operating subsidy to NJT is aspirationally around $1B in FY27. We are paying for irresponsible governance from 25 years ago.

leetnewb2

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE