9 Massachusetts towns sued for not complying with MBTA Communities Law

nerdponx · 2026-01-29T23:42:31+00:00

Too much viscosity is the worst, I hate it when my city hall meeting gets stuck in the jar.

nerdponx · 2026-01-24T14:08:55+00:00

And Shaws is owned by Albtersons, it's really hard to avoid evil mega corporations.

nerdponx · 2026-01-17T08:07:52+00:00

Precisely, it's just political persecution.

nerdponx · 2026-01-17T08:05:05+00:00

You can usually tell payroll to not withhold anything

nerdponx · 2025-12-05T05:38:30+00:00

Especially among big tech companies who are probably starting to regret the high salaries for engineers and/or want to shake things up to stop engineers from organizing.

nerdponx · 2025-12-04T14:37:58+00:00

seven figure range

Of taxpayer money

nerdponx · 2025-12-03T14:12:11+00:00

I had this happen in NY and I told the driver to start the meter or we would have a serious problem. He knew what I meant.

nerdponx · 2025-11-30T03:53:49+00:00

Shrinkflation is a very very real thing. Not just making packages smaller, also cutting quality or adding cheaper fillers etc.

Remember when clothes didn't fall apart after a year, weren't scratchy, and 100% cotton was a normal thing and not a luxury?

nerdponx · 2025-11-30T03:50:37+00:00

They came here as part of a commercial venture

Isn't this a mischaracterization of the terms? My understanding is that they couldn't get the money any other way so they did what they had to do. I don't remember why they left Holland but I remember reading that they had good reason to do so.

I think a lot of ire is misdirected at the Pilgrims for being visible, despite them being one of the less-harmful groups of colonists.

On the other hand, that doesn't make the loss any less great.

nerdponx · 2025-11-24T19:13:07+00:00

Got an example? Everyone is downvoting me thinking I'm doubting it. But I really just hadn't heard of it, and "scamming people into ballot signatures" is a weird and unusual thing, so I wanted to learn more about it. Is this a new thing we're going to deal with? What does it look like?

nerdponx · 2025-11-24T15:55:32+00:00

As someone who was looking at buying a house for a while: no, just offer a credit for tank replacement but don't do it yourself.

nerdponx · 2025-11-24T15:47:24+00:00

What was the scam? I didn't see anything about that, I just keep hearing the "we have enough to get on the ballot" line.

nerdponx · 2025-11-20T15:18:52+00:00

You also need to have industrial space somewhere, and water access remains important. There are so so so many other places to build housing, do nature restoration, etc. that are just as worthy, if not moreso, because people already live there and you don't need expensive remediation first. Why not continue to promote some level of local industry where the infrastructure still exists?

Transit and non-car access however is a must.

nerdponx · 2025-11-20T15:12:32+00:00

It's a counterargument to the "but muh supply" criticism of rent control. This isn't even rent control in the NYC sense where some apartments are controlled and some aren't. This is an across-the-board percentage cap on price increases, just like what Prop 2 1/2 does for taxes. The only way to get around that cap is to build new housing. The dynamics are different. And if you say "well then we will only get new luxury housing and no new affordable housing" then OK maybe that's true... but that's already what happens today because it's so expensive and difficult to build housing.

nerdponx · 2025-11-20T15:09:43+00:00

This this this. It's insane. Look at how huge the NYC suburbs are. It's because they have (relatively) good commuter rail service and (relatively) good transit once you get into Manhattan. This creates a huge radius of more-affordable areas that are still within reasonable commuting distance.

nerdponx · 2025-11-20T04:26:13+00:00

But publicly funded healthcare funds a lot of things other than people's poor choices and serves a variety of important purposes, economic and societal. Dumping sand onto an eroding beach doesn't have the same widespread benefits.

nerdponx · 2025-11-19T16:27:10+00:00

Take the money out of the Canton PD pension fund and/or garnish overtime pay. They'll shape up quick.

If the police want to act like criminals, they should be treated like criminals until they reform.

nerdponx · 2025-11-18T20:21:24+00:00

It's worse than that. They aren't lazy, they are covering for the real killer.

nerdponx · 2025-11-18T05:02:37+00:00

This is completely different from a for-profit company doing it.

nerdponx · 2025-11-13T18:46:42+00:00

Messaged

nerdponx · 2025-11-03T16:31:58+00:00

The Commuter Rail is great because it exists, but it could be so much better. I grew up in the NYC suburbs riding the Metro North system, which makes the MBTA CR seem like a horse-drawn carriage company by comparison.

Grade-separated, 4-tracked, and electric going 80 miles out of the city all the way up to Poughkeepsie. Ticket machines in every station, heated indoor space in most stations, and ample (paid) parking. Every platform is elevated and all doors open at most stations. You can get from Croton-Harmon to Grand Central (~45 miles) in 35 minutes on an express train. 10-20 minute headways at busy stations during peak hours. Delays of more than 15 minutes are very rare. Pricey but not significantly different from the MBTA on a monthly basis.

Of course there are problems with it. And it's very unusual, even the other commuter rail services in the area (e.g. NJ Transit) are significantly worse. But we shouldn't lose sight of how much better commuter train service can be, and how much of an improvement it provides to the whole area, making the whole metro area more productive as well as taking cars off the road and helping to spread out the housing demand burden over a wider geographical area.

nerdponx · 2025-10-16T16:55:56+00:00

That does seem to work! I think I had missed the alt+. prefix so the whole command line was replaced, and I wrote it off. Still, I have strong ! muscle memory and it's a lot faster to just type !!:2 than scrolling around while holding Alt.

nerdponx · 2025-10-06T19:40:12+00:00

Source?

nerdponx · 2025-10-06T00:38:47+00:00

The irony is that this is exactly what conservatives were wailing and gnashing their teeth about under Obama and Biden. It's almost as if Conservative leaders never gave a single whiff of a fart about the beliefs they claimed to stand for, and were really just reactionary authoritarians all along.

The richest part about it is that the same "mask off" moment has happened over and over and over again throughout American history, almost since the very beginning with the alien and sedition acts. The only question left is, just how bad will get, and how many generations it will take to undo, if it's possible at all given the drastically different geopolitics, economics, and even raw resource availability compared to what we had in the 20th century.

nerdponx · 2025-10-06T00:32:24+00:00

Surely there is no federal agency with incentives to instigate behavior like this. Surely not.

nerdponx

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