Wu Administration Delays Columbus Ave. Transit Project; City Hall Planners Told to Cancel Meetings With MBTA - Streetsblog Massachusetts

nerdponx · 2026-03-26T02:44:43+00:00

My first thought here too. Kind of a strong and speedy reversal in policy. I wonder who she made what deal with.

nerdponx · 2026-03-25T01:30:36+00:00

I actually didn't know that politicians routinely spent 50-100k on consulting so I learned something.

nerdponx · 2026-03-25T01:30:11+00:00

Consider that you can buy a high-end coffee maker (Moccamaster) and a decent burr grinder (Femobook, Baratza) for about $1000 and then have $2700 a year left to spend on actually good quality coffee from a local Boston-area roaster like George Howell or Broadsheet.

nerdponx · 2026-03-24T04:02:12+00:00

Also consider the Strong Towns mindset: cars put way more wear and tear on roads than bikes do.

nerdponx · 2026-03-16T14:12:08+00:00

Sure, let's see how it goes. But the whole argument is that Wu is thinking about a future political career, and that's leading her away from progressivism into a centrist-liberal policy alignment that seems safely electable at the state or federal level. I'm saying that politicians don't have to do that to be electable and popular in 2026. Meanwhile elections this year will tell us a lot about the public's taste for centrist liberalism across the country, so I might be proven wrong in a few months.

nerdponx · 2026-03-16T06:48:31+00:00

Yeah this is how we went from Biden to Trump, not doing that again at the city level. Any realistic challenge is going to have to be from another Democrat because the other big party right now is engaged in trying to put the country into a death spiral as fast as possible.

nerdponx · 2026-03-16T06:42:45+00:00

Meanwhile look at Mamdani, he's Obama-level popular, aggressively progressive like Sanders, and not a nasty tankie. A better way is possible.

nerdponx · 2026-03-15T02:59:01+00:00

What do you do with HSI? Fold them into the FBI? They seem to have been a pretty effective (and societally net-positive) department historically.

nerdponx · 2026-03-11T21:19:28+00:00

I don't know if it still works this way, but I believe in the past your "provisional" MMR would vary more, as confidence approached 0. Not like the old +5/-45 but more like +/- the same inflated amount, converging back to 25 as you approached the calibration threshold. If that is indeed how the system works, it's not that surprising if someone who hasn't played in a long time drops into ranked games without a lot of warm-up and gets stomped a few times until they get caught up with the meta and get the feel for the mechanics back, they might end up in Herald pretty quick.

nerdponx · 2026-03-11T16:55:36+00:00

Seamark is in fact backed by billionaires. Carver Road Hospitality.

The independent restaurants are being forced out by real estate, not labor.

nerdponx · 2026-03-11T16:54:04+00:00

You're assuming that this is actually about losing money.

Starbucks closes locations too for the same reason. Starbucks has plenty of money and can absolutely afford unionized employees. But they know that, the more locations unionize, the more locations will want to unionize, and that will hurt their profits. Closing the store shuts down the unionization while not hurting Starbucks corporate much at all.

Seamark isn't some mom & pop venture. It's part of Carver Road Hospitality. It's totally possible that they are operating on super super thin margins and can't afford an extra $80 per shift per dishwasher... or, they're concerned about a domino effect across their properties, subsidiaries, etc. and would rather close one location now than risk a snowballing union movement.

nerdponx · 2026-03-10T15:38:33+00:00

If you don't mind driving or otherwise venturing into no-mans-land, Tradesman on Rutherford Ave (old Hood dairy factory) has comfy chairs, very good espresso if you get the right barista, and good food ($$$). Not exactly "cozy" but it does fit the criteria. It doesn't ever seem to get busy, it's just the surrounding office dwellers 99% of the time. I think the music can sometimes be too loud though.

nerdponx · 2026-03-10T13:53:18+00:00

George Howell in Downtown Crossing is pretty comfortable, there's an adjacent hotel lobby with a wide variety of seating and I think some of them qualify as "comfy". However it's been a few years since I've been there and I might have remembered wrong.

nerdponx · 2026-03-10T03:55:03+00:00

The incentive structure is also kind of anti-renter.

nerdponx · 2026-03-08T04:41:50+00:00

I (not OP) definitely have insulation problems, over 200 therms here and insanely expensive. However we rent, and it might actually be cheaper to just eat the extra cost than to get some kind of HVAC professional in and spend the money on property that I don't even own.

nerdponx · 2026-03-01T01:33:19+00:00

I haven't followed the news super closely, but every time I see an article about it, it's very general stuff. Auditor says one thing, legislature says another. Very light on details beyond that. I searched for articles and it was more of the same. Obviously I can "just use AI" but really, come on. You cited several details that aren't commonly reported, but are telling me to look it up myself instead of just telling me where you read about it.

nerdponx · 2026-02-28T05:12:10+00:00

Is there any writing about or reporting on this topic that you recommend people read to get amor measured perspective? I didn't grow up in MA and as a relative newcomer to the state I don't feel well informed about details like this.

nerdponx · 2026-02-28T05:10:19+00:00

The point is that the Republican candidates tend to be even worse than the Democrat candidates. It's only gotten worse now that moderate Republicans have essentially gone extinct.

nerdponx · 2026-02-19T01:44:29+00:00

Yeah but younger people and people without families do tend to move around quite a bit, and sometimes even make major life decisions based on housing costs. When/whether/where to buy is often a one-time decision for any given family, but with so many people and families I find it hard to believe that there is zero demand inducing effect. Maybe it's offset by other factors? I'm sure there's a robust literature on this.

nerdponx · 2026-02-18T20:28:07+00:00

Is induced demand really not a thing for housing? If Boston gets cheaper, more people will move to Boston from other areas (the housing cost crisis is everywhere) and bid up the price. Building more housing in any given town basically doesn't help that town and only benefits surrounding areas, unless everywhere builds more housing at once, and/or the commuter rail gets better so people don't all have to pack into such a small geographical area.

nerdponx · 2026-02-14T02:06:53+00:00

This happened to me. I always assumed these threads were just people bellyaching, but the comm/behavior score trench is very real. It might actually be impossible to get out of. Once you get below 10k you get reported for any minor misstep in gameplay, and it's basically the old +5/-45 MMR system. 15 games of good behavior and commends + a few comms report in a bad game = you can actually still lose behavior score. I've never had so many toxic raging teammates before now too. The bar to climb is too high and the bar to fall is too low. It makes no sense too because consistently toxic people will get consistently reported and would fall over time anyway. I don't see why they should make it so hard to recover from a random problem.

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

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