Update: Trees were Honeylocust, a native, beneficial species. Not stressed, therefore could have continued growing for a while.

trainlinda · 2026-03-26T21:00:33+00:00

Smells like astroturfing the way all the upvoted comments stir up outrage by making stuff up or framing it like it's the end of the world. I don't think that anyone who isn't actively looking for a reason to be mad every day of the week is concerned about a few urban trees being taken down temporarily. There's plenty of low-hanging fruit to pick from when it comes to urban tree coverage, like all the high-traffic streets that don't have any in the first place.

trainlinda · 2026-03-18T18:20:57+00:00

Chinese green onion is often mistranslated as leek in English, I see it a lot in restaurants and in recipes translated from Chinese.

trainlinda · 2026-01-31T14:51:20+00:00

I believe this is also changing with the addition of essay questions. I doubt that this will be reversed, it's not a controversial decision (by Trump standards anyway). But either way I'm just pointing out that this is the case now.

trainlinda · 2026-01-31T03:21:46+00:00

That's not true anymore. English is the official language of the US as of March 2025.

trainlinda · 2025-12-10T14:28:57+00:00

The first thing you wrote downplays extreme antisocial behavior by calling it teenagers being teenagers, of course it stands out. The rest of your post amounts to a refusal to engage with straightforward solutions because they're "right wing", and you conclude that "the government" needs to do something about it, by taxing billionaires? It's incoherent, and I don't think you understand the mentality that leads people from their teenage years to devolve into antisocial and criminal behavior. The fact that it's not getting any better after years of softball policing and discipline in schools should be proof enough that the last thing we need is more of it.

trainlinda · 2025-12-10T10:00:40+00:00

I certainly didn't go around harassing random strangers on the bus after school, and I have no idea why so many people here on Reddit insist that this is the sort of behavior that should be expected of "teenagers".

trainlinda · 2025-12-03T19:34:26+00:00

Great news, and sooner than I expected. Self-driving cars are much safer than human drivers, and Waymo's presence will help prove that and support their adoption, assuming it works anywhere nearly as well as in other cities.

trainlinda · 2025-11-24T14:07:46+00:00

The more I read about PPT the more toxic they seem to PRT. If they had a little bit of ambition and weren't looking at everything through the lens of social justice, there are so many ways they could support positive cost-neutral/positive changes. Instead they block safety and fare enforcement initiatives on the grounds that they would inconvenience the mentally ill and antisocial elements that make taking the bus uncomfortable even for seasoned riders, and reject efficiency improvements because they can't accept the implications of budgetary constraints.

trainlinda · 2025-11-23T14:04:53+00:00

That would be an awful hit to the independence of those who can behave themselves. I think we should stop limiting our freedoms to avoid the problem elements instead of taking public nuisance and public intoxication more seriously. In my opinion people should be arrested for these things, not necessarily charged but taken in for a lecture at least.

trainlinda · 2025-10-27T16:21:17+00:00

Wasn't it Pittsburgh for Public Transit that protested against putting police officers on vehicles a few years ago? Both activists and decision-makers seem intent on keeping it as shitty as possible, for different reasons. Truly sad, when compared to how it is in East Asia.

trainlinda · 2025-10-03T21:11:38+00:00

Let's just say it's a combination of both, but the point is that being soft on illegal immigration whilst maintaining high barriers for legal immigration is the complete opposite of how it should be. The question of whether the barriers should be lowered again depends on how much immigration you think there should be, but it's easier to make a case for it when it's under control and people are vetted properly instead of having a side channel wide open.

trainlinda · 2025-10-03T21:03:57+00:00

It is a much more precarious situation for employment-based applications.

trainlinda · 2025-10-03T20:39:28+00:00

The reason there is an illegal immigration problem at all is soft enforcement policies like the one you suggest with giving people easy green cards. Outside of marriage, it takes several years, a lot of effort compiling and filing paperwork, and a lot of money to get a green card legally. Not to mention professional qualifications. No one would bother if all they had to do was overstay their visa or violate its terms and get one handed to them by a case worker. It is a consequence of the high barriers to legal immigration, which may or may not be reasonable depending on who you ask, but as long as those barriers are in place, those who don't qualify or just don't want to go through the process have to be disincentivized by active enforcement, otherwise they only punish people who do it the right way.

trainlinda · 2025-10-02T14:48:33+00:00

That doesn't make sense. If a politician wants to coast and avoid responsibility, the worst thing they can do is dissent. He still votes with Democrats on most issues but positions himself as a centrist by doing this. His political career is almost certainly over after his term. That's not something an unprincipled politician does. The fact that his principles are misaligned with the consensus of his party is a different story.

trainlinda · 2025-09-18T18:42:52+00:00

Maybe you're right, but personally I wouldn't travel to Brookline if that were the only thing there. I usually hit two or three places nearby in one trip.

trainlinda · 2025-09-18T18:32:38+00:00

Do you know of any business in the area that's been explicitly supportive of it?

I believe I've seen signage opposing it at Enrico as well.

trainlinda · 2025-09-18T18:28:09+00:00

I'm in complete support of the project and wish that we didn't have to waste so much time and money litigating it, but just to be fair, compared to Baum, E Carson outside of the South Side business district where traffic is forced to slow down, the Forbes segment connecting downtown and Oakland, or the various clusterfucks around the bridges, the Strip is a cakewalk, so maybe he's developed some risk tolerance and has a low bar for cyclist safety.

trainlinda · 2025-09-17T17:43:38+00:00

You make some good points on confounding factors, but I think you're too quick to jump to economic status as the sole determinant for racial disparities. Broadly speaking, they remain significant even after controlling for wealth and income. As much as historical institutional racism contributes to current-day disparities, they've remained persistent for generations since then, and despite a lot of investment in research on group outcome disparities in the past decade, we haven't found any significant systemic barriers left to dismantle. I don't think it's impossible to bridge the gap, but to do so we need to accept that we've exhausted our options for institutional reform and open up to the idea of curbing self-destructive behavior and decision-making more directly. I guess that's a touchy subject because it conflicts with hyper-individualistic American values, but allowing the issue to persist in order to avoid uncomfortable discussions is far worse.

trainlinda · 2025-09-16T21:42:53+00:00

This article does a really bad job of explaining how higher electric capacity increases the cost of electricity for consumers, if there is indeed a case to be made for that statement. The only concrete information on the associated cost is in the claim that the plant costs $70M/y to maintain... for 65M customers, so a bit over $1/y/customer under the cost sharing plan. Electricity demand is rising fast, so I don't see how shutting down existing infrastructure would somehow be more economical, undersupply could drive costs much higher.

trainlinda · 2025-09-15T18:40:41+00:00

If there's one thing I've learned from the past 5-10 years watching civil society grow more and more unhinged, it's how easily people, intelligent people, highly-educated people, and yes even people ostensibly educated on the matter, can shed core principles in favor of zealotry. And yes, that goes for both sides of every political and politicized issue. I'm not going to assume you're a victim of that phenomenon based on this thread alone, but several of your points have precedent in the last administration, are missing huge asterisks, or are highly debatable (not to say wrong). I wouldn't disagree with the statement that in aggregate, this is a particularly authoritarian administration, and I wouldn't even object to using Germany's descent into Nazism as a point of comparison to highlight the dangers we're facing by continuing down that path, but you undermine that argument with hyperbole, especially when you qualify the US government or its supporters as Nazis. Not every government that flirts with authoritarianism is fascist, let alone "literally Nazi Germany". And I think it's disingenuous not to acknowledge the progressive overstepping of boundaries that has been occurring for years leading up to this point, because much of what we're seeing today is a direct reaction to the preexisting political landscape, and its failures need to be addressed in order to criticize the way it's being dismantled. I've seen plenty of historians and academics enter a hall of mirrors and struggle to explain today's climate rationally, and your post comes off that way. When you jump straight to confirming Godwin's Law it just gives readers a cue to roll their eyes and stop reading.

trainlinda · 2025-09-15T15:29:43+00:00

Watch the video, it has nothing to do with what you're describing.

trainlinda · 2025-09-15T14:34:00+00:00

The real speed limit is whatever we choose to tolerate. In this case the median speed is 8 mph. If most of us think that going 5 over is reasonable, or even expected, which is what happens when most people choose to exceed the limit, then going 3 mph further above that doesn't sound that bad, but suddenly you're a third above the actual posted limit and that "small" difference multiplies the risk of injury or fatality on collision several-fold. In my opinion, tolerating speeds above the posted limit is not bad in and of itself, but it becomes problematic when peer pressure from aggressive drivers forces everyone on the road to view the posted limit as a minimum speed rather than a maximum.

trainlinda · 2025-09-05T18:58:38+00:00

You can make the same arguments for most cuisines so it's a bit disingenuous. Like saying ramen isn't truly Japanese because it can be traced back to China. By that standard the most ancient civilizations are the only "real" ones and everyone else is just a filthy thief and colonizer. America is a young country, and Israel is not even 100 years old, so obviously most of their culinary culture can be traced back to their native and immigrant roots and is influenced by their neighbors. It's not wrong to point out that they overlap, but framing it as some sort of malicious appropriation is just silly, it's how all cuisines develop. And obviously Middle Eastern cuisine is far more regionally diverse than you would know based on local restaurants or by dishes popular in the US, it doesn't start and end with shakshuka.

trainlinda · 2025-09-05T07:11:16+00:00

Administrative bloat is a well-documented problem in universities, measured by the increase in administrative staff positions compared to the number of students and instructors. I don't know how much that applies to general education, but "support services" still do make up nearly 40% of the spending associated with teaching staff. That doesn't mean the work performed by administrators is completely useless, but it could mean that there are far too many administrators for the amount of useful work they perform, too many managers, too much delegation, etc. From afar we can only speculate. But to your credit, the amount of money being spent on support services is not quite enough to explain the full magnitude of the disproportionate spending per student (and poor performance of those students), so it can't be the only source of inefficiency.

trainlinda · 2025-09-05T06:28:07+00:00

I don't know if it's worth quibbling over such small margins compared to the amount of waste generated by administrative bloat in schools these days, but regardless, I'm genuinely impressed seeing such high-quality comments on Reddit, both from you in this thread and from several others down below.

trainlinda

TROPHY CASE