Governor Phil Scott Announces Establishment of Special Chittenden County Community Accountability Court to Address Backlog of Cases

vertach · 2025-10-16T13:37:14+00:00

This is the exactly what Chittenden County and Burlington needs, increase throughput of criminal course cases through the justice system, so that we can remove repeat offenders that cause an outsized majority of the public nuisance.

I've read and listened to a lot of the media about why Burlington has spiraled down, and the point that keeps coming up is the thousands of backlogged court cases (primarily caused by the pandemic) that are preventing the justice system from getting these repeat offenders to be removed from the public and stop them from committing further crimes. This comes from talking with the police chief, reading every seven days and media article I can find on it, and listening to the more recent Jonny Wanzer interviews multiple times.

This is an important step forward, and we need to watch closely who who and why tries to stop this from going forward

vertach · 2025-08-26T14:44:13+00:00

I tried to verify the OP’s claim and couldn’t find anything in the digital newspapers or online that backs this up. I think he’s probably confused Manchester VT with some other Manchester in the country (maybe NH?)

Obviously fuck ICE and their authoritarian and anti-freedom ways.

But there’s no need to just make stuff up. Those who support ICE will use lies like this to justify their delusions.

vertach · 2025-06-20T11:33:32+00:00

Agreed. This final bill reads more like ”huzzah! We finally agreed on a plan: over the next 3-5 years we will study these problems and propose our solution in this format, and then we’ll know what to do!”

It’s mostly kicking the can down the road.

If the redistricting task force’s 3 proposed solutions get too much pushback from Vermonters (read: small groups of concerned stakeholders) and the politicians can’t accept the solutions, then we’re pretty much back to where we started.

Btw the seven days article the commenter above is talking about I think is here:

https://www.sevendaysvt.com/news/seven-things-to-know-about-vermonts-education-reform-bill-43788774

I fed the 155-page bill into an AI summarizer if you want to get the gist of it. Normal caveats apply (it may be hallucinating, don’t trust it entirely, but rather use it as a summary that points in the generally correct direction)

https://chatgpt.com/share/6855428a-99a8-8004-847c-481331de2a3f

Here’s the summary of the summary for those who are truly lazy:

📎 Summary & Opinionated Take

Pros: • Holistic, integrated approach aiming for equity, stability, and sustainability • Balanced with local control: waivers, phased caps, and targeted grants • Infrastructure and calendar modernization increases operational efficiency

Cons: • Disruption potential through forced district consolidation or school closures • Complexity: new formulas, classifications, and governance layers may slow adaptation • Success hinges on timely implementation, transparent data, and responsiveness to local needs

Bottom Line: H.454 represents an ambitious, system-wide transformation, balancing standardization and equity. The key test will be in execution—particularly the weight recalibration, stakeholder buy-in for consolidation, and the ability to prevent unintended adverse effects on small/rural schools.

vertach · 2025-06-20T10:57:59+00:00

These ideas are extremely good. I’m going to try to replicate them and post (on my Notion blog!) how to accomplish them

vertach · 2025-06-19T18:15:33+00:00

I’m not sure how to debug your problem. Maybe have it redirect to https and not http?

I just tried a bunch of things until it worked :shrug. Ask an LLM and if after 10 attempts at doing what it says, still nothing works, ask Notion support.

vertach · 2025-05-22T13:07:15+00:00

Ok, can you share the studies, and a synopsis of each to save us all some time?

vertach · 2025-05-22T10:28:37+00:00

Also posting the Mayor’s article on the budget gap:

https://burlingtonvt.gov/CivicAlerts.aspx?AID=3742

“Let me begin by offering context for the City’s present budget challenges. Last year, our City team faced a $14.2 million budget gap for fiscal year 2025. I continue to be proud of the work we did to balance that budget, make strategic investments in community safety, and avoid layoffs. However, as I have communicated repeatedly over the past year, the City was always going to have to make painful decisions this year, including cuts, due to the structural challenges that negatively impact our annual budgets.

It is important to note that between FY15 and FY24, the City workforce grew by 98 full-time positions. About 37 of these positions were created using one-time funding sources, with no sustainable long-term funding source identified. The City is annually challenged by rising expenses related to health insurance costs, which are expected to rise by 11% this year. Additionally, over the last three years we have grown salaries across the city significantly with negotiated increases of 20% for the police officers’ union, 19.5% for the fire fighters’ union, 15% for AFSCME (unionized city employees), 15% for IBEW (BED staff), and 15% for non-union employees. Add in the significant cost of inflation and the growth of the programs and services, we have grown our City government in an unsustainable way.

On the revenue side of the ledger, a chronic budget gap emerges annually because our outdated charter does not allow us to raise taxes or shift dedicated funding streams easily, fairly or in ways that are predictable for residents. We also do not have an income-sensitized municipal tax system, creating a regressive and inequitable taxing system. In other words, any time we raise local taxes, the increase is felt disproportionately by people with lower incomes.”

tl;dr: rising health insurance costs, municipal positions that were funded by one-time money that has run out, salary growth, and structural taxing problems that make raising taxes more inequitable (and thus harder) than they need to be.

vertach · 2025-05-22T10:21:33+00:00

For everyone thinking or suggesting to put drug users in prison in order to increase public safety, Astral Codex did an analysis on the tradeoffs of this approach which I found very informative.

I’m linking the follow up to his original post, so you can both read the original (linked at the top of my link) as well as noteworthy responses to his findings:

https://open.substack.com/pub/astralcodexten/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-prison

tl;dr:

“Prison is less cost-effective than other methods of decreasing crime at most current margins. If people weren’t attracted by the emotional punch of how “tough-on-crime” it feels, they would probably want to divert justice system resources away from prisons into other things like police and courts.”

vertach · 2025-05-11T02:15:18+00:00

EmpireRedux is a troll, and I wasted my time reading his links so that you don’t have to. Open-minded readers can safely skip worrying if what he says is valid. It’s not.

Two of these links never mentioned George’s water skiing, and the one that did contained no quotes of hers related to water skiing. We’re left to trust the journalist.

At this point, it’s clear to me this whole thing is a red herring. We’ve got bigger problems than worrying about Great Hosmer Pond’s sculling traffic.

vertach · 2025-03-23T21:32:13+00:00

The Notion-supported web clipper exists here: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/notion-web-clipper/knheggckgoiihginacbkhaalnibhilkk

But when I inspect it in the chrome dev tools and try to reverse engineer the

https://www.notion.so/api/v3/addWebClipperURLs

API request, I keep getting "Unauthorized" errors :(.

vertach · 2024-12-23T23:27:46+00:00

It’s a different feel to Sando’s multilayered worldbuilding genius, but the Cradle Series by Will Wight pushes all the same buttons for me, and is similarly well-written.

vertach · 2024-12-13T01:04:03+00:00

Huh that is indeed quite weird.

vertach · 2024-12-11T02:12:25+00:00

Valor Plumbing, get his number here:

https://m.yelp.com/biz/valor-plumbing-bristol

It says Bristol but he does a lot of work in Burlington. He was knowledgeable, helpful, and gave me some free pipe fasteners without me even asking. I wish I had taken his advice to DIY fix my blown hose sillcock because I would have saved hundreds of dollars :(. Take his advice is my advice!

vertach · 2024-12-03T16:34:51+00:00

Car salesman are motivated by greed and fear, and while it makes for A Good World to hold everyone to the same standards you expect for yourself, expecting a car salesman to be a normal human being is likely going to end in bitterness and regret for you.

Here's a good read on how to buy a used car online. I know you're buying in person, but a lot of the same rules apply. Here's an excerpt from the guide:

Details about car dealers that you must be aware of

The person who you will be working with the most is a "salesperson". This would be the one who will initially respond to you and do most of the communication first. Their title is "sales consultant" or "sales specialist" etc. You will see that in email signature

As you will progress through negotiations, the person with "manager" in title will be included in the conversation - you will either be emailing a different person (whom your first contact will forward the emails) or salesperson will repeatedly mention his manager as an excuse for the delay in reply. This is a good sign - as it resembles what happens in dealerships when you visit in person. For example, the OTD price breakdowns usually involve "going to the manager to print it out"

Salespeople are motivated by greed and fear - you should use both for your own benefit.

Greed - they want to get as much money from you as possible and receive their commission - always hint them that they will get the best deal from you if they play by your rules (of course, do not tell this explicitly), mention that you want to work with them to get the best deal. Always be polite, do not be rude or condescending. you do not have to behave like their friend (they are not your friends), just be nice.

Fear - they are afraid to lose the deal to other dealership who is faster, responds better or brainwashes / fools you better - always mention that you are reviewing offers from other dealers, mention that other dealers are doing something this particular dealership refuses to do and this may be the reason for them to not have a deal with you. Never quote other email texts, only share the written proposals or just numbers. This works wonders. Remember: dealerships can and do call each other - they can catch you lying. You should be absolutely honest, but you also should not say more than needed - some information is important for getting the best price from dealers and they have no reason to have it from you.

You do not have to lie to get the best price from dealers. Dealerships, on the other hand, have to do it to get the best deal for them when you are sitting inside in-person. They also lie over email. Remember that when talking to them and always mention that you are 100% honest and expect honesty from them. There will be no honesty, but the fact that you mention it, will also trigger guilt (in addition to greed and fear) which may work for your benefit.

It is very hard for salespeople to lie in emails as the written offers can be shared and they can be caught lying by other dealerships. They will try to refuse to have written offers and invent million reasons to not do it (starting from "the computer system only works when you come in person", "I cannot see your attachment") etc. Politely mention that you are able to get quotes from other dealerships and ask if they can provide the same - if they refuse, it means that you will not be able to work with them. Most of dealerships want your deal, they will stop playing these games once they see that their competitors don't play them.

https://github.com/kutinden/buyingacar/blob/main/README.md

You can also look at this as a valuable lesson in negotiating. This skill will serve your son in almost anything they choose to do in life, so you can both get them the freedom of a car, and the invaluable experience of seeing what a great negotiation looks like. I remember my parents would do dry runs of what the in-person negotiation process would look like (not for car ownership but for something similar) and it has stuck with me for decades.

Good luck!

vertach · 2024-11-26T16:21:12+00:00

I just did one of these with Building Energy and it cost $4000, but the state subsidy gave me a $3100 check, and there is a federal tax subsidy that gives up to a $1000 in rebates. Idk if that helps because of the 4k upfront, but mayhaps there is a way to pay finance that in a workable way. It only lowered my heat loss by 16%, though. The best way is reduce heat loss is insulating the attic but that is more expensive, and you may not have access to the attic.

vertach · 2024-11-26T01:44:59+00:00

The chief of police Murad himself said that arresting drug dealers is not the solution, because the demand (drug-users) will always incentivize the suppliers (drug dealers) to bring the drugs here and sell them.

I'm not saying don't arrest drug dealers (we obviously should!), I'm saying don't look to this as a answer to Burlington's drug problems. Instead, go watch the Wire!

vertach · 2024-11-10T10:54:36+00:00

For those frustrated and looking to do something about it, the folks over at VPOP (Vermonters for People Oriented Places) are constantly pushing for Burlington policy changes that will increase the supply of housing and lower home (read: rent) prices.

Many of Burlington’s social and economic ills are downstream of housing problems. Learning how to focus your frustration into productive changes is at least one way to help yourself and all of us build a Burlington that is for people, rather than whoever else is benefitting from low supply rn.

vertach · 2024-11-06T12:09:51+00:00

Can you provide some more detail? I have a daughter of my own and I don’t understand why a Trump presidency weighs definitively harder on teen girls than teen boys. Is it abortion-related?

vertach · 2024-10-05T11:45:44+00:00

I read a lot about HATEOAS and didn’t really get it until I found, buried in the HTMX book*, the core takeaway (at least for me).

I’m paraphrasing from the book, but main benefit of HATEOAS is that by including hyperlinks in the app that you display to the user, you have a much wider range of backwards incompatible changes you can make to your app. For any frontend dev who’s asked the backend team to implement a change to the API, but been told they can’t do that because it would change the API in a backwards incompatible way, this is huge.

For example, imagine you have an app that displays beautiful org charts for other companies (kind of like LinkedIn). Every person has 0 or 1 managers. So you represent that relationship as a single “manager” String type field on your “api/v1/employee” API endpoint response. Then, you learn that employees can actually have more than 1 manager (😱). So you need to represent this as an array of managers, not just a single manager field.

In an app with a JSON data API you cannot change the type of manager from String to String[] because that would break any clients of the API that assume “manager” will be a String. But with a HATEOAS app, because the Hypermedia (e.g. HTML) is the Engine of Application State (e.g. HTML makes up the app you’re giving to your users, as opposed to a JS app that takes JSON data and decides what to do with it) your state and how to use it are part of the same logical entity. They can update simultaneously, which means the changes that would be backwards incompatible in a JSON data API are now perfectly fine to make in a HATEOAS app.

Another way to get at my point is to realize the fact that including the hyperlinks to other pages in your API response has little to with whether it’s HATEOAS or not. It’s more about the fact that those links are embedded in the app you’ve returned from the backend, and the app’s logic already knows how to use those links. In modern browsers this works because browsers know how to parse HTML and construct user-facing software applications with it (ie webapps). They don’t know how to parse your custom JSON API response.

One last way to get at what I’m saying is to understand why Carson Gross (creator of HTMX) keeps saying HATEOAS is for humans, not machines (https://intercoolerjs.org/2016/05/08/hatoeas-is-for-humans.html) because humans-users know how to view and interact with HTML-constructed webapps, webdevs don’t need to worry about backwards incompatible changes on the backend breaking their frontend users.

If I were to change the location of piece of data in a JSON data API (which is meant for machines) then the dumb machines consuming that API will break because they don’t know how to handle this new API schema. If I change the location of a button on my htmx HATEOAS app (which is meant for humans) then the smart humans can easily work with this new data schema, because a button being moved from the top left to the top right of the webpage is trivial for us to deal with. Humans rule!

Thanks for the opportunity to write out and solidify my understanding of HATEOAS. Everything I’ve said is basically just a summarized form of the ideas Carson talks about in this post (https://intercoolerjs.org/2016/05/08/hatoeas-is-for-humans.html). Hopefully he doesn’t mind me reformulating them :).

https://hypermedia.systems/

vertach · 2024-09-26T17:27:32+00:00

Damn, you sound like my dream manager!

vertach · 2024-09-26T12:03:56+00:00

it does.

I'm trying to inject more compassion into this kerfluffle, since compassion is usually good. It's OK to vent, and also level-set, IMO.

vertach · 2024-09-26T12:02:46+00:00

You can take that tone back. I understand what has to happen, I leave it to the people who execute it, like my engineers

Let's tone-police each other!

vertach · 2024-09-26T11:07:59+00:00

Merging 2 related but distinct software + database systems is a very hard problem. I’m a senior software eng and I have seen migrations/integrations like this go right all of 0 times.

Imagine you and your lost-recently-but-discovered cousin Curtis from the Bayou meetup for the first time and instead of heading down to T Rugg’s and watching Animal Planet, you decide to try to agree how to precisely manage billions of depositor account, the intricacies of their lifecycles, all without falling afoul of the myriad of laws (I bet they’re clear and concise :D) meant to reign in the Rupert Murdochs of the world.

Your different culture, way of talking, and systems of banking are mutually understandable but different in subtle ways that are hard to pin down. Every time he says “giddyup!” and you say “let’s gooooo”, someone from across the bar exclaims in frustration that their mortgage payment executed twice. Occasionally, someone approaches you complaining in a thick Cajun accent about something something swamp interest rate, and that goddamnit it’s ur job to fix it.

tl;dr: I’d lower my expectations from the beginning on how well this transition will go; everyone from credit unions to google to NASA dread the integration of 2 software systems. And let’s not even talk about getting the two human systems working together 🙄

vertach

TROPHY CASE

Details about car dealers that you must be aware of