>But she can't introduce bills in the same way.

Why not? Honestly, could she not introduce bills on those issues too?

With demand the way it is, that house probably sold for more than asking. People are smart not to pay more than they can afford, or commit to massive renovations they can't do or pay for, but enough people are willing to do all that and so these dumps keep selling high.

It seems fairly obvious, but you should probably look for jobs here before you move. That way you have a much better sense of your income here and general location in the state. Boston is the hub for colleges, but we do have some scattered throughout the state. Academic jobs here are very competitive, so landing one before moving makes a lot of sense. Once you have jobs, you know roughly where you will need to live and can search the areas commutable to your jobs for housing. Nobody here can tell you what's affordable without knowing where you have to be for work. Generally the farther you are from Boston, the cheaper housing becomes. Central and western MA are much more affordable, but you have fewer high-income jobs available so most people have longer commutes as the trade off for more land and cheaper housing.

Eh. The US is still very religious. Try running for president as an atheist.

I completely understand how it can be a coping mechanism, but that only works if you believe it. If you stop to think why God would allow millions to die horribly while saving a select few, or why he allows suffering at all, or how he could be omnipotent while we also have free will, or which God is the real God, etc., then believing in it enough to actually draw any peace from that belief is pretty tough.

I can't stand how bad things aren't caused by divine power, but good things always are. All the people pulling survivors out of the rubble of the earthquake in Turkey were praising God for each survivor, but nobody was asking why God allowed a million others to die horribly in terror.

Things do work out sometimes, and we need to try to keep our chins up and hope for and work toward better days. You don't need divine intervention to do those things.

The major problem is still access. I live in one of the many large areas of my state where most people commute to the big city, but the only practical way to get there is to drive. There is no subway service and the nearest commuter trains are about a half hour away. Most people would rather drive an hour and a half each way than drive a half hour and then hope there is still any parking left to pay for at the closest train station, wait for a train, and then take that in, and do the reverse home. Trains can be late and sometimes they're overfull and you have to wait a long time for the next one. You don't really save any time taking the train, and it is often longer. The only advantage is being able to sit and read instead of driving, but that assumes the seats aren't already full. Having a slightly shorter commute and knowing you can leave when you want to instead of having to hope the train schedule works out for you is also a big advantage of driving. To make mass transit a more realistic option for more people, we need a much bigger investment in rail service. More lines extending to more parts of the state with more regular and reliable service. Without that, people are still going to drive.

I'm not suggesting that teachers come in early and stay late without additional pay. I'd love to see schools or the state hire staff specifically for these roles. If teachers want the extra work for extra pay, cool. If not, there are other people available. In fact, lots of towns have before and after care already, so these people already exist and are working and being paid. I'm just saying we should try to better integrate them into the standard school offering. The cost of before and after care is high for parents, and the school day hours no longer make sense. The days seem to start between 7 and 9 and end between 2 and 3:30. If you have multiple kids, you might need to be driving back and forth multiple times. The school day seems to have been designed with a stay-at-home mom in mind. Those days are mostly gone. We should rethink the school day like we re-thought women's roles in society, and recognize that both parents are typically working full time these days.

Even where they do have them, they're still expensive. The people most likely to need before and after care are the people who can't afford to have one parent stay home. The costs of before care, after care, vacation care, and summer care are outrageous. Planet Money did an episode on child care and said it's basically a broken market and people are now pushing for the "solution" of parents taking out huge loans for child care like they do for college. It's insane. To have kids these days you have to either be rich enough to pay for everything or poor enough that you don't pay for anything. The middle class just gets screwed.

Adjusting start times makes sense for kids, but I don't know how anyone expects parents to be able to have multiple children of different ages and get their kids safely to school while holding down full time jobs. People complain that parents want schools to be convenient babysitting programs, but the reality is that we aren't in the 1950s anymore. Mom doesn't sit at home preparing meals and sewing clothes between pick up and drop off at school. Having kids is extremely expensive and forcing one parent (still most likely to be mom) to give up a career and income in order to get kids to and from schools at staggered times is rough. I don't know why this state doesn't have more free before and after care programs. There aren't too many jobs that let you start at 10:00 AM, leave at 2:00 PM, and take several days off per month for random half days and school holidays and closures.

I will add to this. The place is vegan, but the food is good. When you say a place is vegan, that's good news for vegans and often a turn off for non-vegans. I'm not a vegan, at all, and the bowls are damn good. Super filling and delicious, and yeah sure vegan and healthy too. Mostly delicious though.

I agree that is safe to say, but it is also safe to say that a majority of MA tax money is spent on the greater Boston metro as well, so that doesn't tell us how much leaves greater Boston and goes to all the rural towns like you said. Do you have a source for your claim? I'd like to verify that and see how much towns are getting from Boston.

Do you have a source for this? I'd like to see how the towns break down on local funding vs redistribution from Boston as you say.

Yeah, it's a tough situation to figure out. Having the best hospital in Boston makes sense because the most people are served by it, but then if you pay taxes and have no hospital nearby you don't feel like you're getting much return on your investment. The same with public transportation. Paying a ton to keep the T going in Boston makes sense, but it sucks to pay for it and not even have a train station within a 45 minute drive. It's a classic problem.

That makes sense. Obviously rural MA has the same representation as everyone else, but I see some merit in the complaints that seem to come up over and over here. Rural MA gets outvoted by greater Boston on funding infrastructure for greater Boston, so they have to pay for it but never get to use it. The city response to this is that it is both available for everyone's use and Boston is the economic hub of the state and attracts all the good jobs that generate lots of tax money. I think the only real merit argument for the rural crowd is that there is terrible public transportation from rural MA to Boston. Commuting to Boston from rural MA is pretty unrealistic for most people, and we are trying to reduce the number of cars on the roads, not increase it. Decent commuter rail lines that actually serve western / rural MA would make this much more fair. Rural folks could actually access the jobs and hospitals and culture of the city, and city folks could also enjoy the rural events and sights and activities while bringing some revenue to small towns that need it.

If sensational claims of correlation equating to causation were banned here, there would be far fewer posts.

It makes sense in theory, but we have a provider shortage. You can imagine that providers working for non-profits serving homeless people aren't making a ton of money. Recruiting them to such an important, but stressful and low-paying position is tough. Having one hub for services maximizes the number of patients you can treat with limited providers. If you spread those providers out, then you probably can't serve as many people. You'd need way more providers to make it work spread out that way, and we already have a shortage. Like everything else in low SES service work, funding is the major limiting factor. When you ask for more money AND for towns to open up homeless addict residential treatment centers in their town, you can probably guess the answer. Most of them are happy to keep those places concentrated where they are.

Good luck passing that in the legislature, where reps vote for the interests of their towns. Also, I agree with you that having housing spread out would make sense, but spreading out the extremely limited free addiction and mental health services is tough. There aren't enough of them to have them available in every town like you want the housing to be. Telling a homeless addict with mental health problems that they get a free apartment in Framingham, but they have to go to Cambridge to get counseling or addiction treatment, isn't going to work for people who typically have no car or income.

I'm not in this area and don't have a dog in this fight, but I think most people opposing these types of places aren't arguing that they don't work. They usually object to bringing lots of homeless addicts to their neighborhood. Those homeless addicts need help and housing, and most people agree with that, but NIMBY is real. In these cases, it isn't even just the rich people not wanting something to bring down their property values, but a fear that the population assigned to this housing will bring an increase in crime. Everybody wants to house the homeless in theory. Not everybody wants to invite a population with serious substance abuse and mental health problems to their home neighborhood.

It's definitely not funny to be hit like that, but it's also a fairly common thing. Idiots think it's funny. I doubt you were targeted for any reason other than being present when they decided to do it. Hopefully it never happens to you again.

It must be wild living in the "western MA" of large states. You can easily drive from one end of MA to the other in a few hours. Imagine what living in remote rural Texas is like.

Not according to this! A whole bunch of old people are also going to be college athletes now too. It's never too late!