> got my procedure done at Dartmouth in Lebanon, but I heard they're no longer doing it.

Whether or not they'll perform it on a 18 year old is a different question, but they certainly perform the procedure on some.

> Eng acknowledged that "it's clear MBTA service is not at the level it should be," and hasn't been for a long time. He did not list specific steps he would take on day one, but cited several broad areas that need immediate attention at the T, including safety, reliability, scheduling and finding more workers.

That sounds a lot like someone who is aware it is currently none of the things you mention.

• Waterproofing repairs in the station - which is I believe what's put the escalator out of commission.

• Building a new headhouse to the Northeast, basically in front of the District Hall building.

Eh, NYS is just as infamously difficult and corrupt.

Because it's a pretty terrible idea when you've got a fuckton of empty land to work with, and virtually nowhere does it make sense unless you wanted to build a canopy anyway.

You're introducing large additional costs and complexity for no reason.

• An overhead structure is a lot of additional....structure, that you didn't need vs just....putting the things on/near the ground.

• $ to build.

• $ to maintain - structure has to be maintained, crews working on the structure or panels now need to care about fall protection, traffic, access, you'll have lots of lane closures for structure work, and so on.

• Increased safety risks

• Your overhead structure has to be supported. Which means support posts. Line the interstate with phone poles every 50ft and you'll have a lot more crash deaths. (small) road signs + light posts are designed to breakaway because they're not supporting anything - can't do that with a structure.

• Increased damage/failure rates

• now you've got car crashes regularly damaging sections of your overhead structure. You see how fucked up guardrails get, imagine if each one of those crashes took out some big overhead structure that collapsed on top of the roadway and cars.

• Road debris and pollution will collect on the panels and reduce efficiency.

• If you're doing it anywhere populated, now any taller buildings/new development going up in the future are likely going to slash output on nearby sections of panels.

Etc.

If you want economically efficient power, it should look like this: Luz del Norte. Anything else is wasting money and efficiency for no reason. Especially not in a world where we can't produce enough solar panels to meet demand - which means they should be getting installed in the most optimal sites with the highest production efficiency first.

Or watch the video of construction (spanish but you don't really need the words): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1e9jj0d43w0

And compare the low complexity of doing that vs the complexity of trying to build vast overhead structures over roadways.

This is a municipal utility, not a private company. What point are you trying to make?

How much of that cost is actual cost of the pipe vs more variable costs?

I'd think in a small town with not a lot of other infrastructure underground and a relatively mild climate/shallower frost line, you'd be coming in towards the low end of things in terms of per foot costs.

No, you've just chosen a bad metric.

The population of the town is not evenly distributed over the land area of the town.

A brief glance at a map indicates that pretty much the entire population of the town lives in a reasonably compact street grid between I-25 and the Rio Grande, while the municipal borders of the town include a vast area of empty desert to the north with near-zero development/infrastructure/population. Just as there aren't even roads there, there also aren't water pipes to maintain.

The US Census Demographic Data Map Viewer indicates that portion of town where anyone actually lives is around 1k people per square mile, and even that is probably understating the density of where the water pipes actually run, since the borders of those census tracts still include some big chunks of empty land.

That doesn't exactly make it a metropolis, but it is probably 5x+ the population density of the number you've come up with, and a much more reasonable density for having a municipal water system.

Edit: And beyond this, being somewhat of a tourist town, the need for services is substantially higher than raw population numbers would suggest. There's at least ~20 hotels/motels/RV parks within town limits.

The article notes: > "The city can attract more than 100,000 visitors during holiday weekends as people flock to the hot springs and the state's largest lake"

Those are obviously not all there at once, but the water system is clearly serving far more than the ~6k year round population, as well.

> I heard of Palladium but the capacity for that space is so big.

There's two spaces, the smaller space (Upstairs) is 500.

Boston/Cambridge:

Brighton Music Hall is 500.

Middle East complex - Upstairs is ~200, Sonia is ~350, Downstairs is 575.

Those both host a lot of the heavier gigs that come to town in that size range.

Sinclair is ~525 but I rarely see any heavy shows booked there.

If you're tiny, O'Briens is 75 I think.

Smaller places I've seen metal shows at before in the wider area:

Worcester - Ralph's Rock Diner - ~400.

Providence - Fete Music Hall's smaller room is ~200, Alchemy - ~300.

Edit: Haven't been there, but Taffeta in Lowell is in that size range I think and has multiple metal gigs on the upcoming calendar.

You could also probably skim this listing of upcoming punk/hardcore shows in the region for venues I haven't mentioned, if they'll book that they'll certainly book metal: https://safeinacrowd.com/

You've linked a site that is tenant resources for Wisconsin.

Wisconsin does not have rent control or rent stabilization (to my knowledge), and is completely inapplicable to the discussion at hand.

Unlike Wisconsin, Oregon does have laws regarding rent stabilization and passed rules about lease renewals as part of that.

Here is a brief summary

In short, if you've lived somewhere for 12 months or more, your landlord can't choose to non-renew your lease + can't evict you unless they can show repeated lease violations, the unit is being demolished, extensive renovations, the landlord is moving into the unit, or they've sold it to someone who is going to move in.

Otherwise, your LL can give you a 7% + inflation rent hike per year, but they can't get rid of you.

Policies like these generally require cause for an eviction or for you to be removing the unit from the market entirely long term (such as moving into it, converting it to a condo and selling it, etc).

Otherwise, the existing tenant is allowed to renew their lease forever as long as they can pay the rent w/the yearly increases.

Which is to say - you can't evict or otherwise force out the current tenant just to go get a new one at a higher rent or one you like better.

Note that you have identified one of the other aspects - landlords may get more selective about tenants (legally or not) when they have fewer tools to get rid of annoying ones.

I'm skeptical. I mean, some politician certainly would have, but there's politicians who call everyone they don't like a terrorist.

Destroying military equipment is pretty squarely within the realm of normal/not against international norms as far as actions for forces to take in a conflict.

If you're a country attacks are directly being launched from, it's hard to claim you're out of bounds as a valid target for where those actions take place.

> When we take it upon ourselves to decide who it's right and proper to murder, it becomes a very murky, grey area.

....ok? I don't really understand how this sentence has anything to do with the event or topic. I don't think anyone even died here.

That wasn't typically the label used for the run of the mill fighters in Iraq or Afghanistan. Not saying no one called them that, but "Insurgents" or "Enemy combatants" seemed to be much more common labeling.

And targeting unattended military equipment is is noticeably less of a "terrorist" than typical practices from those conflicts.

IS was called that, sure, but that was pretty deserved with their tactics/practices.

This is also a support and maintenance contract, not just implementation.

Turnstiles, fareboxes, software/back end payment systems, etc.

The existing fare system already has those costs and they would be expected to be higher (as it gets more obsolete and harder to support) over that time period than the new system. So those aren't exactly new/additional costs vs what the MBTA was already spending at status quo to continue to have a fare system.

You're looking at more like a $650m number for the actual "new fare system" and $300m for a decade of support/maintenance. To be clear, I'm not at all happy with that price or the project management/timeline.

MBTA fare revenue in 2019 was around $672m, 2023 fare revenue is expected to be around $475m.

We're talking about 1 year's fare revenue to implement the project itself, and combined costs (project + ongoing costs) should still be only around 10-15% of the decade's fare revenue. With the at least 20 year project life, you'd be looking at fare collection costs coming in probably below 10% over the 20 years.

Ignoring inflation, over 10 years at pre-pandemic levels, the MBTA would bring in ~6.7 billion in fares. (At current levels, $4.75 billion), and $13.4 billion for 20 years. The fare system can be expected to cost around $1bn for the decade, around $1.3bn for 20 years.

So, the question is:

Where are you coming up with another $4-5 billion for the T in the next decade from?

And if you do have that $4-5 billion, is free fares the best use of that money or is any of the huge list of projects people want to improve the system a better use of it?

If you have shitty enough weather, that output amounts to virtually nothing. Especially in the shortest days of winter where you're stacking the short days, low sun angle, and potential of snowfall literally covering the panels temporarily/further interfering with sunlight reaching them.

Scroll to the bottom for a cold spell w/uncooperative weather and the solar outputs estimated:

https://www.iso-ne.com/about/what-we-do/in-depth/solar-power-in-new-england-locations-and-impact

I mean, that's very easy to prove correct, since it's happened recently.

We hit 40% oil-fired generation on Christmas Eve this year, and prices spiked to over $2,000/MWh around that time.

Bloomberg article (archive link since paywall): https://archive.is/LnFvP

You could also just go straight to the source: https://www.iso-ne.com/isoexpress/. "Resource Mix Graph" and then pick 12/24/22 and look at it. At peak, we were generating 6.5GW from oil that day.

You have days, or even weeks where solar in the northeast is basically producing no power, so you still have to maintain a similar amount of non-solar generation as you have now. Batteries are a good bridge for the time-shift problem (peak demand, is often well before/after solar's peak output for the day), but it's unlikely we're going to build absurd quantities of batteries to handle a week of low output when a major storm moves through.

So your traditional generation will not run anywhere near as much in the past, but still has to be maintained and ready to operate. While some portion of maintenance costs are related to how often it runs ("this thing needs replacement every XXX hours of operation"), some portion are just for keeping the thing ready to run even if it's only used once a year.

The same also applies to the grid itself - when that solar isn't outputting for days, your house will draw the same power as if you didn't have solar, so the grid has to remain built out and ready to provide the same capacity to everyone as before.

How you allocate these costs fairly gets thorny.

For fairness, you'll probably see a somewhat higher share of your bills priced at a flat rate in the long run rather than per kWH/by usage.

Total bills paid by the population should be lower, but bills for a current solar owner might be somewhat higher.

I don't think this will kill the value proposition of home solar (especially with further cost declines/tech improvements), but it'll be a little less favorable in that sense.

(Not the previous poster.)

When we are short on Natural Gas we switch over to oil-fired generation. New England does not have the pipeline capacity to meet demand in major cold snaps.

Traditionally, this has been partially met with LNG imports into Boston (and to a lesser extent, New Brunswick). These are less available and while never cheap, are drastically more expensive now.

Last winter and this winter we have had brief periods where the grid is running on 25-40% oil.

This is not the same as saying that total yearly generation is that much oil, we're talking hours or days, so it's a small % of overall generation....although a slightly larger share of costs, since it's a very expensive power source.

Probably 99% of residential leases are for a year term or month to month. (but in the latter case there's nothing to take over - they'd just end their lease). So you're not going to find some lease with multiple years on it to take over, no one has one. Long-term leases can be a thing in commercial real estate (say, a storefront), but pretty much aren't in residential.

You asked about "finding leases to take over". The word for that is a sublet. Someone has an existing lease and is subleasing it to you - a sublet. That is the term you should be putting into your searches if that's what you want.

Now, coming back to the original point. It's possible you can skip the broker fee if you pick up a sublet and then renew the lease when it's up. The landlord doesn't need to list the place, no broker involved.

Some sublet postings will mention that there's an option to renew or the like. You should look for a sublet that says that, and make sure you confirm that it'll be an available option with the landlord before signing.

Considering Boston's typical 9/1 lease cycle, the most likely time to accomplish this would be October-March or so. Pick up a sublet from someone trying to leave with most of a year left on it and renew after.

Units going up for sublet in summer with only a couple months left are usually going to have already been leased to someone else for 9/1. Although occasionally you might find someone who made the mistake of renewing and is now looking to leave. Then you might be able to sign for 16 months or something.

The word you are looking for is "sublet".

If you want to wait until 5AM for a train, sure. Commuter rail's not running by the time a show lets out. Last inbound on the Providence line hits Mansfield station at 10:45PM on weekdays, 9:59PM on weekends.

> irish village

Yes. Been there for 50 years, owned by the same guy for the last 40 (who's actually an Irish immigrant, not the distant descendant of one), has a dartboard, you get the picture of what kind of bar it is.

The Pony Express averaged 10mph. The B/C/E branches only average 7-8mph.

I mean, it's not exactly "weirdly" dead. 5-10 years ago there basically wasn't a thing there of interest to the general public besides the liquor store and Stop & Shop. Redev of a lot of the rest of the area is still in progress.

Also, there is a good, longstanding, relatively cheap bar literally around the corner from where Brato was that also runs a solid craft selection on tap.

If your craft brewery isn't making spectacular beer, why would I drink there vs said bar?

Tomorrow, preferably. Ski season hasn't been great, and you taking one for the team will guarantee that we get a good snowstorm.

More seriously, April.