understandable but no.... :-)

https://darksitefinder.com/maps/world.html#9/42.4539/-71.6657

we need to turn off/down/shield nighttime lighting. In the context of high beams, it's like stationary high beams that will never turn off.

Broken record time: excessive nighttime lighting has done serious damage to core wildlife i.e Nocturnal animals and insects. There are also some strong indicators that excessive nighttime lighting affects human health and mental well-being.

It's not hard to control. Ideally, people would use Using dark-sky friendly lighting fixtures and motion-activated lighting. But quite frankly, it as simple as pointing light fixtures down and using lower-wattage, lower-color temperature bulbs.

Yeah I was going to point out that the OP was probably a city person. There are lots of dark roads inside of 495 especially at 2 AM.

For the longest time, I never used high beams except in very low traffic situations because I forget that thereon. That faint blue indicator isn't really helpful. My current car has auto high beams which so far has never failed to shut off when there's a hint of a car in front of me.

If I have this feature in a 2017 Chevy, most modern cars probably have as well but I bet the operators of said vehicles don't know how to use these features.

https://newenglandwaterfalls.com/

Since only one of us can get the waterfalls book, here is the online source with lots of free info.

Like we have deaths of despair from suicide and drug overdose, I suspect that these attacks against post office employees are crimes of desperation.

Yeah I picked up a tick in the second week of february. Hiking the summer is going to be tick hell.

I have mixed feelings about Lincoln. It is an agricultural community that used extremely exclusionary practices to preserve open space. Which to me means that it should be treated as a nature/agricultural preserve and the state should have the right of first refusal on any property sale. The goal would be to eventually eliminating all buildings except historically/architecturally important ones and rewilding land.

Given Lincoln's proximity to Boston, it would be transit accessible nature space which is more important than most people can possibly imagine. One way to think of it us as a potential addition to Middlesex Fells and Blue Hills.

Mixed-use zoning still reduces the commercial tax base because is typically used for low value commercial like nail salons, coffee shops, and dentist chains. High-value commercial like manufacturing, pharmaceutical, chemical, R&D lab, nuclear medicine isotope production would still be isolated in an industrial ghetto. They should be colocated with residential so that the people that work in these companies can live within walking distance.

Unpopular opinion: the teacher should not have gone on strike.

They should instead have used that same time to teach students about the labor movement, the importance of striking as a way of maintaining a balance of power in the employee/employer relationship. They also should've taught the students about the abuse of power used to suppress the voice of the people.

Yeah, the teachers would been teaching. Just not the lessons the powers that be wanted taught.

This is awfully close to home. Bought a house in July, it gets cold, heat doesn't work. It's important to know that we have a gas furnace.

I check everything I think of and it looks fine. Call the heating contractor, couldn't make it for a few days but since it wasn't horribly cold, we were okay with waiting. A day later I am talking it over with my partner and I showed her the red switch on the wall that says oil burner emergency shutoff. I tell her "this is a switch for oil burners, I don't know where they put the emergency shut off switch for the gas furnace". We both stop and look at each other then the switch. It's turned off. I flip it on, the gas burner starts up.

I don't know who is the bigger idiot. Me for trusting the labeling, or the furnace guy for not fixing the labeling. Fortunately I was able to cancel the heating contractor visit in time and I didn't get charged a fee.

I agree that urban sprawl and all of its secondary effects such as light and air pollution, should be constrained. At the same time, urban apartments can never be cheap enough to make it worth living there and a public transit only environment would make it hard to escape cities.

Nothing stopping you from forming an LLC with the purpose of developing dense housing. Get some investors, some lawyers and start building

lots of good all year hiking. shorter trails where can practice your skills in rougher conditions or at night. longer trails for when you level up

and if you can't kill ticks with fire, kill then with deep persistent cold. with this kind of winter, ticks just sent their alarm clock for mid February.

Thanks for letting me know clarification was needed

There's a couple ways answer your question. First, look up the definition of median versus an average that explains why I used median for rent.

The advice given to us by the same people that suppress wages and use financial engineering to increase in the quality tell us to spend no more than one third of our gross income on housing. Since housing costs are out of our control, it should be what determines the minimum wage.

what did I miss? :-)

minimum wage should be set to 3x the median cost of a 1 br apartment to keep housing costs are recommended levels

We have gas and we are paying over 400 a month. It is a big house (2200 ft.²) but something .

If someone moves into a $4K apartment, it doesn't make the $2K apartment more affordable. It only makes it available which means someone living with roommates in a $4K apartment will probably move into the $2K apartment by themselves.

What's also likely to happen is a landlord will see that somebody moved to a higher price department, do a spiff and spit job to fancy up their apartment then charge $3.5 K.

Building more expensive condos will not do anything to drop the cost of an apartment. It only free up lower-priced properties which are still too expensive.

Make the use a random number generator to control the length of light times on traffic signals

My two tools of choice are the toro1800 electric snow blower, in the Ryobi 40 volt leaf mulcher.

I first bought the Toro 1800 electric snow blower somewhere in the mid-90s and it worked like a champ clearing 150 ft dirt driveway. They sound crazy but it really worked. Even the year of 100 in snow fall. It even clears slushy New England snow but you really need to get it when it's only a couple inches deep.

Having bought a house recently I just purchased my latest iteration of the 1800. We'll see how well it works this year and if the quality is still there.

Also don't cheat on the extension cord. 12 gauge 100 ft is what you'll need.

The Ryobi leaf mulcher was a surprise purchase. I knew it would be okay based on reviews but I was really surprised to see how well it worked. The mulcher shrinks the volume of leaves down by 4X and one charge on the battery is good for about 2 and 1/2 to 3 leaf bags full of mulched leaves. Nowhere near enough for a big yard but with a couple batteries and a quick charger you'll clear your yard relatively easily.

Lawn mower, I have no idea. We are trying to stick with reel mower from Craig's list

This year I'm not picking up leaves. I'm leaving them for the insect habitat over winter and I'll get them in the I know some people say it'll kill the grass but it hasn't been a problem for me.

Lowell, 2200 SQ ft, 4 bedrooms, $4.2k piti.

Lowell is not a bad place. Not too many shooting at traffic incidents...

Never forgets, inflation may be at a 40 year high, corporate profits are a 50 year high.

<hangs head in shame> I'm sorry. I'm new in town.

And this is why you don't wear or do anything that reduces your awareness of your surroundings.

Killing the natural gas pipeline in a good way to reduce future use of natural gas. If we had a pipeline in place, the powers that make a profit off of the operation of said pipeline would insist on keeping it in operation. The same forces that keep the pipeline open would fight tooth and nail to keep using natural gas for heating and cooking in residential and commercial properties.

If instead, we shifted everybody off of natural gas for heating and onto heat pumps, we would free up a tremendous amount of natural gas for electrical power generation plants where it would be much more efficiently burned. Moving away from natural gas in the home would significantly reduce the amount of leaks of natural gas from the pipeline under our streets.

The gas utilities would still bitch about losing residential customers but fark them.