I'm afraid that if you want to be in the 'mountain region' of PA (I presume you basically just mean the north/north-central part of the state?), you're going to have to contend with fracking wells now and for a long time coming. Honestly you should either find a way to convince yourself that it's okay to live around them, or else just don't live in that type of area.

I can't speak to which towns are good or bad to live in--not really an area of the state that I know well on that level.

Whatever degree of damage could ever be done to Pennsylvania by the plume of smoke and unburned chemical vapors: it's done. The fire has been out for 9 days, and these chemicals are volatile enough that anything which didn't burn has already either offgassed by now, OR is trapped in the soil or the ground water--both of which will affect Ohio, not PA.

There may be damages from airborne contaminants that ought to be compensated, but I highly doubt that airborne damage continues at this point.

The dissonance of describing a chef who is too anonymous to refer to by name as "well-known". [anon's kiss]

What I wish Route 6 would get is a DC Fast charging station (preferably Electrify America) somewhere around Coudersport, or at least somewhere along the Coudersport to Mansfield stretch. I'm sure it'd be a loss leader for EA if they ever put one in, but it'd be nice to have. Even a cheaper 65 kW system from Chargepoint would be great to have up along there. To the best of my knowledge (and though I love the area, I don't live up there, so I could be out of the loop on this), there is no DC station anywhere along that route. The closest you get is an EA in the Wal Mart parking lot just outside of St Marys. That's not nothing, but it's hardly convenient to Route 6.

I'm not sure when you last drove on that stretch, but I have taken it a few times in the past couple of years and it does seem to be finished. Especially the bit at the PA 144 end.

I'm curious what he would do to make up for eliminating school property taxes. When I hear the phrase "school property taxes", what I envision is the portion of real estate property taxes that gets used as revenue for local public school districts to use. I have a general but not well refined critique of this practice, because I think it sucks that the funding of a child's school (and therefore likely the quality of the education available to that child) is so dependent on the perceived property values where that child had the good (or bad) luck of being born. But obviously schools need this portion of their revenue. I think I support (but am not 100% ironclad in this) pooling tax revenue statewide and distributing it to public schools more evenly.

So I think that's where I go next on this subject for Rozzi's position: is that what he would do in lieu of school property taxes? It's hardly like he can eliminate that tax and replace the revenue source with nothing, right? So what's the alternative in his mind?

Biden: "I was gonna give a speech about the importance of infrastructure today, but, uh, well...[gestures broadly behind him] there it is."

Everything I know is wrong. Black is white. Up is down. And short is long.

I cannot believe what is happening!

Yeah, Democrats would have to pick up every single un-called state house seat that is even remotely leaning Dem at the moment JUST to have a chance of taking the majority. It almost certainly won't come to pass that they will, but it's wild that they're this close.

I recently did a deep dive of populations on a city/town level basis in Pennsylvania. There are 2,570 towns/cities/boroughs/whatevers in PA, and the average population size is 5,046 people per city/town. 26% of our population lives in a town/borough that is smaller than this average, but they're spread out over approximately 1,600 towns. Literally almost 2/3 of the cities/towns/boroughs in PA are so small that they're smaller than the average. No wonder so many in this state have a hard time accepting that the cities really do pack a voting punch! Most of the towns you encounter are miniscule by comparison

Here's another fun one: if you take the bottom-1,000 ranking of towns by size (so, like, start with Centralia at literally just 4 residents, and add up towns as they increase in size to the one thousandth bigger town from there), you get a population of about 1.276 million, or roughly 10% of the state, spread out over 39% of the towns. That sounds like a lot of people, until you realize that the city of Philadelphia alone has more residents than that. It's so big, that you could spot Pittsburgh's 300,000 residents to these bottom-1,000 towns by size, and they'd STILL only just barely have as many people as Philadelphia does.

Population distribution is a wild thing.

In case your mail-in ballot materials look a little different than OP's (I think each County Elections board is responsible for printing up the envelopes, instructions, and such, though I could be wrong about this), then you may be interested in more info on this. At this link you will find a list of questions relating to mail ballots, including one about what has to be included with a mail-in or absentee ballot. Response bullet point #4 to that question uses the phrase "the current date". This is the ONLY official place online where I have seen this clarified. I don't remember my mail-in ballot packet materials specifying anything more than just "the date."

Maybe I'm biased because I'm used to the tedious instructions associated with mailing antlerless deer hunting license applications. By comparison the mail in ballot rules are almost simple. Sorry to hear you had trouble!

I mailed in my ballot already, not because I expect to be unavailable to vote in person, but because I have two young kids and who the heck knows what unexpected emergency might pop up on Election Day that keeps me away from my polling location. A mailed-in vote still counts, so I just went with that route to hedge my bets against a sudden lack of availability.

Disagree pretty strongly that the instructions are ambiguous. The instruction card in my mail-in ballot materials package was very clear about what to do, and in what order to do it. The only thing it didn't cover was whether or not it was necessary to hand write your return address on the outer mailing envelope. But I know how mail works...letters need a return address, and this outer envelope has a space for a return address to be hand-written in. So I filled it in despite the lack of instruction addressing this.

But like, just read the instructions people! They tell you what to do, and it's pretty darn important that you do it.

Wild, right? We have definitely had a seasonably cool fall, with only a few warm--and no truly "hot"--days in there to constitute an "Indian Summer", and yet the temps never got down to a true freezing point. Very fine line we're riding with this weather.

You've been at it a while!

I really don't think it's all that bad today. It's no more complicated than it ever was before (back when I started hunting 20 or so years ago), you just have more licenses you can buy now. What would be ideal is if the PA legislature would vote to allow the PGC to sell and issue antlerless licenses the same way that almost every other hunting/fishing license is sold: through an online portal. That'd really simplify things. But I digress and go back to still standing by it that this rule for ballots is both not that hard to follow and also completely useless if the goal is extra security around voting.

FWIW the SCOTUS ruling does not forbid the counting of mailed-in ballots that are missing a date on the outer envelope. It instead states that election offices will now not be required to count such ballots. I believe it will now be at the discretion of each county whether undated mailed-in ballots will be counted or not.

I am so used to the onerous rules for applying for an antlerless deer license as a hunter that the notion that I have to write the date on my mailed-in ballot envelope seems like a nothing burger, but I do realize though that this requirement does absolutely NOTHING to increase security for elections, so all the same: I realize it's a loss for improving access to voting.