My dog is afraid of trains which is occasionally inconvenient for traveling somewhere far as we live car free.

If I had just paired his vaccines with Tylenol he would have instead been able to identify the year and model of every locamotive 🚂 and seek them out like he does now with french fries. 🍟

That’s wonderful you are a data engineer, but in a normal business setting most people are not. I’m the only one at my company who knows SQL exists. But everyone knows what Excel is, everyone knows at least the basics of using it. Even if I got my coworkers familiar with and writing SQL (which is a laughable thought) there are still clients.

Data is everywhere, and Excel has been the default program for light data analysis for decades. I hate it as much as the next person, but right now it’s inescapable and irreplaceable.

Excel/Access is literally the only reason I ever boot to Windows anymore.

Power Query

I’ve actually adopted, ‘if cars can occupy the pedestrian area, pedestrians can occupy the car area’.

Those are all very valid points. I didn’t feel the article was critiquing home births at all tho.

To me that article was about two con artists who have made $13 million + by amplifying those valid problems you shared to the point many women wouldn’t even take suffocating babies to a medical professional. There are dozens of babies who died of perfectly preventable causes but those two influencers just pocketed the money without remorse.

Green is parking structures?

Maybe they’re talking about how the Saudis have bribed their way into controlling Republicans?

They keep saying “both sides have to make sacrifices”, what exactly is Russia giving up? Why isn’t the size of the Russian military being severely limited as well, especially given they are the aggressor in multiple conflicts…

After watching this, and also studying the Stanford experiment. It seems to me the source of much human conflict isn’t sex like the sociologist hypothesized, but class structures. But he seemed to refuse to even entrain that possibility.

They will be adding trans and pride flags in their place, maybe a Palestinian flag for good measure.

My city is also playing with electric buses buying different brand and models. One Chinese brand they have drives me crazy because it rings a bell as it moves. It’s louder and more annoying than the gas buses.

I wish my city was running the electric buses at night. Without the noise of other traffic to help mask it, the gas ones sound like explosions as they drive by at 3a. Unfortunately the bus company said it’s cheaper to charge them at night when electricity costs the least.

It’s more infuriating because 99% of the time when they make these bad route decisions they will cite cost. But then are ready to spend orders of magnitude more per mile on less convenient and more expensive to operate people movers to fix the route mistake later.

Pennywise, pound foolish doesn’t even begin to describe…

The brand new $5.5 billion SoFi stadium opened in 2020, and has a brand new $2.2 billion light rail line opened in 2022 (the same line that the LAX people mover is connecting to) that passes 1.6 miles away, but it also doesn’t have a station. My understanding is the stadium owner used their political power to block it because they charge $140 to park per car for NFL games. Recently because of the upcoming Olympics they were going to spend $2 billion on a people mover to the stadium.

Think about that, the original metro line was $2.2 billion, they then spent $3.3 billion fixing the mistake of not actually connecting to the airport, and then they tried to spend another $2 billion fixing the mistake of not connecting to the stadium. $5.3 billion on people movers, trying to correct the shortsighted mistakes from the original build. And if they had done it the obviously right way the first time you could just get off the metro and be at your destination instead of getting off, navigating a connection, waiting for the next people mover…

https://laist.com/news/transportation/la-metro-crenshaw-lax-rail-line-opening-what-to-expect

https://labusinessjournal.com/special-reports/infrastructure-los-angeles-international-airport/

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2024-07-18/rep-maxine-waters-sofi-stadium-people-mover-olympics

For only $157 billion, at this rate it’ll be cheaper to demolish the airport and rebuild it just to put the station where it should have been all along…

LAX is my go to example of how bullshit transit planning in America is and why sometimes doing nothing is better than doing the wrong thing.

The horseshoe is HELL, and in 1995 they tried to build transit to the airport but budget cuts and other shenanigans led to the Aviation/Imperial station 2.7 miles away and shuttle buses that also got stuck in the horrible horseshoe traffic. The station was barely used by any airport employees much less any travelers, virtually nothing was accomplished.

Then in 2025 they try again, but bullshit prevails again and they spend $900 million on a station 2.3 miles away, and $3.3 BILLION on a people mover.

I’m sorry there is no reasonable explanation for why the new station was’t built in the horseshoe all along.

Not learning from these mistakes São Paulo’s main airport did the exact same thing.

Let’s also not forget many countries that today don’t have a visible black population were also very active in slavery.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afro-Argentines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afro-Uruguayans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afro-Chileans

I come from a red state that is waging war on all public education, especially higher education. They have slashed budgets and closed many programs including trades. They did a similar thing to the universities after 2008, it is part of what is forcing tuition to skyrocket.

I think there are still opportunities for people just finishing, but that’s in areas with strong unions which isn’t much of America unfortunately.

Oh I wasn’t trying to throw shade by any means, in my state they are the same license. My point is when I was in college, there was a large cosmetology school across town that was like $1500 to complete your license. It was seen as a cheaper alternative to college, with a decent career path. Now that same program is nearly 10x as much, it’s still cheaper than college but not by much.

But complain about college tuition to most boomers and they will tell women hair school is only $100 and candy bars are a nickel.

Trade school tuition is already skyrocketing. In my home area hair school is $12,000 and a journeyman’s license will set you back $25,000.

Getting education in a trade is cheaper for now but is quickly catching up to a university degree. Once they hit parity will there be an advantage? I guess AI isn’t coming for plumbers anytime soon.