Part of the problem is that he’s NOT saying it. He highlights the high demand for skilled trades around the country, but a big part of the regional shortages comes from how much higher those wages can be elsewhere, especially in the northeast.

I’m not really sure how I feel about Mike Rowe anymore. On the one hand, I completely agree with him highlighting the fact that the world needs plumbers and electricians and welders and eleventy thousand other jobs that mostly work with their hands. And he’s right that we need to get past this idea that everyone needs…

Tell Mike that if he finds himself needing a magnifying glass frequently, a credit card sized fresnel lens is a great option.

Exactly. Summer is 3 months of hell with only one saving grace, that it’s warm enough to go swimming. Literally everything else you associate with summer is better in spring and autumn. The only saving grace is being warm enough to swim.

Wikipedia goes by the APTA classification of METRORail as a light rail system, which is a separate category from Rapid Transit.

And that’s REALLY grading on a curve. I’ve seen history channel reenactments with more character development than the entire run of SG1 and SGA

Paved roads go to seed pretty quick. They can get washed out, broken up by freezing, and have to be pretty constantly maintained.

Then there’s the part where they dance on the road mound while an opposing player has just suffered a potentially career-ending injury and remains on the field of play.

But again, that’s where you need to “zoom in”. It’s not just about the major cities at the ends of the line. The best HSR trips are under 400 miles, and support occasional travel.

“...high-speed rail doesn’t make sense in a big, spread out country like America”

Metrorail is at-grade light rail with significant amounts of street running. Rapid Transit is a subway or elevated train. Now, if METRO follows through on their proposals to build commuter rail to Cypress, Missouri City, and Galveston, AND they build it is frequent all day regional rail (like only New York, Chicago,…

as much as I want the more powerful surface pro 4, I’m pretty heavily leaning toward a a surface 3.

Evanston is reachable by the Purple line of of the Chicago El. Houston doesn’t even have rapid transit. Chicago getting Aurora is no worse than Houston getting Galveston, and the density between Aurora and the loop is much more continuous than in Texas.

Half of Illinois?

and seriously, take a look at Houston and Chicago side by side (and at the same scale) on google maps. The urban core of Chicago is substantially larger, and Houston quickly declines into low density sprawl

Philly is the same way. there are millions of people just outside the city limits, and lots of small cities that get their own stats even though they’re basically just subregions of the main metro.

Houston (634 sq mi) is more than twice ( the size of Chicago (227). Add in another 400 sq miles of Cook County, and Chicago probably has 4 or 5 million.

Right, and Houston’s 6 million is based on very generous definitions of “Greater Houston” by the census. Also, because of continuous annexation, there are vast parts of the “City” of Houston that would barely qualify as suburbs anywhere other than the American southwest

In Arrow season 1, they used different cities skylines for establishing shots depending on which billionaire’s skyscraper they were at. For Merlyn, it was a 10 year old stock shot of Philadelphia that always distracted me. They were trying to make it look like he was in Liberty 1, but that hasn’t been the tallest…

Hell, I know plenty of Americans would be happy to pay it, given what we already pay for stuff like Netflix and HBO

oof, missing the mark on “npr voice” just sounds brutal.