Aaron

If we applied international practices to the Strait of Hormuz, one could easily take a barrel of oil in Abu Dhabi and move it overland to Al Ashkarah in 45 minutes (and vice versa). We really don’t grasp how transformative frequent high-speed oil would be in this country.

1PTO in mass transit: Good idea.
1PTO in Regional/Commuter Rail: Thorny and lots of fare enforcement/infrastructure questions, but at least plausible.
1PTO in freight rail: PEOPLE WILL FUCKING DIE. Not a joke, not an exaggeration, it is a horrifying idea and it would get tons of people killed.

Yo does this mean a New New Brunswick Construction Hole?

No worries I’m just kidding around. Kind of exciting to see a train running over the thing for all the time I spent having to pore over track and signal drawings lol.

Damn, for all the hubbub about the bridge being faster, that train sure is going at a brisk walking pace…

The Judge's full order is actually pretty scathing to DOT. He's pretty much saying "this was an extremely blatant and obvious breach of contract that DOT is not even really disputing, but SDNY has already ordered it rectified so unfortunately I don't get to order it fixed, it's out of my hands."

This year, GDC was planning on awarding contracts for the Surface Alignment and Hudson River Tunnel portions of HTP. But they're on the record as saying they won't award new contracts while the overall long-term status of funding remains in limbo.

2/3 of DOT's defense brief in the GDC case (hearing in Claims Court is tomorrow) is "please don't grant summary judgment to GDC because the NY/NJ case means they're getting paid (for now) so there's no damage". The problem is these court orders don't do anything long-term.

Plan? What are you Matt, some sort of planner? Haven’t you heard that planning is evil communist woke horribleness?

We just *do* things now. And AI something or another idk, I’m tired.

No that’s new Jersey transit.

Well now you’re talking about transit for jerseys that were just manufactured?

I don’t know, I guess? Seems like a non sequitur as we were talking about New Jersey (the state) not new jersey.

No, it is New Jersey transit. It is not New Jersey Transit.

The capitalization - or lack thereof - on the “t” in transit is load-bearing.

I mean, technically not NJT since the Safety Shuttle is operated by Union County Paratransit.

basically the entire apparatus of orgs like Transit Cost Project amounts to trying to negotiate with terrorists.

Sean Duffy isn't gonna suddenly like mass transit because you lowered the incremental cost of a mile of subway by 40%.

"high costs" is actually the cover they use to justify the funding cuts to transit.

Cover of the book Last Harvest by Witold Rybczynski.

Fun book on the topic that’s worth a read.

Does it matter? Even if it were possible to protect all these oil tankers, Hegseth will just refuse to actually take any of those steps because assigning destroyers to escort shipping is not “manly” or “maximum lethality” or whatever.

Logistics, in the minds of fascists, is woke garbage.

Yeah one of the big disservices of most popular retellings of the Global Financial Crisis is they either gloss over or just plain omit (as in the Big Short) the role of oil steadily climbing eventually to >$100 by early 2008. There was a reason people stopped affording to pay their mortgages.

For those transit discourse aficionados, yes, this is also why things don't get better in the transit space is that there is zero sustained pressure. It's a bunch of gadflies bouncing around how whatever is being talked about in the moment is most urgent. "Fix everything!"=fix nothing.

The simple fact is that nobody really cares about switching between Standard and DST. We can't even agree on which one we'd go with - do we switch to standard time forever or DST forever?

It's not important, nobody really cares about Standard/DST, it's just a thing people gripe about twice a year.

Standard/DST is a really instructive case study in "why things do not get better". Everyone complains about changing their clocks...for about two weeks right around when the clocks actually change. The other ~48 weeks of the year? Nothing.

actually the specific explanation is the cocaine has formed a thin haze and that's why the lighting is the way it is.

Has anyone else noticed that he hasn’t changed that number in months? Like yeah it’s made up but he just keeps saying he ended 8 wars. In his head he just had a really busy ten or so months and then stopped ending wars?

@mayorseidel.bsky.social

Everything is gender except gender which is no longer particle physics it’s gender too so I guess everything including gender is gender.

Oh yeah I forgot about that one. to be fair though it is the River Line so forgetting it is pretty excusable...

Speak for yourself I ride regularly.

The thing about having a QB like Caleb Williams who is a genuine magician is that’s a great and useful thing but also it’s not going to go well if he has to do that magic 6 or 8 times a game.

They managed to dodge any actual issues in large part because Venezuela’s VP just kind of went “ok well I guess I’m just in charge now and I will just be a continuation head of government ok” and literally nobody in the Trump Admin cares that all they did was change the name on the signs.

Wow and here I just thought that was a scummy New Jersey private bus company thing I didn’t realize you could run that scam with trains.

You learn something new every day, don’t you?