The Bay Area is pretty, but it would be better if we could exile its white residents and destroy their culture forever. The minorities are fine.
I like Los Angeles and the Bay Area. I don't go into the city proper of either very often.
I can believe that about San Francisco specifically, since the culture is so suffused with rich douchebags. Less so the rest of the Bay.
Do even local Texas politicians do that? I knew about Rick Perry (and there was just a nice Washington Monthly piece on that).
Thanks for the link, I hate posting them from the phone. Although I realized when I looked into the details of the study referenced about business taxation that one of the reasons California is lower-tax for businesses compared to GSP than Texas is that a bigger chunk of its taxation is on individuals rather than businesses.
5, 7: Places, like Texas, that make a big thing of the "Why would anyone ever want/have to go anywhere else?," are, like Rick Perry, not to be trusted.
Observe how deftly we Californians now rally around the common enemy, rather than taking the bait of disunity!
Oh I'll take the bait of disunity. LA is a more interesting place that SF.
But the better comparison is L.A. and the Bay Area as a whole. They are both huge varied regions.
They are both huge varied regions.
I love the Bay Area, but all too often "varied" around here means "we have different *kinds* of suburbia!". I mean, there's really no comparison between the two places (mostly because LA is just so much bigger than the Bay Area).
And to the OP: of course you didn't like Marin. Rich old white people are boring.
And to the OP: of course you didn't like Marin. Rich old white people are boring.
But the rich young white people in that area seem to be more actively annoying.
Honestly, my impression of bay area tech industry types is that they're utter douchebags. Unfogged commenters excepted, of course.
Identifying the Bay Area with SF and Marin County is kind of trolling. Anyway I'm not sure how the Bay Area and LA area compare in terms of geographic area, but LA is clearly on a different scale population wise.
Marin is very pretty but absolutely awful in every other way. Which is to say, Halford gets it right, again: execute the residents and raze any evidence of their longstanding hegemony (but please don't salt the earth).
I like white people. My wife is white and so are my kids.
Anyway, California is so last decade. Central PA is the new American Arcadia!
Your random Wikipedia fact lookup: Bay Area has 7 million people in 7k mi^2;Los Angeles CSA has 18.2 million in 34k mi^2.
There are many boring things about California, and one of them is that they expect anyone from outside of the state to give a shit about the boring LA vs. SF fight. The fact that heebie brought it up proves it only takes one Hollywood party to go Hollywood.
There are many boring things about California, and one of them is that they expect anyone from outside of the state to give a shit about the boring LA vs. SF fight.
True. The Sacramento vs Fresno fight, on the other hand, is gripping stuff.
18: If you want to compare CSAs, the Bay one (extending to Stockton, Santa Rosa, Santa Cruz, and Napa) is actually 8.4m people.
Yeah, CSA probably isn't the best. I wouldn't count Santa Cruz as Bay Area (nor Napa but I guess it is) and the LA CSA 's area is inflated due to having San Bernardino and Riverside Counties, even though the population centers should maybe be included. I was hoping that the LA CSA was just LA and Orange counties but didn't look into it closely.
Marin is probably at the top of my list of places to live if I had my choice. Why are a bunch of internet shut-ins pretending to care what the people are like anywhere?
LA is also great, but I think it would be more challenging, just given the distances and travel times between cool stuff.
Central PA is the new American Arcadia!
Unscarred by Pittsburgh's bubbling resentment over the eastern part of the Commonwealth getting all the tax revenues....and congrats VW, just heard about your prize.
Identifying the Bay Area with SF and Marin County is kind of trolling.
Yes, because identifying it with (say) Fremont and Newark is going to give *such* a better impression of the area. Or we could always go with Dublin!
Marin is probably at the top of my list of places to live if I had my choice.
Racist.
25: Now that is really trolling.
I wish people would stick up more for San Diego in these conversations. Double the pleasantness of the Bay Area, maybe 1/3 of the insufferable smugness. The nice parts are pretty damn white and expensive though.
I wish people would stick up more for San Diego in these conversations.
Republican. Why not argue for Orange County while you're at it?
The size disparity is a big factor. I find LA hard to come to grips with personally just because of the distances and car dependence. But the comparison for me really is just with SF proper which is TINY, as other than business meetings around the greater Bay Area and jaunts to Berkeley for performances or a movie at the archive we really don't leave the City. And I really do find Marin yucky - boring bland and unjustifiably smug. Point Reyes is wonderful of course but when the kid has a performance at the Marin Civic Center it's like being in nowheresville.
I love SF but am feeling sad lately because the SV young white male and overly affluent rash really does seem to be taking over. I know this boom will bust and likely soon but in the meantime it feels increasingly alien chez nous.
I attended a conference in San Diego, which makes me an authority, and I kept thinking, there's over a million people in the city alone so why does it feel like there aren't nearly that many?
Hmmm I think those put off by smugness in SF have perhaps restricted themselves a bit in who they hang out with / where they go. One reason I've loved the place so much is the fantastic smooshed up concentration of immigrants from so many many places. Generally not a pretentious, smug bunch, recent immigrants.
there's over a million people in the city alone so why does it feel like there aren't nearly that many?
Most of them live under ground and only visit the surface occasionally.
If tons of immigrants from different places smooshed up together is your thing, whether or not in the "we're having an orgy" sense, then I do have to say that LA has SF beat by a mile. Particularly these days.
Its the smooshing together thing in a walkably dense small place with tons of transit so that one is not car dependent that is the difference, halford. I am very confident I would adore LA if I could navigate it as comfortably as SF, I just don't know how.
Also SF does punch significantly above its weight in the performing arts, both home teams and visiting, but that doesn't matter that much to most people I know.
I don't understand LA. Nothing I've heard about it seems particularly appealing, the weather seems awful, though sone of the surrounding scenery is beautiful and I guess if you have to work there there are probably some nice things & good people to make life not totally miserable.
Can someone give me examples of nice things that happened to them in LA that would not be likely to happen in the SF Bay Area, or bad things that happened in SF that would be improbable in LA?
My list of nice things about SF:
* The weather. Almost never too warm, almost never so cold my ears hurt.
* I can get lots of places quickly without worrying about who has a car.
* Lots of conspicuously weird people, enough that if someone is behaving really strangely, I don't feel particularly worried or upset or even surprised. This is really, really relaxing to me in comparison with East Coast cities like DC or New York, where people who behave strangely are avoided and excluded from lots of places.
This last part is particularly important to me, because I have a close relative who lives out there, who has a fairly conspicuous form of mental illness. In some other cities I'd guess that it might be difficult to hang out with him in public, but in San Francisco he's just another weirdo, and nobody really seems to give him much trouble.
But he's white, so I guess under Halfordismo he'll have to find somewhere else to go. Maybe Seattle? I kind of got the same vibe there.
when the kid has a performance at the Marin Civic Center it's like being in nowheresvillethe presence of genius!
BTW I am totally aware that I am generalizing from a single example on that last thing, so I hold that belief super weakly. Maybe I'm just projecting my preconceptions?
Weather in SF objectively SUCKS. Unrelentingly cold damp wind off the Pacific, every time you try on a jacket you have to ask whether a cardigan would fit under it, bare legs always a risk, etc.
Except this weekend of course when I was stuck inside writing a brief.
Virtually no wings in that theatre jroth, just a cinderblock wall. Nothing like watching a kid at full speed hurtle off into the "wings" and have to bounce off concrete.
Republican. Why not argue for Orange County while you're at it?
Diminishingly. Went 51.5% for Obama in 2012. (Whereas Orange was 53% for Romney.)
I've always liked the weather in SF, though I've never actually lived in the city year-round. More or less for the reasons given in 35. I'd rather be cold than warm, and I'd rather be often-cold-but-not-THAT-cold than alternate between too warm and too cold.
I'm prepared to be objectively wrong about it, though.
Curses, am at risk of being a lizard, incapable of generating or maintaing body heat independent of direct sunlight and a rock! (alternatively hot water bottle & blanket)
Insert "revealed as" between "being" and "a".
I'm not big on slapstick, but 40 made me laugh.
The week I spent in SF was part of a monthlong cross-country trip (recently discussed) for which I had packed only one pair of jeans. Wearing them every single day was the best. On top I think I had to layer most of the clothes I had brought.
I dislike heat, so in theory I should like SF weather, but descriptions of it by fans never sound that appealing to me. But I'm a pretty resolutely 4-seasons kind of guy.
I have lived in both, and my preference would be to live where I grew up in San Francisco. Unfortunately, what was comfortably UMC then is now called "billionaire's row". Gentrification negatively affects the gentry, sometimes.
44&45: VINDICATION AT LAST!!
Talking about "weather" in any level of detail across either the LA or Bay Area Metro regions as if it can be characterized as a single thing and then used to compare and contrast the two is even more fatuous than the rest of this discussion. Which is saying a lot.
Of course, you can't talk about weather in SF without noting the microclimates. Palo Alto/Redwood City have temperate weather all day and all year (more or less). Parts of the city proper are fogged in for at least part of the day most days. Etc. Depends very much on where you are.
But the SF discussion has become boring at this point, no? I hear Cape Town is even more beautiful.
Tooling around Rockridge and environs yesterday I experienced the following awful revelation: holy crap I'm bougie.
Parts of the city proper are fogged in for at least part of the day most days.
I get online to escape this.
46: best was attempts to fit the elephant for Carnival of the Animals through the stage left wing during dress rehearsal. First try, hmmm not working, back up and try again, second try - nope, really not working, third increasingly desperate attempt, hurried consultation between front and back legs, then shrunken creeping to stage right wing behind parakeets going at it hammer and tongs in formation ... Russian voice from darkened theatre: "guys, what is this? No, it is not possible! What is going on?!?"
Alas did not catch this on phone video. The only kid video I would ever have actually watched.
I really feel most at home when I feel a little put out and disenfranchised, which is kind of why Texas feels just right. We have crappy farmer's markets and can pine for the extensive, beautiful kind of Marin County farmer's market, but in reality I'd be filled with self-loathing if we had that kind. This is genuinely why I can't have nice things.
At this point, it's not really any easier to navigate San Francisco proper by public transit than it is to navigate, say Downtown LA and Hollywood (which are extremely dense areas of roughly similar size to the City of SF) by public transit. This is in part due to the fact that public transportation in SF sucks, as any SF native will tell you when not making this particular comparison, but still. The main differences are that (a) there's more of an expectation in LA that you'd do things outside of that limited geographic area, so it's harder to stay confined to your limited zone (including in terms of your employment) and you'd likely feel more deprived without a car; (b) although it's changing slowly, bougie whites like me have a deep aversion to public transit so it's deeply race and class segregated.
And driving in LA was not awful. There was not the killer instinct that you have in some cities. Busy, yes, but utter clusterfuck, no. It took a while to get places, just because of the sheer distance being covered, though.
Hmm. On that one, you weren't really trying to get peak places in peak hours. There are some clusterfucks!
Hmm. On that one, you weren't really trying to get peak places in peak hours. There are some clusterfucks!
55: Interesting. How long has this been true?
Also AFAIK basically everyone in a mass-transit-based city thinks their system is bad. For example, New Yorkers visiting DC seem to think our system is nice because it's pretty, spacious, and comparatively clean, but we think it sucks because frequency is low on the weekends, there's no very late night Metro service, transfer stations are jammed with slow shamblers during rush hour and tourist season, and it's almost impossible to get crosstown efficiently if you're uptown.
Maybe everything is easier for tourists? I've never had problems in San Francisco, but I've never lived there either.
I am going to count 57 and 58 as two separate, independent pieces of evidence for my "everything is easy for tourists" theory.
Ok, fair enough. I did go from my hotel to Airedale's, to LAX, at 7:30 in the morning. The hotel people told us to avoid the highways, and it not awful.
Also AFAIK basically everyone in a mass-transit-based city in the US thinks their system is bad.
51: What the fuck were you doing in Rockridge? The only thing worth going over there for is Ramen Shop. (Well and I guess I've heard good things about A16. Still, I've mostly forgotten that Rockridge exists at this point.)
I don't really know LA well enough to comment. The BA was overcrowded at 4.6 mil when we moved there in 1971, and has surely gotten even worse since. But the natural environment is really spectacular, and a big part of that is the complexity and variety. When we lived on a hill in Orinda, we could watch fog roll over from Oakland in waves, including crashing vertically upwards when hitting the next hill. Mt. Diablo was dominant the other way, but a few clear winter days we could see the snowcapped Sierras. We could always see a little bit of San Pablo Bay and some hill between Petaluma and Sonoma off beyond that. Land, water, islands, hill, valley, forest, grassy hillsides -- a wonderful diversity.
The LA basin doesn't feel the same to me -- maybe the mountains are too high to be the same kind of part of my felt environment. I haven't been there enough to experience it as much other then the pain it takes to get from one place to another.
I am apparently not allowed to credibly assert in this context that SF's public transit affirmatively does not suck and in fact is very dense and useable. So I won't bother. Also agree conversation has become boring. Tried to bring some light relief by way of outtakes!
Well, there's a Marin Sun Farms outpost as well, and an interesting-looking beer shop (that I didn't go in), and a different butcher shop, and Bittersweet, and a decent bookstore, and a store that had some nice paper, and several other things, but none of those things are the reason I was there. (Actually, Bittersweet kind of is.)
59, 62: NYers don't think the subway sucks. People moan about it (I waited 8 minutes for a 6 train!), but they don't think it sucks. And while the weird enormousness and cleanliness of the Metro is notable, it is not envied (i.e., we know it's clean because it's closed half the day).
59 -- for maybe 10-15 years. Still very much in flux. But there are a bunch of neighborhoods with lots of people, like maybe hundreds of thousands of people, where more people use public transit than drive, it's a huge public transit system and quite good, especially in the densest areas. But most of those people are poor and most non-poor people also want easier access to things (of which there are a lot) that are not public transit accessible. A lot of it has to do with people's mental geographies of the city. For example I grew up here so I still think of a lot of things as closer than they now are in reality b/c of traffic, so the idea of being limited to a goddamn bus route seems annoying.
68: Right. We think the Metro is adorable, and kind of like the Disneyworld monorail, but wouldn't dream of wanting to trade for it. The NYC subway sucks (loud, dirty), but only if you understand that to include the caveat that it's by far the best in the US.
The real takeaway from my one, fleeting visit to the state: California is totally overrated. Even one of its best features, the beautiful ocean, is a tease—you can't even swim in most of it without a wetsuit. Nice views and great burritos to boot, but I'll keep my ugly-but-bathwater-warm Atlantic coast, thanks.
???? You can swim in the Pacific; are you nuts? Maybe not off Ocean Beach in February, but come on.
Also, I liked the CTA well enough as a Chicago resident.
???? You can swim in the Pacific; are you nuts? Maybe not off Ocean Beach in February, but come on.
Also, I liked the CTA well enough as a Chicago resident.
68, 70: Hmm, seems like the New Yorkers I meet in person in DC are very different from the ones here on Unfogged - a lot of them praise DC's Metro as better unprompted. I suppose there's some sampling bias there.
Glad to know there are some New Yorkers with the correct opinion.
LA actually felt like Miami in a nontrivial way, but maybe I only judge cities on the presence of palm trees and Spanish.
palm trees and Spanish.
I actually find Latinos on the West Coast (I suppose, out west generally, not just on the coast) one of the things that really makes me feel like I'm away from home. Mexican-Spanish accented English is a completely different accent from most NY-area Spanish accented English (Dominican, Puerto Rican, whatever), and I'm only familiar with it from movies and TV. Hearing it in person makes me feel as if I stepped into a TV show.
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Speaking of immigrants and the SF Bay Area, I have something I'd like to Ask The Mineshaft on behalf of a friend:
A research nonprofit* based out of the SF area (I'll call it Telescope) is trying to hire a Director of Operations, and the best candidate seems to be a Canadian (I'll call her Ariel). Ariel has a Bachelor's in Nursing and is currently working as a nurse in Canada, though she's volunteered with Telescope to help with some outreach events including various foreign operations
On the basis of her soft skills like organization, plus her commitment to their mission, Telescope wants to hire Ariel for a 6-month trial period to see if it's a mutual fit.
Telescope doesn't have much experience hiring foreigners, or an official counsel with experience in this, AFAIK. However, they work closely with another nonprofit I'll call Pulley. Pulley was in the process of sponsoring someone for an H1-B and asked their lawyer to handle this application at the same time. Pulley's lawyer said that Ariel isn't a good candidate for an H1-B and refused to file a Labor Certification Application in her case.
From Ariel's email to me:
...Basically, the lawyer from [Pulley], who we spoke to, says that my case isn't viable and isn't going to submit it. The problem is two-pronged.
1) We can't make a good case that the Director of Operations is a "specialty job" that absolutely absolutely requires someone with a bachelor's degree. Ways to prove this: the industry standard is that the job requires a bachelor's degree (N/A, we're not in a reference class with any industries) or the job is so complex and difficult that common sense says you need a degree to do it (but apparently the job description doesn't convey that.)
2) Even if we could make a good case for that, nursing isn't related enough. Basically, any first aid aspects we can plausibly add to the job description can be done by someone with a weekend-long class in standard first aid or something. I tentatively brought it up to the lawyer that maybe [Telescope] could literally employ a registered nurse, and got back that it wasn't plausible because even major corporations don't do that.
Questions:
1) Is this an obvious enough case that Pulley's lawyer is almost certainly correct, or is it reasonably likely that a second opinion would add information?
2) Is there some kind of workaround they're not considering, or is H1-B basically the only show in town for this kind of thing?
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72, 73: I suppose to be consistent I have to count that as two separate, independent pieces of evidence against the theory that transit systems are mainly easy for tourists.
I don't know anything about the law in this area, but what popped out for me is that you can get an H1-B if the job requires a bachelor's degree, but the Director of Operations job they've posted doesn't convincingly require one. If that's right, I can't believe that you can't describe a D of O job such that it obviously needs a bachelor's degree. I'd think just calling Director of anything would be enough.
(My guess is that it isn't that easy, but from your description it sounds that easy.)
For example, New Yorkers visiting DC seem to think our system is nice because it's pretty, spacious, and comparatively clean
No, I always thought it sucked when I visited from NYC. The New York subway is a pain sometimes because city life is a pain, but it goes fucking everywhere and doesn't charge by distance and most of the time is pretty reliable and...it's just great. I spent too much time on it because of my long commute, but it's the only system in the US that makes it 100% unnecessary to have a car.
Ok maybe I should just decide I'm fine with having unfogged on my work browser history so my name doesn't vanish every time.
80: Yeah, that was my thought too - it should be easy to rewrite the job description to make this work.
"Can't do it because as currently described it doesn't require a Bachelor's" sounds ridiculously unhelpful - so I'm wondering whether the lawyer really is an idiot/asshole/lazy/has bad incentives here, or whether I'm just missing some key point that's obvious to employment lawyers but not to me.
If I were going to guess, and I really don't know anything at all about the law, it's not "requires a bachelors" but something more stringent, like "requires a bachelors or an advanced degree in a related field."
Oh speaking of ramen we had the ramen of madness Saturday at a place called Ramen Yamadaya. It was so good we actually died.
But Stanley has it right. The Atlantic you can actually hang out in. Ocean Beach is super pretty for hanging out on but going in sounds severely unpleasant.
There is more to the Pacific than Ocean Beach!!!
You don't even have to go as far south as, e.g., Corona del Mar (or, better, the so-called "little CDM") to enjoy the great Pacific.
I personally went into the Pacific Ocean on December 25th, 2013, not all that far from Half Moon Bay.
I'm not even an ocean-going vessel, generally, but jeez.
IANAIL, but college degree is one of two substantive requirements. The other is that the job be "theoretical and practical application of a body of highly specialized knowledge."
It seems to be fucking freezing in Santa Monica, too. I'm assuming the situation does not get better going north, so that's already a good chunk of the American Pacific coast.
The one time I was in LA I got around fine without a car, but it was true that the buses seemed 100% Spanish-speaking.
The one thing I know about H1-B visas and other visas for employing professionals from abroad is that the employer had better be willing to pay a fair amount in legal fees to make one happen.
I have happily gone swimming many times in... Marin! Full circle.
77: I took a couple spin classes with an instructor with a thick NuYorican (sp?) accent, and it made me feel very cosy, even though I probably encountered close to 0 Hispanics when I actually lived in NY (or NJ for that matter).
I concur that the Pacific is too cold for swimming, with my datapoint being Santa Monica in August. But I find most water too cold for swimming, spoiled as I was by Miami ("The pool's only 78? Screw that.").
90.2: I don't know about the Bay Area, but up here the ocean is indeed uncomfortably cold. After spending a lot of time on Cape Cod and the Jersey Shore as a kid, it feels weird to go to the beach and just look at the water because you'll get hypothermia if you go in without a wetsuit.
Living in a town that is majority-minority, it feels like there should be some way for our kids to grow up speaking Spanish, but I have no idea how it would actually happen. There is just such de facto segregation, insofar as the Latino population would not speak spanish to us without enormous prompting, if that makes sense. So it would take a lot of steps - which I'm not even clear on - on our part to immerse the kids, and it would unravel within a year if we ever stopped doing whatever it took.
96: I love the NYC public schools. Or at least the bits of them we've been in direct contact with. The dual language thing was just so great for us. (I am, once again, trying to teach myself Spanish with some idiotic piece of software. Duolinguo, now. The children wince at my accent. And refuse to engage with me when I direct fractured bits of Spanish at them.)
People are huge pussies about swimming in Santa Monica Bay now. When I was a kid we'd go out there like every weekend in the summer and swim and boogieboard or whatever. Now people are all like wetsuit blah and pollution blah and riptide blah and Swippleinos don't seem to take their kids swimming in the water anymore.
Also AFAIK basically everyone in a mass-transit-based city thinks their system is bad.
I don't! There are parts of the London Underground that are objectively bad (Northern line crushes, for instance), it could do with a 24 hour service, and it's expensive, especially for tourists, but overall I think it's pretty great in terms of coverage and ability to get across town quickly. And the buses are truly excellent - frequent, well signposted with local area maps and at many stops time-to-next-bus displays, next stop displays on basically all the buses now which makes them much easier to use on unfamiliar journeys, comprehensive night bus coverage. I've yet to find a better bus system, though, again, it's expensive for single journeys and Oyster dependent.
98: Didn't the onions get wet?
Thanks everybody for the disconfirming evidence. I now believe that some people prefer their own city's transit system.
I found SF Muni quite usable, and actually had a couple of errands that were conveniently run on a cable car, which was always fun. It was crowded, but I'll accept that for short head times. And the bike lanes in Berkeley and Oakland were wonderful.
Seattle's attempts to improve transit are so bewildering that I'm not the only person suspicious of conspiratorial intent. The trolley lines and bike lanes being installed on the main drag near me swerve from lane to lane, crossing car traffic and -- at at least one point -- each other. (Are trolley tracks bike-tire-trapping? Yes. Do auto drivers get pettish, sulky and uncooperative when they have to deal with the swerving? Yes. WTFF?)
The Port Authority Bus Terminal is a Wonder of the World, even if it is by far the ugliest one, and the DC metro is terrific, particularly compared to the DC beltway.
28: San Diego has a lovely weather and friendly people, but there's a lot less art-and-culture stuff than in LA or SF. Nonetheless it can be very pleasant to gaze out at the ocean and let your brain atrophy.
78: Can she use a TN visa? It works for contract jobs (up to three years) and many fields require "expertise" at the level of appropriate BA/BSc, and it's cheap. Also it apples specially to Canadians and Mexicans (thanks NAFTA). The downside is you have to get it at the border and it isn't guaranteed.
101: There goes any hope of ever writing for Slate!
Here's what I consider to be the book on US public transit:
New York has good public transit, though dirty and often uncomfortable in various ways.
Boston, DC, and Chicago have ok public transit, though nothing to brag about.
Everywhere else in the country has bad unacceptable public transit (except that for some reason in Portland white people use the bus and inexplicably think it's better than it is). Several of them have a single route that's adequately served (e.g. the BART line between the mission and downtown Oakland). Among all these unacceptable places, LA is the only one with rapidly improving transit, and it will likely make its way onto the second list eventually.
SF has put in a lot of light rail in the past ten years. It's quite handy.
And LA won't make it's way on the second list for a long time, because it has a layout that is pretty much designed to foil comprehensive after-the-fact transit. It is getting better fast, though.
In the next few years, there will be a commuter rail connecting San Antonio and Austin, which will be nice for us.
Except there's no good way to get around either location once you get there.
107: Thanks for the suggestion.
It looks harder to frame the Director of Operations job as a TN visa eligible career:
(The H1-B guidelines on uscis.gov are much vaguer.)
Hiring Ariel as something else but really employing her for operations seems sketchy at best.
I guess the worst likely outcome from an honest ineligible attempt at a TN entry is that she gets turned back at the border.
Philadelphia has good public transit.
SF has put in a lot of light rail in the past ten years. It's quite handy.
Ur? There's the T Third, which opened 7 years ago. Other than that Muni hasn't expanded at all since the F Market started up in the mid-'90s. (They've been digging up downtown for the Central Subway for ages, but that's still years from completion.)
I assumed he meant the T Third, which is a pretty big project by modern standards.
112: What is happening with Austin's poor, pathetic light rail thing?
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So the endless Unfogged hype broke me and I started watching Veronica Mars (the TV show). Fact: Four episodes in, Veronica Mars is Rust Cohle.
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Has no one mentioned the best reason to live in Los Angeles, which is that every now and then this happens, and then this happens?
(The baby slept through it.)
LA's bus system is excellent given what it has to cover, and as Tweety points out above, the light rail is shlepping along pretty well.
NYC subways are always disappointing to me in that they are not teleportation booths. What do you mean it takes nearly an hour to get from Park Slope to Times Square? How is that possible? There's a hole in the ground, and you come out of another hole in the ground!
Trying so hard to stay away from all the misinformation but clearly failing.
speaking of SF only:
Our public transit system is remarkably dense. 100% of residential has access to transit within a 1/4 mike. 100% - not a typo. This is REALLY different from any other comparably sized US city.
The bus lines tend to have an absurd number of stops super close together, justified by not wanting granny and/or parent w/child to have to walk far and possibly up/down really steep hills. Hopefully we can all agree SF has some steep hills. Whether all this profusion of stops is really necessary is debatable - it does slow things down but also really hard to take away anyone's stop, howls of protest reliably ring from said hills.
Also making buses and streetcars slow, they compete with other surface traffic. We need dedicated lanes and will hopefully start getting them. Personally I favor like 20k insta-fines and impoundment via ninja helicopter for e.g. blocking a 38 but that's just me.
The vehicles are on average old and break down more often than younger fleets. The fares are cheaper than comparable fares in other similarly sized cities.
San Franciscans use transit ALOT and the system is less income, race and class segregated than comparable systems. Crowding is an issue. Reliability is an issue, but it is majorly tempered by the amazing density and access to real time prediction on your phone.
So heebie if you are actually in SF, not Marin or wherever, I guarantee I can get you any damn place, you won't have to walk far at either beginning or end if your journey and there will be all sorts of folks on the bus/streetcar with you. Fort Mason is a bit if a service black hole, but that is an anomaly.
The work rules are insanely arcane, and the payroll has to be done by hand, there being no system able to handle all of the work rules. But on the other hand, driving the 19 Polk on the weekend has to qualify as hard work. Riding it is certainly entertaining!
I preemptively concede to halford that for some relatively small area of LA the system there is WAY superior to SF because clearly there can be no metric on which SF might outperform LA.
I take that last bit back: our ballet company whups the ass of yours.
(not tossing in orchestra because MTT irritates me)
I went down to a beach near here last February and there was snow and ice on the sand and the wind chill was below freezing. But sure, in southern California the water's kind of chilly when you go to the beach in February because it's in the 70s and sunny.
Now we have to have Smearcase rank the respective operas. Speaking of which holy fuck are opera tickets expensive.
I wish I went to Billy Budd. Now I'm looking forward to wishing I went to Death of Klinghoffer.
Transit from some of the outer neighborhoods of SF to the East Bay can be kind of an ordeal. Going from the Richmond District to Berkeley, for example. Also, expensive.
Anyhow, 109 gets it exactly right, except for adding tier two to Philadelphia maybe to make Walt Someguy happy.
Philadelphia to tier two. You get the idea.
$2 bucks gets you from the Pacific Ocean to the Embarcadero, and pretty smart-like if you take an express. After that you are left to the tender mercies of BART. I limited my remarks to SF proper.
I feel like 122 kind of simultaneously gets it exactly right and refutes its own conclusion. Are you ready to move incredibly, stunningly, excruciatingly slowly? Do you enjoy never ever leaving your neighborhood in under 1 hour round trip? Then MUNI is for you.
I am not the biggest fan of muni in the world, lord knows, but Halford's calumnies must be denied. I have taken the N with great success! Also the 21, the 22, and the 33!
I limited my remarks to SF proper.
Right, I didn't mean to contradict that. Just that there can be a stark difference between within-SF and within-region transit experiences. I liked being in SF - I only lived in the Richmond for about 3 months - but would have felt isolated if I didn't have a car. On the other hand, I was across the street from a supermarket, which was fantastic*, and probably directly related to me eating more healthily and inexpensively than in almost any other place I've lived.
*Not the supermarket itself but being so near.
It does go pretty slow though, you gots to admit.
The cars are stuck in the same surface traffic halford, it isn't faster to drive. Its a small city, it doesn't take that long to get anywhere. My 13 year old benefits from amazing independence, I walk to and from the office, and we get out and about just fine.
I'm not suggesting that driving in the city of SF is any more awesome, especially since holy fuck is the parking a nightmare. Just that it's not an especially easy city to get around in, and not really comparable to e.g. New York in terms of ease of use of public transit.
Outer SF to downtown is probably no worse than Bay Ridge to Manhattan on the subway. But probably worse than coming in on an express train from neighborhoods served by expresses.
Well, the N is underground for significant parts of its route.
128 gets it right. People should make me happy. The fact that Halford sees this proves that LA is superior after all.
The weird thing is that in person, Halford is totally nice.
Until I kill you and eat you.
118: my impression is that it's successfully limping along? Others here can probably speak more knowledgeably than me who has never actually yet ridden it.
Oh he's folded like a bad hand, nosflow. Went from "MUNI sucks!!!! LA rules!!!" to conceding all obvious facts incld clear superiority of SFB and all he's left with is MUNI less convenient than NYS subway.
No shit, Sherlock.
I mean, MUNI does basically suck. I think your defense is basically "hey it sucks but it does an OK job because there's lots of traffic." Which, OK, but that's not much of a defense. You can also take the bus pretty much anywhere here, and it's often faster. I'll concede it's probably higher-percentage Mexicans, though.
it's successfully limping along?
I don't know about successfully, but I'm getting by, thanks.
I'll concede it's probably higher-percentage Mexicans, though.
They do blood quantums before letting people ride the buses in LA? That's pretty racist.
TV pitch: "Like Quantum Leap, but about race."
So you're a bunch of classist gits and you can only claim a win by changing the goalposts re your "limited geographic area" of 55. Kinda sad.
I don't know about successfully
Don't be fatuous, Jeffrey.
I guess California regional fights are a reason not to be too sad I had to move to Ohio.
I posted in the Boston meet-up thread but that's already heading down the sidebar. Has time/place been chosen yet?
You can have your own regional fights about which ineffably gross city is the best.
Cleveland vs. Cincinnati vs. Columbus--Fight!
God I love the smell of regional battling. Let's keep going. Who wants a piece of this?? DC? Philadelphia? Fucking Wichita? Bring it on.
What kills me about this thread is that Halford is seriously the only Angeleno I've ever met who actually gives a shit about the LA-SF rivalry. Congrats, dude! I thought it was only the SF types who had an inferiority complex about the whole thing.
Note my numerous concessions up thread re MANIFEST AWESOMENESS of LA. My experience is that halford is gloriously representative. Resplendent in his representativeness.
I actually like SF. But I enjoy trolling people on the blog here about this rivalry because the one thing Unfogged fears the most is THE AUTOMOBILE.
Holy shit, the amount of time I spent in a car last week (not driving it myself, how nice for me) suggests to me that the place to live if you really want a hearty dose of THE AUTOMOBILE is Long Island.
I happen to have an immigration specialist right here (albeit not a lawyer) and the first thing she thought of was the TNs, which have the additional virtue of not costing $3,000 plus in filing fees. I've asked her to take a look at the thread.
I have taken the N with great success!
How do you feel about its successors?
153: We are lovers, not fighters. Also, I probably don't count.
We lived w/o a car for 5 plus years, was fine. Joined carpool for upper school. Broken foot has meant much more driving as crutches tricky for transit and cartable unbelievably heavy. Better half now sick to back teeth if driving, foot still not healed.
We are lovers
Virginia might have something to say about that.
Okay, her take is that a TN may be possible but only if you can make the nursing degree relevant somehow (eg. it's a health care organization); also, while you CAN apply for one at the border you can also get Immigration to adjudicate it by mail (at the border is faster).
Might be worth going for a second opinion in a venue where you can share actual details.
Add'l points:
1 - Unless this is a quota-exempt organization (which means a university or affiliated with a university), an H1-B needs to be filed the week of April 1 or it will not happen because the quota will be reached in week one. (Otherwise she would be out of luck until Oct. 1 2015 at the earliest if you go the H1-B route). TNs do not have quotas.
2 - TNs are substantially cheaper, which is probably relevant to a nonprofit budget. They also are renewable indefinitely. You have to prove that you do not intend to immigrate. Somehow they don't seem to be as strict about applying this to Canadians as to Mexicans I can't imagine why.
I lived without a car in San Diego. 'Twas horrible. Then in LA I had a car, and it was fantastic, and in the Bay Area I had a car as well as BART, and it was even better. And now in DC I have a car and the Metro, but unfortunately also a lot more snow than I was told to expect.
164: Just because Virginia is for us doesn't mean we have to be for Virginia. I may be a bitch but not yours, etc.
Fucking Wichita?
BTW, if you are tempted to root for Wichita State (underdog last year, undefeated and a #1 seed this year) be aware that the program had moved towards elite status based on funding from one of the Koch brothers (new arena etc.).
For your contrasting "Midwestern mid-major supported by a billionaire" you have Creighton and Warren Buffett.
Didn't Creighton and Wichita State used to be in the same conference? Talk about avoiding a fight.
So you're a bunch of classist gits
Joined carpool for upper school.
But so down with the gente.
169: Yep, Missouri Valley Conference until just this year when Creighton went to the Big East (the really Big East I guess).
He takes the train from French school to Russian ballet class and then bus home for his daily dose of le menu peuple. When foot not busted.
One thing that always surprises me whenever I visit SF is how sprawling it is. The buildings are short, the non-thoroughfare streets are absurdly wide - I keep expecting Brooklyn and I get Queens dressed up in wealthy Brooklyn drag. And people keep looking at me strangely if I jaywalk with no cars in site. So maybe it's Munich. And there's a lot less amenities around - fewer supermarkets, barely any corner stores. And buses? Buses are fine for distances under 2K, for anything over 4K they suck. I found DC mass transit a hell of a lot better than SF. How does this compare to LA? No idea since I've never been down there.
Much of LA looks vaguely similar to Queens, basically nowhere is similar to brownstone Brooklyn (though LA is big enough that you can find a place that looks like pretty much anywhere). Depending very very heavily on neighborhood, there are some places full of amenities for walkers, like little corner stores or whatever. But almost 100% of these are poor-neighborhood stores that exclusively cater to poor people and immigrants, since most people who exclusively take the bus are pretty poor (but there are a lot of them). But, you know, if you're not poor you can still drive easily in non-rush hour so who cares about walking to the supermarket unless you have to. If you want to go full SWPL there are a now a few (and growing) number of places where you could set up your life to be easy walking transit for everything, but it would have to be a deliberate choice, not just something you'd encounter by happenstance.
Isn't everybody going to run out of water and die?
Central PA is the new American Arcadia!
You could live in So Cal Arcadia, with Santa Anita Racetrack and the county arboretum (fucking peacocks everywhere!) and rich asians driving house prices sky high.
People are huge pussies about swimming in Santa Monica Bay now. When I was a kid we'd go out there like every weekend in the summer and swim and boogieboard or whatever.
Word.
There are parts of the London Underground that are objectively bad (Northern line crushes, for instance), it could do with a 24 hour service, and it's expensive, especially for tourists, but overall I think it's pretty great in terms of coverage and ability to get across town quickly. And the buses are truly excellent - frequent, well signposted with local area maps and at many stops time-to-next-bus displays, next stop displays on basically all the buses now which makes them much easier to use on unfamiliar journeys, comprehensive night bus coverage. I've yet to find a better bus system, though, again, it's expensive for single journeys and Oyster dependent.
Part of the problem is that people tend to compare the Underground with, say, Vienna or Berlin or Barcelona's system, when those cities are smaller by orders of magnitude and it's just easier. In fact, the city is in the same weight-class as New York or Tokyo. The challenge is just bigger. I would argue that the Underground beats the Paris Metro (especially if you have baggage, or kids, or a disability of some sort), which is comparable, but London still doesn't have something like the RER, which is a letdown. That said, we kind of will when Crossrail and the Thameslink upgrades open in the next few years.
Yeah, the London Underground is pretty good, I think. I prefer it to Paris, which seems, in my experience, to have lots of endless underground walks between routes or platforms which London isn't entirely free from, but generally has far less of.
In terms of buses, I can't compare many cities, but Glasgow has a pretty decent bus service, and is a fairly big city, but it's not a challenge on the scale of London. The Glasgow Underground serves the centre of the city well, but is hilariously small and lacking in coverage compared to London.
99: I am pretty much convinced that everything wrong with London public transport could be fixed by executing the cabal of taxi drivers who are secretly running the city.
The tube is good! but it stops running after midnight - clearly to force you to take a taxi.
The buses are good, but slow - partly because taxis are allowed to drive in the bus lanes.
The congestion charge is good! but it doesn't discourage taxi congestion because they're exempt.
Cycling is great, but somewhat dangerous - because taxis go in the bike lanes and frequently try to kill cyclists.
Citizens of London! Smash the taxi drivers and bring in the millennium!
The public transportation system here is excellent—so good, in fact, that even white people use it, which is a good thing given the whiteness of the city. The orchestra has become surprisingly good in recent years; the opera is meh.
The Paris metro always seems like it's running the original cars first built during the reign of Louis XIV.
I assume that meant to link these maps?
112, 113: Except there's no good way to get around either location once you get there.
This. When I lived in Houston there was a proposal for light rail which would have passed within a half mile of both my apartment and my place of work. Good doable walk on the living end of it, on the work end it would have involved crossing multiple lanes of a massively non-ped friendly freeway service road/arterial road intersection followed by a quarter mile walk down a muddy berm of that very busy artery. (Granted, mine was a "reverse" commute--geared towards massive park-n-ride on the edges coming into the city.)
Of course, by the time it didn't get built I was long gone.
183, 184: Fascinating. Tokyo's seems curiously small, but it looks like it shows just the two transportation authorities with underground stations (and also reflects their limits by not showing through service to the private railways).
Part of the problem is that people tend to compare the Underground with, say, Vienna or Berlin or Barcelona's system, when those cities are smaller by orders of magnitude and it's just easier.
Maybe Barcelona has improved in the five or so years since I was last there but I'm not at all impressed by either Barcelona's or Vienna's metros. They've got a handful of lines, basically all radial, that don't work very well unless you're going to or from the centre. That's just about OK in Vienna, which has a clear centre, but Barcelona is sprawling. On the other hand, Vienna has good trams, and Barcelona has, well, some trams.
I hear good things about Berlin's underground, but I haven't been since I was a child.
183, 184: Fascinating. Tokyo's seems curiously small, but it looks like it shows just the two transportation authorities with underground stations (and also reflects their limits by not showing through service to the private railways).
A lot of Greater Tokyo's rail transit is overground, especially JR East.
Maps of non-car commuters in LA by census tract. (Worth clicking to ge the full map.)
188: Right, but a lot of every city's rail transit is overground. The maps don't just show underground lines, do they? It looks as though if a line includes an underground component, the whole line is included.
Yeah, I think maps like that in isolation don't do justice to places with strong connecting commuter rail (or just a decent rail network overall). Looking for but not finding comparative maps including all railed transit.
I believe I've linked it here before, but doing it again since it is so very great. Didn't think there was much more that could be done with the NYC subway map? Try this.
188: Right, but a lot of every city's rail transit is overground. The maps don't just show underground lines, do they? It looks as though if a line includes an underground component, the whole line is included.
Sure, but what I mean is that, where many cities would use a metro line Tokyo uses overground instead, often at the same kind of frequency, and the under/over systems are pretty seamlessly integrated. The main circular route around the centre, for instance, is overground. There are over 100 overground lines in total. So that's why the map seems so small. To get a sense of how Tokyo compares in "metro-like" transit you really need to include the overground routes
The NYC maps include the SI railroad which I believe is all above ground, however, they don't include the commuter rail network. The Berlin one includes the S-Bahn which IIRC is mostly above ground. There seems to be a bit of a consistency problem.
Also, Berlin has a pretty comprehensive rails based mass transit system with a density approximately the same as LA.
193: I think we're basically saying the same thing, specifically, "To get a sense of how Tokyo compares in 'metro-like' transit you really need to include the overground routes." The absence of the Yamanote Line jumped out when I saw the map.
Example in point: the much more comprehensive London Rail & Tube map. Because the famous Beck tube map doesn't show heavy rail except for London Overground, South London (which was mostly built after the railways) disappears off the map, and in fact quite a lot of Londoners (and South Londoners) imagine that this is reality. If you look at the more comprehensive version, you will see that the oysterised Southern Electric network is almost as dense as the tube south of the river, although not as interconnected.
http://www.nationalrail.co.uk/static/documents/content/London_Rail_Tube_map.pdf
If you look at it long enough you may also fall through a wormhole into another universe, too.
The maps in 184 confirm my sense that BART covers a huge distance while still not covering a large portion of the region.
Now we have to have Smearcase rank the respective operas.
I've never gone in LA. The one here feels like a good regional house, similar to Houston. The programming right now is profoundly unimaginative but that may be the economy. I think LA may get slightly better singers. SF has a distinguished history, of course. Caruso was singing Don Jose the day of the earthquake, &c.
And people keep looking at me strangely if I jaywalk with no cars in site.
Oh my god yeah WTF.
Also yes BART is really expensive. My commute is about seven bucks a day.
Some of the above stuff about SF reminded me of the wonderful line in Lorrie Moore's "Willing": "She didn't mind Chicago. She thought of it as a cross between London and Queens, with a dash of Cleveland."
Also, Berlin has a pretty comprehensive rails based mass transit system with a density approximately the same as LA.
Sigh. And their buses run on time, too. When I first lived in Germany, I was floored at the existence of bus schedules. And even more so that little old ladies would start looking at their watched and harumphing if the bus was two minutes late.
But Smearcase don't overlook the Waffle Opera and the Pocket Opera.
I have never gotten an odd look for jaywalking whether cars are present or absent.
The Waffle Opera is so named because they give out waffles during the intermission and after the show. Or maybe they do that because they're named the Waffle Opera, or as a third possibility perhaps they came up with the name and the gimmick simultaneously.
I have never seen them perform, but their production of the Magic Flute sold out the (admittedly tiny) Center for New Music for its full run.
I got a few odd looks last time I visited but also saw some other people jaywalking. I still haven't figured out how precisely the jaywalking culture there works.
San Francisco Opera is probably pretty good, but the only pieces I've seen them do are Dead Man Walking and The Ballad of Baby Doe, so I wouldn't know.
People jaywalked all the time in Berkeley when I was growing up. DC seems to have more jaywalking, though. Plus the midday signal timings in some neighborhoods there seem geared towards commute levels of traffic even though few cars are around.
207: Meow!
205.1 is very funny and no I haven't yet gone to the smaller companies though I went to a benefit thingy for an east bay one that was called something and now is called something else. Sadly, they did Vanessa before I got here.
I'm not all that good a sport about plucky little companies, though. The last years of City Opera when everything they did was crap, everyone would wail about their storied past but meanwhile they were just not that good. Ok they're not the best example of a plucky little company but in NYC that was their shtick.
Some year or other (some days I hope my inability to remember any details ever is cute; other days I just don't care) I went to a NYCO benefit where they talked and talked and talked about the good ol' days, and showed a video of Domingo talking about same and I got to amuse myself by blogging "It was a film because he couldn't be there that night. Or any other night since the 1960's." Because really.
The jaywalking thing is just to do it with panache, and ignore any funny looks.
The $$$$ opera thing is a huge drag, the child would go to them all except it would bankrupt us. I think by next year he'll be old enough to do standing room on his own.
Agree SFO programming a major snoozefest. As is SFS sadly. Although the miss rate with the acoustics at Davies is so appallingly high I sort of write the whole thing off on that basis. Last time I was there got to hear a Lilliputian pianist play Bartok from the bottom of a deep deep well, except that I could SEE him just fine. Suppose it might have some sort of hallucinatory allure.
I just looked up the LA Opera programming, even though I'm not actually sure what would or wouldn't count as a snoozefest, and they're doing something next year called "Hercules vs. Vampires" that is literally opera Mystery Science Theater 3000:
Hercules vs. Vampires combines opera and midcentury pop culture, synchronizing live music with cult fantasy film Hercules in the Haunted World, a 1961 sword-and-sandal epic starring three-time Mr. Universe Reg Park. When the actors projected on the silver screen open their mouths to speak, the audience will hear their lines sung by our cast of singers from the Domingo-Colburn-Stein Young Artist Program, accompanied by a 26-piece orchestra.
I remember reading somewhere that your benevolent AAA, you know the guys who come fix your flat tire or tow your car off the freeway, are the ones responsible for jaywalking laws.
It seems that pedestrians would walk in the street and share the space with the horses and buggies, but the automobile is less forgiving. The key was to make sure that the pedestrian is at fault, not the motorist. In the vernacular of the time a jaybird, or jay was someone who was not paying attention to what was happening around them, a scatterbrain if you will. Thus jaywalking was coined to describe someone ambling down the street not paying attention to the dangers that until recently weren't there.
211: objective proof of LA awesomeness.
Went to a Buster Keaton movie once with live accompaniment by the Club Foot Orchestra, that was good.
Between the SIMM Series, the Luggage Store Gallery series, the Center for New Music, the Berkeley Arts Festival, Duende's programming, SFSound, SFCMP, and really lots of other things, San Francisco/Oakland/Berkeley, while no Chicago or New York, has a lot going for it in terms of adventurous/interesting music.
True we are ridiculously spoiled. Yay!
I lived in NYC long enough that I got well connected and sat in great seats at symphony and opera for free the last couple of years so I'm going to be going less here probably. I think it's going to be more about finding weird little events like the really great thing Bave and I went to last week where Joan La Barbara wandered around the Berkeley Art Museum making interesting sounds. Frankly last time I went to the symphony (MTT conducting Mahler 3) I struggled a lot to stay awake so maybe my attention span has aged out of some of what I used to like to do.
First I typed MTM. Which is Mary Tyler Moore.
I am going to hear three Bartok quartets on Thursday and I am just about beside myself. There's a lot of music in this town, but something like 95% of the pieces performed are from the Baroque.*
*Only a teeny exaggeration, really.
213 One of my fond memories of DC was the National Gallery fairly regularly showing old silents with live musical accompaniment. It was free, which was another nice thing about DC culture. Theater as well, as long as you were willing to usher, i.e. show up an hour early and vaguely pretend to do something.
202 I think most places have bus schedules, NYC definitely does, they just don't have much to do with when the buses arrive.
Boston does too, and has similar non-correlation with when buses actually come, even at the start of the route. But I'm pretty sure St. Louis didn't have them back in 1997, or if they did exist, they were in a central office somewhere that was not particularly accessible to bus riders. And in contrast, there they were, posted right at the bus stop in Hamburg! (Obviously the access to schedules has changed with the internet.)
217 A friend here wrote on fb:
Tonight is the second production of Marc-Antoine Charpentier's "La Descente d'Orphée en Enfers" in two months. I guess there are worse things that could happen but, what is this? Boston??
Columbus, Ohio, even has bus schedules! And they are even posted at a few of the central bus stops! There is also some degree of correlation between the movement of the buses and their posted schedules. Still, I have never heard anyone praise the public transporation options here.
Still, I have never heard anyone praise the public transporation options here
I won't praise the options, I'm not up-to-date. But COTA, and Columbus-Celina before that gave me some memorable bus rides, and took me to parts of town I otherwise didn't get to. I remember the Bus, was it Goodale? that would go right along under the high walls of the Ohio Penitentiary.
Aren't any of these cities on next bus? Screw printed schedules go for GPS tracking.
Pittsburgh has bus schedules. The times are unrelated to when the buses show up, but they at least tell you how many buses per hour.
Before I left Pittsburgh, they created a system where you text to find out when the next bus will come, but again, that was the supposed time on the schedule, not the actual time. Maybe with the new inspirational mayor (not sarcastic) the system will be improved. Or maybe it already has been. Or maybe the texting system was eliminated in one of the annual 10% cuts to the transit budget.
225: The Tiramisu app is an overgrown research project that reports both scheduled time along with crowd-sourced data that will supposedly tell you actual time. These are usually both wrong, but it's the easiest way I've found to look up the schedule for the stop I'm at. For a while I would report info back to it but I never saw any improvements in its predictions.
More recently (in the last year), they've started adding actual bus tracking similar to Next Bus. Alas so far it's only deployed on the East Busway and not on any of my usual routes.
If you smoke, you can make a bus come by lighting a cigarette.
OT: There's a certain point when you really should stop laughing because it's a disease or a tragedy or something. We're not there yet.
||
Okay, seriously though, now is definitely the time where I should be working on my talk. Come on now.
|>
Fucking Time Zones, how do they work?
230: Isn't it time that you should be sleeping?
Fucking Time Zones, how do they work?
Sympathies, fellow programmer.
233: once I'm done with my talk, sure.
If it's a choice between the talk and howling on the moors, I say the hell with the talk.
they at least tell you how many buses per hour
Just not when in the hour the three buses all bunched together are going to come.
AC Transit had bus schedules for as long as I can remember. When I started taking the bus from middle school the schedule was almost always correct because that's where the bus route I took started. Generally bus schedules get less reliable the farther in to a busy route, and some parts of the day buses that were 15 minutes apart start leapfrogging each other.
Vancouver's bus system was pretty good. But being a student meant being insulated from the fares. We paid a fee with our student fees that was much lower than a pass would have been.
Metro LA buses have an app that tell you when the next bus will arrive. The schedule is online also. In my experience pretty reliable.
In DC, the buses with the best frequency are the ones with no published schedule - the Circulators. Just "At least one every 15 minutes during these hours."
The regular buses are tolerable if you use NextBus.
I'm short, have hairy toes, and am eating a second dinner. If I smoked or could serve as a stand-in for the agricultural class of 19th century England, I'd be a hobbit.
108: For enough money, I'd still gladly write a contrarian piece with three-anecdotes-makes-a-trend and a clearly argued explanation of why of course this is the case (grass greener, everything is easier for tourists).
But there's better money in honest work.
Drunk Moby is the best Moby. Or possibly the only Moby.
In many cities, I think getting around by transit really is easier for tourists. They're less likely to need to get to a supermarket*, specialty shop, or outlying neighborhood. I live in a dumpy crap town, not a real city, but this place is quite walkable if you only have a few days here and don't need to buy groceries every week, non-Apple electronics*, clothing from stores that don't cater to college students and the middle to upper classes, etc.
*I guess there's a Radio Shack in town.
Jews have hairy toes? Is that a new stereotype?
Now I'm going to be curious until sandal season.
Not for the first time nor the last, Bilbo Bagstein wished he was back in his eruv, smoking his pipe and not eating bacon.
I think I need to read that Ted Cohen book.
244: I appreciate that you think I only say stupid things when drinking.
Oh hey, speaking of cities: anyone got anything to say, good or bad, about Athens, Georgia, particularly with regards to how livable it is for folks who've never owned cars? Any neighborhoods one should check out during an academic-job recruitment visit, etc.?
I think REM and the B52s are from there. That seems like all you'd need to know.
250: I'm way too sober and have dropped my laptop twice tonight (once down the stairs because I propped it in a too-full laundry basket, fucking laundry!) and just knocked over and broke the glass of wine that I was going to enjoy. So at least you're not doing stupid stuff, or at least at least not posting about it here if you are.
Technically, I was in a bar. Now I'm home. Because old.
251: Northern GA doesn't really strike me as somewhere you'd realistically expect to live without buying a car at some point.
Old and was seated near people from Cleveland.
255 gets it right. I've been to Athens but haven't lived there.
I'm home and grumpy and have no excuse. Not even a Cleveland connection.
This one goes out to the one I love.
A simple prop, to occupy The Eye's time.
253: Not your fault, it was gravitational waves!
torrey pine is my favorite, drunk or sober!
I looked into taking a research trip to Athens to look at some land company records before I abandoned the dissertation topic I abandoned before abandoning my later dissertation topic and came to the conclusion that to visit Athens I'd need to rent a car.
That's somebody trying to decide whether or not their car insurance from their own car will cover the rental.
I don't understand emoticons. Did I do it right?
261: If only my coworkers felt that way about me!
Great! As if the rest of the day hadn't been bad enough, now I'm complicit in the rise of emoticons here.
Further to 251: I guess in some narrow sense it might be possible for someone to find a house or apartment within walking/biking distance of both work and a supermarket but really, Northern GA isn't that kind of place (my parents retired up near Lake Lanier in Cumming). There's all kinds of farm and horse properties and great forests and such and lots of little spread out towns connected by these windy roads with no shoulder that you couldn't pay me to bike on. It's hot and humid as hell in the summer but that's pretty much everywhere east of the Rockies. That area does get 40-50 inches of rain a year and I do like the rivers for canoeing and lush countryside and such. Also, fireflies are awesome. The forest out there was a surprise to this westerner. Out here forests at night are quiet places you can hear a twig snap. Out there it's a fucking cacophony of noise from every frog, bug, etc. yapping their heads off all godamn night long.
and just knocked over and broke the glass of wine that I was going to enjoy.
Oh no! I'm sitting around drinking Black Box Riesling with that sparkling orange flavored Arrowhead water. It's my Friday night, I might have to break out the gin and watch some season 4 Archer.
Jews have hairy toes?
Alas.
Though Bave once told me Jews always blame things we don't like about ourselves on being Jews.
Since this is the thread I'm posting in while drinking...
Father and son track down alleged car thief
Salt Lake Police say they're seeing a rash of vehicle thefts downtown.
They say criminals are looking for small items to steal and pawn, but often end up finding the car keys and make off with the vehicle..."I left my phone in the car and in about five minutes, I was able to pull up the iCloud and locate a GPS coordinate for where my phone was at that time," he said..."We had his computer out and there it was on the screen, a little red dot showing exactly where his cell phone was. We called the police, they recommended that we find him. So we went out and jumped in the car and took off like 007," Gunnarson said...The suspect eventually had nowhere to go. Gunnarson and his son held him down and waited for police to arrive. In a matter of minutes, the suspect confessed and told the police they could find the car parked at a nearby grocery store.
Gah. I'm going to clarify this article a tad where no one gives a shit just for my own sanity.
"We called the police, they recommended that we find him." They made an initial report to a patrol officer, and then called back that same patrol officer once they started tracking the cell phone. That patrol officer is a buddy of mine who promptly called my on my cell, knowing I was out and about, and within like two minutes that victim had an auto theft detective (me) calling him with "where are you pinging that phone at? Ok, this number I'm calling you from is my cell, myself and another auto theft detective are out in undercover cars and will be in that area in a couple minutes. Call me the second you get a location update." The victim and his dad then see the suspect and tackle him without calling anyone to let them know they have eyes on him. Auto theft detectives are literally like four blocks away.
"Gunnarson and his son held him down and waited for police to arrive." Or, a patrol guy sees them tackle the guy and jumps out of his car to help and calls it out on the radio. Me and the other auto theft detective hear this on the radio and are on that scene before they're even done searching the suspect. I then talk that guy into telling us where he dumped the victim's car (keys are still in it, left running). The other auto theft detective goes and secures the car immediately so someone else doesn't drive it off. I also talk a confession out of that suspect on a different car he stole and dumped earlier in the day. I then find a Subaru key on him and talk him into telling me where that car is and we recover it (also stolen, not even reported yet).
Sometimes I wonder why I bother reading the news at all. I only had contact with the son and had no idea his dad was the retired DA. We thought he was just some guy and he got the kind of immediate action most victims can only dream of. For the most part I don't give a fuck but man, at times that kind of shit rubs me the wrong way.
I'm shocked, shocked to hear of a prosecutor jumping at the chance to play Real Cop.
He's lucky he didn't get stabbed. That suspect had a big knife on him along with some crack, so you know he was thinking straight.
270: The most recent Archer is the best one this season.
278: I've turned into a curmudgeon in my 30's and refuse to pay a hundred bucks a month for the ridiculously outdated cable/satellite model. I've got Hulu+ and Netflix and Amazon Prime so all I've got is up to season 4.
Not for the first time nor the last, Bilbo Bagstein wished he was back in his eruv, smoking his pipe and not eating bacon.
I think that's answered the question about "would it be even theoretically possible for Peter Jackson to put more ethnic stereotypes into the next Hobbit film".
274; If that happened in Florida, everybody gets shot.
280: It went in a New Star Wars direction then? I saw only the first film of the whole hexadecimilogy or whatever it is now.
I don't really remember it as particularly ridden with ethnic stereotypes, but I was occupied with trying to bite through the veins in my wrists to make it stop, so I could have missed something.
I ought to watch some of the first 35 films because it's a chunk of cultural literacy but I went in with the handicap of never having gotten into the books. I forced my way through The Hobbit because I was in 8th grade and it just wasn't done not to read The Hobbit but then I think at the end of that one or the beginning of the next one there was a long geographical description of a battle/mountain/I don't know/stuff and my non-spatial brain left me with no idea what had happened and it seemed as good a time to give up on the whole thing as any.
the first 35 films
Can't decide. Joke or typo? The last one in particular is interminable.
I was in 8th grade and it just wasn't done not to read The Hobbit
Already beginning to be true in the 60s, along with Salinger--whom I didn't care for either.
It's worth remembering that most kids never read anything; the highly-literate were a small group by comparison, but they had shibboleths of their own.