Letters to the Editor
Electro Robot
Published Letters: 1115 Editor's Choice: 9
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Why do you all sound retarded?
[Read the article: Housing starts: Bad numbers keep getting worse]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]America is not coming to an end. Millions of people aren't going to emigrate to Mexico. And it generally takes a few years to whittle down the excess inventory of housing stock. A few YEARS. And if so then why is it such a bad thing for prices in Palo Alto and other insane markets to come down? Isn't it silly that people who earn $100,000/year have to live 2 hrs from their job?
Take at look at the crazy market on Long Island, NY. Everyone there will tell you they're sitting on a million dollar home. Of course the only people who would ever pay that are other people living there, who would sell their own million dollar home to some other person who lives near them and so on. Unless prices came down 40% then LI is doomed to become a ghost town of nothing but old people trapped in their homes waiting to die. No kids, no schools, no nothing. And since most taxable entities look at the value of a home when it transfers, if the homes don't sell and all the gains are unrealized then all the towns and counties in those areas tend to lose large amounts of tax funds they already planned for.
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No not really
[Read the article: Housing starts: Bad numbers keep getting worse]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I would suggest that zero cities of 350,000 or less have any serious plans for mass transit. It's simply too expensive and too long term for local governments to sell to the public. I live in a city of 350,000 people and there is a zero percent chance that they will successfully build a light rail system, ever. And we are one of the sprawliest of the sprawls. If anyone needed rapid cheap non car based transportation it's us. Even at highway speed it can take 40 minutes to get from one side of the city to the other. And we have typically one of the 10 worst air qualities in the US - because of all the cars, choked traffic and overloaded roads.
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the great thing about holding yourself out as your self appointed moral star
[Read the article: Is it "contradictory" to decry the right's tactics while insisting on their equal application?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Is that you leave all the dirty work and grubby decisions for other people to make and for you to critique. No accountability. You'd rather loose gloriously than eek out a winning compromise.
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This is like the grand old days of IBM PC servers
[Read the article: Let's fight: Popular Mechanics says Macs beat PCs in style and speed]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]They would take forever to start up, between the BIOS checks, RAM checks, device loading, then the OS...you could go out for quick sex while the machines booted. Their rationale, much like Porsche engineers rationale behind having a REALLY shitty linkage to first gear was, "You only need it once!"
Windows follows on this theory by assuming that everything is a customization that has to be loaded. And then behind the covers it kicks off a ton of services that few people ever need anyway. Now services don't take a great deal of time to start, they're services, that's what they do - start quickly. But the overall bag of crap you have drag around does tend to make it sluggish. So I guess the theory is you should never have to start the machine that often. I know I generally run XP desktops in the 200 hrs uptime range. Every 200 hrs or so, restart them to flush out the crap. 700 hrs uptime appears to be the max limit for being able to run a machine w/o having do crazy shit on its own.
Also never discount the incredible shittiness of Vista drivers. When they work at all they work poorly. Last but not least OSX is BSD/Mach/uKernel based. Starting up fast is one of its design points. Try as they might Windows will NEVER EVER EVER be a reliable SRT (soft real time) system kernel whereas BSD is.
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What are your travel times
[Read the article: Housing starts: Bad numbers keep getting worse]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Ours are enormous even under ideal circumstances. Were you to take the bus anywhere, a typical trip would be 15 miles. Most people won't tolerate those kinds of wait times. As for light rail, forget it. NIMBY central. No one wants the tracks or the parking near them. No one will sell rights of way for affordable prices unless they're 'stolen' under eminent domain. We have bus system but it's pathetic. I think it stops running at 10pm so even if there were a downtown nightlife, no one can go home via bus. So much easier to arrest the drunk drivers, you see. A lot more money in that.
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Newsflash
[Read the article: Bush's lame-duck climate change proposal]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]No one, I repeat NO ONE is pretending to pay attention to that shithead anymore. He could read the Georgetown phonebook for all it matters.
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Tell that to all the Native Americans who live near paper RE processing plants
[Read the article: Environmental advocacy at its finest]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Paper recycling is a VERY pollution industry. Ironic, isn't it?
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As a longtime straphanger
[Read the article: Best reason to cab it: The subway groper]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Anyone who says you can't or shouldn't punch a criminal in the head is just not worthy. Riding the NYC subways comes with it the experience of screaming Jesus Freaks, crackheads, the Bushwick gang, disabled 'veterans', fake gang bangers and drunks. Here is what you do - when someone assaults you you turn around and punch him in the face. Hard.Better yet knee to the nutsack and drop him. And when he's on the ground suddenly lose your balance and step on him.
C'mon ya cowards take back the train!