Small Government is best

Interviewer: You type a Gmail username and UI instantly shows "Username already taken" There are millions of users globally How does it check so fast?

We inherited an agreement where FIFA is providing $0 for transportation to the World Cup. And while NJ TRANSIT is stuck with a $48 million bill to safely get fans to and from games, FIFA is making $11 billion. I’m not going to stick New Jersey commuters with that tab for years to come. FIFA should pay for the rides. But if they don’t – I’m not going to let New Jersey get taken for one.

This was $43 at TD Garden And society expects me to afford a home

Oh sweet summer child. We can't put someone on trial without them present. So, if they aren't in custody on high bail, whether any proceeding at all happens depends on if the Defendant decides to show up. If their bail isn't restrictive enough, they'll eventually stop showing up. Speedy trial is also a Defendant's constitutional right, the victim's statutory right, and not a right of the State at all. So, the State can try to push for trial on the victim's behalf, but if its a "non-victim" crime or a crime where the victim is missing, non-cooperative, or just doesn't care—the State's ability to push to trial at all extends as far as simply refusing to send a plea offer and asking the Court. The Defense can make endless excuses for why trial now is a bad time. "The Defendant has an upcoming doctor's appointment," that's one I've heard plenty. "There's been a death in the family." Man, being the family member of someone pending criminal charges must be one of the deadliest groups to belong to because damn near all of them claim this. "We're waiting on discovery." Sometimes true, especially early in the case, but usually false. They have everything and either haven't looked or are hoping for something else to show up. "I need to have a meeting with my client," is an especially common one despite the implication being that this means either (a) the defense attorney is just not doing their job, or (b) the defendant is dodging them. All of these get a continuance anywhere from a week to three months, depending on the type of case and hearing. If the person is out of custody, they will typically disappear by this point. The defense has no obligation to tell the Court when this happens, by the way, and they don't actually have to even show up themselves in my jurisdiction—so we pretty much never know they've absconded until they get caught committing a new crime. If they're in custody, the defense will then ask for a bail review hearing and complain to the judge, "They've been in custody for three months! They've learned their lesson about showing up for Court this time! I promise!" Judges granted these requests over our objections almost all of the time. You can guess what happened next. Of my Top 15, I was personally able to convict zero. As an office, I know that two were convicted shortly after I left and someone else took over. One of them was resolved by offering the guy a guilty plea on 1 (one, singular) felony out of more than two dozen charged. Why? Because it got him a first felony conviction and without that our chance of getting him sentenced to prison is barely above zero. It was a more efficient use of resources to make him a felon, cut him loose, and wait for him to come back again than it would have been two put him on six trials for >24 felony thefts, all of which would've sentenced him to about two months and some probation. I'm telling y'all... the laws are the big problem here. Everything about Soros DAs and race-based injustices are real concerns, but they are not the foundation. They are symptoms. The cause is a soft bench (pool of judges), horrifically bad State Legislatures, and endless 'due process.'

We are sleeping on the value of tunnels. Even in the largest and most sprawled out cities things are just not that far, if you could drive at highway speeds from the suburb of Scarsdale to downtown NYC it would take only 20min instead of 1h. It takes me 1h to go from Greenwich to the center of London by train or by car. With a tunnel it would take 6 minutes. It’s only 8 miles. The problem is that there is no room to build highways, we have limited land area available. So let’s just build them underground. There is unlimited room underground, no concern about noise pollution, no nimby, almost no impact on the surface during construction. It’s virtually perfect, we just need to reach the scale so that construction gets cheaper. We can also settle for much smaller diameters and less amenities than for subways, essentially what the boring company is doing. I truly think that if they manage to do what they are planning to do it will completely revolutionize how we think about distance in cities.

"More than 40 million borrowers are saddled with federal student debt, and a record number — 7.7 million — have defaulted on their loans"

I will die on the hill if you end up on the other side of the wall with the ball, that should be a HR. you didn’t prevent the ball from clearing the fence

A lot of people are dunking on this, and it’s true, she should have paid the $60 per month for 20 years and let the forgiveness kick in. But what they’re missing is that she was loaned $65k for a terminal master’s in historic preservation. That should never have happened. Tuition has skyrocketed because the ability of students to pay it has completely decoupled from how much money they or their families can afford. Colleges charge infinity dollars because students have access to infinity student loans. In many cases students hoping a credential will lead to a better life get duped into indenturing themselves permanently to get worthless terminal master’s degrees. If the loans didn’t exist, then the master’s programs wouldn’t exist, and if the master’s programs didn’t exist then employers wouldn’t be looking for job applicants with master’s degrees which don’t even connote any real skills. Burn this whole rotten system down.