George Nortle

Arky started stressing after having to pay $1,000 in Toronto, Canada for a Doctor to check his broken hand despite having health insurance in America 😭 "they said its $1,000 to just look at it, if you need medicine we are going to charge you extra on top of that"

Ok, who’s buying one? This is an insane deal, roughly US$29,000. The comparable configuration in the U.S. is priced about $13,000 more at $42,490!

I’m crying they’re not even gonna TOUCH Africa

Many people do not seem to want data centres built near them, despite the fact that they don't cause that much traffic and often generate a lot of local tax revenue. I suspect it's partly because they're ugly! My proposal:

🚨🇫🇰 NEW: Argentina’s Vice President says Falklanders should go back to England “If they feel English, they should go back to the thousands of miles away where their country is”

You can support Ukraine against evil Russian aggression 100% but also recognize that Israel owes Ukraine nothing. Ukraine has voted against Israel at the UN—alongside its own enemy, Russia—hundreds of times. Why should Israel be a geopolitical sucker?

“Western leftist has been here.” “How can you tell?” “Russia apologism”

BART spent $90 million on new fare gates. They're recovering about $10 million a year in fares. That's a 9-year payback on paper. The actual return hit in six months. Embarcadero station went from 112 hours of corrective maintenance in the six months before installation to 2 hours after. Daly City saved 109. Balboa Park saved 75. Across the system, 961 hours of cleanup work disappeared. Corrective maintenance is the term BART uses for graffiti, heavy soiling, vandalism, the damage that needs a crew not a janitor. At several stations it dropped to zero. Crime fell 41% year over year. Riders who reported seeing fare evasion on their trip dropped from 22% to 10%. Citations issued by BART police went from 2,200 in January to under 1,000 in July, because there was nothing to cite. The gates were a filtering project disguised as a revenue project. Old BART gates were waist-high orange fins designed in the 1970s. You could hop them in under a second. That made the station effectively a public space, and the rider mix reflected that. The new gates are 72 inches of polycarbonate with 3D sensors that detect tailgating. You either pay or you don't enter. Once you don't enter, you also don't smoke on the platform, sleep in the elevator, or harass other riders. BART tried hiring more police for years. Blitz operations at high-traffic stations. Increased patrols. Dedicated transit cops. None of it moved the numbers the way six feet of polycarbonate did. The $10 million in recovered fares is the smallest line in the return. Fare revenue used to cover 70% of BART operations. After the pandemic it collapsed to 22%. The gates won't fix that gap directly. They fix the precondition for fixing it: a system that office workers, families, and tourists are willing to use again. Ridership growth at stations with new gates outpaced ungated ones before the rollout finished. A $400 million annual deficit is heading to voters in November as a sales tax measure. Voters don't approve sales taxes for transit agencies they don't feel safe in. The $90 million on gates is buying BART the right to ask the public for more money. That's the real return on six feet of polycarbonate.