the website for berkshares does list a decent number of companies in Great Barrington that does accept the bills though

https://berkshares.org/directory/?select=&lp_s_loc=Great+Barrington&lp_s_tag=&lp_s_cat=&s=home&post_type=listing

but maybe it's something that's died out since 2006?

apparently this town has its own currency too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BerkShares

The jones act requires ships to be US built

No shipyards means no ships which means no ships eligible for US-US travel under the jones act

No one wants to buy us ships because they’re expensive, uneconomical against pipelines, and wouldn’t turn a profit.

Of course pipeline expansion or alternative sources get shut down by environmentalists so that’s not really an option either and we’re just left with high cost

The solution is repeal the jones act, which would never happen because supporters would go “but national defense and the jobs of sailors that remain” which has staved it off every attempt to repeal and nuclear power, which also gets shut down by environmentalists

There are no U.S. flagged natural gas carriers they’ve all been out competed

None have been built since 1980

https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-16-104

Alaska has it even worse

https://maritime.law/legal-insights/us-cabotage-laws-and-alaska-lng-trade/

Then you have to pay American wages, and if wages are 50% of operating costs would you as an American company use the American shippper at 100 a crate or the Liberian one at 55?

American shipping is dead because it’s fundamentally uncompetitive internationally

Building a ship in the US is several times more expensive than china or Korea

That’s why even though we spend more on the military than china, China is actually outpacing our naval ship production

Since trade is commercialized, there’s no incentive for these mostly foreign shipping companies to buy American ships and the only ships America really makes are naval ships which are local for national security

The jones act prohibits foreign flagged vessels from transporting from a US port directly to a US port

There is insufficient pipeline capacity and there are no US merchant ships capable of carrying natural gas, therefore we have to import gas from other countries

yeah because Europe imports from the US, but we can't ship from the US to the US and don't have enough gas capacity, so we get to import from Europe, except now that there's no Russia we get screwed

The MBTA has a 13B unfunded maintenance budget https://www.masstaxpayers.org/mbta-finances-cast-long-red-shadow-incoming-leaders

The 2020-2024 CIP for MassDOT includes 9.4B earmarked for the MBTA

https://massdot.maps.arcgis.com/apps/MapJournal/index.html?appid=33a118c32b3f47b3b90a769498aa68bd#

Which accounts for both expansion and maintenance / modernization

Even if we assumed all the funds earmarked for both maintenance and expansion went to the MBTA's maintenance shortfall, we're still short more than 3 Billion dollars at minimum, the MBTA needs more money

The approved capital budget says

>This $13 billion capital sources gap does not include sufficient funding to reduce greenhouse gas emissions nor to protect MBTA’s infrastructure from sea level rise and storm surge. Factoring in climate change costs, the MBTA is short approximately $20 billion for the period from 2023 through 2031. The federal infrastructure bill, if passed, will not meaningfully change this shortfall.

How do you propose we address this $20B capital shortfall (not even the operating shortfall which runs approximately half a Billion per year) the state itself acknowledges exists when making its capital budgets without adding more money and/or revenue

So you mean to say that the T which already underserved a lot of metro Boston should have cut back on service expansion plans because it had insufficient money or otherwise cut back on expansion in a growing region

Sure fine that’s all well and good, but that doesn’t change the fact that the T has insufficient money to make it’s near term maintenance goals as well as meeting larger economic growth goals for metro Boston

The real solution is to fund both maintenance and capital projects appropriately and not force the T to choose

again, their capital budget is still underfunded, as is the maintenance, how would you solve that without more money? greater Boston is growing, you can't just say "stop expanding"

the T still has an unfunded capital budget, and an even more underfunded maintenance budget. It can't hire people. It can't expand. Those are all issues solvable with more money. The MBTA already has one of the least subsidy rates in North America so the solution really is more money

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farebox_recovery_ratio#North_America

The only major city ahead of Boston in terms of reduced subsidy is Seattle, the MBTA is underfunded

That’s a money problem basic supply and demand, not enough people who want to do the job, pay more

They can’t find people to work buses and trains because they don’t pay enough and you say it’s not a money problem?