I’d definitely recommend it as one of the best options downtown.

Hey, now’s your chance to show that critics of the bill are well informed. You could point to something specific and data supporting your claim that it’ll make crime worse.

When they knowingly make false statements about the bill, it’s pretty clear what their goal is. The question is just when they’ll come out and actually say it.

Each time I’ve looked, the owners of those stores live an hour away in Maryland or Virginia. I’m not surprised that they want a personal highway but I doubt it’s representative of their customers or employees.

Pedestrians don’t have to jump out of my way because I avoid pedestrian areas and slow down when I can’t. If you’re not just trolling, try counting how many times pedestrians have to change what they’re doing to go around or avoid being hit by cyclists and by cars – the numbers aren’t even close, as you could guess from looking at the collision stats. The cause is obvious: cars need 10-20 times as much space per person so despite having so much space reserved for them it’s never enough; the same number of people on bus, bike, or foot will have a much easier fit.

I’d bet if you did a study you’d find more than a few residents avoid crossing such busy roads. That could be significant for a business which isn’t hugely profitable.

Yeah, but think about how long the cycle is and how you’ll be dodging people turning right or running the light. You can certainly do it but the extra hassle adds more weight than it might seem.

Connecticut Avenue was designed to serve suburban car commuters, not residents. There’s pretty much always traffic, it’s unsafe and unpleasant to walk around with all of the speeding cars and their pollution (who wants to eat outside with 110dB of car noise?), and if you’re already driving the parking situation is a mess so you might as well keep going to the suburbs with better pricing and easier, cheaper parking. The redesign should help a lot since it’ll make it safer for the majority of customers who live in the area.

MPD hasn’t done traffic enforcement seriously for much longer than that - the calls for automated enforcement are in part because it’s not getting done otherwise. The officers don’t seem interested in doing it and having the same people receiving calls means that it’s not anyone’s priority.

First, I was specifically responding to the “abysmal” characterization — I think there's plenty of room for improvement. The main point was that when making comparisons across countries we have to perform some corrections if we're looking for ideas about where we could improve. Since wealth isn't evenly distributed across countries or within them it's easy to find a smaller country which looks like an outlier, run some editorials about how they've discovered the secret to education, and not really have learned anything other than that life easier if you're not poor.

What we'd want to look for in setting goals are the countries with high social mobility because, as you mentioned, it's better when students can do markedly better than their parents. The results of that comparison likely also ideas outside of the educational system itself: for example, if the child of poor immigrants in Scandinavia does better it might be that their teachers and curriculum are about the same but the better social support system means their parents aren't working 3 jobs to make rent or asking their oldest child to stay home to watch their siblings while they work.

Part of why I mentioned immigrants in that previous example is that this is also a complicating factor for the U.S. because we have a relatively large number of immigrants compared to many of our peers and a large fraction don't arrive speaking English. Many older children score poorly that way due to language proficiency, so using those figures to attack the educational system is a disservice to both sides.

It’s not. American education quite closely tracks the parents’ socioeconomic status, and we have a disproportionate level of poverty for a rich nation, however. Once you compare children of similar status things tend to be a lot more similar than you’d expect based on our political discourse.

One similar confound for comparison is that we use one general system for everyone and don’t track kids into separate non-college vocational programs. That’s not saying that those are bad decisions but if you’re comparing student performance or cost you need to make sure that you’re not inadvertently comparing a system where, say, kids with learning disabilities are separated to one where they aren’t without trying to correct for that.

This is my favorite ice cream shop in the district. I’d suggest dinner at ANXO next door but that requires extreme discipline to have room left.

> Also, can we find out which auto body shop or supplier is buying these wheels and bring down the hammer on them as well?

This is a very good question: going after the money is effective and it’s not especially hard because the seller has to have some level of public presence. I know MPD did this with bike thefts during the Lanier era because they busted some shops buying bait bikes and it seems like a similar approach would work here — or doing something like having an undercover officer buy the fake tags being sold on Facebook.

This is why I think we need a citizen bounty system: if they knew anyone on the street could get $50 for a discrete photo and the company would fine them, it’d change the calculation from “I’ll just be a minute, it’s No Enforcement Everyday”.

I’d also like to have a policy that unless there’s no garage parking within 10 blocks, a restaurant has street parking reclaimed for pick ups & deliveries while they’re open. Better to avoid the congestion & chaos by benefiting many dozens of people than subsidizing one person over the same timeframe.

They’re relatively responsive but it only works for people who are staying for an hour or two - it doesn’t work so well for things like DoorDash drivers who are parking in a traffic lane for 15 minutes. Some areas (1st & M St) either need cameras or roving patrols.

One thing which could really help would be running a bounty through FHV (roll in deliveries) where cars registered to a rideshare service would need the service to demonstrate that the driver wasn’t working for them in the 15 minutes around a citizen report or they’d get a hefty fine billed to the company. If it paid $20, a ton of people would report that kind of annoyance and charging the companies avoids both the questions about linking a plate to a person or dealing with non-residents and cancelling out their profits would make the companies give their drivers more realistic schedules.

They want decentralization when it comes to cheating on their taxes or being able to buy illegal products.

They want the government to step in when they get ripped off by someone who better understands what “no regulations” means.

Cryptocurrencies are also fiat currencies: the random hashes have no intrinsic value, even less than the paper in a dollar bill. The difference you should be learning about is that in the case of, say, Bitcoin there is no power behind that fiat - nobody is required to use it, pay taxes in it, or receives it without alternatives. That’s why the price is so volatile because at any point a user has to decide whether it’s better to use a different currency (betting that the price will go up).

In contrast, the USD is the default currency in one of the largest economies in the world and millions of people are required to use it to pay taxes, receive payments, or get paychecks from the government, and strong pressure to use it from all of the contracts specifying dollars. That’s a huge amount of inertia and there’s no plausible mechanism where that changes quickly but there’s still a global economy.

FHV has a very easy way to report it: email dfhv.complaints@dc.gov. I get a reply from a city employee every time and they’ll update you with progress.