I was excited to have this come here, tried takeout from it a handful of times, and it was quite bad each time. Thought it was just the stuff I tried or a bad day, but it was lousy each and every time with different food.

I’ve had a good experience here for years. No frivolous work has ever been recommended. The office is always up to date with the latest technology.

Interesting. In EC at least they seem to do great business. Given that we don’t have things like Miss Shirley’s or Atwater’s out in the Columbia area, they’ve been at least a solid option for breakfast and lunch.

It's probably much ado about mostly nothing. They probably should not have closed 4 hours early to host this event, but they did have a plausible reason to host it; it was not just somebody needing space for their private sorority event who didn't want to pay, but one in a series of community outreach events. The tactics the auditor used were overly aggressive... however, the information the auditor was fed was not right either and it is hard for me to tell whether the tactics were intended to get to the bottom of it or score a political win. Probably just a polite ask for information would have closed this issue without a problem.

Doesn't look to me like it is a state agency. That doesn't mean that it is a county agency subject to being audited by a county auditor, but I don't see in the HCLS report even the original claim that it is a state agency.

I am wondering the same. I also did not see any source explaining this. It would be highly unusual in my experience for a county library system to be considered a “state agency”. The State Library is a state agency. But a county library system that takes some guidance and funding from the state is not de facto a state agency, just as a local school system that takes guidance and funding from the state Department of Education is not a state agency. This link explaining the governing structure of Maryland county libraries makes no reference to them being state agencies of any kind. I’m quite familiar with this relationship in Pennsylvania, having said that, it is possible that Maryland could be different, just have not seen anything that says it is. I’m wondering whether this is just a creative legal argument.

It does seem strange for a public library to host a private event free of charge and close 4 hours early to do it. That does not sound like a good tradeoff for the people who would otherwise have tried to use the library that day. If it weren’t for the closing early part, the question would be whether the library should provide use of its facilities for free for private, closed events. Many libraries charge.

Sure, but why is that? Virtually the only homes in River Hill are large SFHs that are at least 20 years newer than most of the rest of Columbia. Plus a small pocket of condos and townhomes near the village center. The housing mix and zoning are first and foremost what causes this. Clarksville is going to do whatever since they are much more hands off, but River Hill is a village in Columbia that doesn’t really abide by Columbia values.

I agree with your intentions but not the mechanism. New apartments are generally going to be expensive because they’re new and automatically more desirable than similar-sized existing housing stock. Income subsidized units in buildings like the Marlow and Juniper are actually pretty laughable solutions to affordable housing. They’re always outrageously expensive for people who actually meet the income limits, and there is always some tiny number of affordable units allocated to check a box. A much better solution for affordable housing is simply to let builders build more and denser housing. And Marlow and Juniper are examples of builders doing exactly that. Even if they stay top end for a while, their construction will increase supply and lower the prices of the rest of the apartment housing stock. Meanwhile many neighborhoods in Columbia fight hard against this kind of dense construction even though it was Rouse’s vision to mix more dense and less dense housing together. Generally it’s all these building restrictions that have pushed up prices to ridiculous levels—for the most extreme examples, see Silicon Valley.

I live in River Hill, and I do think that community at least is more segregated than others. It has far fewer apartments/condos/townhomes than other communities, and the ones they do have are expensive. While it is diverse in a way, it has relatively few Black households. The last village newsletter I got led with a clearly NIMBY article, backed by all the River Hill leaders, fear-mongering that Howard County’s plans might cause more density or more people to move in (and making what seemed like a bunch of false assertions to support their position). To me, all of this is the opposite of what Jim Rouse wanted… vibrant communities that mixed rich and poor, black and white, apartments and SFHs. Unfortunately once in place, people start prioritizing keeping home values up by keeping other people and new construction out. Made me think, if all the River Hill leaders really want is to live in Clarksville, why didn’t they just move there and save the HOA fees?

Would be careful. This is a $250 fine with no points, correct? You were caught by a camera actually on the school bus. The alternative if you were caught by a police officer is $570 with 3 points on your license. Unless you totally do not have the ability to pay this fine, I would just recommend paying it. Judges may not feel like excusing passing school buses with red lights flashing.

Both are excellent places to live. We looked extensively in Ellicott City before deciding on a home in Columbia. Ellicott City has lots of large single family homes in stately residential neighborhoods with all the shopping/restaurants on Route 40. The only real exception is the historic downtown, which is in an odd pocket (and has major floods—be aware). EC has a large Korean population and many Korean restaurants. Schools are top notch. Columbia has more people, is denser and has more shopping, restaurants and activities. It is a much newer city and doesn’t have the quaint downtown. It has a much wider variety of housing, so you need to look at the neighborhood level. Many schools are also top ranking. Columbia is extremely diverse. It has a phenomenal park and trail system. While EC is closer to Baltimore, southern Columbia is accessible to DC, which is great for weekend trips. Columbia is a planned community, and between the Columbia Association and Howard Hughes Corp, there is always something major being planned or built.

That’s old news, most likely temporarily at the beginning of the pandemic. They did close 25% of them.

I think Baltimore City spends much too much time considering the needs (usually tax breaks) of large businesses and large developers, but very little time worrying about neighborhood level economies. There are very few large companies left in the city. But large business HQs in cities are also starting to become a thing of the past post-COVID. People don’t want to commute into downtown Baltimore and work in an office. But they also don’t want to trek into downtown Seattle or San Francisco (or even New York!) and work there either. These cities are hardly pictures of realty health right now, San Francisco office occupancy is something like 40%. The question is how to make Baltimore a more desirable place to live and a more economically productive place, and that starts by looking at economies at a neighborhood or even street by street level. Which start with residents and the businesses that serve and employ them.

My point is that AI doesn’t need to have any idea what it’s doing—it doesn’t need to have sentience etc.—to produce unexpected output and be very dangerous. Facebook AI only has the tool of matching users with news or posts. So I suppose the worst that can happen is that users get matched with the worst posts (sometimes injected by bad actors) in a systematic way. Bad enough. Give an AI more capabilities—browse the web, provide arbitrary information, perform physical actions, be controlled by users with different intents—and much worse things can happen. There’s a textbook (extreme) example of an AI being tasked to eradicate cancer that launches nuclear missiles and kills everyone, as that is the fastest cancer cure. Even that AI wouldn’t need to have sentience, just more capabilities. Note this does not equate to more intelligence.

Facebook news feeds that used ML have already contributed significantly to more extreme polarization in the US. It’s known already that Facebook users engage more with angry, extreme posts that amplify some of their own views. So an amoral AI that prioritized user engagement would feed users more and more angry stories that push users to the extremes of their own bubble—this is exactly what has happened. This isn’t malevolent AI but rather AI misaligned with human values. This behavior wasn’t expected or intended when this system was designed. And as AI gets smarter (ChatGPT) and has the ability to perform more actions, it has the potential to become much more dangerous.

In theory sure. In practice public transport ridership has to actually increase substantially for this to happen, otherwise this just makes it worse for everyone traveling by car. And I’m not sure what the rationale for ridership increasing is—will the buses run a much faster or more frequent schedule than they did before? I think many are skeptical of Baltimore’s investments in public transport (especially the metro and light rail) as they have been so badly planned and executed upon (they don’t connect, etc.) and haven’t actually resulted in their projected usage.

I hear you. I find all those wide streets in Inner Harbor/Downtown pretty soul sucking. If only they were half as wide and tree-lined, places where people might actually want to walk. I think a lot of it is people making their way in a car around the Harbor, for me it was often Hampden or Roland Park or Fells Point to Federal Hill. Lombard and Pratt and Fayette and Light and President just get packed with those sorts of cars. A subway wouldn’t even cross my mind in those sorts of situations… for it to there would need to be a lot of new infra built.

Baltimore is so far away from a city in which people can rely on mass transit to do much of anything, though. DC is barely there as its stations are generally too spread out. Baltimore has two unconnected lines that hardly run close to anyone in the city or anywhere they’d want to get to - and a bus system. I like mass transit, don’t get me wrong, but Baltimore needs so much more of it just to be barely functional for even a small percentage of its residents. Whereas an 83-95 link that doesn’t go aboveground around the harbor seems immediately useful to me and I suspect a lot of other people - and could perhaps be what Inner Harbor needs to make it livable.

The Big Dig was derided by so many people, cost so much and had so many cost overruns, and was about highways as opposed to mass transit - but look at the results. Neighborhoods connected, waterfront property exposed, tons of new parkland, land value way higher. The costs seem to be easily justified in hindsight. In Baltimore, one could envision the effects - get rid of lots of round-the-harbor traffic, shrink Pratt and Lombard and President and Light, make the whole area pedestrian friendly.

I don’t think it’s just a cost to the city. My family stayed in a downtown hotel, ate dinner and lunch in Baltimore. The hotel and the others around it were completely full, mostly of runners. While I’m from out of town now, I did live there for almost 10 years (and remember getting shut in my place those mornings). There were a ton of police out and I can only imagine the cost of that, but it may be that the high entry fees cover at least some of that. And it does serve as a great PR event for the city.

I hear you, it’s good that we are first in that section and probably indicates that we are doing something right with regard to crime. Still the point stands, about 25% or thereabouts of the weight of this overall ranking is about crime, and the WalletHub thing is kinda clickbaity and misleading.

To get 25% I roughly added up the weights of all the crime-related individual items in their “methodology.” So crime is only 25% of it overall.

I’m not making a point about Columbia crime… I live here and have a fairly good idea where things sit. But this WalletHub thing is kinda silly.

Agree. However that pattern is true in basically every city, which is why cities skew young. There are a large number of powerful factors driving families with kids to suburbs: lower crime, better public schools, larger houses for the money, more land for the money, more convenience for driving and shopping, and lower overall taxes are some of the biggest ones. Cities have to succeed in spite of that, and usually that’s because of appeal to young people, social activities, general appeal of sights/activities/restaurants, and convenience to work. I do think for all its faults that Baltimore is still much more appealing than Columbia for many people 5-10 years out of college. And while DC is even more appealing, that’s where price differences come into the equation.

This Wallethub “safest cities” ranking uses a strange definition of “safe”. Only about 25% of this ranking has to do with crime. Otherwise it’s about things like road quality, unemployment rates, COVID vaccinations, and natural disaster risk. Look at their methodology. Honestly I think it’s mostly (effective) clickbait - how many times a year do I see this headline? And how many rankings do you think they do across the US where other cities are number 1? I wouldn’t put any stock in this ranking.