Realistically, beyond these "jinxes", there are places where electrical service is far more reliable than in others. In certain areas of the city you have lots of redundancy and switches so that faults can be isolated and routed around. Places where you can have a bunch of separate power line cuts where nobody loses electricity or where there is no way for more than a few buildings to lose power without lots of electrical faults in the area. If you know what you're looking for, you can find lots of automated switches on the electrical lines within the city. By contrast, there are places, especially as you get further from major cities, where if a single tree falls on a power line running for miles through wooded or tree lined streets, everybody in that area is without power.

I don't know about Georgia, but certainly not in Pennsylvania (nor Allegheny county).

Yes, this is their method of PR.

Your comment is just flat out wrong in so many ways that your final question becomes nonsensical (since it is predicated on false statements).

In addition to the above roles, the mayors job is to be the face of the city. The chief executive of any entity, be it a corporation or a locale is the top representative for that entity both internally and externally and is never not political.

As to denigrating drag as a just a "sexual fetish" is like saying that feet are merely a sexual fetish and anyone who goes out in bare feet should be shamed and outlawed because of that. Nearly any argument you could make for not wearing anything on your feet could be argued for wearing clothes that are traditionally worn by the other gender in western societies. This runs the full gamut of "it's more comfortable to me" to a "sexual fetish". But if you seem to only be able to focus on the sexual fetish part of it.

This is a really twisted and non-standard usage of "law enforcement". His purpose is to prosecute crimes. No police officer is supposed to answer to him professionally. Quite the contrary, the police are supposed to be independent of the prosecutors and investigate suspected criminal cases without bias while the prosecutor is by definition in an adversarial role. The shitty thing is when police and the DA's office see themselves as partners which is where all kinds of problems crop up.

Except I wasn't talking about how they were sentenced.

The fact that the DA sees the police as more important than those people who are not police is really fucked up, regardless of any other biases and prejudices they might have. And this disgusting relationship causes issues in lots of manners. This includes:

• It means that an action against a police officer (including many things that are not criminal) is treated much more harshly, often in a retaliatory manner rather than merely upholding justice and maintaining the peace while crimes against others are often ignored. And it's not uncommon for someone to have great injustices done to them because too many police officers take a person asserting their basic rights as a personal affront.
• when police commit crimes their actions are routinely ignored or just given extremely gentle treatment.
• The DA and police often see each other as partners in attempting to get convictions for the DA rather than the true job of the investigatory role of police which is to investigate potential crimes in an unbiased manner. And while it is a criminal action for a DA to withhold exculpatory evidence, this "partnership" routinely sees police turning a blind eye towards evidence in favor of the accused and so the DA never has it in their possession to withhold.

What you're describing is illegal, for very good reason, in any civilized country (and certainly any country or state that derives some of the foundations of its laws English Common Law like PA does).

It is no different from when someone leaves any other item of value on your property. It's not yours and there is a legal procedure for dealing with it. If you try to do so in a manner that is not legal then that puts you in far greater legal jeopardy than the person who left it on your property.

This is no different from someone blocking your driveway with a car. And like when someone parks a car illegally, you're not allowed to just take it or destroy it. You have to go through proper procedures to get it moved even if it is a major headache for you.

Likely the people who leave them there don't realize that they're causing any issue (based on the image it does look like the people who put them there attempted to put them in an out of the way location). If you go through the app it will almost certainly resolve the issue faster and more permanently than any other method.

You're not really giving them "engagement" in any form when you do so and when your OS asks for permissions to use it make sure to specify that those permissions are only for when the app is active.

Those entities will be active in the remediation and they will certainly be trying to bill NS for their time and resources. But what teeth do they have? What authority do they have to compel NS to do much of anything?

As much as this might be the case, I'm not sure what all he can do beyond complain a bunch. The railroads have worked really hard to make it so that they only answer to the federal government and then neuter the limited oversight that exists there. And as long as at least 50% of the members of the federal legislatures are made up of some combination of republicans and a handful relatively conservative democrats, this isn't going to change barring a much larger catastrophe than this one.

Just for clarity, there's a lot to be said for just acting as if you own the property and depending on the details, there's a good chance you'll never have an issue in your lifetime (when I was looking at homes recently, one that I was seriously considering had much of its fenced in yard and paved driveway on city property and it had been that way for at least several decades with no reason to believe that that the situation would change any time in coming decades). However PA state law doesn't allow actual adverse possession (with transfer of title at the end of the process) with municipally owned property.

If you have 200 amp service in your house, the wiring to your house is at least sufficient for household electrical needs for the foreseeable future. However you may want more discrete circuits in your house than your panel currently holds or you might want to wire in a bunch of new circuits to a location far away from your electrical box, and then it is often worth your while to put in a sub-panel. Presumably if you have 200 amp service you likely have a decent sized electrical box. And even once all of the slots are full, you can get away with a few breaker slots being doubled up. But eventually there comes a point where the box is too crowded to safely work in it.

For instance when I moved into my new house, I wanted to set up a small wood and metal workshop in my garage. My garage is on the opposite side of my house from my main electrical panel so it was worth it to me to hire an electrician to install a subpanel in my garage so that I'm only running one large electrical circuit all the way across the house and through a foundation wall rather than a dozen smaller ones.

Similarly when I moved in, I had 100 amp service to my house and the main panel was both small and completely full. 100 amps would cover my immediate needs but I did want more circuits in the main house. So I could have gotten away with installing yet another sub-panel near the main panel. But I had no headroom for doing things that I anticipate will likely happen in the future (switching to a heat pump for heating and hot water, I can't imagine that my next car won't be electric, and likely other unknown uses). Thus I opted to just increase my service line to 200A and replace the original small panel (that likely was installed when the house was built in the 1940s) with a much larger panel.

> My previous electric water heater

Based on this comment, presumably they did. But even if they didn't, adding a 240V outlet is not very expensive as long as its location has reasonable access to the breaker panel and you have available capacity. If you don't have available capacity then you really want to consider upgrading that in the semi-near future regardless because you will absolutely want it.

And even then. Lots of states have gone through this (I have personal memories of Ohio going through it while I lived there and continuing on long afterwards). Because any budget/taxation changes have to come through the legislature and I know of no state court that was able to compel a state legislature to fundamentally change how it funds something (since ostensibly the courts and legislatures are equally powerful and it could easily result in a constitutional crisis if the courts tried to hold the legislators in contempt of court).

By contrast, my girlfriend who has bounced back and forth between AASHTO and contracting work for FHWA and in her roles at those organizations works with lots of the individual state DOTs says she genuinely enjoys working with the engineers at PennDOT.

But that sounds like an awful long time being underemployed while you get the "experience". not quite 30 years ago I did some of that in the private sector (I spent maybe a year with the title of "programmer's assistant" while being the principal architect of a decent size system that a multi-billion dollar corporation depended on and could not function without) but very quickly was promoted out of that. For the past 20 years or so, most of my jobs in the private sector have on paper had the requirements of a master's level education and nobody bats an eye at the fact that my highest degree is a high school diploma.

It really bugs me that so many people characterize government workers as people who just sit and do nothing. Most of the people I know of who work for government agencies work their asses off (if nothing else because they are perpetually understaffed), often with little appreciation for the work they do. They do it because they see value in making the world a better place (though if you can put up with the lousy pay and the inflexible bureaucracy, the health and pension benefits generally aren't bad). Yes there are places like the DMV where role of the line workers has been bikeshedded into something that approaches my definition of hell and with that on top of all of the austerity measures that have been put into place, you're not attracting anything approaching top talent. But there's a lot of people who do a lot of very important but very thankless jobs in the government and comments like the above aren't helpful.

15% of the state's adult population has "some college but no degree" and another 10% have associate degrees. That's likely a large number of additional people who now meet the required qualifications for many of these roles. As a simple anecdote, I'm one of the 15% who never graduated college but have enough credit and experience that I would now meet minimum requirements for several of the jobs that previously required a bachelors degree.

Considering that 25% of the adult population of PA has acquired "some college but no degree" or an associates degree, there's likely a significant percentage of that segment of the population that would now qualify.

Can I borrow your time machine?

They are close enough and overlap in their specifications to the point that they can be used interchangeably and I've seen sources of it in smaller markets say that they start with the same refined product (presumably since it would take more effort than it's worth for a refinery on the west coast, where there is a heating oil market but it's tiny relative to the northeast, to sell a separate product).

We've long ago started small in that lots of local governments have been using it in various forms for a while (I used to live in Cambridge MA which has been doing so for about 80 years now) and it continues to work just fine. Recently several smaller states have also begun to use it.