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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • In America, there’s like 3 different things you could call a mall. When most people talk about them, it means a giant building with central indoor paths connecting a bunch of businesses. Typically, there would be a handful of “anchor” businesses, like department stores and a movie theater, and then space for a bunch of much smaller businesses in between including restaurants. These malls (at least the ones I’ve been to) for whatever reason don’t typically have grocery stores. I have seen pharmacies and small Dr’s offices in them.

    Then there are “strip malls” that are typically a row of businesses on one side or surrounding a big parking lot. Typically grocery stores are in those.

    Lastly, there’s “outlet malls”, which are often set up like a fake town with parking distributed throughout. They are commonly built on cheap land in the outskirts of towns, and they have mostly clothing. They are typically brand specific stores (e.g., Nike), so they are allegedly cheaper.

    It’s that first category that Americans are going to be talking about if they just refer to a “mall”, though. The idea to have all your shops in a convenient place has been around forever, and still works great in many traditional business districts. The “shopping mall”, though, was somewhat of an artificial movement in the 80’s and 90’s that was always a bit destined to fail. Like people have said, the internet is partially responsible, but malls were hurting before the internet started really doing damage. In America, you basically have to drive everywhere, and if you are driving everywhere, it’s easiest to just drive directly to whatever shop you need. With malls, you have to park far out in a giant lot, and walk a long way to get to whatever business. You could call it lazy, but if you’ve only got a little bit of time after a day of work to do shopping, are you going to do the option where you get the task done in 30 minutes, or an hour?










  • Keeping the air dry reduces both the length of time microorganisms can live outside your body and the length of time that vapor particles can harbor them.

    Pretty sure this is only true for some microorganisms. Well, I’m not sure about length of survival time, but I’ve definitely see studies that have shown that lower humidity causes respiratory droplet evaporation, resulting in more airborne virus particles and increasing spread. There is some evidence that this increases infection rates





  • The current tunnel is a relic from a long time ago when trains were slower, and there were competing train lines that had to try and fit through baltimore where they could. If you look at a map of the train line, it actually sharply curves out of the way of that currently Black neighborhood to go under the currently white neighborhood. This means the top speed is 30 mph. Under the new plan, they could hit 100 mph.

    There are other problems with the current tunnel, mainly just down to being old, and those you could fix by redoing it in the same spot, but that wouldn’t fix the speed issue, because the speed is governed by the curvature (and grade).





  • That doesn’t appear to be good journalism. The article does not mention that the reason they want to move the location of the tunnel is to remove the biggest bottleneck on the northeast corridor, and redoing the current tunnel location keeps that bottleneck. Removing that bottleneck would have huge benefits to public transit on the eastern seaboard.

    Additionally, they mention “train emissions”, but don’t mention that the trains that would use the tunnel are all electric. The only time there would be any emissions would be in the case of a fire, which is very uncommon in passenger trains. The highway and other busy streets in the area are a far bigger problem.

    Overall, it seems like standard nimby-ism.