Strip district is prime real estate now. Could probably sell the land for a few million to a developer that will put it back on the tax rolls, and then move those operations to a less expensive area.

> The city is currently parking ambulances and dump trucks on millions of dollars worth of Strip District property.

I think that was part of the original plan for the site, though from the City Paper article it sounds like that may have been one of the items that got cut due to the cost inflation.

https://pittsburghpa.gov/press-releases/press-releases/5397 > The project will save millions of taxpayer dollars currently spent on leases by relocating public safety operations and public works storage from around the city to the campus. The City plans to bring Emergency Medical Services headquarters from Shadyside, Police Headquarters from Chateau, Police Training Academy from Allegheny West and the vehicle repair shop from the Strip District. The plan also includes building an indoor firing range on the campus to move it from its current location in the Highland Park neighborhood. Locations that will be vacated that the City currently owns can be sold to be put back on the tax rolls and redeveloped to benefit neighborhoods.

Your conclusion that it's unnecessary and fills no pressing need is based on... what analysis exactly?

The city does claim that it would save millions of dollars by centralizing existing facilities, and in theory those freed up properties could be sold off and returned to tax roles. How many of those facilities are at the end of their life and need major renovations regardless?

The shooting range is supposed to be indoors, which would replace the outdoor police firing range in Highland Park which I know has been the source of occasional complaints about the sound of gunshots in this very sub in the past.

> When will people learn that they aren't going to lace a cheaper drug with a more expensive one.

Fentanyl is cheap, and it's been pretty well documented that it sometimes turns up in other drugs like cocaine and meth. Either intentionally to create a "speedball" type product, or unintentionally because of cross-contamination in the packaging.

That said I certainly agree that the concerns over marijuana are overblown, and there's especially no reason to think that a gray-market item like Delta-8 THC edibles would be either intentionally or unintentionally laced with fentanyl.

It's been well known for years that the field tests that police use to detect illegal drugs are error prone, a lot of innocent people have been arrested and charged because of false positives from these tests.

Washington Post - Why are police departments still using drug field tests? > In 2016, a report by Pro Publica and the New York Times found widespread false positives and user errors by cops when administering the most popular tests. Precise error rates are hard to calculate, because some test results can be affected by variables such as weather conditions, user error and lighting conditions. Some studies have shown error rates ranging from 1 in 5 false positives to 1 in 3. But even those disturbing figures can get worse if you create an incentive for a police officer to want a positive result. In 2009, the Marijuana Policy Project used the KN Reagent field test on 42 substances that weren’t marijuana. They were able to get false positives on 70 percent of them. > >The ProPublica report also found that the most commonly used tests didn’t include warnings about the high false-positive rate, despite a 2000 guideline from the Justice Department to do so. Surprisingly, the report found that more than half of those wrongly charged after a false positive actually pleaded guilty, an indication of how the threat of serious jail time can persuade innocent people to falsely confess.

This has been known for literally decades now.

Cost overruns have always been the reality for big government projects.

Plus we can't ignore the unfortunate reality that costs for everything have ballooned between when the project was initially planned, and now. The city isn't immune to the inflationary conditions we've all been dealing with.

> Nemacolin for cops

Is there any indication that the proposed Pittsburgh project is needlessly "luxurious" or are activists just lazily parroting the talking points from a controversy in another city?

> Are you on a hillside or valley

My first thought was lucky placement that avoided most groundwater intrusion issues.

My second thought: survivorship bias

The 100+ year old house in the lucky location not to have that issue, is more likely to survive to be that old.

Unfortunately you see a lot of misinformed stuff when it comes to self-defense and use of force, so it's hard to tell sometimes. I've seen tons of people make the "tranq dart" suggestion completely seriously.

At any rate, hope someone found the info helpful.

Tranq darts don't work like they do in the movies. The target doesn't drop instantly. Even nature documentaries tend to make them seem quicker than they actually are due to editing for time.

Here's a Youtube video involving tranquilizing an African Wild Dog in real time:

https://youtu.be/k4D2pDk4Yvw?t=35

The shot is taken at the 35s mark. The wild dog runs away and even ends up coming back to continue eating it's prey. By about the four minute mark it's starts stumbling around drunkenly, and then only goes down after about five minutes.

How much damage could a human with a gun cause in that amount of time? Plus unlike animals, humans have hands and are likely to rip out a dart before it's had a chance to inject it's full payload.

Ultimately they're just darts of medical sedatives. A bigger dose could theoretically produce a faster effect, but an overdose can easily kill someone. Unlike in surgery you're not going to be able to have an anesthesiologist to carefully administer the proper dose in real-time and monitor the subjects vitals.

It's already a controversial practice for police to have agitated and uncooperative individuals sedated with ketamine by responding EMTs, and even that can lead to severe complications and death despite the administration being done by medical professionals. Giving police pre-loaded darts to shoot at people without medical supervision would be disastrous.

I am curious about the alleged harassment and threats towards the PR firm.

The article didn't mention that but I Googled his name and found these articles from 2005/2006:

https://archive.triblive.com/news/fbi-arrests-plum-officer/

https://archive.triblive.com/news/government-ends-case-against-ex-cop/

https://archive.triblive.com/news/suspended-plum-cop-wants-job-back/

Clearly he got his job back after the charges were dismissed.

It's also worth noting that prior to his 2022 run for Governor he was kind of an unimportant fringe figure in the state GOP. Republican leadership in the state legislature hated him and stripped him of committee chairmanship after various public feuds, including over pushing too hard on the election fraud craziness.

He probably wasn't seen as important enough to influence, he was just another rank and file Republican who got the standard donation. Of course once Republican primary voters handed him the nomination in 2022, Republicans fell in line because that's what they always do.

Doesn't look like the NS fund posted their contributions for 2022 yet...

> That's not true, according to campaign finance records. Since 2019, Mastriano has in fact received $1,000 from Norfolk Southern's political action committee, the Good Government Fund, per filings with the Pennsylvania Secretary of State. The last contribution, amounting to $500, came in 2020 when he was running for reelection to the state Senate.

Searching for the NS "Good Government Fund" finds this page on their website where they disclose their contributions:

http://www.nscorp.com/content/nscorp/en/about-ns/government-relations/political-activity-and-political-contributions.html

Seems like they only allocate about a half million per year to these activities, but it's spread out over like 20 pages of candidates. Looks like $500 per cycle is a pretty common amount for them to allocate to state legislative candidates.

http://www.nscorp.com/content/dam/nscorp/get-to-know-ns/government-relations/Political-Activities-Report/2020/2020-political-contributions-report.pdf

It's been noted that this region has an unusual concentration of pizza places. While there's no shortage of locally owned eateries, it just seems like so many of them fall into the pizza category, particularly in the suburbs.

Could stand to see a bit more variety in the locally owned restaurants.

You might be surprised by the number of places that rely on part-time officers being paid Walmart wages. Like anyone else in that situation, it often requires holding down multiple jobs to make ends meet.

Curwensville Borough has about 2500 people. The Curwensville Borough website lists a grand total of two employees for the police department, the Chief and a School Resource Officer. Very common to see part time officers in places with a limited tax base like that.

According to the municipal budget on the website the borough budgets for the chief, one full time patrol officer, one part time patrol officer, and the school officer. The budget for the part time patrol officer is $32K, the Chief gets $56K.

There were three special elections to fill vacancies in the state house, all for districts within Allegheny County.

One member died before the November election, but too late for them to be replaced on the ballot. One was Austin Davis, who is now Shapiro's Lt. Governor. The last is Summer Lee, who was elected to a seat in the US House.

> In 50 years the generation of teens and 20-something will be eager for the deaths of the unrepentantly backward, greedy and immoral Gen Z.

More like millennials probably. Millennials are the second largest generational cohort after boomers, so will have massive electoral heft once the boomers shed their mortal coil.

Gen Z are probably going to be another Gen X type situation, always living in the shadow of their numerically larger predecessors.

Edit: Correction, millennials outnumber boomers as of 2019.

Giant Eagle stopped having 24hr locations even before COVID.

We'd probably be looking at actual shortages right now without that domestic capacity, instead of just uncomfortably high prices.

What's crazy to me is that apparently Britain was already largely deforested, by the time the Romans showed up.

https://aeon.co/essays/who-chopped-down-britains-ancient-forests

Who even said anything about taxpayer dollars?

Every little bit helps, and cannabis should be legalized for it's own merits regardless of the revenue potential.

That said the activists obsessed with this issue tend to vastly overstate the revenue potential.

Just as a comparison of size, over a decade PA diverted $4.2 billion from the infrastructure piggybank funded by the gas tax to the state police. As I recall, that amounted to about a quarter of the fund.

Since Colorado legalized cannabis in 2014, they've collected $2.4 billion in total.

I think people tend to forget that cannabis is kind of a niche recreational product, and inherently can't produce that much tax revenue in the grand scheme of things. It's almost like... the average person buys a lot more gas than weed.

There is an argument that gas taxes in the US are far too low, which encourages consumption and discourages efficiency, contributing to climate change and slowing the transition to greener alternatives.

That view is going to have more support among Democrats, especially those in deep-blue urban areas. But Democrats representing more suburban swing-districts really can't afford to adopt that sort of stance.

> Hole up - this legislation would fix the wholesale cost at 2.99/gal.

That confused me, it has to be a misunderstanding because there's absolutely no way that PA can fix the price of gas.

I'm guessing the wholesale tax fluctuates based on the market price, which is why it shot up at the beginning of this year because the average wholesale price shot up last year.

So the legislation is probably saying that for the purposes of the amount of the wholesale tax, we're just going to pretend that gas is $2.99/gal forever.

> Medical weed should not be taxed at all.

Apparently there is a 5 percent gross receipts tax, but MMJ is exempt from the state sales tax so it's kind of a wash.

https://www.revenue.pa.gov/TaxTypes/MedMarijuana/Pages/default.aspx