Ha ha ha ha ha ha!!!!

(Source: New Jersey)

They try and get you to sign up with an energy company that purports to be much cheaper than PSEG. And they are... for the first month or two, and then the rates jump up, but you're locked into a contract and are stuck paying more.

Amenities also can't replace space. I live in a 3-story, 4br house with a sizeable backyard, half a block from Lincoln Park, and my mortgage doesn't come close to $3500 a month.

And for $3500 a month, that island better have a palm tree on it.

$2000 in cash every month

Well, it's easy to make that argument if you inflate the numbers ridiculously. You're not losing 30% of your kids or anywhere near that, and while public school enrollment is down, charter schools are a drop in the bucket:

Some non-made-up numbers:

Contrary to some theories, there’s no evidence that families are fleeing public schools in droves or for charters and private schools. While the city’s enrollment dropped by about 100,000 students since 2019 — not counting 3K — overall enrollment in city charter schools has grown by just over 10,000 students, or by 7.8%, since the pandemic started. And over that same time period, the city’s private schools actually saw a 3.6% drop in pre-K-12 enrollment, according to state data.

This isn't the same cast, but there's a fan theory I love that David O. Russell's Three Kings is a stealth prequel to The A-Team. It's about an army team that goes AWOL and steals gold, which is what the A-Team were accused of on the show.

And the characers map: Clooney=Hannibal, Wahlberg=Face, Cube=B.A., Jonze=Murdoch.

This is just one personal anecdote, but my son broke his wrist last spring running around in the park after dark. At first he insisted he was fine, so we didn't end up going to the JCMC emergency room until after midnight. Being late, it wasn't too crowded, but they also didn't seem to be all that well-staffed. And someone came in with a gunshot wound and someone else came into the waiting room in labor, so we weren't the priority.

At 4AM I decided my kid needed some sleep, so we went home and went to urgent care in the morning. They wrapped him up and sent him to an orthopedist in the suburbs who put him in a cast, all in less time than we sat in the waiting room at JCMC.

So, moral of the story is less that JCMC is bad, and more that, don't go to the emergency room unless it's life-and-death. Odds are you're going to get better care and faster from urgent care.

Maybe things have changed in the past few years, but Christ was always chronically understaffed. I had to take my kid there for a severe flu, and while the nurses gave him an IV to hydrate him, he was there for two days and nights and we saw a doctor for maybe a grand total of fifteen minutes. They had one pediatrician who was stretched between pediatrics, maternity, and the ER. Which meant if he was delivering a baby, the emergency room would have to wait and vice versa.

Son, Dewey Cox gotta think about his whole life before he poses for a group photo!

> the money comes from the same pot as the general education one

But so do the kids!!! The mainstream schools get less money because they're educating fewer kids! The per-student funding doesn't change!

It's like complaining that your job doesn't give you a parking stipend because you no longer have a car.

Success Academy is the biggest example of "one guy ruining it for everyone" since someone put a razor blade in a piece of Halloween candy in the '70s.

My kids went to a charter in Jersey City, and not one of the knee-jerk criticisms the previous comment rattled off apply. My son had an IEP and they lavished support and resources on him. The school was more than 50% reduced lunch, they had special ed kids, they only expelled one student in my kids' 10 years there (and he was stalking and making threats against another student), and they did it all with less per-student funding than mainstream public schools and the state didn't pay for busing.

And I have no idea what business' pockets are being lined — like every charter in New York and New Jersey, the school is run by a nonprofit board. But the facts will never stand in the way of good talking points, and the "all charter schools are a corporate plot" one will never die.

> They believe that keeping these bad people in an otherwise good population will magically reform them

People believe this because it very often works and its pretty well documented. You have this reductive view that there are "good people" and "bad people" and those are somehow immutable. This isn't a video game where your job is to punish the bad guys. So much misbehavior in high-poverty schools is the result of poverty, and so much of the rest is atmosphere. If everyone in your school grew up in generational poverty and sees nothing but the behaviors that that engenders, you're going to act the way everyone around you acts. If everyone in your school grew up middle class, with middle class behaviors, you're going to act differently. Are kids in that situation going to immediately become perfect, 100% of the time? Of coures not. But on the whole it's absolutely beneficial.

You just have to have faith in people and a genuine desire to help, not your sneering dismissiveness of people who grew up in poverty as inherently "shitty people".

Most diverse city in the world

In 45 minutes you can be in Times Square or be on a farm

It has the sense of community you get in a small city (ie. you see a lot of the same faces if, say, your kids are the same age; I've met our councilperson numerous times; you can bike anywhere in town easiliy enough), but you still have access to everything NYC has to offer.

It's great and reliable at rush hour and at no other times.

Maybe, but if we were capable of doing such a thing, surely we could just make an existing planet liveable with a lot less effort.

I wasn't hating on wealthy people, I was acknowleding the reality that a very large number of them live in New York City, to the point where it's nearly impossible for a non-rich person to live in Manhattan or the western neighborhoods of Brooklyn and Queens. The idea that rich people are flooding out of New York just doesn't square with anything that has happened in the last 25 years.

Yes, New York City, famous for its lack of rich people. No wonder housing is so affordable!

> Could it be that there are more Non-trades people buying these trucks and they changed the design to match the majority of the market?

Right. That's the whole issue. There are fewer actually useful trucks on the market because the industry has turned trucks into minivans, to cater to suburbanites who want to feel "rugged" when they squeeze their oversized toys through the Starbucks drive-thru.

tl;dr: "I, for one, welcome our new robot overlords!"

So many moons compared to what? We don't really have any idea how many moons other solar systems' planets have, because they're generally too small to detect. (Most of the exoplanets we've discovered are gas giants, because they're the easiest to spot)

Innocent question: why are they called "speed humps" in Jersey City and "speed bumps" everywhere else in the country? Speed hump is what my dog does when he gets excited. It never doesn't strike me as an odd choice.

This is good news for my Boomer mom, who calls every Spanish-speaking person Puerto Rican.

You're in the nicest neighborhood in town, and close to basically everything. The epicenter of nightlife in JC is Grove & Columbus; wherever you are near Hamilton Park, you're a short walk from there, which means you have easy access without the traffic or noise. Take that apartment and don't let it go!