You can also throw those 500 hours at a contractor without good oversight and end up burning tens of thousands of dollars on a crap outcome.

Often times "we can't" in a software system does not mean it is a technologically impossible problem. It means that whatever effort is required to solve the problem way outweighs the value represented by solving it.

That can be true of even things that have tremendous value. If creating one feature that everybody will absolutely love takes 500 hours and with that time, you could build 25 other features and bugfixes, sometimes you just have to get the 25 in favor of the one.

That often means the one 500 hour feature will never get built because you will never just have 500 hours available at one time to burn on a single fix or enhancement. And some projects don't have the capability to be incrementally solved, aka we'll budget 10 hours for it this month and that will give us a small improvement. It could very well be that 490 hours don't get you a useable change, only the last 10 hours that wraps it up makes it useable.

Likewise if you can afford to budget 10 hours a month to it, that means it's going to be 50 months before it will ever go live. And in that time, there will be hundreds of other changes to the system that will have to be compatible with the one major feature, which means adding however many hours to the 500 to account for how the system has evolved since you started it.

Lastly, you can sometimes shave off time by putting multiple developers onto a project, but at a certain point, you can't put more people in the same work stream because they won't have anything they can do or they'll get in each other's ways. You can absolutely have two or three or four chefs cracking eggs and stirring batter and making icing, but eventually that cake goes in the oven and it's going to take as long as it takes to bake, no less and no more, no matter how many chefs you hire.

None of this is to excuse the DOT. Whatever it is they aren't doing here may not be anywhere near that complex. There could just be ineptitude at play preventing this from getting solved. But the details above might help explain this or other engineering issues you may come across.

Generally speaking, the kind of place that serves a $60 ribeye vs a $20 ribeye is going to have a vastly different dining experience. Better cocktails, better wine selection, better apps, better sides, better dessert, better service, better atmosphere. And the steak itself is likely to be a high quality piece of meat that is cooked properly, crusted and seasoned expertly, and is served at the temperature you ordered.

The best meal I've ever had in my life was at Joe's Steak and Seafood at Caesars Palace in Vegas. The steak was perfect, I still dream about the hash brown potatoes, and the service was immaculate. And I'm pretty sure after it was all said and done at two steaks, two sides, appetizer, couple of glasses of wine, dessert, with a healthy tip, it was probably around $250.

I also just ate at Longhorn (a steakhouse chain) last Friday and paid $24 for a strip that was quite yummy. I don't discriminate.

And like I said before, I'm not wealthy. Comfortably middle class. I haven't gotten into Wagyu or Kobe or any of the dry aged market price pay by the ounce shenanigans that can set you back $200 a steak. I think there's likely a point of diminishing returns. I can tell the difference between a $20 steak and a $60 steak, but am I going to be able to tell the difference between $60 to $180 steak and even if so, is it going to be worth the triplicate increase?

Only one way to find out but I'm not fiscally there yet.

I seriously do not get the shock that people seem to be undergoing in this thread about these steak prices. I'm not wealthy by any means but my wife and I go out for a fancy dinner now and again and I've absolutely paid 60-80 for a standard cut of steak.

You hit the right kind of white tablecloth restaurant in Vegas or NYC or Philly or DC or whatever and you're absolutely not getting out of there for less than $200 across two people.

What. Kind. Of. Writing. Do. You. Do?

Are you a recent English major grad looking to get started in novel writing? Have you been watching the wire and wondering if any people from Baltimore helped write that television? Do you dream of going out to Hollywood and doing the big new screenplay that gets you an Oscar? There are dozens if not hundreds of little subfields for the concept of writing.

It's like asking if there any opportunities to cook. What do you cook? Are you a pizza chef, have you been making sushi your whole life, are you a grill master?

You got to give us something here, dude.

Writing what? Television? Plays? Grants? Technical manuals?

Do you know how reddit works? People ask questions all the time that are solved with a Google search, but we bring them here for the discussion, the context, the story.

Well good for her!

First date tip that made a massive difference for me:

If this is an online dating match or otherwise your first in-person interaction of any nature, don't commit yourself to that amount of time. You could know within the escalator ride up in the aquarium that you don't want to spend a second longer with this person and you've got an hour ahead of you.

Meet somewhere for coffee or a drink (or in warmer times, froyo or ice cream) and give yourself an opportunity to extend it, but don't plan two hours if you don't know if you can spend twenty minutes in this person's presence.

Hi y'all,

Coming up from Baltimore for a day and I'd like to overnight downtown. I've been having some back trouble lately and a nice couple of soaks with a bath bomb would be lovely. Unfortunately, I usually stay at the Notary Hotel and they do not have any rooms with tubs.

Can anyone recommend a hotel that has soaking tub rooms available in that vicinity? I'm not opposed to a suite but I'm not necessarily looking to spend $300+ for a single night.

Appreciate any recommendations you can provide!

Wonder if it's the same person from the health department who thought "edgy" is a thing citizens want from their municipal government.

Gonna have to agree with everyone else here, you're offering crap pay for a job that literally entails getting yelled at by people all day long. There are fast food jobs that pay close to this (and the free food might balance it out).

Good luck getting a decent candidate.

Who's got two thumbs and booked a rental car this morning for an 18 hour drive because his Southwest flight got cancelled? This guy.

The other way to do it is to make it free. MTA costs roughly $800M per year and sees less than 100M riders. If every rider was spending two bucks a ride, that still wouldn't even get to 25% of the budget.

Just make all transit services free and watch ridership balloon.

Did that abandoned pickup truck at Ostend and Leadenhall ever get wheeled off? I submitted it to 311 on three separate occasions. It’s been brutalized by the neighborhood, windows broken out, dashboard raided, I’d imagine there’s components that have been ripped out under the hood.

Sure would be nice if that eyesore was gone…

I would be in favor of fairly expansive term limits to help mitigate the concerns but still encourage a little bit of turnover there. Something like 18 years for House and 18 years for Senate. Between the two, you would have the ability to have a 36 year career on the Hill which is more time than many people spend in one job.

That gives plenty of time for continuity and knowledge building but prevents any one person from setting up shop their entire life and preventing anyone from the next generation from having a chance due to the incumbency advantage.

I don’t want anyone to go to jail for having it, selling it, or using it, especially considering how long weed arrests have been used as a cudgel against minority communities but I’m gonna be honest with y’all, I’ll be damned if I don’t absolutely hate the smell of it and wish people would just switch to edibles. Weed had to be one of the most unpleasant smells and it just permeates a ten foot radius around any smoker.

Because the place hasn’t opened yet, so you can’t make a fair comparison. It’s like saying you like the food better at another place than a restaurant you haven’t eaten at yet.