I've been to the Moffat Tunnel many times and I never realized there was a water project associated with the better known rail tunnel there. FWIW, I've also never seen any sort of security there. Besides a lone Gilpin county sheriff's deputy who lives out along that road and makes it his life's mission to ticket any vehicle parked illegally on the county road.
The big black fence around the east portal didn't used to be there, and you can see the DHS surveillance gantry right over the tracks. You can't get anywhere close enough to even read the plaque/dedication embedded on the right side of the portal. Hope you have a good telephoto lens!
On the west side, the DHS cameras are back to the left out of frame of the shot, at the very eastern edge of the Winter Park station platform. The water system is also much more visible on the west side than on the east side: https://earth.google.com/web/search/Winter+Park,+CO/@39.8871...
The Federal Reserve Bank of New York has a great quarterly report on consumer credit [0], which the article briefly mentions. The latest report (Q1 2025) is here [1]. Student loan delinquencies shot up in the last ~2 quarters, which checks out with TFA. It's amazing how the age 50+ cohorts carry substantial student loan debt (slide 21). Is this original debt from their own time as students or is it, for lack of a better word, "second-hand" debt from supporting their children through school?
To add a little more detail, ES is the e-mini S&P 500 futures contract traded on the CME. The way it works is that you put up some amount of money called the "margin", and you get to buy or sell a larger "notional" valued contract. The difference between the margin that you put up and the greater notional value is the implicit leverage that parent comment refers to.
You can find the contract specs on the CME's website here [0]. The implicit leverage is actually a bit greater than the parent comment says. The contract notional value is defined as $50 x Index Value, which is currently around 6500. So the contract represents close to $325,000 and the exchange's margin requirement is around $21,000. Interactive Brokers seems to require similar margin [1]. The margin requirement is around 6.5% of the notional value, i.e. 15x leverage. So a 6.5% decrease in the S&P 500 would wipe out the account.
Not sure why the parent comment is downvoted, I suppose it has a moralizing tone?
The imperative for the government is to reduce the deadweight loss of under-improved land. Whether or not the owner chooses to improve should be their choice, but there is an opportunity cost to not improving.
Absent a LVT, that opportunity cost is mostly born by the people who don't own the land, i.e. the coffee shop that _could_ have been there instead of whatever lower value use is there now. With a LVT, that opportunity cost falls more on the person who owns the land, i.e. the owner wants to keep their SFH in the urban neighborhood, but now pays a higher tax which reflects that under-improvement.
PR has a dry season when the island receives less rain, and there are dry regions that generally get less rain. In fact, there are sometimes forest fires [1].
Regarding construction, I've never seen a smoke alarm inside a residential building in PR. I would hazard a guess that this is allowed for concrete/cinderblock; presumably the roof thing is the same.
Model trains and New Jersey? I assumed it was about Northlandz [0]. I haven't been there in several decades, but I guess it's still in business. Very neat.
I'm curious about that quote. To my mind, we don't farm because we're trying to use land to "create energy", we farm because it produces food that humans demand in order to live. Is there some way to satisfy humans' need for food using solar panels? Is there a way of synthesizing consumable food using only electricity and ambient air, maybe add a bit of water, etc?
It just feels a bit silly to imply that the point of farming is to produce energy, in a general sense.
Yeah, the comparison feels a little off, but you could make a direct comparison to producing ethanol from corn or sugar cane.
And historically, it is true that agriculture was the source of most wealth, including both food and energy. Consider growing hay -> feeding pack animals -> transportation. Also, using firewood to generate heat, large amounts of which were needed to for expensive processes like iron smelting. (Not to mention human labor.)
Nowadays it's the other way around, agriculture requires energy inputs for things like fertilizer.
To be sure, Puerto Rico is a territory of the US. I imagine that making deals with China as you describe would draw the ire of Washington, if it's even "legal" in the first place.
