Posted on 12/28/2017 4:16:43 AM PST by calvincaspian
No city can kick you in the teeth quite like Boston.
I thought I’d lived and worked here long enough to know how to avoid it.
A man gets careless from time to time.
I found myself driving to work yesterday instead of taking the MBTA because of the mega-arctic cold freeze. Traffic was light and I found a spot opposite the convention center. It was about 7:45 a.m.
Summer Street, in winter, is transformed from a popular access road between downtown and the Seaport District into a nuclear-level wind tunnel, blasting icy air toward the harbor. It was hellacious. Officially about 14 degrees, with a “feels like” factor of minus 1. It felt like minus 30.
(Excerpt) Read more at bostonherald.com ...
Now, I know that I’m not exactly a victim in the true sense of the word, and the social media pile on is already in full swing, calling me a “cupcake” and “whiner” and I guess I am.
It’s just that I’ve lived and/or worked in Boston as an honest, taxpaying citizen for 20 years and I’m not alone in saying that too often, it feels like the city is sticking it to me
The most viciously racist people I have ever met were from Boston, Massachusetts.
It’s not just Boston. Every city has many hungry mouths to feed. The only way they know how to feed them is to take from those that have and give it to those that rely on their confiscation.
That is correct and my experience as well.
Hey Tom, have some sympathy for the Parking Meter Patrol, they had to be getting cold while waiting for the meter to expire! One of the BEST FEELINGS in the world is to realize, upon getting out of working in the city (any city), that those fell Servants of Satan could no longer get their clutches upon a minute’s worth of expiration!
Unfortunately, our cities have become havens for that kind of soulless money-grubbing jerkiness. Don't park in Alexandria, Virginia for example: they have a Byzantine system of parking signs running up the sides of a pole and if you miss the meaning of just one of those miniature signs, Bingo! Massive fine.
I wonder if the city officials - while counting the wonderful revenue receipts their enthusiastic and merciless Meter Maids have wrenched from visitors - ever contemplate how much business revenue might be lost from customers who never come back after being fined?
The ParkBoston app sounds like a nice idea. A few taps on your mobile app and you pay for your parking meter. No fumbling for coins.
However, since the system knows exactly how much parking time you paid for (meter maids can check the system to see if you are paid up) the system could also send an alert to the meter maid in the area when you meter is freshly expired or a few minutes from expiring.
Cruising down the roads by the Charles River on a breezy evening in early summer, then hooking down through Beacon Hill, Downtown and the Seaport, gorgeous girls jogging everywhere, a hodgepodge of delicious smells wafting out of dozens of restaurants, beautiful buildings architecture on every street, the sea air cooling everything down, I always wonder how I ever had a bad thought about Boston. At any other time, I wonder how anyone, ever, could have a solitary non-negative thought about the place.
I was showing a friend from out of state around the North End and he commented that the only other place he had seen so much garbage and detritus in the streets was Baghdad, and the only place he had met ruder people was Honolulu.
Massholes.
“The most viciously racist people I have ever met were from Boston, Massachusetts”
My southern manners were absolutely shocked by Bostonian caustic racial hatred. Most Northern stayed take a close 2nd.
““The most viciously racist people I have ever met were from Boston, Massachusetts”
Must be the Irish getting a pay back.
“Unfortunately, our cities have become havens for that kind of soulless money-grubbing jerkiness.”......
Thus saying, those “jerks” can’t find other gainful employment where using ones head is required?
I have lived all over the world, driven all over this country, and lived for the last 40 years in this area.
Boston is not materially any different from any other large city in this country in a significant way.
I know. I’ve traveled and been here and there.
What I see here is both people who have little real idea of what they are talking about (some probably never even having been to Boston) and people who bring their preconceived notions with them.
Boston is an extremely compact city with (for example) some 100 plus institutions of higher education (univ., college, grad school, etc.) in a 20 mile radius and a TON of young people converge on (and IN ) her every September.
My point above is that all large cities to a degree are not suited to their nature to be inviting to people, and that I have not found Boston to be much different at a personal level than Jacksonville, Atlanta, Houston, Louisville, San Diego or Chicago.
But then again, I grew up in the military and did a hitch in the military, so it is possible that perhaps my viewpoints on these things are reflective of my own upbringing, which may be less regional and parochial simply because I am used to being in different places.
When I interact with people in places I am not native to, maybe I approach it differently than others...perhaps I get reflected back at me what I project out to them.
But saying people are more racist in Boston than say, Atlanta, is just not true. It isn’t.
I worked in Boston much of my life. I relocated to New York City a few years ago. The people of NYC are much friendlier and polite. I mean that sincerely. I was shocked to find that out as for years, I was hearing about how bad NYC was.
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It’s not just Boston. Every city has many hungry mouths to feed. The only way they know how to feed them is to take from those that have and give it to those that rely on their confiscation.
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Not directly...but, *BOY* do I wish FR would get out of the Socialist talking-points\presumptions realm. At least be consistent!
A city has RESIDENTS, it has no (humanly) needs. As Washington has been attributed, it is *FORCE*.
The *resident* has the mouth(s) to feed (as many voluntarily, after those they are responsible for\themselves). It is not the job of GOVT to provide even the most basic of sustenance; as you have stated, itself only having that which it has taken from ANOTHER (aka theft, which they’ve renamed ‘taxes’).
In Seattle it is illegal to “feed” the meter if it’s not your car. There was a case where a guy saw a meter maid coming and he walked down the street, feeding the meters of all the cars that were past time.
This was fixed when they put those “universal” meters in place where you put the sticker in your window.
My solution was to just move to rural KY. Problem solved. I’ve driven in every state except a couple on the east coast, I have absolutely no desire to go to Massachusetts again.
The system could replace the meter maid entirely.
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