Good morning. It’s Tuesday. In 1973 on this date, Dark Side of the Moon went to number 1 and stayed there for 14 years.
Musings from Dorchester that don’t have much to do with coronavirus.
On another non-coronavirus topic, the Globe reports that the MBTA is finalizing a contract for an updated system-wide fare collection system. The cost is almost a billion dollars, which sounds a little high to me. Actually it’s $600 million for the system and another $300 million for ongoing system maintenance for the next few years. Still a lot of money. There was mention in the story about the ability to do surge pricing but nothing about using contactless payment methods like other big city systems do. I hope that’s in the contract.
To make contact tracing work there are a few things that need to be done right. Patrick Howell O’Neill elaborates. Stefan Volk underscores.
Poorly managed blue states? It turns out that Kentucky, Mitch McConnell’s home state, gets way more net funding from the federal government than those blue states do -and a lot more than it contributes.
And, I used to hate it, but as I’ve gotten older I’ve warmed up to opera. If you’d like an introduction, here are some good selections recommended by a few well known people. And I’ll even add my own, the Strophes prologue from Berlioz’ Romeo and Juliet.