Ram23

^ It's about risk assessment. You know you can never be 100% certain, but the risk involved with accepting Burmese refugees is essentially 0, while ISIS has stated (and demonstrated) that its plans are to take advantage of lax border security and refugee programs to infiltrate foreign nations, making the risk specific to Syria much greater. There's no need to change anything concerning most refugees, just refugees from this one specific conflict for the short term.

I bolded what I think that's the key word. How can you really vet a refugee who might turn up with no identification? You can't even really confirm who they are, let alone whether or not they've been in contact with known ISIS members (or share the ideology). Even if they manage to get their passport before fleeing, all you have is a single picture to confirm identity, and even if you confirm the identity, there's no way to fully prove someone isn't a threat. There are millions of refugees. We plan to accept 50,000 a year. If you seriously believe the statement you just made you have no knowledge of the US Department of State refugee resettlement program. My point is that it's imperfect, and it's literally impossible for it to ever be perfect - be it refugees or asylum seekers. Tsarnaev comes to mind, and the Boston Marathon bombing is likely one of the reasons Massachusetts is among the majority of states currently refusing to accept Syrian refugees.

The solution is to eliminate ISIS (not contain it) and not require people to flee their own homes to survive. There needs to be more support for local refugee camps in controlled areas of Syria, and (as Hollande has called for) there needs to be a coalition dedicated to the complete destruction of ISIS (the US, Europe, and Russia should be working together). We should close our borders to refugees from this single conflict in lieu of better solutions and as a result of now known abuse by ISIS. Not all refugees from all conflicts should be treated the same. At the very least, we shouldn't increase the amount of refugees we grant asylum to, as it does nothing to resolve the bigger issue at hand. If we have the resources to grant asylum to millions of people, we have the resources to make them safe in their own homes.

I bolded what I think that's the key word. How can you really vet a refugee who might turn up with no identification? You can't even really confirm who they are, let alone whether or not they've been in contact with known ISIS members (or share the ideology). Even if they manage to get their passport before fleeing, all you have is a single picture to confirm identity, and even if you confirm the identity, there's no way to fully prove someone isn't a threat.

^ Just yesterday my dad said he heard the streetcars were all "Cleveland Browns" orange. I insisted they were Tennessee Vols orange. I wouldn't put it past WLW being the source of this.

^^ Could this be going into the Toby Keith's spot or has something already been announced there? That was 16,000 square feet but could be potentially split up, in theory, to provide one large space and one smaller space similar to the the Jimmy John's footprint.

Cranley: too busy to make it to the arrival or testing of the Streetcar, but plenty of time to host a press conference about a Billy Joel concert.

I have had no problems with Ikea bathroom vanities (have one in each of my bathrooms) and kitchen cabinets, especially considering the fact that the kitchen cabinets were about 1/2 the cost of even an entry level Home Depot kitchen cabinet line. Unfortunately, as mentioned above, they redo their products so often that they don't make any part of the kitchen I installed just 2 1/2 years ago (granted their kitchens had been around for a couple decades by then).

I'd suggest they simply bump this schedule back an hour. Same number of hours of operation, but better serves the demands of downtown and OTR (as mentioned, no one is moving around at 6AM - I'm on my way to the airport that early a couple times a month and the city is virtually empy): Sunday-Thursday 7AM-11PM Friday-Saturday 7AM-1AM

That warehouse to home conversion at 42 West McMicken (the old space for Tinderbox parties) is very interesting. It looks to be a very expensive, custom house in an otherwise off the beaten path location. It's a short walk from the streetcar, though.

In the time it took to accidentally close out of that article and reopen it, they changed a rather positive sounding title that you posted to "City: No streetcar rides for public right now," and revised the text to be about "dos and don'ts" rather than how quickly the tests are progressing.

While there's only about 19,000 square feet of retail available at Phase 2 of the Banks, while shooting the shit with a random construction worker there awhile ago he mentioned they were preparing the space for a grocery store but they were still finishing up the plans for it. Either that guy felt like lying to a random passerby or a grocery store is planning to go there (it could or could not be this one).

I have begun to hear some anti-transit folks use the future of driverless cars as an excuse to not spend money on infrastructure like rail. You see those claims on places like Reddit fairly often. I think that even if you adjust for inflation, if/when driverless cars ever come around they will cost a lot more to operate per passenger mile than most personal vehicles do today, and significantly more than something like a streetcar (which could be made driverless much more easily than any car). As you mentioned, people that make this argument are simply coming up with ways to perpetuate current suburban development.

The Bengals are 7-0 for the first time ever.

^ Here's the text in the Ohio Constitution: I still think this would end up in court because Issue 2 and 3 might not be entirely conflicting. Issue 2 could strike down certain parts of 3, but not all of it. If Issue 3 passes with more votes, I'm sure the Issue 2 crowd would take it to court.

I have a few key reasons I’m opposing Issue 22: The city is running a surplus and now is not the right top to raise property taxes. The city’s property tax rate is already higher than suburban locations (who typically have better schools). The county is asking to renew a parks tax next year, which might see more opposition than normal because "we just voted for a parks tax." Cincinnati’s Parks are among the most well-funded in the country currently (I believe they are second place behind DC when you adjust for cost of living). The Parks Board has also proven to be far from transparent when it comes to money, much of which they claim is “private,” which is a notion I disagree with entirely on principal. If the city is going to raise taxes for anything, it should be something that needs additional funding (like mass transit), not one of the strongest and well-funded assets.

It does indeed accurately rank them higher! It's a ranking based mostly on record, with some amount of perception mixed in. The power index is just a weird stat-based list that tries to predict which teams would win a game - in my opinion it's something that competes with Vegas odds more so than a ranking. So Pittsburgh is ranked higher than undefeated Cincinnati despite being just over .500, but ESPN thinks they'll score more points per play or something so they are the favorite. Vegas has Cincy by 2 currently.

I don't even allow Steam through my firewall, so it's basically just a background process that runs when I play games, which is rare these days. The only time I let it connect online is while buying/downloading.

Those are "Power Index" scores, who knows what ESPN is trying to say with those. Here are their "power rankings" which are done by humans and make (slightly) more sense: http://espn.go.com/nfl/powerrankings

I agree that most of the $600,000+ homes are probably going to empty nesters, or middle aged double-income-no-kids. Young professionals in general don’t have the buying power, unless they are independently wealthy. I’m also still impressed with the profit margins that the developers must be seeing. Even at a construction cost of $200 a square foot, which is probably more than these quality homes cost to construct, they are making triple figure profit on each home. The demand is clearly there and appears to be growing, as more and more developers are building but the prices are still going up.

Aren't there a few hundred surface parking spots across the street that are about to become available when Anthem moves? Wouldn't utilizing those be a wiser decision than demolishing a historic building?

For the first time in NFL history, there are five 6-0 teams, including the Cincinnati Bengals.

http://www.cincinnati-oh.gov/streetcar/faqs/ I think 7 a.m - 11 p.m. would be better on weekdays, how many OTR residents are going to work at 6 a.m? 1 or 2 a.m. on weekends would also probably be a good idea.

That reminds me of a bar near where I grew up, that had a monkey who smoked cigarettes.

This is a really interesting quote on a few levels: "It will wreak havoc on our normal life."