Rahul S.'s Profile

JulieM, who are you kidding?

There is a reason property values are higher in Potomac than Great Falls, Bethesda than McLean, or even downtown Silver Spring vs that tiny strip of Arlington people actually like (as opposed to the Levittownesque hellhole that Arlington turns into as you head south from Ballstone) - more people want to live there, and that drives the price up.

Follow the land prices, you see what people want. DC is more desirable than Arlington/Alexandria, thus it is more expensive. (Taxes aren't the explanation; we're talking transaction price of real estate, not carrying cost)

Virginia is filled with defence contractors and (the remains of dying) tech companies. Maryland has biotech, and most of the doctors in the area, as well as most lawyers who don't live in DC proper. They are very different communities.

grafxnerd: It's not going to be hard to get to; we DC residents _walk_.

I, for one, will cross the city limits northward (Bethesda, Silver Spring) but avoid crossing the river.

I don't like spending money where the taxes will support policies of which I disapprove.

Virginia treats its gay residents worse than any other state on the eastern seaboard (and is one of the bottom in the nation in that regard).

It has an open carry law; it's legal to walk down the street with a loaded shotgun.

MD and DC have agreed to direct funding of WMATA (our regional transit agency, that manages Metro(rail) among other things), which allows WMATA to tap federal funds that would match that amount many times over.

Virginia won't agree, despite the loss of federal money.

We have our reasons.
-RS

Go by Muleh; it's around 14th and R. They have a lot of organic modern lighting, made from silk worm cocoons, mulberry bark, etc.

Well, I placed my order about 15 minutes after the announcement; my MacBook Pro should arrive Monday!

I think they're quite an improvement, and while I understand TekniKulay's point, in the color verification stage, aren't you using a CRT anyway? (or at least a non-laptop LCD screen)

FWIW, this isn't the glossy surface of old; it's glossy because it's glass, not a reflective film. You should be able to treat the glass to minimise reflections, if you are so inclined.

-RS

Marimekko in Silver Spring is a Finnish clothing and fabric store; they have a lot of different patterns in stock at the store, and can get more to order.

Bold and modern, generally.

Wow, this thread is quiet; well I have a question for you all.

Track lighting, recessed lighting, both of these I'm told are on their way out. Is there a reason, or do they just seem dated? Is there a new sensibility?

Thanks!

There are non-rattan items in the Muleh collection; those are perhaps the most exotic, but the mahogany/palm pieces are striking and ... more resilient.

I'm wondering if anyone has any sense of Muleh's pricing; are we talking "normal Modern" pricing (ie 2-3K for a sofa) or BB Italia-esque pricing (4-5K )?

Macarons are not quite the same thing as Macaroons; the former are a light, flavourful dessert from France, the latter are dense, often Kosher for Passover, and have Italian antecedents.

I hope the former are the next big thing; the latter are, to me, a seasonal treat that would get quite boring year-round.

eeka, wool can be produced without cruelty, and were we to shut down all livestock agriculture (and gain environmental benefits from it), we'd have to put to death 1.3 billion cows, 24 billion chickens, 1 billion pigs, 1 billion sheep, etc... Without doing this, they'd just keep on eating from pasture land, displacing other species as they began to radiate out from their current confined locations, and breed in an uncontrolled fashion.

Mind you, this will barely affect climate change. The carbon in their bodies would still be released into the atmosphere, as they rot; animals act as a form of carbon sequestration for a time, just as plants do. Those plants, if not consumed by the animals and their carbon stored in their bodies or passed out as methane, would end up being released as the plants died and decayed.

The carbon cycle is inexorable and most of the carbon in it "natural", other than fossil fuels. Therein lies the only climate change benefit to this mass slaughter that is the implicit result of your position; we'd no longer burn fossil fuels to manage these animals. All other climate change effects are inherent to the carbon cycle.

Now there are environmental costs to livestock agriculture other than climate change, and indeed killing all of these animals would help alleviate the over-nitrogenation of our water table and soil, and in the case of intracoastal waterways, help prevent algal blooms that choke out marine life.

So there are environmental benefits - so long as we slaughter all these animals. If we don't, they continue to defecate, releasing bacteria and nitrogen into our water supply and soil, perpetrating the same damage alive and free that they would alive and imprisoned - and free they'd collapse adjacent ecosystems as invasive species, as I described earlier.

So there is your choice; keep these billions of animals alive, in which case we may as well keep them imprisoned, to prevent cascade damage to currently-intact ecosystems, or kill them all, in which case we get some benefits to soil fertility and fisheries populations, as well as some lessened demand for fossil fuels (not much, and the resulting decrease in price may re-incentivise fossil fuel use, to the degree it would occur).

How would one go about trying to purchase one of those "quad" bookcases?

Thanks
-RS