E-Verify isn’t magic

Things have been a little chaotic lately. Last week, the whole family was down with the flu for several days. Just as I was feeling better, it was time to head up to New Haven for the excellent Law of Abundance Conference (where Slow Boring’s own was one of the presenters). I got back to D.C. just in time for the city to shut down all week with ice and snow. On Wednesday, Kate and I took part in a parent volunteer effort to shovel paths and play areas around our elementary school so it would be functional when schools reopened today (sort of — hours are still quite limited). So it’s been a little hard to focus on work, even though this has been a dramatic week in American politics.

Hopefully things will be back to normal in my daily life soon; I have no such hope for the political world.

Nicholas: I was traveling on Sunday and surprised to see Amtrak had pre-emptively canceled most trains between Boston and New York. Is this just an extension of pandemic-era malaise leading Amtrak to say “let’s just not do it?” Is there a technical reason they can’t run the trains in the snow? This probably sounds like a dumb question, but I’m curious what the actual limitations are and chatgpt is not giving satisfactory answers. The MBTA was still operating on a normal schedule between Boston and Providence and Southern RI. As far as I can tell, so was Metro North between New Haven and New York.

Very large volumes of snow can prevent trains from operating, but, generally speaking, heavy rail is one of the modes of transportation that is most resilient to snow, as seen in the continued operation of Boston’s M.B.T.A. commuter rail. Here in D.C., the metro system has been running even as almost everything else in the area is paralyzed.

My understanding is that Amtrak behaves more conservatively than a commuter railroad with this kind of thing because the potential failure mode of an intercity train getting stuck in a remote location is a lot worse. If you start running the trains and the snow is worse than expected and then you end up with a train full of people stuck outside of Elkton, Md., you