Did two things:

- first, updated the rails versions to fix the vuln.
- two, i think that having a plurality of environments around means we can avoid issues. for two reasons, i changed the development and test db's to sqlite3: one, because i hold the above opinion, and two, i couldn't get PG to work locally. 

tests work.

if you'd like, i can revert the latter and resubmit the PR. i just did that to get the tests working.