sad to announce we have delayed this project by eighteen thousand years 😔 (See you all in two weeks!!!)

To the question about California's "insurance crisis" Steyer gives the best response. It's not the answer some justifiably angry people in LA want to hear, or some self-centered residents in Marin County want to hear... but it is the answer that the state as a whole needs:

This is a great first question to tease apart the field It took a ton of work to pass SB1, to raise the state's gas tax modestly -- those funds are critical for maintaining transportation infrastructure Any Dem who claims they're going to cut the state's gas tax won't get my vote

Every Dan Walters column is headlined: - "What's worse for a governor running for president, being a Democrat or being a Democrat?" - "Which is going to implode first, CalPERS or CalSTRS?" - "Who's worse for students, the California Teachers Assoc. or the California Fed. of Teachers?"

State of California: all hospitals must be seismically retrofitted! Kaiser: O.K., we will build a new hospital Neighbors:

First best outcome would have been Buffy Wicks running for governor... Second best outcome is Buffy Wicks and her office becoming just as bold and methodical about transportation as they have been about housing!

All but two of the Democrats in the California gubernatorial race have the same tax platform as both republicans: reduce or repeal the income tax (Porter, Yee, Bianco, Hilton), no new taxes (Mahan, what is wrong with you) or reducing the fossil fuel tax (Villaraigosa). These are the worst democrats.

Apple didn't announce that the next CEO of Apple is an LLM trained on the collected corpus of Steve Jobs's emails, demos, and hagiography

Thank the rain gods of #$NVDA! (and all the hard-working Californian's paying taxes on their incomes)

Best of luck to the long-time owner of Chez TJ His retirement was effectively stolen by the NIMBYs of "Livable Mountain View" www.almanacnews.com/ae/2023/10/3...

I'm still waiting for an "AGENTIC PERSONAL INJURY LAW FIRM YOU CAN RUN FROM THE TERMINAL ON YOUR MAC MINI" billboard

California's Franchise Tax Board testing the size of this season's snowpack

"Steyer has promised to reform Proposition 13 to ensure that corporations pay their fair share in California." ^-- Yes, the time has come to touch the "third rail" of California politics!

Ha, that was a somewhat entertaining poll to take...

Pour one out for Hampshire College... The good news is that there continue to be liberal-arts colleges offering small faculty-led classes. The bad news is that to survive, the privates rely on endowments > $1 billion and the publics rely on supportive state legislatures

Boat & bridge

Piss off, NYT headline writers No, it's not ideal, but we'll figure it out

Were you hoping to vote for an under-qualified white male in his early 40s from the Bay Area suburbs? No need to be sad... Matt Mahan is still running for governor of California!

Swalwell ended his campaign due to: 1. Brave women sharing their stories 2. Excellent reporting by @sfchronicle.com AND 3. Dozens of organizations, electeds, and staff revoking endorsements/calling on him to drop out This is what accountability looks like. Now let’s remove him from Congress.

Artemis II splashing down exactly when predicted, to the minute, after traveling like 700,000 miles is why we need dedicated bus lanes tbqh.

Props to the commander for referring to the full name of the "European Service Module" And I trust the Canadian astronaut will insist on delivering all remarks to the press in both English and French

"good reefing" ^--- finally a phrase on the NASA live broadcast that I (someone who doesn't know physics or avionics but has sailed) can understand

Statement from CADEM Chair Rusty Hicks on Recent Allegations Against Rep. Eric Swalwell.

Ideally Rob Bonta or Buffy Wicks would immediately file to run for governor... but with that deadline already passed, I guess I'll be voting for the enviro-and-Prop-13-reform-curious billionaire

This inscription at the Stanford Business School never fails to make me laugh — so Californian!

I called Assemblymember @asmmiabonta.bsky.social and asked her office to pull co-authorship of AB 1557 I'd rather not have to carry paperwork with me to prove to police officers the exact date on which I bought my Class I e-bike (which will be necessary if amended version of AB 1557 is passed)

1. Maybe we could get tickets to see softball at LA28 Olympics 2. Oh, the softball event is in Oklahoma City 3. Wikipedia says that the US softball organization moved to Oklahoma City in the '60s after leaving its original home in Newark, NJ 4. Has Philip Roth written about softball?

OpenAI: Frontier LLM models will put everyone out of work tomorrow!!!! OpenAI: Also, we're hiring contractors to transport human beings into our offices

My entire time and work in grad school was thanks to NSF's Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences directorate Program officers who have spent decades funding and nurturing entire fields of specialty... kaput

It is mindboggling that, in the face of climate change, increasing traffic, gas prices, and *everything else*, the California legislature's highest transpo priority this session is limiting the use of e-bikes. Genuinely a real possibility of the CA e-bike industry being regulated out of existence.

A snappy way of describing a real phenomenon* (* people who would rather retain imaginary riches, than pay tax on realized capital gains)

TRUMP: "I've requested $152 million to rebuild Alcatraz and reopen it as a prison! Thank you for your attention to this matter!" AECOM: "Our pleasure to serve you on another important project, Mr. President. We'll gladly use that budget to [checks with relevant practice lead] draft one document"

Oh no (I love Franzen's writing and have zero interest in learning how it translates from the page to the screen)

You'd have to go back many decades to find a year in which fewer than 100 million trips were taken over the Bay Bridge (and the 6 other state-owned bridges) There's no "better past when people didn't crowd my drive over the bay" in the data: mtc.ca.gov/about-mtc/au...

Ha, SFGATE's editors are devious in the dark arts of headline writing

Good news: Edward Tufte didn't get an excuse to sell an updated 3rd edition today

Cloudflare: "we created the spiritual successor to Wordpress!" 99% of people who run Wordpress: "OK, is it cheaper?" Cloudflare: "Well, it's actually rewritten in TypeScript, supports x402 micropayments, safetly sandboxes plugins..." 99% of people who run Wordpress: [back away slowly]

Helicopter footage, drone footage, ominous background music... the SFPD sure has high production values for its posts to YouTube www.youtube.com/watch?v=sCe-...

I look forward to someday riding the Nancy Pelosi train from Alameda to Salesforce Transit Center to Palo Alto...

MUTCD warrants are such sacred rituals that civilians who lack the stamp of a Professional Engineer will be arrested: www.latimes.com/california/s...

Highway 37 does not need to be widened... it needs to be raised to become the 8th state-owned bridge across the bay (according to regional decision makers 🤦)

Bad news: Dems in disarray Good news: There's always the backup option of a recall 🙃

Newbie #CAleg question: When an Assembly committee meeting is scheduled "upon call of the chair" what does that actually mean in practice?

"Tonight, as the California Hall of Fame shows Chavez the back door, the museum’s Board of Trustees will line up to welcome yet another sexual predator, Schwarzenegger, in through the front." Man, fk that noise. www.sacbee.com/opinion/arti...

In the wake of investigations of the behavior of labor leader Cesar Chavez and acclaimed chef René Redzepi, our latest piece from @soleil_ho asks a hard question. Not "who should we cancel next?" but "why do we need heroes so badly in the first place?" www.coyotemedia.org/kill-the-her...

If I wanted to give a succinct example to my family back east why California politics are so cursed, “Sierra Club leader wants more parking” is probably a great start

Wow. What awful headlines and awful details — and simultaneously what diligent reporting. NYT reporters and editors showing the power of the "fourth estate" when properly funded and not micromanaged by owners.

Most every planner knows the diagrams by Donald Appleyard and team that traced social connections across street blocks... but I don't think I've ever seen the report's cute cover: