Begging mainstream journalists to never say that Venezuela has "vast oil reserves". Hugo Chávez woke up one day, in a Trump-like frame of mind, and simply declared it was 300 billion barrels.

I admit I am delighted to watch Oakland Nextdoor pile the ratio on a NIMBY octogenarian from Santa Rosa who is trying to block senior citizen housing built by the Red Cross on the basis of shadows. Maybe we are done humoring these people.

Is it considered a problem when the water is running out of the storm drains, instead of into them?

Tower crane at multifamily housing construction in Berkeley. @stephenjacobsmith.com since you wondered.

Housing news, from Berkeley, not Caracas. In Q4, of the few leases registered, 47 leased down compared to their previous tenants in inflation-adjusted terms, while 11 leased up. There was only 1 perfect comp; all the others were on the market for 15 months or more.

Stylometry's greatest hits: Boomer on Nextdoor using their real name vs. pseudonymous Facebook "group". Neither entity has a working space bar.

It's too bad we're doing this Panama/Haiti/Grenada thing again because I wanted to spend Saturday morning talking about how internet cranks are whipping conspiracy theories about the Fed again.

I can't even think of a way that I, and therefore any normal person, would be exposed to the effluent of CBS News.

I think a 10-mile-long bridge for bikes, connecting that Bay Trail in the East Bay with, I dunno, Coyote Point on the west side, would be fun. If it was only for pedestrians and bikes it could be made out of plastic and aluminum on friction piles. We have this technology. Come at me, BCDC.

There are a LOT of English majors writing articles in newspapers about AI data center size and power. These guys, on the other hand, are doing it right with first principles estimates benchmarked to public data and press releases. By the way the huge building in the center? Was a Gatorade factory.

I understand why they can't zip up this section of the building while the hoist is still there, but installing fiberglass, then just leaving it flopping around in the weather all week makes these buildings seem ridiculous. There has to be a better way.

Sneaked in a little bike ride between rain clouds. It's a beautiful ... hour, if not a beautiful day. Happy 2026.

Oh my God, this murder spree continued for days

I am confident that there are American jurisdictions where, if someone tries to force their way into a day care, you can legally shoot them dead.

Speaking of my heater: current PG&E bills are the direct consequence of minor, long-forgotten tax revolts of the 1920s. In 1923 Sacramento decided to tax itself to build their grid. In the East Bay we decided to do water only. SF voted down MUD bonds 8 times.

I'm always abstractly interested in building a home but winter is when I sit around in the evenings drawing hypothetical wall assemblies because my current home can't be effectively heated :-[

The what party?

Based on the dates of blocking, virtual all of the people blocking me did it because I can do arithmetic and I know how much water a data center uses. I am genuinely please these people removed themselves from my universe.

I don't know why the discourse around 2442 Haste St. has reappeared, but here is a reminder that even the incredibly lax and gullible staff of the Berkeley Landmarks Preservation Commission disrespected the hideous house that is being demolished.

When your local NIMBY group is conspiring to violate tax laws, election laws, and housing laws during the monthly meeting.

An elderly woman was knocked unconscious Monday night when a driver struck her in a Berkeley crosswalk, according to early reports.

@mtcbata.bsky.social you here?

Post a perfect album from the 90s that isn't Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden or Alice In Chains.

This is fine, and it raises my opinion of Schiff slightly, but the numbers here are ridiculously low in proportion to the problem. If this was proposing a ten TRILLION dollar loan fund, then it would be something.

Soon to be condos in Napa. Actual for-sale condos.

Li's Knife Cut Noodle is exactly what downtown Berkeley needed. I assume when the university resumes it will be impossible to get in there, but this week it's perfect.

@idothethinking.bsky.social Rents in post-2000 construction in Berkeley, by bedroom, according to the rent registry. Data at observablehq.com/@jwb/rents-i...

I saw this Chinese EV on campus today. Very cool.

I should sue the regents of TAMU for devaluing my transcript. Absolute clown show.

Bit windy, it was

Very cool of Contra Costa County to have fixed Wildcat Canyon Road so that I can get run off the side of the road by Deep East Bay teenagers driving clapped out Miatas while I'm just trying to enjoy a park.

Area bicyclists in mourning

We don't have to canonize bad people just because they get a disease.

People said "Stand By Me" was Reiner's masterpiece so I watched it and I was throwing things at the TV at the end. Apparently it did not face contemporary or modern criticism for the Boomer victory lap of the last 5 minutes. Makes me want to enroll in a venue where I can denounce this film.

The new clout chasers are all about making up stories about what AI cannot do. People love these posts. But they are easily falsified. Actual results on the right. You can quibble about the legend, of course. The smarter way to use the tool is ask it to write a program that makes the map (3rd pic).

The bar set by this FPPC nexus test requires anyone with a "foreseeable" source of income to recuse themselves from decisions. It should be turned around to toss realtors and consultants off planning and landmarking commissions.

If you are a full-time professional take-haver, dedicated to the narrative that AI has no uses, then I guess you wouldn't know, or indeed would have carefully curated ignorance of the fact that AI can indeed recognize handwriting. But AI experts would tell you that AI is extremely good at this task.

This strikes me as an extremely counterproductive housing platform, and tends to confirm my suspicions that after Newsom and Weiner are out of the picture California Democrats intend to revert to the SF-Huntington Beach axis of building absolutely nothing.

Where are all the people at the ski rental counter at Sports Basement coming from? There is no snow anywhere in the west.

This is a neat article worth reading. But I think the scope of "cases" is misleading. According to this method, unions have only used CEQA against 25 projects in 50 years. If we expand to threats of CEQA cases I can show you hundreds of those from labor unions, every year.

It's pretty embarrassing that PG&E has a major outage from water-transformer contact in the Bay Area every single year. If we had real regulators, they would have shut PG&E down by now.

If you are baffled by the behavior of car-first westside conservatives, or if you're just younger than me and didn't see the old battles, read this book: www.amazon.com/Street-Fight...

The "housing package" that the NY city council passed yesterday is wall-to-wall NIMBY poison pills. Incredible stuff. Never been a superfan of Adams, but a mayoral veto of all this junk would be just. www.cityandstateny.com/policy/2025/...

My contribution to Berkeley's "Corridor Zoning Update" for North Shattuck. Before 1978, the whole area around Shattuck was classified R-5, the now-extirpated maximum density zone. If the NIMBYs don't think we should have 5-6 stories on Shattuck, we can simply RETVRN to R-5 for the areas behind.

I've complained about the disappearing artifacts of the AC Transit BRT design process so many times over the years, I guess I should just start gathering them up. Here, at least, is the almost impossible to find draft EIR as a single PDF. drive.google.com/drive/folder...

A Boomer tried to tell me that Boomers are the most highly educated generation. This is not true, obviously. But if that was true it would admit a monumental failure of Boomers to shepherd the future. So why would someone say such a thing?

Someone requested this alternate graphic: total tax, by year built, for all residential structures in Berkeley. In terms of local property/parcel tax yield, the five years from 2020-2024 amount to more revenue than all the buildings built during the thirty years 1970-1999.

Yo, you can get lunch at BAMPFA again, for the first time in five years, and they have Hainanese chicken rice. Why are they calling this "bar and bakery" they ought to hang out the "chicken rice here now" sign instead

Iterating on this presentation ... 5 year bins probably makes more sense. Also trying to work around bsky's irritating cropping preference.

Illustrating this point for Berkeley. Despite the fact that Berkeley has built virtually nothing post-Nixon, local property tax revenues are disproportionately drawn from recently-built homes. These charts show the number and value of residential structures in Berkeley by decade built.