TJ

"I think a life properly lived is just learn, learn, learn all the time."

[Bay Area New Liberals 🌐 @BayAreaNewLibs]

It's good to have tech companies starting in SF and staying in SF. We should do whatever we can to avoid losing these companies to the Peninsula (as Stripe was unfortunately forced to do because of our stupid tax policies) as they scale.

[Kim-Mai Cutler @kimmaicutler]

California elected the Chesa Boudin of home insurance amid a wildfire crisis. The system was starting to stabilize in the last two years of Lara’s term, but now it might blow up again.

[conway @ConwayAnderson]

The bay area’s most livable cities*

* according to claude

[Bill Gurley @bgurley]

"Don't think for a second that because you are an 'alarmist' that you are doing a social good." Amen.

[TJ @teejmadsen]

@Gladwell

[John Arnold @johnarnold]

I found 29 Fortune 500 companies that relocated >200 miles and across state lines over the past decade:
13 moved from CA; 9 from Northeast
0 moved to West Coast or Northeast
59% moved to TX; 20% to Southeast; 10% to VA
19/29 moved from a state with an income tax to one without

[Jeremiah Johnson 🌐 @JeremiahDJohns]

People are about twice as likely to approve of **coal plants** being built nearby as opposed to data centers.

Coal plants use more water and pollute more. They create comparable noise pollution. There's no way this makes sense outside a media panic.

[Chris Freiman @cafreiman]

Leisure hours have steadily increased under capitalism.

[Sheel Mohnot @pitdesi]

Trump on @theallinpod:

“What I want to do and what I will do is you graduate from a college, I think you should get automatically, as part of your diploma, a green card to be able to stay in this country.“

He’s doing the exact opposite, brain draining the US.

[Vinod Khosla @vkhosla]

Right question

[Frank Smith @frank_smith1111]

Europe figured out concessions decades ago. Every park has a kiosk: espresso, pastry, maybe a spritz or a beer at 6pm. Small operator pays rent, city gets revenue, park gets foot traffic and eyes on the grass. Everyone wins.

SF has 230+ parks and almost none of this. Dolores Park froze a Blue Bottle cart permit over community outreach complaints. Coit Tower took years of hand-wringing over a removable food kiosk (unsurprisingly: Peskin territory). Meanwhile we wonder why maintenance budgets are tight and parks feel empty at 7am.

Give me a coffee kiosk in every major park. Let the concession help pay for upkeep. Let foot traffic take care of public safety. Create a third space — a square where people can meet instead of shouting at each other on social media. I’ll die on this hill.

Photos from Lisbon, Portugal 🇵🇹

[TJ @teejmadsen]

@Rasmic

[Matthew Yglesias @mattyglesias]

It’s a great country and one of the civic purposes of our schools should be to teach young people to appreciate it and not adopt this mindset that relentless negativity is the way to create positive change.

https://t.co/ubuP8WWK4z

[Smirkley @Smirkley]

A 5-gallon water cooler jug of water produces about $132 in economic output from data centers, but only about 2 cents from almonds.

[Quick Thoughts @lthlnkso]

Why are so many people afraid of data centers?

[TJ @teejmadsen]

@CNLiberalism @AndyMasley Yes - please invest in more video clips of CNL content!

[Sheel Mohnot @pitdesi]

From SF, watching the LA mayoral race is a reminder that it could be far worse.

(so thankful for Lurie!)

[Sheel Mohnot @pitdesi]

Jane Kim is INSANELY bad-

She was really bad in SF (tried to pass a moratorium on building housing!)

She wants the state to provide insurance, taxpayers would subsidize people living in wildfire zones

Support Patrick Wolff, I did!
https://t.co/XlXqItOHNS

[Sheel Mohnot @pitdesi]

A down-ballot race that matters!

TL;DR - I did my homework and urge you to vote Patrick Wolff for Insurance Commissioner. He's the only one who has any clue what he's doing.

California's insurance commissioner race doesn't get much attention, but it's actually one of the most important races on your June 2 ballot.

It took me over a month to buy a car because insurers had paused new auto policies in the state and I needed insurance before being able to sign the lease papers. Many homeowners can't get coverage at all right now, and a lot of homes in the state are losing value because they can't get insured! We've had a series of fires over the last many years and folks who lost everything got screwed by the companies they'd been paying for decades.

TBH It's crazy that we vote for insurance commissioner at all. This should clearly be an appointed role. Most states appoint someone with actual expertise. But we live in California and have this silly form of direct democracy. For this position, we've ended up with a conveyor belt of bad or termed-out politicians with zero relevant background trying to get into political office somewhere.

That's how we got Ricardo Lara, who ran for the job on a platform of (I kid you not!) - being openly gay and "standing up to fight our bullying President, Donald Trump." This is the insurance commissioner. We elected a journalism major who had never worked anywhere near insurance because he's gay and promised to fight Donald Trump. WTF!

The job is rate filings and claims oversight. Lara fleeced us. He took money from companies he regulated, and gave them preferable access, and spent tons of taxpayer money traveling around the world, while at the same time being too busy to accept rate filings from insurers who then pulled out of the state.

Rate filings supposed to take 60 days routinely took over a year. Auto insurance rate approvals were frozen for two years. Seven major carriers paused or stopped writing policies in CA. The FAIR Plan doubled. Meanwhile, we've been in crisis mode with some of the worst crises in history during his term...

The field to replace him is mostly more of the same. Has-beens who have no insurance background. Jane Kim wants to insurance run by the state, and is endorsed by Bernie Sanders. We have a bunch of other career politicians in the race, hoping to become insurance commissioner because they failed at whatever else they were actually aspiring for.

I'm voting for Patrick Wolff. He's a CFA who built an insurance brokerage, analyzed insurers for 20 years, and passed the property and casualty license exam during his campaign, the first candidate ever to do that. He's self-funded his campaign and won't run for another office.

His plan is straightforward: allow real competition so no single insurer can gain enough market power to blackmail the regulator on pricing. Require subsidiaries operating in CA to have financial backstops from their parent companies. Publish claims performance report cards for every insurer so consumers can reward good actors and punish bad ones. Streamline rate filings so they actually get processed.

The crisis in our state is the result of bad regulation... Good regulation can fix it.

Vote Patrick Wolff, and enjoy this awesome video!