I Have No Idea What I'm Doing

• Girl Scout Thin Mints™ Pretzels

• “Home Use Gumballs”
• Plush, Crane & Amusement

nodding knowlingly

Quiet luxury is out, loud budgeting is in: How to make the most of it

They’re Taking Everything From Us

Maverik plans to drop Kum & Go name after buying stores

• Billionaires plan utopian California city, collect signatures - Los Angeles Times

  The group, called California Forever, envisions a community with tens of thousands of new homes, along with crisp new parks, bike lanes, open space and a solar farm. The model city would be walkable, socioeconomically integrated and fueled by clean energy.

  But to get there, the backers will have to persuade Solano County voters to approve the sweeping endeavor. … The first stage of that campaign took place Wednesday, when Jan Sramek, chief executive of California Forever, took to a podium in the Veterans Hall in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta town of Rio Vista to pledge that the project would be a “great neighbor” to everyone in the county.

  Sramek, a former Goldman Sachs trader, has said his vision for the city coalesced while he was on a fishing trip in the nearby delta. He and other speakers listed a long series of benefits that they say would result from raising a new city on a rolling expanse now dedicated to ranching and wind farms.

  Hmmmm….what would tech billionaries want with a huge chunk of property along a river delta in California???? Hmmm, what could it possibly be???

• The Farmers Had What the Billionaires Wanted - The New York Times

  Whether it was paving over San Fernando Valley orange groves to build out Los Angeles or ripping out apricot farms in what is now Silicon Valley, California became the nation’s biggest state and economy largely by trading open and agricultural land for population and development.

  That shifted in the 1960s and 1970s, when a backlash against the growth-first regime and its penchant for destroying landscapes helped create modern environmentalism. In the half-century since, this turn has been codified in laws that aim to restrict development to existing cities and their edges. It has protected farms and open space, but also helped drive up the cost of living by making housing scarcer and more expensive to build.

  Mr. Sramek framed his proposal as a backlash to the backlash, part of an ideological project to revive Californians’ appetite for growth. If the state is serious about tackling its dire affordable housing problem, he argued, it doesn’t just have to build more housing in places like San Francisco and its suburbs — it also has to expand the urban footprint with new cities.

  …

  Mr. Sramek likes to fish. The way he tells it, around 2016 he and his girlfriend (now wife) started making the one-hour drive from San Francisco to Rio Vista to catch bass on the Sacramento River. One of those trips, driving past pastures and grazing sheep, sparked an idea.

  “What if you could start from scratch?” he said.

  In a state whose agricultural bounty has historically been a function of moving water great distances, the area is something of an anachronism. For generations, families like the Mahoneys have practiced “dryland farming,” which means they rely on rain, not irrigation.

Pretty sure the answer remains “climate change”

It’s freezing outside, but winters are actually getting warmer - Vox

• Sargon, are you okay? Are you okay, Sargon?

  https://twitter.com/UticaEric/status/1748727470474383382

• Let’s check in on Bill Kristol

  https://x.com/BillKristol/status/1748924746010431882?s=20

• Hey wait a minute, you aren’t supposed to say that

  https://twitter.com/disclosetv/status/1748045086812692757

• Brits have opinions about football

  https://x.com/TigersJUK/status/1748833737218089044?s=20

• BREAKING:

  https://twitter.com/generalmcnews/status/1746177782521188711?s=12

• I’m Gonna Be a Millionaire Before I’m 20
• How’s Anyone Supposed To Live On $400K??????

• Great Stork Derby - Wikipedia