Running down a dream. I won’t back down.
Carmel, California
Joined October 2009
- Tweets19.6K
- Following3.2K
- Followers573
- Likes43.6K
Active Ingredient retweeted
BREAKING: Sebastian Matta, a 19-year old student at Arizona State University, just successfully CRUSHED his Republican opponent to become the next clerk of Superior Court in the nation's 4th-largest county. He killed it on Jimmy Kimmel tonight. This is a must watch.
Active Ingredient retweeted
It’s a fair point. New York and Florida are basically the same, except for our 24/7 subway system, one of the nation’s largest public hospital systems, a higher minimum wage, stronger worker protections, universal 3-K, paid family leave, paid sick leave, and paid prenatal leave.
Active Ingredient retweeted
Wow.
BREAKING: The Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee @DLCC says Democrats have officially won a majority of state legislative seats nationwide, flipping more than 500 seats across the country.
Active Ingredient retweeted
Dear @SFBART,
YAY! WE WON!
The residents of the Bay Area have given public transit an enormous vote of confidence and BART a 14-year lifeline.
But that support comes with expectations: change, transparency, accountability, and ultimately, financial self-sufficiency.
We cannot mistake this victory for permission to continue doing business as usual. The clock is ticking, and we need to fundamentally rethink both our revenue model and our cost structure to address BART’s long-term structural budget deficit.
The traditional model, built around weekday commuters traveling to and from downtown offices, no longer works. And even if more employees return to the office, we cannot afford to depend exclusively on commuter fares to sustain our system.
We need to reinvent BART for the next generation of riders, revenue, and regional mobility.
We have to start somewhere. Here are a few thoughts to get the conversation moving:
1. DEVELOP A LONG-TERM INNOVATION & FINANCIAL INDEPENDENCE ROADMAP
- Create a 5-, 10-, and 15-year roadmap with measurable goals, performance benchmarks, and clear accountability
2. BUDGET, OPERATIONAL EFFICIENCY & NEW REVENUE
- Rightsize staffing: Leverage workplace efficiencies, technology, and automation
- Reduce non-emergency overtime: When recurring overtime becomes the norm, evaluate whether additional staffing is more cost-effective
- Monetize station parking assets: Explore digital billboards and other advertising opportunities
- Implement dynamic parking pricing: Consider surge pricing, as well as evening and weekend parking fees
- Explore dynamic fare pricing: Evaluate time-of-day and direction-of-travel pricing to better manage capacity and generate revenue
3. RIDER EXPERIENCE & FARE INNOVATION
- Extend weekend service: Keep the system open until 2:30 a.m. on Fridays, Saturdays, and New Year’s Eve (Thanks, Maddy!)
- Explore early openings on weekends to encourage airport travel
- Rethink fare structures: Introduce a simplified pricing model:
- Short trips: 1-4 stations
- Longer trips: 5+ stations
- Dedicated airport fare
- Expand BayPass: Develop an individual rider option
- Reward frequent riders: Explore a “Ride 4 Days a Week, Get 3 Free” program
- Expand pass options: Offer monthly, family, and tourist passes
- Maintain equitable access: Fare-free programs for eligible students and riders with disabilities
- Strengthen first- and last-mile connections: Work with small bus operators and feeder-service partners to identify sustainable funding opportunities for their services and strengthen coordination around BART schedule changes
- Improve Paratransit: Evaluate bringing the service in-house or developing a procurement model that attracts more competitive bids and delivers better value
- Put politics aside on BSVII: Ensure the project meets or exceeds BART’s safety and operational requirements - or reconsider moving forward
4. TRANSIT-ORIENTED DEVELOPMENT (TOD)
Every TOD project should create a destination, not simply add housing.
We need restaurants, bars, clubs, entertainment, retail, and other attractions that give people reasons to visit our stations throughout the day and evening
We cannot rely solely on TOD residents to generate the ridership and economic activity needed to make these investments successful
5. LEGISLATIVE & REGIONAL REVENUE OPPORTUNITIES
- Revisit Proposition 13: Pursue meaningful property tax reform
- Explore a sustainable payroll tax: Develop a long-term, dedicated funding mechanism that better reflects the regional economic benefits of public transit
- Eliminate transaction fees on public transit purchases via credit or debit cards
Active Ingredient retweeted
~1.73M people live in both Dakotas combined. They get 4 senators.
There are 4 cities, 38 metro areas and 19 counties at least that big. Each shares 2 senators with the rest of its state.
A Dakotan has ~46x a Californian's Senate power, ~23x a New Yorker's. So cry me a river
Rural conservatives in deep-blue states are effectively governed without consent. In New York, Republicans win most counties yet still lose statewide by 20 points because dense urban and suburban voters in New York City and its suburbs cast the decisive ballots and vote overwhelmingly Democratic. The result is that rural and upstate communities pay the taxes, live under the regulations, and absorb the costs set by politicians they consistently reject. Same story in California and Illinois. Population density has become a veto over the rest of the state.
Wankpanzer winter for Poland, France and the rest of the world forbes.com/sites/siladityara…
Active Ingredient retweeted
Helpful explanation of why a few hundred thousand hardy people will always have two senators all to themselves. (Most of this also describes North Dakota and Alaska.)
In case you’re considering moving to Wyoming after the mid term results I thought I’d help everyone think this through.
* Hope you have lots of time to drive, because a trip to Costco can take your entire day.
* Your Amazon Prime account won’t work the same here. In Wyoming, “Prime” just means you’ll eventually get it.
* We have winter for eight months. No really, we do.
* The wind will blow the snow right back into the driveway you just cleared. It’s a fun little hobby.
* I-80 in the winter can turn a simple drive into a very long day of sitting in your car, waiting for the road to open and questioning your choices.
* It’s not always easy to run out for one thing. Sometimes that one thing is an hour or more away, and lots of times after the drive you can’t find the one thing in that place either.
* We don’t have every store, restaurant, or delivery service you’re used to. You’ll learn to plan ahead, or learn to do without.
* Hiking? Sure. Just remember you might run into a bear. Nothing like enjoying the scenery while also keeping an eye out for something that could eat you.
* And those deer and elk everybody thinks are so wonderful? They’re beautiful right up until one jumps in front of your car.
Wyoming is cold, windy, inconvenient, and a long way from Costco. Hope this helps. 😂
Active Ingredient retweeted
Seattle's newly approved 9.5-foot fire lane. theurbanist.org/in-battle-wi…
Active Ingredient retweeted
Dude, this is how you win as a Democrat in an insanely red state. He deserves every iota of praise he's getting, and a hell of a lot more.
WINNING GOOD
I walked the Trump rally line to listen, not make assumptions. I talked with voters, asked questions and heard what matters to them.
When I'm elected, I'll represent all 82 counties and every Mississippian, no matter who they voted for. That's what being your senator means. #MississippiMatters
Active Ingredient retweeted
I'm less impressed by how @ossoff speaks (though he's terrific at that too) and more impressed by what he says.
This 2-minute clip is the best explanation of Trump corruption that I've ever heard. His explanation of the Russian dirty deals is so accurate and so clear. He knows the facts cold. And he explains them better than I can.
Active Ingredient retweeted
A thread 🧵If you wanted to watch seven hours of Fox News personalities losing their ever-loving minds on election night but don't want to waste seven hours of your life I've condensed it for you. Hour 1 - DENIAL - They had no idea what was coming 1/7
Active Ingredient retweeted
BREAKING: HOLY SMOKES! Democrats now control enough states to effectively abolish the Electoral College through the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact.
Republicans did NOT have this on their bingo cards...
Under the Constitution, states control their electoral votes and are allowed to decide how they are allocated during presidential elections. Currently, almost every state gives its votes to whoever wins the state.
In practice, the current system means that a candidate can win the national popular vote, but lose the election because small states like Wyoming exert undue influence on the outcome. That state has 3 electoral votes with a population of just 577,000 people. California has 54 electoral votes and a population of 39.5 million people. So a vote in Wyoming is essentially 3.8 times as valuable as one in California.
Since 1992, Democrats have won the popular vote seven out of nine times.
Under the NPV, states that join agree to give their electoral votes to whoever wins the national popular vote, not just their own state. So a state could go red on the map, but if the Democrat wins the national vote, they still get that state's votes. And vice versa of course.
The crucial mechanism is that the compact doesn't trigger until the member states have a combined power of at least 270 electoral votes, the number needed to win the White House. So far, 18 states plus D.C. have joined, totaling 222 electoral votes. We only need 48 more.
Now is the chance to pass this measure in every state possible. Democrats won both houses of the legislature in Wisconsin for the first time in 18 years (10 electoral votes). We won the Pennsylvania state Senate for the first time since 1993 (19 votes). We now have a trifecta in Michigan (15 votes). And we won the governor’s race in Nevada (6 votes).
10 + 19 + 15 + 6 = 50.
222 + 50 = 272.
And if we hold our lead in the Arizona Senate, that number could climb as high as 283, more than enough to trigger the compact.
In addition to removing an imbalance in our system that favors Republicans, this novel approach would fundamentally change how candidates run their presidential campaigns. Currently, they are incentivized to ignore most of the country. If you live in a “safe” state, red or blue, your vote for President is basically decided before you cast it. Campaigns spend their time and money in a handful of swing states while the rest of us watch from the sidelines. If the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact is adopted, they'll have reason to hit every state because they're aiming to win the largest swath of the country as a whole, not just certain states.
States have until July 20, 2028 to join the compact in time for the next presidential election.
We can fix our democracy. The time is now.
Please like and share if you support this idea!
Active Ingredient retweeted
To all those who pivoted to appease/work with Trump, criticized me for being too “partisan”, and predicted with great certainty that MAGA was the inevitable way of the future, I look forward to hearing back from you now.
Active Ingredient retweeted
Weird. It's 10:30 AM on the East Coast and the Trump administration still hasn't created a new crisis to push the election out of the headlines. Someone is slacking.
Active Ingredient retweeted
All nine current justices of the Texas Supreme Court are Republicans, and there had not been a Democrat elected to the bench since the 1990s.
TONIGHT WE REPLACED FOUR OF THEM WITH DEMOCRATS!
If one resigns in Governor HInjosa's four years, they will be replaced with a Democrat, and we will have the majority on the Texas Supreme Court for the first time in over 100 years.
Active Ingredient retweeted
Probably the best take yet on the Lear jet crash:
Long post worth the read. I have a close friend who flies private jets. He flew Lear 60 for over 15 years and now flies a Gulfstream. This is a copy and paste of his response to me asking him if he thought Ice was the issue.
“We always fly in ridiculous cold temperatures.”
“Usually you get the bad ice when the temperatures are like 0 to negative 20. Believe it or not, there's a point where it gets too cold for ice. At negative 40, you pretty much can't get ice. Besides that, the airplane is equipped with hot wings and hot tail.”
“I flew the Lear 60 for like 15 years. It's a no joke airplane and probably the most dangerous airplane I've ever flown. It has a super critical wing. The airflow has to be perfect. When it gets into rough air and turbulence, it will easily stall. It has stalled on me at 41,000 feet just because we got into some turbulence. (On the way to Palm Beach as a matter of fact. ) we recovered and got her flying again around 30,000 ft. Scary
But here's the problem. This airplane has a terrible coffin corner. (At high altitudes) what that means is, you fly in a really narrow window where if you lose 20 knots, it stalls. And if you gain 20 knots, it goes into overspeed. The air goes supersonic over the wing and it goes into a high speed stall, or worse, a Mach tuck.
So if you stall, the normal recovery is to push the yoke forward to lower the nose and gain air speed again. At low altitude, you can push really hard and recover quickly. But in the 60... if you push hard, it will gain air speed and go into a high speed stall, it doesn't take much. It's very sensitive. The 60 has super short wings that don't make much lift. So then you high speed stall, and the computer is yelling at you... OVERSPEED! So then you pull back and enter a low speed stall. And you go back and forth trying to keep it in the air speed window.
This whole thing is pretty scary. And you should recover basically by using your finger tips using super small corrections. You can't over do it. If you try to muscle the recovery, she gets mad and will become unrecoverable. If she enters a mach tuck. You're done.”
“I taught the Lear 60 to other pilots and mentored them. I told them... this airplane has a soul and it's trying to kill you. Do not ever try to top the weather. Don't go over a thunderstorm. Go around it. If it means a half hour longer, then do it. Going over the thunderstorm will go into turbulence that you might not recover from.
These pilots went right over a thunderstorm. I think it stalled which caused them to drop down into the thunderstorm and ended up in mach tuck. They picked up so much speed that it ripped off the horizontal stabilizer. At that point... chuck Yeager can't fix it.
These same pilots did something similar a couple months ago. ATC got mad at them. They poked the bear one too many times.
This is not a beginner airplane. The Gulfstream would never do this. It has HUGE margins of error and won't stall like that. But then again... it's got HUGE wings. It's a pussy cat.
The Gulfstream is like driving a 4 wheeler. The Lear 60 is like riding a uni cycle.”
Active Ingredient retweeted
Tolkien on NIMBYism. This quotation hits harder when you realize that Tolkien is describing himself and his own class.
Active Ingredient retweeted
Now that she's officially re-elected, it's time for Governor Hochul to restore the original $15 congestion toll.
BREAKING: Democrat Kathy Hochul wins New York's governor race, NBC News projects. nbcnews.to/4BIiUkY
ALT BREAKING: Democrat Kathy Hochul wins New York's governor race, NBC News projects. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2026-elections/new-york-governor-results