1) voice one: young adult calls, sobbing 2) grandparent inquires with a name... "Ben, is that you?" 3) voice one: "Yes grandma, it's me, Ben... I'm in trouble, please don't tell mom 4) voice two: "Hello, I'm attorney..."

My grandmother fell victim to this almost 20 years ago, which only stopped when Western Union refused to let her continue sending wires... she was forced to call her daughter (at which point they just called my brother.)

Our takeaway (at the time)... the voice doesn't even need to be terribly accurate, since the original interaction is brief / somewhat inaudible over the tears. Typically just requires an older vulnerable adult, a lucky strike with the initial setup (e.g. grandparent actually has a grandkid), and a lot of high pressure / duress salesmanship.

https://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/Maps/CompareTwoWeeks.aspx

(*Technically slivers of the state in the far north/south were 'abnormally dry' in 2024, a small difference from 2026)

You can see some of these same dynamics playing out in SF with the decommissioning of the 'Great Highway' on the west side, which led to a recent recall of the local council member. Why does the majority vote of a city of 800k people get to unilaterally dictate the transportation options for a region upwards of 7MM?

I get that no one likes highways running through their communities, but when you decommission historical arteries while aggressively adopting anti-car transportation policies throughout the rest of the hub, it's somewhat inevitable that the network get snarled.

Maybe congestion pricing is the way to go -- it can certainly work for major European cities built inland, and surrounded by ring roads. For NYC / SF (surrounded by water), I'm less convinced. Sure, I'll 'just take public transport' to go downtown, but the options significantly diminish if I want to travel from North Bay to South Bay to see my parents, or Jersey to South Brooklyn to visit my inlaws.

The guy operated a marketplace for illegal goods in order to enrich himself. The illegality wasn't just incidental, it was literally his business model -- by flouting the law, he enjoyed massive market benefit (minimal competition, lack of regulation, high margins etc) by exploiting the arbitrage that the rest of us follow the rules.

Said a different way, he knowingly pursued enormous risk in order to achieve outsized benefits, and ultimately his bet blew up on him -- we shouldn't have bailed him out.

That's great, but kind of obvious that if you build out dedicated bike lanes, cyclists are more likely to prefer them to alternate routes.

I don't know what is it about AI and current state of tech, but the discourse as of late has really taken a nosedive. I'm not saying that any of this conjecture won't happen, but the acceleration towards fervor and fear mongering on the subject is bordering on religiosity - seriously, it makes crypto bros look good.

And yeah -- looks like some cool new tech from OpenAI, and excited when I can actually dig in. Would also love it if I could hire their marketing department.

So yes, water is major a bottleneck for residential development out west. But to solve this you need new means of transport (pipes / channels), storage (reservoirs), and treatment (plans)... infrastructure that doesn't currently exist, is hard to get approved, and would likely need to be paid for by increasing the cost of living for existing residents.

Agree that we should be smarter about how water is allocated / used out West, but 'taking from ag' isn't going to make it any cheaper for you to buy a home.

Let's say you have a vaccine that appears effective (great, right?) You give it to 1000 willing test subjects, and most become immune (fantastic, right?). Then, three to six months later 50 of the subjects go into terminal liver failure due to their body's immune response to the vaccine (as determined by their genetics.)

It's not just whether a vaccine 'works' for you, it's whether it's effective AND safe over the huge genetic pool that is humanity (as measured over a sufficient period of time). This kind of stuff comes up all the time with drug trials, and it's why there's a process, and things can't be rushed.

What's fun about drone lighting is that the detail is all 'real', with most of the 'art' going in the setup / staging. Really fun to see it executed well.

Light painting in the sky is one thing, but getting the light source to simultaneously "paint" the foreground in a realistic way -- so it's suggestive how the two physically interacted -- requires another level of PS wizardry (at least beyond me).

* https://photos.app.goo.gl/9ED17BWiRfieVrap8

anything that restricts or impedes what you can do with a home is a liability, not an asset. Up in SF, even partially tenant-occupied homes typically sell for a sizable discount.

(also doubt that ~10k/year is going to make waves in the target market -- Bay Area homeowners with a back yard big enough to make this viable.)