Haha $450m? That didn’t give it away? lol. Davis has a concept of a 20 year old plan and Sac has a scratcher from the local Indian casino that might win half a stadium if they scratch 3 green feathers.

Occasionally someone calls me for a reference and I’m not even allowed to acknowledge if they are/were an employee, let alone give any feedback, on orders from the legal department. I’ve found that the “perfect” resumes and interviews are from the people who have “studied for the test” rather than mastered the material.

I’m not sure that targeted recruiting of any flavor for an institution that receives federal grants would be allowed these days. Small college finances can be tough so to add football, these schools presumably identified a market of people who want to play and people who will watch that drives value. I think it’s great to see more opportunities. There are a lot of high school football players in California who may want to play in college but aren’t D1 players.

I think many people will find private cubicles nice. If you’ve ever been to a Buc-ees sitting on the throne in a private throne room is luxurious. If privacy was the motivator, you could have done that within men’s/women’s facilities rather than spending millions to make one big happy locker room/restroom. The stated goals of janitorial efficiency and medic response are nonsense. This is a solution in search of a problem, takes resources away from projects that could benefit a much higher percentage of people in uncertain economic times, distracts from the work the university does that has or could have broad public support, and is red meat for a federal administration intent retaliating against anything perceived as DEI related. I am far from a Fox News consumer, but I still read the room - this is poor timing to double down on this sort of bet.

I would argue that state universities have a primary fiduciary duty to the state, as in the State of California funds the university because it is good business for all citizens to have a critical mass of smart educated people, even if every person isn’t college bound. The secondary duty is to the student, who is a paying customer. The third duty, which I have gotten into arguments about, is to alumni, who have a vested interest in the upward trajectory of the university and avoidance of scandals. We want our degrees to be appreciating assets, not depreciating ones with an asterisk. As universities have industrialized into quasi-corporations, administrators have become more fiduciary to their own interests and in that quest have fallen into the trap of picking winners and losers based on what resonates well within the inner circles of academic administration rather than what resonates well with the interest and advancement of all Californians.

I find a lot of activists to be exhausting because there is no actual finish line of what they want, at least nothing reasonable and achievable. I believe a 3 branch government is a sturdy stool and I feel wise mentorship could guide that energy into the appropriate legislative channels to make changes for the better that have gone through a compromise process. Instead, what universities basically have been teaching is, it’s ok that your view has limited support, never compromise, shout at the executive or judicial branches loud enough and you may find a champion to ram through your minority opinion, whether it be locker rooms, Netanyahu, or something else.

I’ve had some people disclose to me they were trans and I would have had no idea otherwise. But “passing” as an ordinary man or woman is based on a couple factors - access to medical/financial/cosmetic resources and desire to pass. I had one employee who was trying to transition on a dollar store budget and just looked like an offensive lineman in drag and another who wished to identify as something else, loudly wearing dresses and a Santa Claus beard. While I recognize legitimate fears of violence in some situations, my estimation is that this is more important to the self-described “allies” feeling comfortable in their ally echo chamber than about people actually using the restroom.

overall in society trans and nonbinary is thought to be around 1-2%, among Gen Z maybe up to 5%. Hard to know if the rate is actually going up or just diagnosed/identified more. It has a correlation to autism, which also has higher rates reported than older generations. I have had several trans and nonbinary employees and for whatever reason some have (over)shared with me. But one of their comments was that there is a chasm in that community, with one side, perhaps in fact the larger group, just wanting to use regular men’s/women’s facilities without anyone noticing and the other side wanting to loudly be accommodated as something else. Those two sides don’t really like each other, with the quiet side feeling like the loud folks are making it harder than it needs to be and the loud side feeling like the quiet folks are not sufficiently contributing to the cause. So actual beneficiaries would likely be a subset of this 1-5%.

I suppose the “original” dorms were North and South Hall. Not sure if they even had indoor plumbing to debate bathroom genders. The Primero dorms were Beckett-Hughes and Struve-Titus. These were torn down in the 90s and replaced with Primero Grove apartments, although the street name Beckett Hall Circle remains. All of the Tercero dorms have been replaced, as I understand they were concrete buildings and could not be seismically reinforced to standard. Part of the dining hall is still there but has been substantially added on to so it would be hard to recognize the original part. In Cuarto, Castilian was sold off and the 1980s-era buildings on Oxford Circle were torn down and replaced. So the only “old” dorm buildings are Bixby, Gilmore, Ryerson, Malcolm, and Regan. I looked up student housing and Regan looks exactly like it did when I was there 20 years ago although they are building some new dorms to fill in remaining pockets of land in Segundo. It also said all restrooms in Regan and many throughout housing have been turned gender fluid and appears you would have to actually request a floor with a gendered bathroom.

I lived in Regan, the forgotten part of Segundo. My building was 3 stories, one restroom per floor. Probably single sex buildings in the 1960s. In my building, 1st floor was all women with female restroom, 2nd floor was coed with male restroom. 3rd floor was “rainbow theme floor” and at the time had the only non-gender restroom on campus. They had put weatherstripping on the gaps in the stall doors. The interesting thing was a lot of the 3rd floor residents still went down to 1st or 2nd floor because they weren’t feeling the mixed thing. It was niche for a very small clientele. If there was one thing I learned it was LGBT+ are not a monolith and in fact some subsets really don’t like being affiliated with each other. But if it was busy downstairs, the 2nd floor women would just use the 2nd floor men’s room. For some reason they felt more at home in the men’s room than the gender neutral gig upstairs. It was shocking to find a lot of women leave a bathroom grosser than men. But the main problem for the RA’s was people using the gender neutral shower for consensual hookups.

at least if there’s no public animosity, maybe it bodes well for the sports that would like to remain affiliates with Big West. Interesting comment about aspirations.

for me it’s the lack of transparency. The new fee will raise about $4.2m per year of new money 3 years from now. It’s in a ramp up now. They’re spending $5m on new lights. Great. Where’s the other $95m? Is the plan to issue a $95m bond with $5m in annual payments over 30 years? In which case you don’t really have $5m of new money every year. Like, wouldn’t it be more straightforward to say we want a $200m stadium. We can mortgage half with student fees, we need $50m from Sac Republic for a 30 year lease, $40m from donors and a $10m redevelopment grant from the city. That would be a straightforward deal. Instead you’ve just got another emperor trying on his new clothes in front of all of Twitter/X.

So fun fact about these fee increases. CSU has 2 mechanisms for student input on fees. An election or a special committee appointed by the president. He opted for the committee and, wouldn’t you know, they unanimously agreed most of his proposals. They held town hall listening sessions and apparently couldn’t get through his opening remarks before protesters caused his early exit. Not sure if this guy is leading a university or a banana republic. Also, my experience in construction tells me that “phase 3” for the architectural stuff is code for never happening. Of note, one of the things buried in the fee proposal is 1 free ticket to all home athletic events for 3 years after graduation.

The easiest answer is just don’t connect to public WiFi. It is possible that WiFi operator or another user could intercept your data, either for nefarious hacking or maybe less nefarious to sell data to ad brokers. Likely your biggest risk is someone gathering enough information to take over your email account because then they can reset your other passwords. In the US at least, your phone plan probably has more than enough cellular data for routine internet use and can be tethered to your computer or iPad. State level actors can spoof cell towers to steal data, and there is evidence of this in Washington DC, but this would be unlikely at a random tourist spot in middle America. Some tiers of Netflix or Hulu let you download content to your device ahead of time so you don’t have to stream on the road.

VPN has different use cases—
1. You want to obscure your location. Maybe to watch a game not available in your market or other blocked content (ex western news in china)
2. You want to obscure your data from your service provider or the government. For example if you use a Swiss VPN it may be harder for law enforcement to subpoena.
3. You want a more secure data tunnel when using unsecured wifi.

Presuming your use case is #3, any of the big players are probably fine. But you can count on paying $10-$15 per month. Be wary of free services… there is no such thing as free. They are monetizing you in some way.

yeah I suppose you’d need 5000+ ft for many private jets. Would also have to figure out how to avoid TAPS doing anything dumb like putting a ticket under Larry Ellison’s wiper.

I think selling stuff like this was Rocko’s thing before coming here so I’d assume he knows what he’s doing to right size the luxury to the market. Not sure what the wealthiest corporations are in Sacramento region, but maybe it’s about bundling. If there were 2 or 4 executive suites with year around access, what if they came with guaranteed landing rights and car service from the university airport. Paired with the right catering, Mondavi access, or whatever, you could create a package that nobody else has.

it might not be an issue. From what I understand, today’s college students are not as likely to play a pickup game of basketball and have a greater expectation of “programmed” activities (they wouldn’t know what to do with an “open gym”). Recreation offerings are tilting toward dance, cycling, aerobics classes, and organized IM leagues as well as non-athletic pursuits like competitive video gaming or live action role play (think a fantasy card game where you dress up and act out the actions on the card you are playing).

no idea what was considered at the time, but the mistake at the Toomey site was building the North Entry garage too close to the stadium in the early 90s. Remember the cheapskates who watched the game from the garage? Today of course those vantage points would be a security concern too. I think the site selected was probably chosen because there wasn’t anything there to bulldoze and no neighbors (except cows). Other north-south oriented sites might have been Hutchison or Russell IM fields or possibly somewhere along Old Davis Rd. We may have gotten a better stadium if the architect was challenged to fit it on a smaller site and closer to downtown… steeper, higher, closer to action like Montana. But reallocating IM fields would have been controversial and locating adjacent to city of Davis could have spurred nimby litigation about light and noise pollution, despite the revenue it would drive for downtown.

kind of like my plan to exercise and eat more vegetables.

allow me to point out nobody is taking notes and the only guy with a computer definitely has Outlook open going through unread mail, must be super engaged. It’s not Autocad, BIM, or Revit. Having been in this exact business, this guy has all the tells of a charlatan. I bet he is very annoying to actual professionals.

Soccer and football can share a stadium but aren’t prefect roommates. Soccer is like baseball in that there is a range of acceptable field dimensions, but the preferred dimensions are significantly wider than a football field. At elite levels they want different turf profiles. Soccer will want natural grass cut shorter and elite foreign players will refuse artificial turf. Football tends to make do with (or even celebrate) adverse field conditions, just ask the Packers or Bills. So shared stadiums tend to skew to soccer specs because of how temperamental South American soccer stars are. I saw one cry one time that he couldn’t play because the water droplets were too big and he wanted the sprinklers changed to a finer mist. A shared stadium could work with current USL/FCS talent. But if both teams upgraded, an MLS/FBS relationship would be more strained. Here’s an example of overlaid striping.