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.

This is unfortunate but the current model of higher education is moving toward one where the residential on-campus experience is a luxury and due to inability or unwillingness to control student housing costs, more and more students are online, satellite campus, or hybrid. This isn’t all bad, because it opens college up to people doing career reboots or caring for children. But I think it is eroding the personal connection people have to their university and willingness for alumni and communities to remain engaged. Except at the P4 level I think it is difficult to find appreciable direct revenue. So the question becomes is the strategic value worth it? For many CSU campuses the answer may be no. Sonoma State isn’t trying to be a household name on the east coast and I think increasingly people are just seeking a teaching credential, CPA license, etc. through the most economical means they can, which for many might mean limited time on campus. And I think for that type of student, once the degree is awarded, the transaction is complete and they don’t really desire alumni engagement, athletics or otherwise.

admittedly I have not been to an Aggie hoops game in a long time. I caught a few minutes of one on ESPN+ recently and it looked pretty dead with some sort of roped off area on the floor where the band and Aggie Pack overflow used to be. And as far as expensive? Nothing is expensive when it’s someone else’s money!

I liked the old configuration better too. My guess is that the new configuration better suits Campus Rec uses. Until the 2000s, the Pavilion/Rec Hall housed all functions of the ARC under its roof. They found a way to use every square foot and its size and scope were light years anything our D2 contemporaries had in the 1970s. It’s been nearly 50 years and it’s still probably one of the more capable venues in the Big West. Probably bottom third of MWC. Open question if it is worth a major renovation or if it makes more sense to fully absorb it as part of the ARC and build a new major venue in the next 10-15 years.

this is a venue I worked on designing. I drew some inspiration from the Pavilion actually, but replaced the loge seats with a flexible suite/box level, stacked a fixed upper bowl on top, and moved the concourse behind the seating. It’s about 8000 seats. Not sure if the Pavilion has the vertical clearance to rework like this. We determined in this case it was more cost effective to narrow the function of the arena and build a 100,000sf expo hall adjacent than to add more transformable elements.

Not sure what “talent pool” we are talking about… Folsom HS or Folsom State Prison? Since it they are already building the reputation of shopping for “second chance” dudes.

I agree it makes good sense for CSU campuses to have satellite locations co-located with JCs to be more accessible. My point is it seems like immature leadership to consume all the oxygen in the room on Combat U, Sac12, and the plan to attract out of state students to pay for it while hardly promoting the real work that educators are doing.

setting aside the weird stuff, they are working a sizable satellite campus in Placer County with Sierra College and are leading a research group looking at AI uses in education. Not sure why he doesn’t talk about those things more.

Katehi may have survived the pepper spray incident had she immediately emptied out UCDPD. It was the coverup. Remember the multimillion dollar consultant to scrub her personal image on Google? Aside from that, she also hired family members with reporting relationships that reeked of nepotism, moonlit on unapproved corporate boards and took kickbacks from a textbook publisher. An accomplished electrical engineer, promoted beyond her competence, who should have never been an administrator or manager.

I mean, in certain fields, if you want to be an elementary teacher, marriage therapist, or accountant, Sac State is a good school, perhaps more relevant than Davis. Social scientists can be scholars and I have every expectation that the leader of a CSU campus would be one. Not all scholars are good leaders (see Katehi) but this guy’s qualifications to lead a major university are squishy and I read his 23-point strategic plan and almost all of them are either DEI or athletics/fundraising related, with a few nonsense items like Combat U. His top priority academic plan is creating a “general studies” certificate.

his BA/MA from Sac State, PhD from Arizona State and was a professor at San Diego State. His major was Ethnic Studies and his thesis involved interviewing 28 college students where he identified themes such as focus, family, motivation, employment, attendance, and completing homework as important factors to success of minority students. I’m not saying social sciences are unimportant but come on the premise of this thesis is kind of like asking 28 people if the world is still round. How would that defense go any way other than golf clapping in an echo chamber? The Wood brothers seem like narcissistic self-promoters who thrive on suspense and drama. They have found a successful business model to peddle this, so good for them I suppose. Though it is probably more appropriate for Six Flags to tease next season’s new ride than a university president. His thin-on-specifics braggadocio reminds me of someone else. I bet I could draw him into a twitter debate on hand size.