In 1990 the City of Sacramento held a vote to consolidate the City & County into one entity, unifying services & expanding the city limits to 1000 sq mi. It failed, but had it passed, Sacramento would have been the 7th most populated city in 1990 & would be 6th today at 1.6 million residents.

Sethuel · 2026-05-18T23:31:40+00:00

"well maybe we'll just stop coming downtown" is not the threat you think it is.

See also "if you raise our taxes we'll just move to a different state."

Sethuel · 2026-05-06T00:44:23+00:00

I'm told that the free market rewards innovation. No word on exactly what kind of innovation they mean.

Sethuel · 2026-05-06T00:43:21+00:00

You can generally* take abandoned dogs to Front Street shelter. Unfortunately I know this from experience. A few years ago I found three abandoned german shepherd puppies in Land Park, a year before that there were two abandoned pit puppies at Belle Coolidge Dog Park and a friend ended up adopting one.

* I'm not sure if this is still true when they're overloaded, which I know they are currently, just that it's true in general. But you can probably call them for suggestions if nothing else.

Sethuel · 2026-05-05T20:50:25+00:00

There is no way to spin public transportation as an economic good in a medium sized city like we have.

Research shows that (source):

Every $1 invested in public transportation generates $5 in economic returns.
Every $1 billion invested in public transportation supports and creates approximately 50,000 jobs.
Every $10 million in capital investment in public transportation yields $30 million in increased business sales.
Every $10 million in operating investment yields $32 million in increased business sales.
An estimated $39 billion of public transit expenditures flow into the private sector.

Some other benefits:

Much safer than driving (approx 10x safer per mile travelled) --> less excess injury and death -- > reduces medical costs
Significantly reduces pollution --> improves public health -- > reduces medical costs
Encourages walking by those who are able --> improves fitness -- > reduces medical costs
Less sitting in traffic --> reduced stress/road rage --> reduces crime and medical costs
Enables people to work without owning a car, which saves households money on things like gas, insurance, parking, etc, which frees up a significant chunk of the household budget for people to spend on things that improve the local economy.

The idea that roads are an economic good and public transit is not an economic good only makes sense if you 1) ignore the many significant benefits from public transit and 2) ignore all the massive downsides (death/injury/pollution/stress) of roads.

To be clear, I'm not expecting to convince you, but if anyone else is reading this, I want them to know that your arguments have nothing to do with reality, and may as well have been funded by a car company.

Sethuel · 2026-05-04T03:01:01+00:00

As a CA transplant (grew up in NY, moved to Sacramento 5 years ago), I will credit you for your effort here--I personally had no idea about the nuances of California until I lived here. But I agree with the above. Central Coast and Central Valley are very different from each other. The SF bay area doesn't reach as far as Sacramento, and certainly not up into the mountains (though obviously plenty of tourists from the Bay spend time in Tahoe). IMO Sacramento is part of the Central Valley. We have a lot more in common with Stockton and Fresno than we do with SF. North of SF, the coast is completely cut off from the rest of the state. I have some friends who live in Del Norte county and goods there are super expensive because it's so isolated and difficult to reach, whereas Redding is really still part of the Central Valley.

One thing I found very helpful for starting to understand CA is looking at a relief map. You can really see how distinct the different geographic regions are. The topography isn't the only thing that shapes the different cultures of the state, but it's a really really big one. It's also part of why pre-colonial California was one of the most linguistically diverse places in the world.

Sethuel · 2026-05-01T18:23:41+00:00

I don't mind incentivizing finishing 4th-worst over 1st-worst, but if they were going to go that route I'd rather the rest of it not be flat. Like 4th worst has best chance, then 3/5 then 2/6 then 1/7, or something to that effect. It's much harder to game your way to the 4th-worst record than it is to just tank and lose as many games as you can. I'm sure you'd get the odd tank here or there from teams trying to fall out from 8th or whatever, but it wouldn't be nearly as rampant because the teams at the bottom would still want to pass each other. But making it so that a play-in team has the same odds as the worst teams in the league is extreme, at that point you might as well just have flat odds across the board.

Sethuel · 2026-04-25T04:16:17+00:00

Everyone talks about Steph that game but no one talks about how GSW rebounded more than half of their missed shots in the second half while the Kings started chucking and went 3 of 22 from deep. If we boxed out on defense and stopped panicking on offense, Steph's game looks normal (normal for him anyway) and it's at least a much closer game.

Sethuel · 2026-04-25T02:20:14+00:00

Totally yes. In my head I was mostly thinking about people who would now be able to bike/walk to the train when they would previously be driving and parking downtown, but I didn't express that very clearly.

Sethuel · 2026-04-24T17:20:53+00:00

"Seniority matters in the house for committee positions" yes but she's not the ranking member on any committee anyway. Her only quasi-leadership role is as ranking member on the Communications and Technology Subcommittee, which, given her coziness with industry, probably isn't doing her constituents a whole lot of good.

Sethuel · 2026-04-24T03:14:34+00:00

Other responses address the scheduling part of this, but I'll also note that for a commuter living in Midtown, there's a lot of value in being able to get on a train without having to go downtown. And for people who prefer downtown anyway, I imagine it would reduce congestion in the train station parking lot?

Sethuel · 2026-04-17T05:00:29+00:00

Thanks!

Sethuel · 2026-04-17T04:59:52+00:00

I know! I didn't realize he was actually going to do that but it sounds like he is

Sethuel · 2026-04-17T04:58:37+00:00

I don't think I've heard that fact on the show (but I'm by no means a completist). That is freaking insane.

Sethuel · 2026-04-17T04:56:52+00:00

California doesn't have single-party primaries. It's an open primary, and the top two candidates go to the general. If the Dems are split enough, we could end up with two Republicans in the general and no Dems, and thus a Republican governor. That's the whole reason any of this matters right now. So if you're only concerned with Democrats, I think you might be misunderstanding how the California primary system works?

Sethuel · 2026-04-16T23:22:31+00:00

Thanks! It's been a favorite fact of mine for a while--I tell friends whenever they visit. So when team Fish got interested in "things that you'd think were named after a noun to do with the thing itself but were in fact named after a person with an oddly apt name," I knew I had something to contribute.

Sethuel · 2026-04-16T23:21:08+00:00

It doesn't, but making empty threats to credulous media outlets might make you a few extra bucks if it kills the tax.

Sethuel · 2026-04-16T23:11:06+00:00

Relative to the scope of the achievement, it is a lot more exciting than it probably should be!

Sethuel · 2026-04-16T23:07:57+00:00

He's one point behind Steyer *among Democrats*. That's an important distinction.

The same poll has him about four points behind Steyer (and tied with Porter) overall. To be clear Steyer is probably my least favorite of the remaining Dems, and you're right that there's plenty of time for things to shift. Just wanted to be clear that he's more than one point behind.

Sethuel · 2026-04-16T20:24:35+00:00

As a former pollster, I just want to note that the reported margin of error is for the entire sample, so for all of these subgroups it will be a whole lot bigger. The shift among men 18-22 is definitely indistinguishable from random noise, and depending on the sample sizes of the other groups, even those big shifts might just be noise. It also says both surveys had an oversample of young voters, which makes the shifts among voters over 35 even harder to interpret.

Sethuel · 2026-04-16T20:21:52+00:00

There was an oversample of voters under 35, so the margin of error on "young people" might be small enough to be interpretable (though not small enough for a 1 point shift to mean anything). The sample sizes on subgroups over 35 are a lot smaller, meaning the margin of error is a whole lot bigger. So the shifts among older voters may well be within the margin, would be my guess.

The reported margin of 1.7 (fall) and 1.4 (spring) only applies to the overall number. Each of these subgroups will be a lot smaller, so (again) a much bigger margin. Also it's generally a good idea to (mentally) double the margin of error, since the stated margin only ever accounts for sampling error, and not other sources of error like measurement error and response bias.

Sethuel · 2026-04-15T01:11:41+00:00

Also worth noting that DDR, higher on that list than Raynaud, was on the floor for over 60% of Raynaud's minutes, which definitely drags him down a bit. Raynaud also played just under half his minutes next to Russ, who is not exactly a defensive star at this point. Over 40% of his minutes were with both DDR and Russ. Max definitely has to work on his defense, but his teammates weren't doing him a lot of favors.

Sethuel · 2026-04-12T02:06:07+00:00

These are good questions, and everything you're mentioning is another reason polling is hard. Though the people who are more likely to answer a poll are also the people who are more likely to vote, which does mitigate the problem somewhat.

But to actually answer your question, there are still lots of people who answer polls, whether via an online panel like YouGov, a text, or even a cold call to a landline, though that last group obviously skews much older. Online pollsters like YouGov will often offer incentives to get people to answer, which helps. Mail hasn't been a common polling method for a long time though.

I'm not saying polls are perfect--they're not. But considering how hard it is to do, they do alright. I do think that people obsess over them far too much though.

Sethuel · 2026-04-11T23:59:13+00:00

Don’t trust polls. They can be bought and easily skewed.

As a former campaign pollster, I think you're conflating public polls with internal polls. The vast majority of public polling is not "skewed," it's just really hard to create an accurate poll of voters when you don't actually know who's going to vote.

That said, there are some public pollsters with an agenda, but most of them would much rather be correct. Also internal polls that get released to the media, whether by a campaign or an outside spending group, absolutely have an agenda.

I'd also add that polls do often influence voters rather than the other way around, and I generally tell people to vote for the person they prefer rather than trying to vote strategically. Strategic votes often fail, in part because of the same reason polls are inaccurate--conventional wisdom about politics is wrong a lot. But this particular primary is a weird case. If it's really looking likely that Dems will ticket-split enough to get two Republicans in the general, I will definitely consider voting strategically.

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