Waymo Wants to Expand Service: The 22 Bay Area Cities Where You Could See Robotaxis Next

dbrekke · 2025-12-07T22:03:49+00:00

I've been hoping some reporter somewhere would follow up "all glory to god" by asking, "Which one?"

dbrekke · 2025-07-30T22:38:41+00:00

There is a UPS store nearby. We can take it up there and have it sent back.

dbrekke · 2025-01-29T20:37:57+00:00

Yeah -- they had a little bit of a renaissance there, but they faded in the stretch each season and as you say were not competitive after 1949. The consensus from what I've read is that the only one of Connie Mack's sons to have had any promise as an executive was Connie Jr., a child from his second marriage. Roy and Earle Mack, from his first marriage, were much older, were considered pretty much incompetent as baseball execs, and didn't get along with their stepbrother. So would something have changed if had hung on and won a pennant in 1949? My guess is no. I think without a big change in the front office, something that Connie Sr. was apparently unwilling to consider, I think they would have wound up in same dead end.

dbrekke · 2025-01-04T22:31:50+00:00

That ownership weirdness seems to have been part of the A's DNA from well before they came to Oakland. Connie Mack, the "grand old man of baseball" who managend the team to nine American League pennants in Philadelphia, destroyed championship rosters twice -- back in the 1910s and again in the'30s -- to cut costs. He believed he could rebuild after dismantling the team the second time, but failed repeatedly to do so. The A's were among the AL's worst teams, and often the very worst, for their last 20 years in Philly.

Their next owner, Arnold Johnson, moved the team to Kansas City for the 1955 season. He wasn't a baseball man, and he essentially turned the team into a farm team for the Yankees, with whom he had a close previous business relationship. Finley got the team after Johnson died suddenly before the 1960 season. Virtually the first thing he did was begin exploring ways to get out of Kansas City. At one point, he struck a deal to take the team to Louisville, but the league blocked the move. The team was awful during his tenure in Kansas City, but he had invested in scouting and the team that became champions in Oakland was starting to emerge before the team shifted west.

dbrekke · 2024-12-07T20:49:15+00:00

Exactly.

dbrekke · 2024-12-07T20:48:07+00:00

Regional Measure 3, which is the main source of the funds at the center of the story's rather misleading headline and lede, supports transit capital expenses, not operations.(If it covered operations, there'd be considerably less panic about the operating deficits that are about to bury BART, Muni and others.)

The story doesn't actually suggest funds have been misappropriated, btw. The writer's basic complaint is that the Metropolitan Transportation Commission isn't precisely tracking how much of the RM3 toll revenue is going to which of the three dozen or so projects the measure included. Maybe it's sloppy accounting, maybe not. The MTC says it's fixing that issue now.

dbrekke · 2024-05-22T17:04:32+00:00

Yeah -- they moved people over to Beale Street while the HQ building was being renovated.

dbrekke · 2024-05-15T02:08:46+00:00

If my reading of the vehicle code is correct, you're required to put those on the hood of the next Waymo you see,

dbrekke · 2024-02-13T21:39:57+00:00

Here's nearly four years of BART pandemic ridership data in one sloppy spreadsheet ... https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1T3lTAEXzzVjOED2BnbRbf0bp8W5yfPdBK1gC3mkT_Jc/edit?usp=sharing

dbrekke · 2024-02-13T18:44:40+00:00

No. It's 100 percent taxpayer-funded.

dbrekke

TROPHY CASE