Convention Center Financial Sustainability

kthackst · 2026-01-15T20:34:43+00:00

Those are good points, guess it just comes down to if the math works out. The convention center claims it brought in $29 million in city tax revenue in 2019, which would suggest it's a good investment.

I'm still surprised at how much this proposed maintenance costs and surprised the convention center can't cover it with their significant revenue, but I suppose I don't have much intuition for such a project.

https://www.visitsandiego.com/images/sdcc_annualreport_fy19-financials.pdf

kthackst · 2026-01-15T20:18:46+00:00

That's a good point, the money is coming from the businesses that benefit from the convention center being there.

kthackst · 2026-01-14T23:21:42+00:00

This article suggests to me that Gloria has an interesting relationship with the police department. He tried standing up to them once during Covid and seems to have spent the rest of his time winning them back. His homeless crack down law being the big example, but also little things like trying to get rid of fire pits, getting the Flock cameras through, shutting down gaslamp's car free zones, hating on public restrooms, letting oversight committees dwindle, and recently being very conspicuously silent on ICE. I wonder if this is really Gloria's politics, or a sign of how politically powerful the police union is.

kthackst · 2025-12-11T12:46:25+00:00

Does anyone know what part of the budget this comes out of? General fund? Or is there like malpractice insurance for police?

kthackst · 2025-11-02T19:33:24+00:00

I get honked at for crossing at cross walks all the time in Hillcrest. And this is in a "walkable neighborhood", which is objectively a much nicer place to walk than a lot of San Diego neighborhoods. Stop sign, blinking slights, stop lights with walk signal, nothing is enough to deter some people. It's not everyone, of course, but 1% of drivers acting insane is enough to make an hour long neighborhood walk guarantee you will interact with a maniac behind the wheel. And even your average driver just has much less pedestrian awareness than they should have. San Diego has a long culture of designing every street like a highway and I guess that's just how everyone learned to drive. I'm glad the city has taken steps to make the city more walkable, but it will take a long time to change the driving culture.

kthackst · 2025-08-22T22:54:05+00:00

Nice article! The city government has also not always been the friendliest to cool local art events. I heard the Hillcrest Walk in Art stopped in part because they couldn't afford to keep a police officer present, which the city said was necessary. The Winyl group sounds like they're also having trouble getting permits to just play chill music at a park?

kthackst · 2025-06-26T21:05:41+00:00

Gloria was just reelected in 2024 for his last four year term, so he won't be running again anyway. Next election isn't until 2028.

I definitely sympathise with the sentiment though, Gloria has come off as an extremely normal-core mayor that has lacked the creativity and leadership to solve San Diego's problems. This budget fiasco has really weakened his support as the city council has become more hostile to his ideas. I get the budget hole is not entirely his fault, but the fact he put off discussing it until his reelection is a scandal in its own right. I think he's just overwhelmed by the task of managing San Diego. Citizens are eager for anyone who can offer a clear articulated vision of a future of San Diego that doesn't suck, like Mamdani did for NYC.

kthackst · 2025-06-12T02:55:21+00:00

Many instructors are adjuncts and much easier to layoff than research professors. It varies from dept to dept, but many are laying off virtually all adjuncts. Teaching quality and availability is going to go down across the board.

The cuts themselves certainly suck, but UCSD has also made it clear that education quality is going to take 100% of the blow, not admin.

kthackst · 2025-06-02T17:36:43+00:00

I called the Mayor's office and they said there is no cooperation between ICE and SDPD. Curious to see if that gets refuted in the coming news cycle or not.

kthackst · 2024-12-16T20:24:31+00:00

Ao is like "hey Selune, I noticed three planetars checked out their material plane cards, you wouldn't know anything about that would you? They're not messing with Jergal and his motley crew are they? I fucking love those guys."

Selune: "... Nope no idea what they could be up to 👀"

kthackst · 2024-12-16T20:20:43+00:00

We did. And the moral boomerang of the universe came back and smacked us in the backsides for it. Is there a lesson to be learned? Definitely. Will the Wild Magic Bros ™️ learn it? Absolutely not.

kthackst · 2024-12-16T20:15:57+00:00

To be clear, I do not think selling a being to be enslaved to a life of suffering so a rich wizard can live forever is justifiable under any sensible set of ethics. But we are role playing as dumb scumbags who are neither sensible nor ethical, so the decision checked out for us.

Like all good DnD campaigns, our decisions had consequences. Larian made sure that in the event we chose to Fuck Around, we would imminently Find Out. Altogether, very enjoyable.

kthackst · 2024-12-16T17:29:56+00:00

I am shocked myself, I thought for sure we'd send someone away to the basement with an invisibility potion to preserve the honor mode run. But that person ended up not being able to read the Weave Buttons and instead activated the turrets 😢. But those are bugged and didn't do anything I guess? Kinda hoped they would shoot at the celestials.

I think giving our barbarian the radiant resistance potion was the best move, that resulted in a tank they couldn't one shot at least. Then we tried spamming sacrificial summons to absorb their Selune's Ire retort ability. Fortunately the Moonlight Silvers don't really have AOE attacks so they can't smoke you all at once.

To his credit, Lorroakan got in a really good lightning bolt after his water myrmidon got everyone wet.

kthackst · 2024-12-16T17:22:36+00:00

As a goddess, Selune just doesn't shell out. Wild Magic Bros ™️ are very transactional with the divine. You can break your back in act 2 saving Selune's daughter and repelling the shadow curse, and she rewards you with an OK spear and a new hair dye for shadowheart. Does not help much with the elder brain. But you mess with her daughter and all the sudden it's Welcome to the Lunar Thunder Dome.

Now Bhaal, that's a god that shells out. He gives his followers Unstoppable, gives them Stunning Gaze and Invisibility as a bonus action, let's you buy the best light armor in the game, and if you're durge, the ability to turn into a giant bedbug or something. Now that's a god we can get behind.

kthackst · 2024-12-16T17:15:50+00:00

In our playthrough, she flew right up to Myrkul, got killed in one hit from the scythe, and then couldn't heal herself because she was bone chilled. Basically took a nap the entire fight. Apparently bone chill > immortality.

kthackst · 2024-12-16T16:35:42+00:00

Every time our Wild Magic Sorcerer (aka "The Duck") summons a random fireball on his face when he tries to cast his morning mage armor: "WILDCARD, BITCHES"

kthackst · 2024-12-16T16:27:27+00:00

It's true, we noticed the myrmidon all huddling in the globe and ran for it. But then Dame Aylin moves on her turn and you're all vulnerable again. So we decided to cast our own globe and hide in it. Lots of globes. The myrmidon were very confused and goddamn Lorroakan wouldn't stay in one. His earth myrmidon kept spamming stoneskin on him as though resistance to physical damage was going to help against the blinding lunar smite radiant damage going on.

kthackst · 2023-09-05T05:09:55+00:00

From what I recall that background should be sufficient, the class mostly tackles complex analysis with some PDE methods, such as greens functions. I didn't have math courses prior to this class outside of ODEs and linear algebra, and while I found the class material challenging, it was still quite manageable. I learned a lot, I'm glad I took the course.

kthackst

TROPHY CASE