PleaseBlitz

I can't wait to hate Zach Leonsis for the final 30 years of my life. Even Jose Andres, who voluntarily flies into war zones to cook, looks like he can't stand being next to him.

JDub has been Mayor for like 6 years, all of which I've lived in ALX. He replaced a truly crazy lady and, except for this specific issue, I've pretty much agreed with everything he's done, and I just like the guy. He's not a politician glad handing people, he's an administrator trying to run the city as well as possible, and that speaks to my inner nerd (which is the majority of my innards). But that also makes him bad at this kind of thing. Frankly, my biggest issue is he needs to pick his thumbnails much more carefully because this one is brutal. Anyways, fun fact: I did get into it with him on Facebook and I got him pretty flustered, which was fun. If I recall, he was not a fan of my characterization of the financing as "magical fairy bonds."

Those people don't come to ALX either. They understand the plethora of these bumper stickers really mean YOU ARE NOT WELCOME HERE to those types.

A cyberattack? A boat crashing into a bridge is a cyber attack? LOL Also at :30: "The I-94 Corridor" This lady definitely knows what she's talking about.

I can't speak to all of Virginia. I know that basically nobody in Alexandria besides the Mayor wanted it. Personally, I could have lived with it going in, but did not buy for one second that I wouldn't be on the hook for paying for it (and it was going to be the largest public subsidy for an arena ever in the US), so **** that. And I'm a huge Caps fan. Everyone here that isn't a Caps or Wiz fan uniformly wanted nothing to do with it. The process by which they tried to get it done was also, well, terrible. They tried to pull all of the political tricks to keep the bad parts in the dark and they were clearly overselling the good parts, but this is ****ing Alexandria, people here can identify all of that bull****.

Agree that Chinatown is a good locale. Did not see that they've reached an agreement with DC. Got a link? Edit: I found it. WaPo: https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2024/03/27/dc-capitals-wizards-capital-one-arena-alexandria-bowser-leonsis/ That all seems reasonable and should have happened before the whole ALX mess.

I usually go with an increasingly escalating series of life-endangering mishaps on my way to the 7-11 to get the cards.

Ted is talking with Maryland now. https://www.sportsbusinessjournal.com/Articles/2024/03/20/ted-leonsis-arena-maryland-wes-moore You almost have to admire Ted's shamelessness. He has absolutely crushed his standing in the area.

I'm Steven Crowder curious, but don't want to google him on my work computer. LOL.

"Siri, where is the closest bar."

How much power do you think the board has, after it agreed to go back to the old deal rather than start from scratch and renegotiate a brand new deal? Disney got what it wanted, the old deal reinstated. Is there now maybe some oversight that was completely lacking before? Maybe. The whole reason the Reedy Creek deal was controversial before 2022 was it pretty much made Disney sovereign over a big chunk of Florida land, which is pretty bizarre. But Florida was getting (and will now continue to get) billions of dollars a year in economic activity, so it agreed to it before and has now agreed to it again. But before this was a political fight to make DeSantis look big and tough, Florida wanted to let Disney do whatever it wanted. The only thing that changed was DeSantis needed a big target to bully for WOKEWOKEWOKE, and he did, and now his reason for doing it (the GOP primary) is over. So Disney got the old deal back and it's in Florida's interest to let Disney do whatever it wants, just as it has been for decades.

Yea, sucks how he's getting $245 million to sit at home. Unconscionable. GOAT Nat is easily Scherzer.

Disney didn't want to do all that stuff, it was forced to to protect its interests. Disney wanted the old deal but DeSantis tried to blow it up. That's why they negotiated the old deal. Now they get the old deal.

Oh come on! The POINT, sir, was to allow Ron DeSantis to show how incredibly tough he is when standing up to wokey wokeism like The Walt Disney Company and its shareholders in order to launch him into the political stratosphere just ahead of a Presidential election that he was sure to dominate.

My read is that this puts the relationship back to where it was under the "2020 Comprehensive Plan" and before any of the battle about the Don't Say Gay law started in 2022. It's not entirely clear because the AP report refers to "a comprehensive plan from 2020", but I think they really mean the "Comprehensive Plan 2020" which was actually agreed to in 2010. In either event, Disney was perfectly happy with its arrangement with the State of Florida prior to 2022, so reverting back to a 2020 or 2010 agreement seems like a pretty complete victory for Mickey. This deal just voids all of the legal maneuverings Disney did in reaction to DeSantis' shenanigans which, although hilarious in exposing Florida's lawyers as completely inept, wasn't the deal Disney wanted. They wanted the deal they struck prior to 2022. If anyone recalls, Disney cancelled several billion dollars in planned investments in FLA, so will be interesting to see if those are back on the table (which would be a victory for Florida, in the sense that it'll get something back that it already had before it tried to flex on Disney.

This is generally correct, but leaves out the part about there being lots of different interest rates. Below is a graph of the Federal Funds Rate, the key rate the Federal Reserve controls, for the last 20 years. It is the interest rate at which banks lend excess reserves to other depository institutions overnight. You will note that rates crashed in 2000 coinciding with the Early 2000's Recession, then crept back up until they crashed again with the housing bubble leading to the Great Recession in late 2007, stayed at rock bottom during that recession, then started creeping back up as we got out of that, then crashed as hard as possible during Covid when the economy largely shut down for a few months. Now that the economy is running hot, leading to inflation, the Fed raised rates in order to essentially pump the brakes to avoid another recession (which seems to have been successful). The Fed recently announced it expects to lower the Fed Funds rate 3 times this year. #ElitistData.

WHICH MOUNTAIN!?!??!?!

I feel like the Trump Bible is gonna have to be pretty different from the New Testament. For starters, Jesus is white and from Nazareth, Kentucky, and drives a pickup and listens to Jasen Aldeen. And wears American Flag clothing 100% of the time. All of the passages about strangers/refugees/immigrants have to be totally rewritten. Probably feeds the multitudes with McDonalds.

Before my oldest started public school last year, the cost of daycare for my 2 kids was significantly more than my mortgage. And I would consider it a "slightly-above-average" daycare that was 20% less than the daycare located in my neighborhood. Here is a real day care tuition schedule for a real day care in Alexandria that I would consider nothing special.

I am also fatalistic about this election, but the thing that gets me isn't the basic misunderstanding of economics, it's that people thing Trump can fix things. That Trump can fix anything. And that people that are upset that Biden and Biden supporters point to actual objective metrics about the economy doing well, when Trump, before he was elected the economy was a "disaster", 2 months after taking office it was "the best economy in history" and then immediately after leaving office it was back to being a "disaster" and too may people seem to believe that nonsense.

Exactly. The article aligns with a lot of what you all are saying. So complaining that you are being told you are "wrong" (you) or that "this was about the disconnect in how well the economy is doing and that folks are still kinda bummed out about cost of living going up" (Renegade) is sort of silly when the whole point of the article is explaining why the disconnect exists, not that the disconnect is wrong or stupid (if you read the whole article).

Maybe ya'll should have read the whole article.

Yea, I lived in Arlington VA for several years. The list has 2 neighborhoods in Arlington, including their #1. I would rank them both in the bottom half of all Arlington neighborhoods, and maybe in the bottom half of all VA neighborhoods inside the beltway. I've also unfortunately had to spend some time in Coppell TX, and let's just say it was very surprising to see it on this list. It's basically a very spread out distribution hub for DFW airport with some commercial buildings and strip malls mixed in.

Yea, this is not a new thing that has developed since Biden became POTUS. Edit. This doesn’t even get into Biden greatly increasing the child tax credit in 2021 (effectively giving parents $3600/yr for each child under 6 and $3k for kids 6 and up) until Trump’s GOP took it away in 2022 because tax credits should be reserved for ExxonMobil, not parents.