Varun Bhandari

watched a girl do this in a bar after he said he was married and didn't want her number. for some reason she laughed hysterically afterwards with her girl. he waited until she was done laughing and then pulled out his badge. off duty. whole bar went ooOooooOooOOOOoOoooo

The State of California makes more money off a gallon of gas than the oil company that refined it and got it to market. Almost $2 of every gallon there goes to Sacramento’s coffers. And these people are *still* mumbling about “corporate greed” and more taxes.

What the Artemis II astronauts did over the last 10 days was a testament to their bravery. And the fact that they traveled farther from Earth than anyone ever has, re-entered our atmosphere at more than 24,000 mph, and splashed down safely was a testament to human ingenuity. Thanks to everyone at @NASA for making this mission possible, and for taking us along for the ride.

After 2021, Portland raised the IZ requirement from 10% to 25%, requires developers to set aside 25% of new residential units for affordable housing As a result, affordable housing fell almost 99%

A @StubHub @coachella story to get your morning started… 3 months ago I purchased 2 Coachella passes on Stubhub for $812 each.The in hand shipping date was yesterday via FedEx. For a week I have called and been told wait until Tuesday the week of. I called yesterday afternoon and was told my original seller didn’t come through but don’t worry a replacement link would be sent. My hotel is booked, my flight is booked but I have no ticket. There are passes available on their site currently but for double the price I paid. I waited all night for the replacement link. Nothing. I just received an email this morning that my order is cancelled and a refund will be coming. Awful experience! Now because of a trash seller and a trash site I have to buy a new passes today from another site for 2k each. I wasted weeks and now am paying an extra $2600 for 2 tickets Stubhub didn’t deliver. Look at the current market…⬇️⬇️

Robbing 3 HRs in a game when you win 1-0 has got to be one of the most wild performances in MLB history

A sobering moment for me was realizing the tenant bar opposed eviction diversion proposals because it would end 95% of housing court cases for nonpayment and get people aid faster rather than funnel taxpayer money into right to counsel so they can hire more attorneys. We aren’t doing this anymore. Everyone needs a home. There is no right to live wherever you want for free. Get aid quicker to those who prove need and build more housing. There are people who work very hard to pay their rent who deserve quality housing, which their rent should help pay for. Collecting student loans is not violence. Collecting car payments and mortgages is not violence. Collecting rent isn’t violence.

A decade ago, there was no building boom in Everett, but in Chelsea next door. Chelsea is closer to Boston and has better transit connections. Then Chelsea imposed 20% IZ. There's been essentially no market rate development since, depriving them of tax revenue and homes.

This is genuinely one of the most insane things I’ve ever seen in baseball. Robbing a homerun is hard and rare enough. Robbing two in a game is the record. But three?? One in a million chance. Take a bow, Jo Addell. #RepTheHalo

Red Lobster did go bankrupt after a PE firm bought them. But it was also after that PE firm sold them to a non-PE company. There’s an elitist strain to economic populism where they have utter contempt for the people they’re trying to persuade.

This is largely nonsense, and Warren, who is supposed to be an expert on economics, should be embarrassed to make such a claim. Red Lobster is a giant chain that has always been owned by corporate conglomerates, and has been struggling for decades. Red Lobster was owned by General Mills through the 80s and became part of the Darden Restaurant group when Darden, which also owns Olive Garden, was spun off of General Mills in 1995. After Darden acquired Longhorn Steakhouse and Capital Grille in 2007, activist investors pressured the company to get rid of underperforming Red Lobster in order to focus on successful brands. Darden sold Red Lobster to the private equity fund Golden Gate Capital in 2014 for $2.1 billion and used the proceeds to pay down debt and do share repurchases. Darden saw significantly improved margins after the sale. Golden Gate partially financed the acquisition of Red Lobster with leverage adding debt to the company, and liquidated the company's real-estate holdings in sale-leaseback deals, turning the restaurants into tenants in locations the chain had previously owned. Golden Gate sold the chain to Asian seafood conglomerate Thai Union in 2020, and while the deal terms were not fully public, Golden Gate is believed to have made about $500 million restructuring, turning around and selling Red Lobster. Thai Union, which acquired the chain right as the Covid pandemic began hammering restaurants, tried aggressive cost-cutting, impacting the quality of the food. The restaurant's reputation suffered as a result and it became perceived as downscale. The all-you-can-eat shrimp promotion was a response to declining store traffic, but was a debacle for the chain. The promotion was a huge money-loser and it functioned as anti-marketing, as viral videos of crude and rowdy patrons misbehaving in restaurants they were visiting to exploit the "endless shrimp" became closely associated with the brand's reputation. After Thai Union -- which, again, is a foreign seafood conglomerate, not a private equity firm -- ran it completely into the ground, Red Lobster went bankrupt. It is currently attempting a turnaround under the ownership of an investor group led by the private equity firm Fortress Capital Management. But Red Lobster has been struggling for decades, and it's obtuse and disingenuous to blame the chain's problems on the 2014-2020 period when it was owned by Golden Gate -- the only owner who managed to make money on Red Lobster in 30 years.

Perhaps the nation's most baffling degrowth regime is New England's ban on itself Hundreds of historic town centers*ban their own buildings*, mandating Sunbelt cinderblock strip mall replacements if anything burns down It is so bizarre that the legislature must intervene

After Richmond disabled its Flock cameras to "protect immigrants," car thefts jumped 33%. Immigrant shopkeepers begged to bring them back. Last week their city council finally listened. Opposing safety cameras is a luxury belief. gli.st/nfolm33i

This is why we must hold the line against slopulism in housing policy. At first Warren's position was "investors can build as many apartment buildings as they want, they just can't build single-family homes to rent" Now she is sending menacing letters to institutional investors who build multi-family apartments and manufactured housing.

One more time for the people (and mayorial candidates) in the cheap seats: The cities with the MOST amount of renter protections are the LEAST affordable. The cities with the LEAST amount of renter protections are the MOST affordable. By allowing a subset of renters to stay in their apartment for months on end without paying rent, you create a scarcity of vacant apartments. Or to put it more succintly... we should do what these cities are doing 👇

What's really concerning about Senator Warren's push to restrict build-to-rent single-family: this underlying assumption that apartments aren't for families and that families who can't afford to buy, or just don't want to, shouldn't have access to single-family homes at all.

APARTMENTS 👏 ARE 👏 HOMES

6:49am: sudden spike in oil futures trading. no news. no announcement. nothing public. 7:05am: trump announces a pause on iran strikes. markets move. someone knew. 16 minutes early. $580 million in contracts. the corruption is staggering.

The city announced yesterday that they’re going to start trying to pay people’s parking tickets for parking justice or something. So, the people who get squeezed here are people who don’t own cars, while people do negligently own cars get city subsidized illegal parking. Cool.

He and two friends lured a father working as a pizza delivery driver into a trap and butchered him for just over $100. Now the parole board says he’s ready to walk free. This is beyond wrong, It’s shameful. We need to fire the entire parole board, every single one of them. Massachusetts cannot keep rewarding brutality and calling it justice. Read more here: zurl.co/3CAV7 #mapoli #magov