hud lockett

@kennewickmike @abathrowbacks @spurs i went to the very last chaps game in 1973 with a handful of my closest personal friends. then went to several spurs games in the 73-74 season where the biggest group of fans were the basic training cadets from Lackland AFB.

@abathrowbacks @spurs Bob and me agree that they will always be the Chaparrals to us😁

The Spurs joined the NBA almost 50 years ago to the day…

@GigaBeers If this is exterior the pipe needs to be buried below the "frost line" if there is one.

Fired my plumber—he buried bare copper pipe straight in the dirt, no sleeve/wrap. Claimed it’s “standard practice.” I asked for protection from acidic soil. He called me a Karen, demanded $4k anyway, now threatens to sue. Who’s wrong? Plumbers, is bare copper OK underground? AITA?

⚡️What is emerging is the collapse of the old urban elite bargain. For decades, New York ran on an unspoken pact: capital accepted punishment because the city conferred power. High taxes, brutal costs, political hostility, congestion, disorder, regulatory pain. The exchange still worked because New York gave access to the center of gravity. Deals, law firms, media, finance, culture, status, elite labor, philanthropic prestige, institutional validation. That pact is breaking. The new political class still wants the fruits of capital, but no longer wants to honor the status of the people who create it. It wants the tower, the jobs, the taxes, the donations, the office demand, the civic subsidy, the global prestige, then wants the builder to stand there and be morally indicted after delivering it. That is the deep contradiction. A city can extract from capital when capital believes the city is indispensable. A city can insult capital when alternatives are weak. A city can tolerate dysfunction when proximity remains mandatory. New York’s danger is that all three conditions are weakening at once. Capital is more mobile. Work is more distributed. Financial elites have alternatives. Florida is no longer a retirement punchline. Texas is no longer a provincial sideshow. Miami, Palm Beach, Dallas, Austin, Nashville, and global private networks now offer enough infrastructure for wealth to keep compounding without begging New York for permission. That changes the psychology. The old New York premium was: suffer here because the center is here. The emerging question is: why suffer here if the center can move? That is the part the political class does not understand. Prestige used to be New York’s moat. Now prestige is becoming portable. Capital can build its own rooms, its own conferences, its own private networks, its own schools, its own philanthropic channels, its own media, its own political machines. Once capital no longer needs the city to certify its status, the city loses its deepest leverage. The Griffin fight is a symbol of that transition. He represents a type of actor who should be treated as strategic infrastructure by any city that wants to remain dominant. A builder of institutions. A buyer of land. A creator of high-value jobs. A source of tax flow. A donor. A signal to other capital that the city still matters. If the city’s response is contempt, the message to other capital is clean: come build here and become prey. Deep deep down, this is the emergence of jurisdictional sovereignty inside America. The wealthy and productive are no longer merely choosing neighborhoods. They are choosing regimes. One regime offers prestige plus extraction plus moral hostility. Another offers lower taxes, friendlier politics, more space, and fewer rituals of humiliation. The old coastal model assumed talent and capital were captive. The new map proves they are not. That is why this matters beyond New York. This is the same pattern showing up everywhere: high-status legacy institutions still believe they own the future because they owned the past. Universities, media, cities, agencies, credential systems, old financial centers. They keep charging the old premium after the monopoly has weakened. That is how incumbents decay. They mistake inherited gravity for permanent gravity. The emerging structure is harsher: capital will increasingly route around contempt. Talent will increasingly route around decay. Builders will increasingly choose places that treat them as assets rather than tribute animals. Legacy cities will still matter, but their monopoly on ambition is cracking. The real truth is that New York is not fighting one billionaire. New York is testing whether a city can despise its own engine and still remain the center of the world.

@Austen Hyatt

I travel a ton but is there a loyalty program that is worth it enough to actually optimize for? I just book whatever is cheap and easy whenever I see it.

I love love love when reporters walk up to the chalkboard, draw a circle around the big thing nobody's pointed out yet, and everyone gasps. This is exactly that. Classic of the genre: reuters.com/business/autos…

@FastbreakHoops5 Donnie Freeman. Pioneer of drawing contact on a jump shot.

Name a guy whose midrange jumper was automatic.

You may be pleased to learn that kids playing in street beneath the spray of a busted water main--their peals of joyous laughter ringing out like springtime birdsong--is just as wonderful and life-affirming in Hong Kong as it is everywhere else

Warren Buffett, in his first sit-down since stepping down as Berkshire CEO, gave the cleanest indictment of legalized gambling in a decade. He called it a tax cut for the wealthy. The math proves him exactly right. Americans wagered $165 billion at legal sportsbooks in 2025. They lost $16 billion of that. FanDuel pulled $6 billion of the losses. DraftKings pulled $5.3 billion. Every state with legal mobile sports betting collected a tax on the bettor side. New York alone took in over $1.2 billion in 2025 sports betting tax revenue. Layer the lottery on top. State lotteries generate over $90 billion a year. The bottom half of income earners account for roughly 70% of total spend. The average lottery player makes $38,000. A household earning $20,000 spends three times more on tickets than one earning $30,000. The implicit tax rate, meaning whatever the state keeps after prizes, runs 30 to 50% depending on the game. No other revenue source in America has that base and that rate. The structural design is the engine. A single straight sports bet carries a hold of 4 to 5%. A four-leg parlay carries a hold above 30%. FanDuel and DraftKings spent five years rebuilding their apps to make parlays the default product. FanDuel's blended hold rate hit 11.4% in 2025, up from roughly 7% in 2022. The product got worse for the customer and the customer wagered more anyway. Now look at the substitution. Nine US states have no state income tax. Seven of those nine run state lotteries. Seven of those nine have legalized sports betting. The states most committed to never taxing wealth are the same states running the largest extraction machines on people who cannot afford to lose. Read it as policy. Here is what Buffett is actually pointing at. The state needs revenue. It can raise income tax on the top decile, or it can run a lottery plus a sports betting tax. The second option raises the money from the people who can least afford it. The first option becomes politically optional. New York's $1.2 billion in 2025 sports betting tax is $1.2 billion the state did not have to ask of someone earning $5 million. DraftKings and FanDuel sell a privatized collection mechanism for a regressive tax that the state never has to defend at the ballot box again. Voters approve legalization once. Collection runs forever. The state takes a cut. The wealthy get a quieter top bracket. The bettor's cut shrinks every quarter as the parlay menu gets pushed harder. The function of a government, Buffett said, is not to play its people for suckers. Thirty-nine state governments now do.

Ian Fleming creó a James Bond. Tambien era un vividor profesional. Su rutina diaria es algo de lo que todos podemos aprender🧵:

@aakashgupta In Dallas, the DART light rail trains are on the honor system. No gates, no turnstiles, no conductors, very few transit police.

BART spent $90 million on new fare gates. They're recovering about $10 million a year in fares. That's a 9-year payback on paper. The actual return hit in six months. Embarcadero station went from 112 hours of corrective maintenance in the six months before installation to 2 hours after. Daly City saved 109. Balboa Park saved 75. Across the system, 961 hours of cleanup work disappeared. Corrective maintenance is the term BART uses for graffiti, heavy soiling, vandalism, the damage that needs a crew not a janitor. At several stations it dropped to zero. Crime fell 41% year over year. Riders who reported seeing fare evasion on their trip dropped from 22% to 10%. Citations issued by BART police went from 2,200 in January to under 1,000 in July, because there was nothing to cite. The gates were a filtering project disguised as a revenue project. Old BART gates were waist-high orange fins designed in the 1970s. You could hop them in under a second. That made the station effectively a public space, and the rider mix reflected that. The new gates are 72 inches of polycarbonate with 3D sensors that detect tailgating. You either pay or you don't enter. Once you don't enter, you also don't smoke on the platform, sleep in the elevator, or harass other riders. BART tried hiring more police for years. Blitz operations at high-traffic stations. Increased patrols. Dedicated transit cops. None of it moved the numbers the way six feet of polycarbonate did. The $10 million in recovered fares is the smallest line in the return. Fare revenue used to cover 70% of BART operations. After the pandemic it collapsed to 22%. The gates won't fix that gap directly. They fix the precondition for fixing it: a system that office workers, families, and tourists are willing to use again. Ridership growth at stations with new gates outpaced ungated ones before the rollout finished. A $400 million annual deficit is heading to voters in November as a sales tax measure. Voters don't approve sales taxes for transit agencies they don't feel safe in. The $90 million on gates is buying BART the right to ask the public for more money. That's the real return on six feet of polycarbonate.

@ArtButSports @adampantozzi @KDTrey5 @KingJames Apologies, Hubertus Fuscus

@ArtButSports @adampantozzi @KDTrey5 @KingJames Guy on the left is Hubie Brown

Study of the Heads of Two Old Men, by Philippe de Champaigne, 17th c, 📸 by @adampantozzi

Happy San Jacinto day to those who celebrate!

A federal judge has dismissed President Donald Trump's lawsuit against @WSJ, ruling that the president had failed to prove the paper's reporting on his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein was defamatory. Here's what the judge said and what happens next.

@vvestiges End of the 9th bases loaded 2 outs. The Mets call in pitcher Mel Famey Sadly Mel has been drinking beer He stumbles to the mound & throws 8 straight balls walking in the winning run. The opposing manager sees the empty cans & says "There's the beer that made Mel Famey walk us"

Schlitz Beer commercial. (‘67)

@AmandaMAtwell Picture someone you know on active duty with our armed forces. Then picture your payment going directly to them. Takes a little of the sting out.

Sometimes I miss my young naive self who looked forward to filing her taxes expecting a refund. These days filing my taxes makes me want to throw up.

@TracesofTexas I saw the Dallas Tornado lose the NASL championship 1-0. On an own goal. Game was played on AstroTurf.

The Arcane Texas Fact of the Day: Texas Stadium, the home of the Dallas Cowboys since October 24, 1971, was imploded 16 years ago today, on April 10, 2010. What's your best Texas Stadium story?

Japan is enjoying a $400bln private equity boom—not an experience popularly associated with PE, but business efficiency is a boon for its rapidly shrinking population. Now wary officials risk stymying a nascent economic revival. My deep dive @breakingviews reuters.com/commentary/bre…