Last Call For Sim City 2023

For years now, a mysterious investment group called Flannery Associates has been buying up tens of thousands of acres of farmland in Solano County, California, northeast of San Francisco. Speculation has been rampant as to who the buyers really were, and the situation had not just state but federal officials pursuing the truth as the land bought was increasingly near Travis AFB.

Yesterday, with increasing pressure from Washington DC, Sacramento, and county officials, Flannery Associates took off the mask to reveal some of the wealthiest tech players in America, and their intent to build a major new US city from scratch.

 

Flannery is the brainchild of Jan Sramek, 36, a former Goldman Sachs trader who has quietly courted some of the tech industry’s biggest names as investors, according to the pitch and people familiar with the matter. The company’s ambitions expand on the 2017 pitch: Take an arid patch of brown hills cut by a two-lane highway between suburbs and rural land, and convert into it into a community with tens of thousands of residents, clean energy, public transportation and dense urban life.

The company’s investors, whose identities have not been previously reported, are a who’s who of Silicon Valley, according to three people who were not authorized to speak publicly about the plans.

They include Mr. Moritz; Reid Hoffman, the LinkedIn co-founder, venture capitalist and Democratic donor; Marc Andreessen and Chris Dixon, investors at the Andreessen Horowitz venture capital firm; Patrick and John Collison, the sibling co-founders of the payments company Stripe; Laurene Powell Jobs, founder of the Emerson Collective; and Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross, entrepreneurs turned investors. Andreessen Horowitz is also a backer. It was unclear how much each had invested.

Brian Brokaw, a representative for the investor group, said in a statement that the group was made up of “Californians who believe that Solano County’s and California’s best days are ahead.” He said the group planned to start working with Solano County residents and elected officials, as well as with Travis Air Force Base, next week.

In California, housing has long been an intractable problem, and Silicon Valley’s moguls have long been frustrated with the Bay Area’s real estate shortage, and the difficulty of building in California generally, as their work forces have exploded. Companies like Google have clashed with cities like Palo Alto and Mountain View over expanding their headquarters, while their executives have funded pro-development politicians and the “Yes in my backyard” activists who have pushed for looser development and zoning laws in hopes of making it easier to build faster and taller.

The practical need for more space has at times morphed into lofty visions of building entire cities from scratch. Several years ago, Y Combinator, the start-up incubator, announced an initiative with dreams of turning empty land into a new economy and society. Years before that, Peter Thiel, the PayPal co-founder and billionaire Facebook investor, invested in the Seasteading Institute, an attempt to build a new society on lily pad-like structures in the law-and-tax-free open ocean.

But while these ideas have garnered lots of attention and curiosity — lauded in some corners for vision and derided in others for hubris — they have been little more than talk.

As Flannery began seeking property, it bought so much land, so fast, that it spooked locals who had no idea who the buyer was or the plans it had in mind. Catherine Moy, the mayor of Fairfield, Calif., started posting about the project on Facebook several years ago after she got a call from a farmer about some mystery buyer making offers throughout the county. In an interview, Ms. Moy said she had gone to the county assessor’s office and found that Flannery had purchased tens of thousands of acres.

John Garamendi, a Democrat who along with Mike Thompson, another Democrat, represents the surrounding region in Congress, said he had been trying to figure out the company’s identity for four years.

“I couldn’t find out anything,” he said.

On Friday, he said that had suddenly changed. This week representatives for Flannery reached out to him and other elected officials requesting meetings about their plans. That meeting is now being scheduled, he said.

“This is their first effort, ever, to talk to any of the local representatives, myself included,” he said.

The land that Flannery has been purchasing is not zoned for residential use, and even in his 2017 pitch, Mr. Moritz acknowledged that rezoning could “clearly be challenging” — a nod to California’s notoriously difficult and litigious development process.

To pull off the project, the company will almost certainly have to use the state’s initiative system to get Solano County residents to vote on it. The hope is that voters will be enticed by promises of thousands of local jobs, increased tax revenue and investments in infrastructure like parks, a performing arts center, shopping, dining and a trade school.

The financial gains could be huge, Mr. Moritz said in the 2017 pitch. He estimated the return could be many times the initial investment just from the rezoning, and far more if and when they started building.

“If the plans materialize anywhere close to what is being contemplated, this should be a spectacular investment,” Mr. Moritz wrote.

 

I figure by 2077, this place will be Night City. And I don't mean that in a good way.

Like Elongated Muskrat and Mars, the obvious solution of investing in housing in San Francisco and Oakland for people with $800 million sitting around just hasn't occurred to these titans of industry, but then again they wouldn't get to make all the rules in their tech dystopia hellscape, now would they?

A Price-Less World

Legendary game show host Bob Barker, of The Price is Right fame, has passed at the age of 99.

 

Bob Barker, who hosted "The Price Is Right" for 35 years, has died, his representative, Roger Neal, told CBS News on Saturday. He was 99.

Barker died at home, Neal said, adding that, "he had a beautiful life."

Barker appeared on national television for over 50 years. Before his time at the country's longest-running game show on CBS, he hosted one of the nation's first televised game shows, "Truth or Consequences," for nearly 20 years, earning him recognition in the Guinness World Records book as television's "most durable performer."

On "Truth or Consequences," Barker charmed audiences with his quips and plainspoken style. Every December 21, show creator Ralph Edwards and Barker would drink a toast at lunch to celebrate the day in 1956 when Edwards notified Barker – who had no previous television experience – that he was going to become the host. He stayed with the program for 18 years, calling it a "fun show," during a chat at the Google headquarters.

In 1972, Barker began hosting a revival of "The Price Is Right," which originally aired in the '50s and '60s, and he stayed in that position for 35 years. Audience members were enthusiastic about their affable host; some participants asked for kisses, which Barker once obliged by smooching a fan square on the lips while dipping her backward. Another fan told Barker she dreamed he was chasing her in a hayloft.

During his career, Barker was honored with 19 Emmy Awards, 14 as host of "The Price Is Right," four as the show's executive producer and a lifetime achievement award. In 2004, Barker was inducted into the Television Academy Hall of Fame.

Robert Barker was born in Darrington, Washington, on Dec. 12, 1923, to Matilda, a schoolteacher, and Byron, an electrical power foreman. He spent most of his childhood on the Rosebud Sioux Reservation in South Dakota and was a citizen of the tribe.

His mother was a schoolteacher and then a county superintendent of schools. Barker's father died after falling from a utility pole in 1929, and eight years later, his mother remarried and the family moved to Springfield, Missouri.

In high school, at the age of 15, Barker met and fell in love with his future wife, Dorothy Jo Gideon. Their first date was on Nov. 17, 1939, when he took her to see an Ella Fitzgerald concert. Barker said they "were never separated from then on" – until her death in 1981 from lung cancer.

Barker attended Drury College in Springfield, and when World War II started, he joined the Navy as a fighter pilot. After the war ended, he graduated summa cum laude with a degree in economics. The couple tried living in Florida before moving to Los Angeles, where he became the host of his own radio program, "The Bob Barker Show," before moving to television.

His first – and only – feature film role was for the 1996 Adam Sandler movie "Happy Gilmore," in which he throws punches at the star. Barker said during an interview that audience members for "The Price Is Right" would ask him about that scene and say, "Can you really beat up Adam Sandler?"

Outside of his storied television career, Barker was a renowned animal activist who once testified before Congress in support of a federal ban against using elephants in traveling shows and for rides.

Barker made headlines for his passionate support of animals during the 1987 Miss USA pageant when he refused to host if contestants wore real furs during the televised event. Producers acquiesced and contestants wore synthetic furs that year, but the following year – after 21 years of hosting - Barker resigned when producers refused to stop giving fur coats as prizes.

Barker gave large endowments ranging from $500,000 to $1 million to the law schools of numerous universities, including Harvard, Duke, Columbia, University of Virginia, Northwestern and UCLA, for the study and support of animal rights law.

In 1995, he started the DJ&T Foundation in honor of his late wife and mother to give to free or low-cost clinics or voucher programs to spay or neuter pets in an effort to control animal overpopulation. After nearly 30 years of donating to clinics and supporting animals, the foundation stopped activity in 2022.

For his final "Price Is Right" show that aired on June 15, 2007, Barker ended his run with his familiar plea: "Help control the pet population. Have your pet spayed or neutered!"

 

To this day, the Zandarparents will tell you that I grew up watching Bob Barker as a baby and never really stopped as a kid through college. I think my entire younger Gen X/elder Millennial cohort tuned in whenever we were home sick from school. Drew Carey has made the show his own now after more than 15 years, but the OGs remember Bob, announcer Johnny Olson, and Barker's Beauties teaching us about California's retail economics.

Bob's right up there with Fred Rogers and Levar Burton for me.

Thanks for all the memories, Bob.

A Rudy Awakening, Con't

Remember that both Arizona and Michigan, with Democrats as each state's AG and Governor, are investigating their own slates of fraudulent 2020 electors in addition to Georgia, and many of the players at the national level, Trump's inner circle f criminals, are mostly the same. Arizona's AG Kris Mayes in particular would like to have a few words with one Rudolph Giuliani.

 

PROSECUTORS IN ARIZONA are “aggressively” ramping up their criminal probe into the 2020 fake electors plot aimed at keeping then-President Donald Trump in power. They’re not just looking at the fake electors, though. Rudy Giuliani is also now high on their list.

Two sources with knowledge of the matter tell Rolling Stone that in the past several weeks, state prosecutors have been asking questions about the former New York mayor who became a ringleader in Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election. Investigators assigned to the case by Arizona’s Democratic attorney general Kris Mayes have recently asked potential witnesses and other individuals specific questions not only about Giuliani’s behind-the-scenes conduct, but that of other key Trump lieutenants at the time, as well.

Prosecutors appear particularly interested in a number of notable meetings and phone calls, including a late November 2020 meeting with members of Arizona’s state legislature convened by the Trump legal team, which aired bogus claims of voter fraud and lobbied lawmakers to “take over” the state’s selection of electors, the sources say.

Arizona’s attorney general has publicly referred to the case as an investigation into “fake electors,” but the questions about Giuliani suggest that investigators may be interested in probing pro-Trump figures who were higher up on the food chain in addition to the 11 Republicans who falsely claimed to be the state’s legitimate electors.

In public comments following the Fulton County, Georgia, indictment of Trump and his associates earlier this month, Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes called for patience, saying “we are doing a thorough and professional investigation and we’re going to do it on our timetable as justice demands.”

State investigators have also at times inquired about Trump’s level of personal involvement in the Arizona-focused pressure campaign, one of the people with knowledge of the situation says. The campaign was part of a multi-state fake elector scheme, which along with other aspects of Trump’s crusade to overturn Joe Biden’s legitimate 2020 victory has figured prominently into multiple federal and state-level criminal probes.

Giuliani’s attorney and a Trump spokesperson did not immediately respond to emails seeking comment on this story. The Arizona attorney general’s office declined to comment.

Arizona law enforcement officials have also been looking into the activities of former Arizona GOP chair Kelli Ward and her role as a fake elector. As Rolling Stone reported last week, prosecutors have asked possible witnesses about a December 2020 signing ceremony where Ward and 10 other Republicans signed documents falsely attesting to be Arizona’s legitimate electors.

 

Going after ward, and God willing, Kari Lake as well, would go a long way towards people in the Grand Canyon State getting a big dose of The Find Out Phase. 

We'll see if Arizona is as gung-ho as Fani Willis is.