I'm taking the 7:36 am train from Chatsworth to downtown right now. Two ICE agents and a dog just walked down the aisle.

new northridge location just opened up and I liked the matcha I just had, but hearing now its MAGA run, is that true? I couldn't find much info about it. If its maga owned I will not be going back ✌️

NoHo, here.

Are there any places in the SFV I can go to get deviled eggs? I don't mind making my own eggs (fried, scrambied) but deviled eggs seem outta my league. I Just have a hankering for deviled eggs alla sudden and would like like to know where I can go outside of Thanksgiving to just take home a platter of deviled and house them fuckers.

Thrifted this amazing cashmere sweater but found several small moth type holes (left part of picture). I’ve found several ways to invisibly repair it, but I have no thread/yarn, and because two of the holes are right in front, I’m trying to make the mend invisible. I thought to use thread from a seam, but sweater has none !?! It does have a turtleneck (right side of picture).

So my question is could I unravel a bit of the top of the turtleneck to use as the repair thread/yarn?

But if I unraveled, how would I re-finish the unraveled edge? It’s so soft and beautiful I really want to rescue it. Any help would be appreciated :)

My 10 yr old guy is ready to go. I was hoping I could get him some help so his end isn't painful. Let me know if you have leads on where I can get help.

It’s an honest, silly mistake.

This translates to smth like “accidentally a lawyer”

But I guess it works since here I am, talking about it. But, not today cause I ain’t doing advertisement lmao.

I wanna see a juicy meal up there
Too same lawyers and insurance company advertisements

Are there any Korean beauty stores in the valley? No olive young or korheim as they don't carry actual Korean sunscreen

I’m moving to the valley soon and I recently graduated with my bachelors. I work remotely and know I’ll have to put myself out there to meet and make friends. Interested in meeting people around my age range 20-26.

I don’t love to drink, smoke, or party. I’m open to new adventures and enjoy spending time outdoors, working out, trying new restaurants/coffee shops, self care, makeup, etc.

Any suggestions on where to meet people or any clubs/activities to keep an eye out for? I figured joining a gym and having a consistent coffee shop could help in the meantime. TIA

tl;dr: I lost a congressional primary, landing 4th of 9, with a $39,134 campaign. Maps of the certified precinct-level vote results show that my vote was the photo-negative of turnout (what percentage of registered voters actually vote in an election). I did best exactly where the lowest proportions of registered voters voted: the most-Latino, lowest-income precincts that every funded campaign flies over. And I did it with 35X the dollar per vote efficiency of the 3rd place vote-getter, Jake Levine. Receipts + maps below.

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Hi again! My name is Marena Lin, and I lost the June 2nd primary against Brad Sherman in District CA-32. All the numbers below are reproducible from FEC reports (deadline was last week), publicly available Statement of Vote csv files (or a purchasable LA County voter file), and other voter and election info databases. Methodology is in the appendix.

One of my opponents (Jake Levine) had ~$104 in money behind every vote he got. I had ~$3 behind each vote: $39,134 total, of which $7K paid for skywriting. Jake’s campaign targeted voters that are high-propensity (wealthier, whiter), and I targeted voters who don’t turn out.

The Money

Levine's committee raised $2.74M. Of that, ~$586K net was his own money: $750K in personal loans (the committee repaid him $200K) and ~$36K in contributions. Approximately ~$302K of his committee's money was general-election contributions. Donors can give $3,500 PER election, primary and general. He had to refund the ones designated for the general when he lost the primary. I count the funds intended for the general election OUT of his total below, which is the conservative call.

Jake Levine’s super PAC (New Era Leadership) ended up being principally funded by his parents, Rick Caruso, and Ripple Inc. crypto billionaire Chris Larsen: ~$777K spent half on ads for him and half on ads attacking Sherman.

That "grassroots" super PAC comprised SEVEN checks totaling $800K. Of note, Jake’s family and two billionaires:

1. Family at $550K total:
   • his dad (former Congressman Mel Levine) $250K
   • a family LLC (Levine Consultants) $250K
   • his mom $50K
2. Two billionaires $230K total:
   • Rick Caruso (billionaire developer) $130K
   • Chris Larsen (Ripple / crypto billionaire) $100K
3. Two others: $20K.

Another super PAC chipped in $50K more for him.

So, Levine had a total of $3.3M backing him in the primary election: his committee with ~$2.4M (after the ~$302K general-election refund comes out), plus ~$850K in super PACs. ~$1.1M of that is family money (his own net $586K + his parents' $550K).

I raised AND spent $39,134 and then terminated my committee. I was working with ~1% of the total that Jake was.

I got 13,215 votes, and Jake was ahead of me one place, in third, at 31,688 votes.

Not only did we have vastly different financial backing, the spatial pattern of where we did best could be mistaken for photo negatives.

The Mirror

In the same LA precincts, we did the best at opposite ends of every gradient – % Latino, voter turnout, and income. An honest caveat: our two maps are NOT literal photo-negatives, as head-to-head, our shares barely correlate (r=~0). We're both small-share candidates fishing the same anti-Sherman water. Instead, the mirror is in WHOM each of us pulled. Levine’s ~$3.3M political-consultant-driven machine optimized for people who already vote. I had ~1% of that (the only kind of one-percenter I'll ever be lol), and I did best in the precincts that money forgets. (Note the color scale differences, as the point is the spatial pattern. Levine beat me by a lot of votes.)

Where I did best

Remember the consultant I'd mentioned?

Here, I'm showing the same district across three maps: (1) my 2026 election vote share, (2) this election's turnout, and then (3) % Latino by precinct according to 2023 census data. My map is the photo-negative of turnout, and turnout is the photo-negative of % Latino. (Simi Valley hatched = not in the correlation analysis of this section.)

My vote share was the inverse of turnout. See the correlations below across precincts (only counting precincts with >100 registered voters):

• My vote share vs turnout: r = −0.67 (best where fewest people voted). Levine’s was r=0.47
• My vote share vs % Latino: r = +0.59. Levine’s was r=-0.32
• My vote share vs median income: r = −0.72. Levine’s was r=0.17

Of everyone in the field, I was the most sharply drawn to low-turnout / Latino / working-class precincts.

Is class or ethnicity driving these results?

Turnout rises with income AND with % white. The two are entangled, where raw turnout vs % Latino has a correlation of r=−0.75. We can hold income fixed and use partial correlations to ask what ethnicity does on its own:

When we hold income constant, voter turnout vs % Latino with income still has a strong negative correlation of r=−0.50.

In two precincts with the same income, the more-Latino one still votes noticeably less. This is a distinct gap in voter turnout by ethnicity, on top of income.

The Latino Turnout Gap

Everything above is vote counts on a map. But these next two come from other kinds of evidence: who turned out, by ethnicity, at the precinct level according to surnames classified to Latino/non-Latino ethnicity from the voter file (the method used in Voting Rights Act cases), not using ballots.

In the primary elections that decide this seat, Latino turnout ran ~16-17 points below everyone else, and it's stable:

1. 2022 Primary Election for CA-32: Latino ~24% vs non-Latino ~41%.
2. 2024 Primary Election for CA-32: Latino ~23% vs ~39%.
3. 2024 General Election: the gap shrinks to ~11 points (Latino 63% vs non-Latino 74%). So primaries run about 1.5× the general-election gap — and primaries are what decide this seat.

Two independent sources land in the same place: Berkeley's Statewide Database (public, surname-based), and my own LA voter file both put 2024-general Latino turnout at ~63%, which aligns with the Berkeley database results within half a point.

This isn't just young voters not turning out. Break down my voter file down by age AND ethnicity, and turnout climbs steeply with age in every cycle. One honesty note on the data: crossing age with ethnicity (turnout for Latinos at each age) needs an individual voter file. I have that for the 2024 general, so that's the one election I can cut both ways. For the primaries, Berkeley's SWDB only gives me age and ethnicity separately, and the 2026 primary voter file that would let me cross them for a primary just came out, so I don't have it yet.

The primaries sit about ~40 points below the general elections through middle age, narrowing to ~20 points by 65+.

For the 2024 general election, the Latino line sat ~4–7 points below the overall at every age band.

So it's a real ethnic gap layered on top of age. It’s not just young people not turning out.

The neighborhood cut says the same story, that among registered voters, the whitest quarter of LA precincts turned out ~55% vs ~35% in the most-Latino quarter. This is a ~20-point gap, past every "eligibility" excuse. A major caveat is that surname is a proxy (no voter file has race), and turnout does not indicate who they voted for. But the direction isn't subtle.

These low-turnout, most-Latino precincts are exactly the ones I did best in.

What a $39K campaign actually did

(this is the follow-up to my skywriting post, same campaign, but now with the certified results.)

I also spent $8,500 — more than a fifth of my final budget — on a Sunday LA Times ad answering the repeated smears about my ethnicity: "MARENA LIN IS NOT A CHINESE SPY." It went to ~67,000 print subscribers and reached over 100,000 online.

My next biggest expenditure was skywriting. I gave a pilot four exact street corners and had him write over them. My community of supporters hand-wrote and printed ~4,200 postcards into the same low-turnout precincts. We put yard signs all over Simi in the last week before the election. And I was on at least fifty front-door Ring cameras talking about transparency and dark money in this election cycle.

I chose to fly over these precincts on purpose: they are the precincts everyone else flies past.

And it drove real attention. Here's Google search interest over the final weeks: the "I'M NOT A CHINESE SPY" ad bumped searches for my name — but the skywriting, which spelled LIN32 across the Valley, sent "lin32" straight to the ceiling. People literally looked up.

There are two possible takeaways from all these data:

1. I just correctly found my base, and they’re votes I'd have gotten anyway.
2. The skywriting / outreach actually moved them.

Either way, I reached a population every funded campaign writes off, a base of voters you can win at ~$3 a vote, that a ~$3.3M campaign left completely on the table.

Where did my votes come from? In the LA precincts that were in the district BOTH years (same ground, so redistricting can't explain it), Ahuja’s vote count barely moved between 2024 and this 2026 primary (decline in 10%), while turnout there rose ~11 points. The electorate grew.

The raw math alone can't rule out up to ~7 in 10 of my votes being ex-Ahuja voters (that's the ceiling), but the cross-precinct pattern points the other way: a modeled estimate puts ~7 in 10 of my votes from 2024 non-voters and only ~3 in 10 from Ahuja. So I didn't peel off a rival's base. I mobilized the missing voters, which was my aim. This split is a modeled neighborhood-pattern estimate over 49 precincts, not from knowing anyone’s actual votes.

To be clear, none of this is to knock on the other candidates. Chris, Jake, Doug, and Josh all reached out with genuinely kind words after the election, and I'm grateful for this experience with them.

This is about a system that pours millions of dollars into the people who already vote and writes off everyone else. I reached those folks at ~$3 per vote, against the $104 per vote that it cost the next candidate.

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Appendix

THE VOTE-SPLITTING MYTH

When I first started running, I was told "you're splitting the vote, drop out." Thompson (R) took 2nd: 68,295 votes. If we summed the votes of every candidate who didn't advance, and put them behind one person, we’d get 63,667, which is short of Thompson by 4,628. The top two were mathematically locked, unless 2+ Republicans are running. No consolidation of the Democratic challenger field reaches the general. I outpolled the candidate, Chris Ahuja, that I was supposedly splitting with: 13,215 to 8,718.

BITTERSWEET

Turnout actually rose ~9 pts relative to the last comparable primary (2022), but it rose evenly across the district. The gap between high- and low-turnout precincts did not close.

SIMI VALLEY

Prop 50 added Simi Valley (Ventura) to CA-32 this year. Simi is whiter, higher-turnout. I kept it out of the LA turnout-gradient numbers above (it's hatched on the maps), in part because my comparisons required previous years' data. There’s a separate, redistricting-specific story for Simi.

METHODOLOGY AND DATA SOURCES

- vote counts: certified precinct-level Statements of Vote — LA County Registrar (lavote.gov, election 4338, contest cc10303) + Ventura County Clerk-Recorder. reconciled to certified county totals (LA exact; Ventura within 0.06%, from suppressed small counts).
- money: FEC 2026 cycle — all on **open.fec.gov**; search each candidate/committee and you'll find the same numbers: candidate-committee totals + Schedule E independent expenditures + Schedule A super-PAC receipts (New Era Leadership, committee C00945824; donors itemized on its filings). "money behind" = money RAISED for the primary (not spent), so the numbers can't be gamed by refunds or self-loan repayments. Levine's committee is shown NET of the ~$302K in general-election contributions he had to refund when he lost the primary (donors may give $3,500 per election; general-designated money can't be spent in the primary) — a conservative choice that only understates his advantage. His $750K in self-loans sits inside his committee receipts; the $200K the committee repaid him is captured in his ~$586K net personal figure, not double-subtracted.
- income & % Hispanic: ACS 5-year 2019–2023, area-weighted from census tracts to precincts.
- turnout comparison: 2022 registration/ballots interpolated onto 2026 precincts by 2020 census block-group population (LA only — 2022 predated Prop 50, no Ventura).
- ethnicity turnout (the Latino-turnout map + age chart): surname-classified turnout — Berkeley Statewide Database (statewidedatabase.org, block-level, current-boundary) for the multi-cycle numbers, cross-checked against the LA voter file (Census 2010 surname list). surname is a proxy (CA registration has no race field); turnout ≠ vote choice.
- stats: unweighted Pearson + partial correlation, ≥100-registered floor (so tiny precincts don't add noise and low-turnout precincts aren't down-weighted). turnout-gradient figures LA-only (n=121); candidate comparison full district.
- mobilization vs conversion: restricted to the 49 LA precincts in CA-32 in BOTH 2024 and 2026 with stable geometry (redistricting-controlled). Two estimates of where my 2026 votes came from — (1) assumption-free bounds (Duncan-Davis): at most 72% could be ex-Ahuja voters; (2) non-negative ecological (Goodman) regression of my 2026 vote on 2024 Ahuja/other/non-voter counts: ~71% from 2024 non-voters, ~29% ex-Ahuja. Ahuja was ~flat there (−10%); turnout rose ~11 pts. 2024 column confirmed from the SWDB P24 codebook (CNGDEM02=Ahuja, CNGDEM03=Sherman).
- caveat: precinct-level correlations (ecological) — a real neighborhood-scale pattern, not a claim about any individual voter. "conversion" is unobservable individually (secret ballot); the EI is a modeled estimate with a constant-rates assumption, not proof.

I need my AGSU patches repositioned cause i made the mistake of going to an elderly lady to sew in the patches and now the patches aren't aligned at all. Any veterans on here know any good tailoring services in the area that can accurately get the details right for my AGSU? Thanks.

I ran a little cross county one summer in high school but experience ends there. I am not a great runner but I would like to pick it up for fun. Is there a welcoming run club for beginning females near the pierce college area or maybe Woodland Hills? Thanks!

I (28M) started running a couple of months ago after a friend invited me to a local run club. I wasn’t sure what to expect, but I’ve been surprised by how welcoming, uplifting and supportive everyone has been. I’ve met people of all ages and running abilities, and it’s made getting into running a lot easier.
I’ve checked out Valley Guys Run, 8run8, and Run Culture, and they’ve all been friendly experiences, with emphasis on community strength. If you’re looking to meet new people or get into running, I’d recommend checking out one of these local clubs.

Tim Russ aka Tuvok from Star Trek Voyager was there with his Blues and Soul band last night at the Rabbit Hole. I've never been there before but I really liked the set up with the black lights and all of the colors. The furniture is really unique too and fits into the Alice In Wonderland theme.

Effective immediately no lane closures permitted during rush hour traffic unless deemed absolutely necessary.

Everywhere you turn a lane closed for one guy working and 2 on thier phone.

Just recently found out my wife will be having our first child. My wife usually gets treated out of the country, but looks like we’ll need something closer. We have PPO insurance.

Thanks in advance!

My band Play Fair is playing at the legendary Midnight Hour one last time before they close this year. If you’re a fan of alt rock/indie rock music, come check out this awesome lineup! Tix in comments

If you happen to know the pricing too that would be very helpful 🙏 Thank you

Hi guys!

I have been driving for a month and a half now with my permit and I’ve taken driving lessons with a professional instructor. I was going to do my behind-the-wheel test at Arleta but due to scheduling conflicts, I was unable to schedule an appointment there and I decided to schedule my test at Van Nuys. Everyone around me is saying that I probably won’t pass because Van Nuys DMV automatically fails people for no reason (this can be seen in the Google reviews as well) and the streets are super busy. Is the Van Nuys DMV rlly that bad or should I just tough it out and do my exam there instead of rescheduling and doing it at Arleta?

TLDR: Is the Van Nuys DMV really as bad as everyone says it is for driving tests or no?

Hi all!

Does anyone have any experience with YMCA’s in the area or any other family gym recommendations? I’m wanting something that has a gym + extra curricular classes & swim lessons for kiddos.

Thanks!