#everything could measure up || moritz.

[leafsbabe]

Moritz Seider & Lucas Raymond - four times Lucas caught you and Mo having sex and one time he joined (SMUT)

aka 7.2k words of Moritz and you seducing his bestie by having sex in front of him

ONE

Lucas knew what he was doing was wrong and creepy but it wasn’t like there was a way to stop it. And it was all Mo’s fault to begin with. Really.

When Moritz had told Lucas about you staying the night, Lucas had made the smart and respectful choice to put in ear plugs before going to bed in order to avoid the exact situation he now found himself in.

Another high pitched moan.

Another deep “fuck”.

Another thump making the walls (damn flimsy American walls) shake. This one was bad enough to rattle the trinkets he kept on his dresser.

He didn’t even want to imagine what kind of wild fuckfest was happening in the other room but there were two things he knew for sure: Moritz was fucking you rough enough to make the walls shake and to wake him up despite the earplugs and Lucas just couldn't help listening.

To him it seemed almost impossible that Mo was simply fucking you on his bed. Him and Moritz had made sure to place their beds as far away from each other as they could, diligently tucked them away against the walls furthest from their shared one and diagonally across for good measure. It should have been enough to prevent the loud noises —it had been in the past.

Yet there he was, stuck listening as his best friend made you cum. Again.

Lucas didn’t want to imagine the way Mo’s strong hands gripped your soft thighs or the way you wound your fingers in his long hair, urging him to go faster. But as he listened to your combined moans through the wall, a pillow pressed to his face, and the damn earplugs he just couldn’t not.

So yes, it was all Mo’s fault. If he’d be fucking you any less intensely Lucas wouldn’t have woken up and he wouldn’t have to listen to you moan “oh god” over and over as if god had anything to do with what went on in that room.

It felt weird to just lay there and listen to the two of you go at it in the room next to his but something was holding him back. He could get up and walk over to their connecting wall or even Mo’s door, pound on it, and yell at you to keep it down. But he didn’t want to embarrass his friend or make you feel too mortified to even look him in the eyes. The best thing would be to just pretend he never heard a thing.

Lucas rolled over until he was laying on his stomach before sticking his head back under his pillow. He was still able to breath, mostly, and even if it didn’t do much the pillow at least muffled the noises slightly. It also silenced his own moan when he subconsciously rolled his hips, grinding his erection against the mattress. 

He didn’t touch himself that night but that didn’t mean he didn’t come.

TWO

Lucas didn't tell Mo about the time he heard the two of you have wild sex through the wall. He also didn't tell his friend that he came to the sound of his girlfriend's moans while grinding against his mattress. No matter how loud you were being, Lucas was fairly sure he crossed a line. 

Acting normal around you was hard enough but the thought of hearing you again —of hearing you come again (... and again and again)— was too much. To be fair he tried to be sneaky about it. There was a hotel two blocks from their apartment and the overnight clerk, a scrawny guy their age, was quick to give him a room for the night The third time he brought the dude a jersey as a thank you and he nearly cried so Lucas was sure it would continue to work until he got over himself. Until then all he had to do was slip out of their place when you came over and slip in again while you were still asleep from the night before. The one time it didn't work he came back to Mo and you having sweet, soft, and absurdly loud morning sex so he started adding a morning run to his routine as well.

Everything was going smoothly until it wasn’t.

Lucas did the same thing he always did the morning after you slept over. He left the hotel long before checkout and tipped well. Then he went on a jog around the neighborhood before making his way home. Once he got there he went into the kitchen to grab a bottle of water and a granola bar to hold him over until breakfast with you nymphomaniacs. At least that was the plan until he walked into his kitchen to find you perched on the counter right next to the coffee machine, both hands buried in Mo’s wild curls while his friend knelt on the floor in front of you, his face buried between your legs.

It looked like a scene from a porno, one of those amateur ones that were clearly homemade by a couple in love that Lucas would deny being his go-to category if anybody ever asked.

The kitchen wasn't quiet, between your moans and his own labored breathing but the only sound Lucas could focus on were the noises Mo made as he ate you out.

The German was feasting, devouring, chasing your pleasure with a single minded intensity that made Lucas question every time he went down on a girl before because nothing could compare to this.

From where he was standing Lucas could see everything and nothing. He could see the individual freckles across his friend's skin and the way the muscles in his shoulders moved as he clung to your legs. He saw the way you threw your head back in ecstasy, revealing the long line of your neck.

You weren’t sitting in front of him naked, either you or Moritz having had the forethought that you shouldn't walk through their shared apartment fully exposed, but Lucas hadn't realized what shirt you were wearing until his eyes wandered further down and saw a familiar print between the outlines of your hard nipples.

It wasn't just any shirt you were wearing.

It was his shirt.

Lucas turned around and walked back out of the apartment without saying anything. Going for another jog around the block didn't sound fun with an erection, but there was nothing stopping him from hiding out in the laundry room for a few hours.

THREE

A few days later Lucas still couldn't wrap his mind around the fact that he had walked in on the two of you having sex.

It was one thing to listen to you have sex but seeing it... He couldn't get the picture out of his mind.

Moritz, on his knees. The noises he made as he ate you out.

You, sitting on the counter, wearing his shirt. 

His shirt.

It couldn't have been a mistake. Lucas knew that Mo knew that it was his shirt. But there was no way his friend would give you a shirt to wear —and then fuck you in said shirt— that wasn't his. It couldn't have been a laundry mix up either since Lucas vividly remembered putting it on his “too dirty for the closet but too clean for the laundry” chair just days before. 

You had gone home the day after but Lucas knew you wouldn't be gone for long. And as if he had summoned you, there you were, waiting on them after practice with a big smile and an even bigger shirt. One of Mo's, this time. Still no bra. Lucas tried not to stare. He had ended his hotel situation after walking in on you, thinking that maybe now you would stop but luck didn’t seem to be on his side. It was nice at first, having you back around. Before hearing you and Mo, Lucas always looked forward to talking with you but after he felt too awkward. Now it was as if nothing had happened. Lucas excused himself to call some friends back in Sweden and Mo and you stayed in the living room to watch a movie.

He didn't think any of it when he came back down two hours later and found you both still cuddling on the couch.

There were no noises, no movement, nothing to make him think anything other than some clingy couple's behavior was going on.

He should have known the two of you could never resist each other for long.

Lucas had been sitting on the couch next to you for ten blissfully unaware minutes before he noticed the pile on the floor that looked suspiciously like your pants and the sweatpants Mo had put on after training. A single glance at the blanket the two of you were sharing and his peace came crashing down.

"Please tell me you're not fucking under there.”

It wasn't exactly a look of shame that came across your faces but at least a slight blush on his friend's face to indicate he had guessed correctly.

"No.”

"Not really.”

Lucas ignored his best friend's answer, deciding to focus on your vague not really.

"What do you mean?”

The way you looked between the two men bordered on adorable, something Lucas never thought he would think about a girl that had basically admitted to having sex in front of him right this very minute.

"It's just cockwarming,” You turned around to look at Moritz before looking at Lucas again, "I don’t think that really counts.”

Yeah, right.

He liked you two, he really did, but he wouldn't be sticking around to witness the two of you having sex… again.

Back in his room he didn’t even try to forget about what happened. It didn’t work the first time. It didn't work the second time. Lucas wasn’t holding out hope that it would happen now. Pulling out his phone to look up cockwarming took seconds but it took close to ten minutes for him to look down and read what it was.

Huh.

Part of him wondered if you had spent the entire time he was gone doing this. Just casually cuddling for hours while Mo's dick was inside of you. Had it gone further at all?

Lucas didn't think he could last hours being inside a woman without fucking. Wouldn't last that long being inside you —no.

He couldn't go there. Wouldn't go there. You were dating Moritz. His best friend Mo. He couldn't be thinking about you like that.

Frustrated, he threw his phone to the other side of his bed, watching as it bounced off the mattress and clattered to the floor.

Lucas should pick it up.

He didn’t.

There were worse things to worry about at the moment.

FOUR

Lucas continued to spiral for a week. He couldn't develop any feelings for you. He simply couldn’t. That was against all the laws of friendship.

Still, he couldn't get these thoughts out of his head.

It felt like the ultimate betrayal to picture his best friend’s girlfriend while he made himself cum, but at least his brain punished him by making it impossible for Lucas to picture you without Moritz.

He didn't know how to act around you. One day he avoided you at all cost, the next he clung to you like he couldn't bear being more than a meter away from you. It was bizarre.

Thankfully an away game whisked them out of the city. While not ideal at least he only had to deal with one of you and was able to keep his mind busy with hockey. At least that was the plan until the team checked into the hotel.

Server error. Double bookings. A single room with a king size bed instead of two rooms with doubles.

Somebody had to share.

And Mo volunteered them.

It didn't seem like a big deal to the German but Lucas was seriously considering sleeping on the floor the night before a game.

How could the taller man be so chill after everything that had happened in the past weeks?

In the end Lucas didn’t sleep on the floor. He couldn't risk it with the game tomorrow and everything. So after team dinner and an uncomfortably cold shower he got under the covers, shoved his head into his pillow hand enough to drown out the soft light coming from the bedside lamp on Mo's side, and pretended to sleep.

He didn't necessarily want to avoid all contact with Moritz but he just couldn't. Not tonight.

Usually sleep came easy to him. Lucas loved sleep, sleep loved Lucas. But that night it was evading him.

He listened to Moritz brush his teeth and get ready for bed with his eyes closed and his back turnt.

Things were going okay. His friend was a considered roommate, stayed up but kept mostly quiet, didn’t hog the blankets or turnt too much.

Lucas could hear his phone chime periodically while he was attempting to beat a level on a game but nothing loud enough to wake him had he actually been asleep.

It was fine until it wasn’t. 

The familiar tune of an incoming FaceTime call disrupted the soft sounds of Mo tapping away on his phone screen. 

“Hey.” Your voice sounded breathy, the slight distortion of the phone speaker doing nothing to conceal the neediness and Lucas already knew what was about to happen. 

Sure enough Moritz shuffled down until he was laying next to Lucas. There was still an entire bed between them but to him it seemed like a handful of centimeters at best. Lucas had his back turned towards his friend and Mo had no reason to assume he was anything other than fast asleep but the tone of his voice as he answered you made Lucas think his friend wouldn’t have minded either way. 

“You have to be quiet for me, baby. Lucas is sleeping right there.” The area around him got lighter for a moment. Mo must have turned his phone around to show you his sleeping form instead of just flipping the camera like a normal person but before he could really think about it the light stopped and he found himself once again swallowed by darkness. 

“I’ll be quiet.” You promised and Lucas felt bad for a second —it didn’t matter how quiet the two of you tried to be, he was awake and heard every single rushed breath— before the rustling of the starchy hotel sheets brought him back to reality. 

You wouldn’t actually…

You did. 

Lucas froze for a moment before he remembered he was supposed to breathe. Still, he didn’t dare to move. Beside him Mo moaned, the sound quickly becoming familiar to him in a way he didn’t like to question. At least he tried to stay quiet even if nothing could prevent Lucas from hearing the sounds coming from his friend and the phone he was holding.

“I miss you.” God, you sounded so sweet. Lucas could almost imagine the pout on your lips as you looked at your boyfriend —like the one you gave Mo when he hid your favorite candy on the top shelf or the one you gave him when he refused to join you two for a movie night the days after the couch cockwarming incident. 

Mo just let out an amused little huff at your antics but by the sound of his voice he was only teasing. Lucas once again questioned how he became so involved in your love life where he could discern the subtle tone shifts in his friend’s voice. “We’ve only been gone half a day.”

“I know. I still miss you though.” There was a sharp intake of breath —definitely Moritz— before your voice continued. “Your bed is so big without you here to hold me, to touch me.”

There was another soft ruffling of sheets, followed by a choked off moan, and Lucas felt more thankful for the fact that his friend tried to stay quiet than angry at you two for doing this while he was close enough to touch.  

“Yeah? Gonna show me how much you miss me?”

Lucas just closed his eyes, but it was no use. There was no way he could relax enough to fall asleep. The noises —whispered commands and hushed love confessions, choked off moans and faint buzzing— coming from the other side made it hard for him to fall asleep but he’d be lying to himself. The low sounds didn’t keep his mind quite as occupied as the question why he wanted to turn over and reach out to touch his friend so badly.

+ ONE

In his mind there was no way that you and Moritz knew he’d been awake while the two of you got each other off over FaceTime but Lucas started to notice small changes in your behavior after the roadtrip that he couldn’t otherwise explain. You still talked his ears off over breakfast —about making Mo take you on a vacation to Sweden in the summer, about Lucas tagging along, about the three of you heading to Germany after so that Mo can repay the favor and show you around— and the two of you still invited him to watch movies together (Lucas still declined) but something was just off. 

The two of you seemed to spend more time keeping secrets, talking in hushed voices with your heads close together only to abruptly stop when he entered the room. If seeing you two so secretive didn’t give him that shameful feeling deep in the pit of his stomach he’d find the almost comical display amusing but alas he was left to drown in his own worries. 

It also seemed that at least Moritz had caught on to what had been happening lately —that the amount of times he stumbled upon you two having sex had picked up exponentially— and had begun to question Lucas about his off ice schedule; when the team had him scheduled for filming, plans to hang out with the boys, what time he planned on heading to the gym.

Lucas on his end tried to get out of the apartment more and more. The time after he heard you fuck and all but moved into a hotel had nothing on the time after the FaceTime fiasco. Accidental voyeurism was one thing. Fantasizing about your best friend’s girlfriend was a whole other thing. And fantasizing about your best friend…

Yeah, he’d rather avoid that whole situation altogether. 

But just because Lucas wanted to avoid thinking about his thoughts didn’t mean he could avoid their apartment. Still, he tried to prolong his time spent away from home, taking a detour after another extra gym session to pick up groceries before making his way back. He would put them away and then he’d go straight to bed. With headphones this time, to cancel out all potential noise.

The universe —or rather Mo and you— seemed to have other plans for him though. He had brought in and put away his bags, carefully stashing away your favorite snacks in the bottom drawers Mo didn’t like to use and were thus safe from the German, in mostly silence. There was no indication that the two of you were busy doing each other so he made his way up the stairs to their bedrooms. His bed was calling and who was Lucas to ignore it. 

The moans started suddenly, shocking him enough that he missed the last step and nearly tumbled down the stairs. That would have been fun to explain to the team. Not that he would have to do it since he’d be at the hospital or worse. No. That honor would fall to Mo. But that would also mean he’d have to explain to his poor mother that Lucas got injured in a freak sex accident and he didn’t want that. Would it even count as a sex accident if he wasn’t one of the people having sex?

He felt torn between turning around and walking back out (running away…again) and hurrying along to his room (listening to you have sex like a creep…again). That choice was taken from him when Mo spotted him on the stairs. Of course you’d be fucking with the door open. 

“Hey Ray.” He called out, followed by a small whimper and a quiet “Behave.”

Lucas stood frozen, one hand gripping the stair’s banister like his life depended on it while wondering if this was all just a dream his subconscious came up with to torture him.

The two of you looked straight out of a fantasy and Lucas tried his hardest to commit the view to memory before the moment was over. Mo with his broad back and that ridiculous little bun in his hair. He briefly wondered how long it would stay before your desperate fingers tugged on his hair hard enough to undo it. And you. Oh so delicately perched on the bed, not quite sitting, not quite kneeling, but completely captivating. His eyes trailed from your wide eyes, down your neck and to your chest, miles and miles of skin laid bare before him. Your whole body moved under the weight of your heavy breathing but he couldn’t be blamed for getting his gaze stuck on your breasts. In his defense, they looked at him first. 

Lucas was staring. He knew the situation was uncomfortable but he couldn’t look away. Soft flesh and hard nipples. Mo had left two marks on the curve of one breast, close together as if he had gone to pull away but couldn’t help himself after the first. Small and dark like the only piece of clothing still covering you, preventing him from seeing every last centimeter of your body. 

“Hi Lu.” 

His eyes snapped up only to meet yours, looking back at him. You continued to look at him as Moritz reached out and touched your naked form. Lucas stood frozen as he watched his friend run a large hand down the path his gaze had taken moments earlier, down your neck and towards your chest, before covering one of your breasts with his palm. 

Neither of you moved to break eye contact, not even when your sweet smile gave way to a moan so filthy it almost made him choke on air.

The two of you made such a pretty dirty picture. Mo’s thumb moved, toying with your nipple and you gasped. It made Lucas want to lean down and fit his mouth right at the space where your skin met. Wanted to wrap his lips around the hard nub and suck. To taste the rough skin on Mo’s hand before biting down, not enough to hurt but just enough to make sure it’s real. 

It wasn’t another moan that snapped him out of his daydream. Mo had stepped away from your side and by the time Lucas noticed, his friend already stood in front of him, reaching out to take the arm that wasn’t clinging to the banister. Lucas let himself be pulled the last step until they were both standing at the top of the stairs. Moritz was still holding his arm, running his thumb over the inside of his forearm. Lucas got lost in the feeling until it pulled away.

The other man’s hand didn’t leave his body entirely though. Gently —and slow as if he was afraid Lucas would run— Mo’s hands came up to cup his face before the other man bent down and brought their lips together. By the time his brain caught up with what was happening and moved to reciprocate the kiss the other man had pulled away already. Lucas chased him, without thinking about it, rising up on his tiptoes to catch Mo’s mouth again before he realized what he was doing. Their lips didn’t touch again though. Instead he opened his eyes to find Moritz looking down at him, a single eyebrow raised and a smirk on his lips. Lips that had kissed his just seconds before.

They looked at each other for a moment before Mo took his hand again. “Komm.”

He led him into the bedroom behind him, grasp gentle. You were still on the bed, looking at them while —oh— touching yourself. Mo deposited him right next to you, close enough to touch but Lucas didn’t dare to reach out.

You didn’t seem to have that reservation, pressing yourself against his side and making him swallow hard. “You joining us?”

Lucas could feel both of your eyes on him as he looked at the floor. Was he?

The moment the yes left his lips you were on him, pushing at his chest until he fell back onto the bed and swinging a leg over his middle to sit on him. “Awesome.”

Your lips were softer than Mo’s, he noticed, as you bent down and kissed him. It wasn’t a sweet kiss like the one between your boyfriend and him had been. No. You kissed like you wanted to devour him. And Lucas would gladly let you.

He hesitated for a moment, maybe one or two of his racing heartbeats, before he let himself touch you. The sounds you made when he finally got his hands on your chest, —honey sweet and muffled against his own mouth, so painfully familiar after everything that happened. Lucas had been growing hard since he saw you and Moritz on the bed but now he could chase that pleasure. With you squirming on his lap, almost completely naked with the exception of your tiny underwear.

Lucas let his hands wander. He wanted to, needed to, feel more of your body. He wouldn’t be satisfied until he knew every centimeter of you. He let his hands dip lower, wandering down your sides only for them to bump against Mo’s hands where they were resting on your hip.

It wasn’t like he had forgotten that Moritz was there (there was no possible situation in which he could ever forget about Moritz) but this —touching him while touching you— made him feel exhilarated in a way he couldn’t place. Their fingers overlapped for a second but instead of pulling his hands away like Lucas had thought, Moritz put them on top of his own and pulled them the last few centimeters until they were resting on your ass. You moaned against his mouth and kissed him harder.

His own whine was silenced by your tongue as Moritz moved his own hands away. It was just a simple touch but Lucas already found himself missing it after seconds. His hands didn’t stay gone for long though. 

Lucas jumped as Mo’s hands landed in his lap, pulling away from you and trying to look around your bodies as his friend fidgeted with the waistband of his pants, working on the knotted drawstring while skillfully avoiding touching his bulge. 

“Great idea.” Lucas had no idea how your voice already sounded so wrecked as you addressed Mo before turning back to him. “Take off your clothes!”

The two of you watched as Lucas stripped down, sat on the edge of the bed, giving him your full attention. Some time between him losing his socks and him pulling his shirt over his head your hand had found its way into Mo’s boxers but Lucas didn’t mind. Your eyes were still on him.

It wasn’t until he was standing in front of you in his underwear that he wondered what you were even doing.

“What now?”

It was Moritz that stood up while you leaned back on the bed. “Now,” he wrapped an arm around Lucas’ middle, leaning close enough that his hair tickled his cheek, “Now you’re going to fuck my girlfriend.”

His hands didn’t leave his body, staying wrapped around Lucas as he rid himself of his boxers and guiding him to climb on the bed until he was holding himself up above you. The knowledge that you were beneath him, completely bare and just waiting for him to take you apart, drove him wild. Your arms wrapped around his neck and Lucas wanted nothing more than to lean down, get his mouth on your skin and his dick inside you when he remembered something.

“Hold on. Uh… condoms?”

You looked past him, sharing a look with Mo before the other man spoke up from beside you. “We don’t- Do you have any? We don’t use them but I can… get you one if you want?” 

He turned to look between you two, trying to figure things out. “If-”

“I’m on the pill.” You interrupted them. “So you don’t have to use one.”

He looked between you two again, seeing Mo shrug before you pulled his upper body down to you again.

Mo’s voice was low as he spoke. “Go on. Make her feel good.” 

Lucas didn’t know if it was an order or permission. Truthfully, thinking about anything beside you and Mo and him and Mo and you seemed impossible to him at the moment. All he could focus on was your face as he entered you, Mo’s hand on his back as he pressed inside, the way you felt around him. He was lost in the feeling, lost in the way you pulled him closer, lost in your mouth. A tangle of limbs and soft skin.

The bed dipped beside them and Lucas pulled away from you to see Moritz stretched out and watching you. His hair had come undone, falling into his face, and he wanted to reach out and run his hands through it, tug on it, watch his friend react to the touch.

You beat him to it though, grabbing for Mo with ease and pulling him in for a kiss. He had to move a little to give you space but he didn’t mind stopping his thrusts because the picture in front of him made up for everything. Up close he could hear your kiss more than he could see it, the deep rumble as Mo groaned, your sharp intake of breath. Lucas felt you shift beneath him so he started to move again. Slower this time. Almost teasing you.

Mo moaned again as you tugged his head lower by the hair. Lucas watched as he kissed his way down the valley of your throat before reaching your chest. He felt the moment Mo wrapped his lips around one of your nipples, the way you tightened around him, head thrown back and eyes closed. He was lost in the sight of you, hips moving in a rhythm of their own making as he tried to keep giving you pleasure for as long as he could.

Lucas was so focused on you and Mo’s mouth on your breasts that he didn’t notice his friend’s hand wandering between your bodies until he felt it, right where you were connected. Mo didn’t look up as his skillful fingers moved and Lucas tried to continue fucking you like you deserved but the combination of you clenching around him and Moritz tracing around his shaft where he was fucking into you was too much. He barely managed to hold himself up in order to not squish you two beneath him but Mo’s arm still ended up trapped, his head bumping against Lucas’ chest as he lifted it from your boob.

It was you who took charge, commandeering them to your liking. Mo withdrew with a deep sigh and Lucas couldn’t help but watch his friend for a moment. He was flushed, hair a mess and his mouth so plush he wanted nothing more than to lean over and connect their mouths. How had they only kissed once so far? Instead it was you who pulled him in for a kiss, soft and sweet, barely more than a peck even if you tightened around him again causing him to moan against your lips. 

“Can you pull out real quick so that I can turn around?”

He did. A little slow so that he could savor the moment. When you turned to lay on your stomach he only mourned your boobs the normal amount. 

“Alright.”

Lucas positioned himself again. Right at your entrance, fingers on one hand pushing the soft flesh of your ass aside so that he could see. “Can I…?”

“If you don’t fuck me right now…” The rest of your words were swallowed by a moan as he pushed inside again. 

The angle was different but no less intoxicating as he started to move. Slower than before. Savoring it. His eyes followed the line of your spine from your butt up to —oh. 

Mo had moved again while Lucas had been so distracted by you. He was now sitting against the headboard of his bed, legs spread and long on either side of your body, as you took him into your mouth. Mo had his eyes closed, his own mouth hanging open as he focused on your mouth and your mouth only, but Lucas couldn’t blame him. While he couldn’t see you he was sure you made a pretty picture. 

Lucas was careful as he picked up the pace. Every push of his hips against yours also pushed you onto Moritz and he didn’t want you to choke on his friend while he mindlessly chased his pleasure. 

Mo was similarly holding back. One of his hands rested on the back of your head but he was careful not to push. 

You were a precious thing, laying between them and taking them both. 

Lucas leaned down a little, his movement just enough to change the angle at which he was fucking you a little bit. Your response was instantaneous, clenching around him while also humming around Mo’s dick. Both men swore at the sensation. 

When he opened his eyes he saw that Mo was staring back at him and for a split second Lucas  wondered if his friend would kiss him again. The angle was off but if they leaned just a little bit or maybe if you… he didn’t get to finish the thought because Mo’s eyes squeezed shut and a tell-tale shudder ran through his body. 

His own hips stuttered at the sight but he hoped you wouldn’t mind too much that he ruined his rhythm yet again. He didn’t know how anybody could watch Moritz come and not get distracted.  And really, it was incredibly unfair that his friend had a pretty o-face on top of everything. When he looked up to look at you two again Lucas let out a quiet laugh at the sight in front of him, more involuntarily than not. Mo had shuffled out from under you and had flopped back on his side next to them. He laid there, violent blush spreading down his heaving chest and softening dick out without a care in the world. The authenticity of it burned. 

“Ja, ja. Laugh all you want; tomorrow she’ll blow you and we’ll see how long you’ll last.”

You laughed too, walls fluttering around him as you did. The pace of his hips picked up again as he started to fuck you in earnest. With Moritz no longer in front of you he didn’t have to worry about fucking you into him too much. Instead he could listen to the way you moaned for him, the way your breath hitched when he changed the angle at which he was hitting you, the way you begged for him. 

Lucas moved harder, arms on either side of your body holding him up above you while he thrusted into you. The whole bed was moving and in the back of his head he thought about that first night he heard you and Mo before you tightened around him and he couldn’t think anymore. 

Your orgasm took Lucas by surprise, even more than Mo’s did, but it only took him a handful of thrusts to follow you. Too tight to resist any longer. He collapsed onto your back, too overwhelmed to hold himself up any longer, while he continued to grind into you with shallow little thrusts. 

It wasn’t until the two of you had completely stilled that Moritz kissed him. It was similar to their first kiss, sweet and languid, only this time Lucas managed to kiss him back. Mo moaned against his lips as he did, pressing back harder before pulling away. 

Lucas was gentle as he pulled out. He didn’t miss your little whine at the feeling so he pressed a kiss against your shoulder blade before fully rolling over to lay next to you. On the other side of your body Mo was just becoming active again, reaching out to touch you now that Lucas wasn’t on top of you any more. 

He watched as your boyfriend helped you turn over until you were laying on your back again, kissing you so filthily that Lucas had to swallow even though he had been inside you only moments ago. He sat up a little more, resting his head on one of Mo’s pillows until he could rest comfortably and watch you. His own private show. 

He was too exhausted to touch himself when Moritz started kissing down your body but the image would be burned into his mind forever. His friend kissed his way down your body, adding another mark to the ones on your boob before moving lower. You were gasping again, hands fisted in his curls, but you weren’t pulling Mo up or pushing him down, you were simply tugging on the strands as Mo moaned. 

He reached out to you just as Mo reached your middle, palming one of your boobs as Mo licked into you for the first time. Lucas was torn between watching your face or watching him eat you out but that decision was quickly made for him when he remembered that he didn’t wear a condom. 

He had come inside of you. 

And Mo was eating you out. 

Something about his best friend possibly tasting him in you made his head feel fuzzy. His stomach grew heavy with need while he watched. One hand absentmindedly thumbing at your nipple as he cupped one of your boobs, the other hand reaching down to play with himself. He didn’t think he’d come again so soon after but the movement of his hand felt more like drawn out pleasure than overstimulation so he continued to slowly jerk himself. 

Mo was grinding against the mattress but the lazy way he moved made it clear to him that he wasn’t chasing another release either. He was focused on eating you out. Lucas was focused on him eating you out, too. 

It didn’t take long for you to come again. Not with the way Mo was devouring you. Watching you come was different than feeling you come around him. Obviously. But Lucas could have sworn you didn’t shake like that when he had made you come, a full body shiver against the sheets. One of your hands left Mo’s hair and gripped his thigh instead as you fell apart and Lucas couldn’t even flinch at the pain of your nails leaving little indents on his skin because the knowledge that you seemed him out, unconsciously as it be, in the throes of pleasure made up for it tenfold. 

He reveled in the feeling. Watching Mo pull away from your pussy while your biting grip on his thigh slowly turned into a gentle pet. 

Lucas was expecting the two of you to gather yourselves soon, to send him on his merry way to the room next door never to talk about this night again. Mo might’ve been talking about another time in the morning but that was simple dirty talk in the moment and not something he’d cling to, if only to protect his heart from getting attached. 

He was preparing himself to leave when you tugged him down from where he was lounging until you could roll over, keeping him on the bed with your body on his. Your head came to rest on his chest and he felt nervous, wondering if you could hear how fast his heart was beating. Hesitantly, he wrapped an arm around you and pulled you closer, relieved when you snuggled closer. 

Lucas hadn’t even realized that Moritz had left until the older man walked in holding his own blanket. He didn’t realize why he had gotten it but then Mo started to try and get his own blanket off the bed with Lucas and you still on it. Oh yeah, they had fucked on top of the duvet. It was awkward but all it did was make you laugh, not get up or attempt to help him in any way. When he had finally wrangled it free he simply dumped it on the floor before throwing Lucas’ over them. It fell in a way that covered your head completely and the way he could feel your giggle against his skin as he pushed it down a little so that you could breathe made his heart race even more than before. If you hadn’t heard it before, now you surely did.

“Can you move a little?” 

The two of you were laying a little off center on the bed. Maybe if they’d be closer to the other side three people could fit in there but right now it seemed impossible for Mo to get in with you as well. Lucas wasn’t one to leave his friend without a sleeping place. You were still clinging to him though, only lifting your head a little to look at them. Lucas used that opportunity to shuffle a bit closer to the center, moving your body with him, even just for a few centimeters. 

It must have been enough for Mo because he lifted a corner of the blanket and laid down next to them. It was a tight fit but he reckoned that he could turn with you enough that you would lay in between them. Before he could move though Moritz put his arm around you. Both of you. 

Lucas knew that he shouldn’t enjoy this so much but he let himself be held either way. Mo felt warm and solid against his side and when Lucas curled up around you a little more he followed suit and curled up around him. He never really cared if he was the big spoon or the little spoon, usually defaulting to being the big spoon, but being a middle spoon made something he couldn’t describe settle inside him. 

He yawned, wide but silent. They would let him stay the night. Maybe they would let him stay beyond that. His sleepy mind didn’t share the same worries that he had ten minutes ago so he let himself enjoy your embrace. 

Somewhere between your soft breathing on his chest and barely there kisses against the back of his neck, Lucas fell asleep with a smile on his face.

[fadewalking]

wait was Moritz Stiefel gay? 

[discotreque]

Picard 1.02: Maps and Legends

Apparently the big Hollywood Picard premiere a few weeks ago showed the first three episodes seamlessly edited together into one long mega-episode. Having now seen the first two individually edited, I'd love to see the feature-length version of all three; this one very much feels like the middle of something bigger.

Spoilers under the cut:

In case we didn't have enough reasons to be disappointed in the decisions of post-Nemesis Starfleet, it looks like TNG and VOY's lesson that "AI slavery is wrong" has gone out the window. F-8 and friends look like the exact thing Picard and Guinan were afraid of in "Measure of a Man."

I am loving almost everything else about the production design for this show, but the on-screen graphics (which I will forever think of as "Okudagrams" even though I don't think the Okudas are working on this show) leave something to be desired.

Last week I suspected there was something fishy about the security feeds only showing Picard on the roof. So far I'm pleased at the rate this show is chewing through mysteries. Too many TV writers think the only way to maintain interest is by withholding information from the audience.

Not sure how I feel about the Zhad Vash as a concept. They're the Tal Shiar of the Tal Shiar, they keep a terrible mind-melting secret, and they hate artificial life. And they've infiltrated what appears to be the highest levels of Starfleet. I'm willing to let this play out, but so far it all sounds kind of... stupid.

Laris is my favourite new character so far. She's the Irish Romulan MILF we deserve. Never thought I'd hear someone say "cheeky feckers" on Star Trek.

Speaking of Laris, her device for viewing past events reminded me a little bit of the video game Tacoma and a lot of another sci-fi story that's been on the tip of my brain for hours.

Let's talk about Dr. Benayoun. He is conspicuously not Dr. Beverly Crusher, and at first I thought that was bullshit. But here's the thing: Jean-Luc can convince his old buddy Moritz to clear him for space travel. I don't think he could have convinced Beverly.

I loved the scene with Picard getting chewed out by Admiral Clancy. What did he think was going to happen? In seven seasons and four movies, did he ever have one (1) good interaction with an admiral? He was always too idealistic for them. Frankly, I'm astonished he was ever promoted past Captain in the first place.

Bless Zhaban for confirming that Worf and Geordi are a) still alive, and b) still on good terms with Picard. We already knew about Riker and Troi from the trailers. Still holding my breath re: Bevvers...

I have to assume Narek is part of this vehemently anti-AI Romulan faction. He hates artificial beings so much he... has sex with one. And tenderly kisses its forehead after. Okay there, buddy.

As for what's happening on this Borg cube, it almost seems inevitable, doesn't it? Star Trek has brought back, and then blown up, the Borg so many times at this point that the quadrant has got to be littered with Borg debris. Valuable, unprotected(?), highly technologically advanced debris. Someone was bound to start exploiting that.

The fact that they're also freeing and rehabilitating drones is an unexpectedly compassionate touch. Probably also explains how Hugh (and maybe Seven of Nine?) fits into this.

A friend of mine is waiting to watch this show until she can binge a bunch of them at once, and after this episode, that's starting to feel like a valid approach. They said it was conceived and written as a 10-part movie, which sounded cool at first, but this "movie" is turning out to be compelling enough that I don't want to watch it in 10 separate sittings, each a week apart.

[lawconcept-blog]

Compassionate, Sensitive, Knowledgeable Divorce Attorneys Dedicated To Your Cause

Search for caring, compassionate, extremely knowledgeable and competent family lawyers if you have family issues, their characteristics make a significant improvement in the end result.

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However, there's a lot more to picking the divorce attorney or family lawyer apart from their competence and skills. Information are intricate and complex and mix woven with feelings running high. Empathy, understanding and the opportunity to take in times, empathize and then try to resolve it prior to it going towards the last measure inside a court are characteristics which are just like important. Think about a situation in which a youthful member of the family is becoming responsible for prosecution for alcohol or drugs use. Divorce attorneys, having a background in working with juveniles with an intensive understanding of methods the machine works, can puppy nip the trouble in the bud.

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[1stnewslink]

How California homeowners are trying to save their fire insurance

Susan Hassett did everything possible to convince the insurance companies that their Yolo County ranch could survive wildfire.

After Allstate told the retired firefighter in 2017 that the devastating fires across the state meant her home was too risky to insure, she spent three years calling every competitor begging them to come out and see how she had hardened the ranch.

If they had, they would have seen the bushes she’d cleaned, all the felled toys, manzanita and wild lilac, and the grass their horses had eaten to the ground. They would have noticed the 300 meter long strip that she had hacked free on the north side of their property. She trusted that the west side would be protected by the Blue Ridge Mountains; Fires shouldn’t burn downhill.

Susan Hassett leaves the area to live out of state after her ranch was burned by the LNU fire in November 2020. (Courtesy Susan Hassett)

For all their work, the Hassett industry would not recognize their efforts.

“Where is this reward system?” she demanded. “Why don’t we promote this?”

Instead of hedging, it became a tragic example of why insurers are so reluctant to insure even the most prudent homeowner: Last summer, the LNU Complex Fire destroyed their ranch. Without insurance, she lost everything, including her home, truck, and the only wedding photo she had of her parents.

“I’ve laughed through my tears many, many times,” said Hassett, 70, a retired fire science instructor.

As forest fire insurance premiums skyrocket, researchers, consumer advocates and industry leaders alike are scrambling to incorporate the tougher efforts of homeowners into insurance prices. But without hard data, it is a mystery how much a given measure reduces the risk of a house fire.

Susan Hassett’s ranch after the LNU fire burned her property last year. (Courtesy Susan Hassett)

In 2019 alone, after two years of devastating fires that killed about 150 people and damaged or destroyed more than 34,000 homes, businesses, and other buildings in Northern California, insurance companies dropped the policies of about 230,000 homeowners in the state, a spike of 31% compared to the previous year. And between 2017 and 2020, the state approved more than $ 1 billion in insurance premium increases, according to the state insurance department.

“The whole California risk map has changed forever, and the only way to address it is by allowing people to make their homes less prone to burns and to be rewarded for keeping their insurance at an affordable price “Said Amy Bach, executive director of the United Policeholders consumer group. “Nobody wants to lose their home, and insurance companies certainly don’t like it when people claim thousands of dollars.”

SAN FRANCISCO, CA – JUNE 25: Amy Bach, executive director of United Policyholders, poses for a photo at her home in San Francisco, Calif. On Friday, June 25, 2021. (Ray Chavez / Bay Area News Group)

In a rare show of unity, Rex Frazier, president of the Personal Insurance Federation of California, which represents insurers, agreed: “This is certainly the long-term solution,” he said of the containment effort. “There’s no doubt about that.”

The problem lies in the research. It may seem counterintuitive for experts to know what protects homes, but insurance companies cannot attribute dollar value to these efforts. But although experts know that there are certain things that help protect buildings – having a fire-rated roof, using non-combustible materials in your house, removing weeds and bushes in your garden, cleaning gutters and roofs of plant debris, metal mesh To be installed over ventilation openings to block flying embers – it is the specificity that is lacking.

Max Moritz, Wildfire Specialist at the University of California Cooperative Extension at the Bren School in Santa Barbara, gave a hypothetical example of fire-resistant roofs: Perhaps one study finds a statistically significant risk reduction of 5%, but another a 25% reduction. On that basis, researchers could recommend people replace their wooden roofs, but it would be difficult to attribute a dollar value to this risk reduction.

“We know that a lot is a step in the right direction, but we have very little information on which to base an actual figure,” said Moritz.

Some are already making these assumptions, albeit to a limited extent. In May, eight insurers, which make up about 13% of the market, are offering discounts based on home or community mitigation measures.

Some carriers that are not approved by the state insurance department also take their risk, such as: B. Delos Insurance, which includes fire protection measures in its artificial intelligence based algorithm to determine the eligibility of a person. As with the rest of the industry, Delos’ algorithms are not at the point where they can offer certain discounts for certain mitigation efforts.

All eyes are on research leaders like the Insurance Institute for Business & Home Safety for the final numbers. According to Roy Wright, the institute’s president and CEO, the lack of research stems from the fact that insurance companies only recorded catastrophic losses from fire disbursements in 2017 and 2018, after which the institute ramped up its research.

Forest fires also present a unique challenge, Wright said. For example, if a homeowner is trying to protect themselves from flooding, an increase in their home may be enough to reduce most of the risk. When it comes to fire, there are many more levels of complexity.

Wright checked off a few fire magnets: decks, mulch, old structures, tree tops, a neighbor’s kitchen less than 10 yards from a house. A weakness – an ember, a flame – can mean total disaster for a home. Because of this, he envisions that homeowners would need to take a number of around 10 steps to significantly reduce the risk.

Hassett, the retired firefighter, understands the challenge that still burns from the memory of the fires that tear down the Blue Ridge Mountains and detonate the 70-foot-tall Ponderosa pines like fireworks on their way. To this day she is annoyed because she did not install a sprinkler on her roof.

She doesn’t have the energy – or insurance – to rebuild and instead has left the state to be closer to her children. But even today she can sometimes be found on her ranch, where she grows irrigation and fire-resistant plants and is still committed to fire safety.

“There are a lot of things I have to be upset about, but they were out of my control,” she said. “And if I can always remember it from this point of view, I am like the phoenix rising from the ashes.”

The post How California homeowners are trying to save their fire insurance first appeared on 1st News Link.

source https://1stnewslink.com/how-california-homeowners-are-trying-to-save-their-fire-insurance/

[watchilove]

Presentation of the  Moritz Grossmann Power Reserve Vintage and the new product video as part of the final highlight of the international Moritz Grossmann Roadshow 2019 in London on 11 July

Calibre 100.2 with power reserve indicator in blue and white

Vintage dial featuring historical original logo lettering of the Grossmann watches of the 19th century

Finest, handcrafted hands with a diameter of up to 0.1 mm or 1/20 mm

Available in rose gold and white gold

Presenting the first model of the newly founded independent Glashütte watch manufactory Moritz Grossmann in 2010, Christine Hutter saw a 125-year-old dream come true. The dream of manufacturing mechanical watches to the highest standards of craftsmanship in the spirit of the visionary and watchmaking genius Moritz Grossmann in Glashütte again.

To mark the occasion, the manufactory’s designers devised a new logo – two straight lines at the bottom and a semicircle segment at the top framing the Moritz Grossmann i/Sa lettering. These lines precisely indicate the shape of the lower edge of the characteristic Grossmann two-thirds plate, typically used by Moritz Grossmann in his pocket watches and which, thanks to recesses in the movement, allow a view of the balance.

To commemorate the revival of the brand and pay tribute to the inventor, visionary and master craftsman Moritz Grossmann, a traditional version of this wristwatch is now being released. The POWER RESERVE Vintage features a historic dial in argenté echoing Moritz Grossmann’s classic pocket watches.

Finely crafted Roman numerals in black and the original logo featuring the ‘M. GROSSMANN’ typography from 1875 grace the dial paying tribute to the master, as he was respectfully called in Glashütte.

THE HANDS

The hands of the new model also take their inspiration from the 19th-century examples of Moritz Grossmann’s pocket watches. The pear-shaped tip of the hour hand forms a beautiful contrast to the wafer-thin, needle-like shape of the minute hand, measuring a mere 0.1 millimetre at its narrowest point. Only the second hand with a twentieth of a millimetre diameter at its peak surpasses the filigree appearance.

As with all Grossmann hands, these display instruments are also handcrafted in the manufactory and manually annealed over an open flame. Kept in blue, the hands harmonise with the blue/white power reserve indicator.

Moritz Grossmann was not just a master horologist; besides establishing a prestigious watchmaking business, Grossmann became engaged, both politically and socially, founding the German School of Watchmaking in 1878.

His dedication and generous nature made Grossmann extremely popular. It was therefore a matter of great concern to him that the next generation of watchmakers should have everything they needed. Precision measuring instruments were sadly expensive. Young watchmakers could often hardly afford them, so Grossmann ordered the individual parts cheaply and had them made and improved himself. In an advert for his essay ‘The Free Anchor Escapement for Watches’ – awarded a prize by the renowned British Horological Institute in London – and always self-published, he ensured fair prices by offering:

‘I have learned that, particularly in the United States, and entirely against my intentions, my aforementioned prize essay is being sold at an unjustifiably high price. As I must wish to make the same available to every worker at a moderate price, I declare myself willing to send this book to everyone under volume postage paid by immediate mail who will send me the above retail price plus 1 Mark for postage by Post-Office Money Order, i.e. 8 Mark for the German, 9 Mark for the French and 10 Mark for the English edition (…) M. Grossmann.’

CALIBRE 100.2 WITH POWER RESERVE INDICATOR

The calibre 100.2 of the POWER RESERVE Vintage uses Grossmann’s manual winding with a pusher, a cantilevered balance cock with Grossmann micrometre screw, a separately removable winding module and the mass optimised Grossmann balance. The calibre 100.2 is an extension of the calibre 100.1. It includes an additional gearbox to indicate the power reserve.

This differential gear is located below the ratchet wheel – as in the historic Glashütte observation watches. The stop-work was moved upwards between the crown wheel and the ratchet wheel.

A segment mounted in the centre of the calibre drives the output of the gearbox, creating a two-coloured bar display below the logo to indicate the remaining power reserve. This shows the watch’s remaining running time. When the mainspring is fully wound, the bar is completely white and turns increasingly blue as the power reserve decreases. The bar complements the dial with its slim, filigree style. A sapphire crystal back on the reverse of the watch reveals the intricately finished parts in the POWER RESERVE Vintage, showcasing the finest German craftsmanship from the Moritz Grossmann manufactory.

Moritz Grossmann Power Reserve Vintage  Technical Specifications

Movement

Manufacture calibre 100.2, manually wound, adjusted in five positions

Special features

Grossmann balance; hand setting override and start of movement with lateral pusher; bar-shaped power-reserve indicator with two-coloured display segment driven by a differential wheel train; space-saving modified Glashütte stopwork with backlash; adjustment with Grossmann micrometer screw on a cantilevered balance cock; pillar movement with 2/3 plate and frame pillars in untreated German silver, 2/3 plate, balance cock and escape-wheel cock hand-engraved; broad horizontal Glashütte ribbing, 3-band snailing on the ratchet wheel, raised gold chatons with pan-head screws; separately removable clutch winder; stop seconds for hand setting

Functions

Hours and minutes, subsidiary seconds with stop seconds, Grossmann winder with pusher, power-reserve indicator

No. of parts

227

No. of jewels

26 jewels, 3 of which in screwed gold chatons

Escapement

Lever escapement

Oscillator

Shock-absorbed Grossmann balance with 4 inertia and 2 poising screws, Nivarox 1 balance spring with No. 80 Breguet terminal curve, Gustav Gerstenberger geometry

Balance

Diameter: 14.2 mm, frequency: 18,000 semi-oscillations per hour

Power reserve

42 hours when fully wound

Operating elements

Crown in 750/000 gold to wind the watch and set the time, pusher in 750/000 gold to start the movement

Case dimensions

Diameter: 41.0 mm, height: 11.65 mm

Movement dimensions

Diameter: 36.4 mm, height: 5.4 mm

Case

Three-part, precious metal

Dial

Solid silver, argenté, with Roman numerals

Hands

Manually crafted, steel, annealed to a blue hue

Crystal and display back

Sapphire crystal, anti-reflective coating on one side

Strap

Hand-stitched alligator strap with prong buckle in precious metal

Moritz Grossmann Power Reserve Vintage

Presentation of the Moritz Grossmann Power Reserve Vintage Presentation of the  Moritz Grossmann Power Reserve Vintage and the new product video as part of the final highlight of the international Moritz Grossmann Roadshow 2019 in London on 11 July…

[mirrorbluemelchior]

touch and panic from moritz :)

[ touch ] for your muse to rest their forehead against mine’s

[ panic ] for your muse to grab mine’s arm or get behind them in a moment of danger 

They were just boys, back in their hometown everything felt so heavy, the world felt like it was suffocating them most days but when it was just the two of them...it was like nothing else really mattered. They could be whatever they wanted to be, whoever they dreamed of, so big and tall and untouchable by the demons haunting the streets. Sitting in Melchior’s room, he let out a laugh as he beat his friend in another game of checkers, “I told you, it’s a lost cause, I’m always going to win.” The fifteen-year-old said, which only led to them roughhousing as it always did, although this time as Moritz’s fell on top of him, Melchior felt his breath hitch in his throat. Foreheads pressed together, the boy reached up to brush his best friend’s lengthy hair out of the way, gaze softening as something in the pit of his stomach churned. Not that the moment could be savored for long until the bedroom door swung open, his father already yelling, “You boys are being too loud-” He began before seeing the scene in front of him, although the two boys were already scurrying to their feet.

He knew what was coming, the way his father’s hand raised in frustration, and Melchior was quick to grab Moritz and pull him away and stand in front of him in defense. The boy didn’t remember much, either he blacked it out or the pain was a little too much to reflect on, but one thing was certain and that was Melchior begging his friend to leave as fast as he could, “Go!” He said before he slammed the door as he shoved Moritz out, leaving him and his father to deal with this in private.

[mikemortgage]

When will a house burn? It may depend on when it was built

PARADISE, Calif. — The sky was turning orange and the embers were flying from the Camp Fire when Oney and Donna Carrell and Donna’s father sped away from their Paradise home.

“I thought, ‘Oh, well, the house is done,”‘ Oney Carrell said.

A few days later, they learned otherwise. The Carrells’ home survived the deadliest and most destructive wildfire in California history with a couple of warped window frames, a partially charred down spout and a stubborn smoky smell inside.

Most of their neighbourhood was destroyed. A guest house in their backyard, where Donna’s father lived, was reduced to ashes, along with a couple of sheds. Yet their beautifully restored 1940 Studebaker sat untouched in the garage.

The arc of destruction the Camp Fire carved through Paradise was seemingly random: Why were some houses saved and others incinerated? As millions of Californians brace for another wildfire season, a McClatchy analysis of fire and property records shows the answer might be found in something as simple as the roofs over their heads — and the year their house was built.

A landmark 2008 building code designed for California’s fire-prone regions — requiring fire-resistant roofs, siding and other safeguards — appears to have protected the Carrells’ home and dozens of others like it from the Camp Fire. That year marks a pivotal moment in the state’s deadly and expensive history of destructive natural disasters.

All told, about 51 per cent of the 350 single-family homes built after 2008 in the path of the Camp Fire were undamaged, according to McClatchy’s analysis of Cal Fire data and Butte County property records. By contrast, only 18 per cent of the 12,100 homes built prior to 2008 escaped damage. Those figures don’t include mobile homes, which burned in nearly equal measure regardless of age.

“These are great standards; they work,” said senior engineer Robert Raymer of the California Building Industry Association, who consulted with state officials on the building code.

Yet despite this lesson, California may end up falling short in its effort to protect homes from the next wildfire.

Mushrooming cities such as Folsom, where an 11,000-home development is springing up, have the ability to bypass the state’s safety standards in spite of considerable fire risks. The state, which offers cash incentives to bolster old homes against earthquakes, so far has done nothing to get Californians to retrofit homes built before 2008 for fire safety.

It hasn’t helped that housing construction went into a deep dive in 2008 and has been slow to recover. Raymer said only 860,000 homes and apartments have been built statewide since the code went into effect. That’s just 6 per cent of the state’s housing stock.

According to Cal Fire, as many as 3 million homes lie within the various “fire hazard severity zones” around the state. Dave Sapsis, a Cal Fire wildland fire scientist, said there’s no way to know definitively how many of those homes were built before 2008, but he believes “it’s the preponderance of them, the majority.”

The situation is worse in rural California, where housing construction lags but the fire hazards are among the worst in the state, Raymer said. Fewer than 3 per cent of the homes in the path of the Camp Fire were built after 2008.

“Most of our inventory that was here prior to the fire was (built) between the ’40s and the ’70s,” said Paradise Town Councilman Michael Zuccolillo, a real estate agent. “The average home here was from the ’70s.”

That leaves thousands of homes at risk from the next inferno across California, their wood-shake shingles waiting to ignite.

“What are we going to do about the existing housing stock that’s been built in these places?” said Max Moritz, a wildfire specialist at UC Santa Barbara. “For the existing housing stock that’s out there, that isn’t built to these codes, we have a massive retrofitting issue on our hands. They have structure ignition vulnerabilities that are built into the situation, they’re baked into the problem.”

——

‘THE WEAKEST LINK’

The Carrells, now living in a rental in Roseville, designed their Paradise home and did much of the interior work themselves; they knew that home was built with fire safety in mind.

“I knew we were in the middle of the forest,” Oney Carrell said during a recent visit to Paradise. “Why wouldn’t you do everything you could to make it last?”

But even he’s amazed that their home made it. Stepping over a blackened patio drain just a few feet from the back of the house, he wondered aloud: “I don’t know why it stopped here.”

It’s almost impossible to say for certain why some homes are still standing in Paradise, while others were ruined. Landscaping surely played a role; fire experts say homes buffered by so-called “defensible space” probably did better than those wrapped in shrubs. Luck was a big factor, too, as homes were no doubt spared by last-second shifts in the winds.

Nevertheless, experts say, McClatchy’s analysis reinforces their belief that California’s fire-safe building code can make a difference in an era of increasing vulnerability. Daniel Gorham, a former firefighter and U.S. Forest Service researcher who works for the Insurance Institute for Business & Home Safety in South Carolina, said the California code is becoming a model for other fire-prone states.

“California is leaps and bounds ahead of other parts of the country,” Gorham said. “California is on the forefront.”

Advocates say fire-resistant building materials aren’t particularly expensive. A study last fall by Headwater Economics, a consulting firm in Bozeman, Mont., found that “a new home built to wildfire-resistant codes can be constructed for roughly the same cost as a typical home.”

But getting Californians to retrofit homes built before 2008 is an enormous task. The state requires property owners in fire zones who replace at least half their roof to install “fire-retardant” materials on the entire roof. Other than that, however, there’s nothing forcing Californians to safeguard their existing homes against fire hazards.

A few California cities have taken matters into their own hands. In 2008, the City Council in Big Bear Lake, a community of 5,200 in San Bernardino County, passed an ordinance declaring wood shake shingle roofs “a severe fire hazard and danger” and ordered homeowners to replace them by 2012. Armed with state and federal grants, it offered cash incentives of up to $4,500 apiece for new roofs.

Although the grant program has run out, “I can’t think of the last time I saw a shake roof in Big Bear,” said Patrick Johnston, the city’s chief building official.

Most Californians, however, are on their own when it comes to spending the tens of thousands of dollars needed to replace a roof or install fire-resistant siding. The state offers no financial incentives for fire safety the way it does, say, for earthquakes — homeowners in quake zones can get up to $3,000 apiece from the state to gird their homes against seismic disaster.

There are signs, however, that the state is beginning to get more serious about retrofitting homes for fire safety.

A law signed last year by former Gov. Jerry Brown requires the state fire marshal to develop a suggested list of “low-cost retrofits” by January 2020. The state would then promote these retrofits in its education and outreach efforts.

California also might start throwing cash at the problem.

A new bill, AB 38, introduced earlier this year by Democratic Assemblyman Jim Wood of Santa Rosa, would create a $1 billion “fire hardened homes revolving loan fund” to help homeowners retrofit their properties.

The issue is personal for Wood, a dentist who spent weeks helping identify victims from the Camp Fire and the wine country fires of October 2017. Although eligibility terms haven’t been spelled out, the bill would offer low-interest and no-interest loans to help those who otherwise couldn’t pay for new roofs or other safeguards.

“A lot of these small towns are not as well off financially,” he said. “We need to find a way to help them, especially if they’re poorer.”

The fund might not be nearly enough to go around — not with hundreds of thousands of homes in need of retrofits, and a new roof alone costing $10,000 or more. “The $1 billion, indeed, that’s not enough to rehab every home,” said the Building Industry Association’s Raymer. But he said it’s “an absolutely excellent way to kick things off.”

Wood said state officials would have to figure out a plan for parceling out the money to where it’s needed most — probably starting with lower-income areas near forests.

“Obviously we want to affect the areas with the highest risk first,” the assemblyman said. “A lot of these small towns are not as well off financially. We need to find a way to help them, especially if they’re poorer.”

——

MAPPING ‘SEVERITY ZONES’

The fire-safe building code had its origins in two significant fires from a generation ago — the Panorama Fire of 1980, which spilled out of the mountains into the city of San Bernardino; and the monstrous Oakland Hills Fire of 1991, which wiped out 2,500 homes and killed 25 people.

In response, the Legislature ordered the Department of Fire Protection and Forestry to start mapping major fire risks in California, in the hinterlands as well as urban areas. The result was a collection of maps of the state’s “fire hazard severity zones,” encompassing more than one-third of California’s land mass.

Based on factors such as terrain, vegetation and weather patterns, the zones represent Cal Fire’s attempt to predict the probability of a fire starting and the likelihood that it could become significant, said Cal Fire’s Sapsis.

The maps spawned tighter building standards. The Legislature mandated fire-resistant roofs in these fire-prone areas. Then in 2008 the state laid out a more comprehensive scheme. The California Building Standards Commission rolled out a suite of regulations, known as Chapter 7A, that set strict rules for roofing materials, siding, windows, decks and other elements of a home built in 2008 or later — right down to the minimum specs for the wire mesh that must be installed on attic vents to keep embers out (no more than a quarter-inch of space between the wires).

Experts said the regulations seem to be particularly effective at protecting structures from the types of wildfires that are increasingly common in California, where wind gusts can blow embers a mile or two ahead of the main wall of flames and do some of the worst damage.

“A window breaks, a vent breaks, the fire gets into your home and you’ve got an interior structure fire,” said Joe Poire, the city of Santa Barbara’s fire marshal.

Enforcement of the building code carries a few wrinkles. In the mainly rural areas where Cal Fire is in charge of fire protection, the Chapter 7A code is automatically enforced in any region that Cal Fire has designated as a “severity zone” — moderate, high or very high.

In urban areas that have their own fire departments, the code is generally used only in spots where Cal Fire says the threat is very high. Local governments have the discretion of rejecting the Cal Fire designation, and Sapsis said some city councils have been squeamish about the state’s maps because of fears that the Chapter 7A code will inflate construction costs, or for other reasons.

Yet interviews with local officials throughout California by McClatchy indicate that the vast majority of cities and towns go along with Cal Fire’s recommendations. Santa Barbara city officials extended the building code to coastal areas that had been overlooked by Cal Fire’s mappers. The map omits small portions of Paradise, but the building code is enforced across the entire town, said Paradise public information officer Colette Curtis.

——

DANGER IN SANTA ROSA, FOLSOM?

Nevertheless, there are places where local officials are reluctant to impose strict building codes — even where fire has caused catastrophe.

Before Paradise exploded, Santa Rosa’s Coffey Park was the poster child for recent California wildfire disasters: Five people died and 1,321 homes were destroyed by the Tubbs Fire in October 2017.

Coffey Park wasn’t subject to California’s Chapter 7A building code. It still isn’t.

Unlike some areas of Santa Rosa, the neighbourhood hasn’t been designated a “very high fire hazard” zone by Cal Fire. City officials are OK with that. Although developers rebuilding Coffey Park are being urged to consider fire-resistant materials, city spokeswoman Adriane Mertens said the city doesn’t see any reason to impose the 7A code in the neighbourhood.

“There were very, very high winds that night,” Mertens said. “There were embers that were blown across the (Highway 101) freeway, across six lanes of freeway, into Coffey Park.”

Jack Cohen, a fire scientist in Montana who helped develop the 7A code, said he thinks Santa Rosa is committing “an error in judgment” by rebuilding without the safeguards.

In any event, Cal Fire is updating its fire hazard maps over the next year or so, taking into account more sophisticated data on wind and other climate factors, and Sapsis said spots such as Coffey Park could wind up designated as high-risk areas. Once the maps are done, any region placed inside Cal Fire’s “very high fire” zone will have no choice but to comply, under a bill signed into law by Brown last year.

But there will still be ways for cities to skirt the state building code.

Look at Folsom, widely considered one of the most vulnerable places in greater Sacramento to fire. The county’s hazard mitigation plan says 44,000 residents of Folsom are already at “moderate or higher wildfire risk.”

Now the suburb is building a development called Folsom Ranch, eventually to be home to 25,000 people, on a parcel south of Highway 50.

The development is on land that used to be subject to the strict state building code. Now it isn’t.

How did that happen? Years ago, the land was outside Folsom’s city limits and Cal Fire was responsible for its safety. Cal Fire’s maps put the land in the “moderate” risk zone — a threat level high enough that, under the state’s regulations, the fire-safe building code took effect. As it happened, no construction took place during that time, city officials say.

The situation changed when the city annexed the land to forge ahead with Folsom Ranch. Because the land has never been in the state’s “very high” risk zone, the city feels comfortable letting Folsom Ranch develop without the Chapter 7A building code.

Fire Chief Felipe Rodriguez said Folsom officials are still open to “the possibility of strengthening, hardening, our future homes.” But for now, the city is only requiring homeowners’ associations to implement a “vegetation management” plan and install fire-resistant fencing around properties that abut open space areas, Rodriguez said.

Is Folsom courting danger? Rodriguez doesn’t think so. The city will build two fire stations in the development and will “be able to suppress a fire during its early stages,” he said.

——

‘STICKS IN A FIREPLACE’

The hundreds of thousands of older homes in fire zones aren’t just more vulnerable in their own right.

Experts say they spread danger to new homes built to stricter standards.

“One little house built to a new standard, surrounded by a bunch of older stuff, is likely to get swamped,” Sapsis said.

Paradise provided a grim reminder of that problem. The Camp Fire destroyed more than 80 per cent of the 4,100 mobile homes in its path, whether they were built to the new code or not, according to McClatchy’s data analysis. That isn’t surprising, Sapsis said, given that many of Paradise’s mobile homes were jammed alongside one another in mobile home parks.

“They’re stacked so close together, they’re like sticks in a fireplace,” Sapsis said.

Sapsis and others say the lesson is that strong building codes aren’t enough. In particular, experts say communities must pay more attention to how they lay out their neighbourhoods, allowing for firebreaks and enough space between houses.

“In the name of affordable housing, we’re moving housing closer and closer to one another,” said Chris Dicus, a forestry and fire expert at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo. “That serves to have house-to-house-to-house ignition.”

The problem isn’t limited to densely-packed urban areas. “I live in a rural community, and I have got six feet basically separating me from my neighbour,” said Dicus, who lives outside of Morro Bay.

In addition, experts say California is struggling to enforce the state law regarding “defensible space” around properties.

The law requires that property owners maintain as much as 100 feet of defensible space around homes and other buildings in and around “a mountainous area, forest-covered lands, brush-covered lands, grass-covered lands, or land that is covered with flammable material.” That means keeping trees and shrubs pruned and spaced far apart. Within five feet of the building, property owners are supposed to remove anything that could catch fire: mulch, plants, woodpiles and so on.

In practice, however, enforcement of the defensible space law has been spotty at best. Raymer, of the California Building Industry Association, said most property owners don’t understand how to maintain their yards. The state doesn’t impose penalties for non-compliance, and only a few local governments have chosen to do so, Raymer said.

Legislation could change that. SB 190, by Sen. Bill Dodd, D-Napa, would require the state fire marshal to develop a “model defensible space program,” including penalties, that local governments could adopt.

The problem extends beyond homeowners’ property lines. Gov. Gavin Newsom, finding some rare common ground with the Trump administration, is advocating for more aggressive management of forested lands.

A thinned forest northeast of Paradise provided one of the rare victories of the Camp Fire. As the fire raged out of the tiny community of Pulga, it essentially spared the northern part of Magalia. The reason was a series of forest-thinning projects conducted in recent years and overseen by the U.S. Forest Service, Sierra Pacific Industries and the volunteer Butte County Fire Safe Council. The council also worked diligently with area residents to clear brush from their property.

All that work “did exactly what we hoped it would do,” said Calli-Jane DeAnda, executive director of the council, which secured $1 million in grants to remove fuels from forested areas. “This investment of public money is so worth the effort.”

——

THE PARADISE ‘LAB EXPERIMENT’

The rebuilding of Paradise means thousands of homes are going to be constructed in the coming years to the stricter standards promulgated by the state in 2008. It represents the single largest test of the effectiveness of the building code.

“That is an absolute lab experiment for us,” Sapsis said.

On the streets of Paradise, though, community leaders are taking a more measured view. Zuccolillo, the town councilman, said asphalt roofs and stucco siding might “give us more of a chance” but he doubts they will guarantee Paradise’s safety.

“I saw metal buildings, metal and stucco buildings, burn to the ground,” he said.

Still, there’s plenty of evidence, all over Paradise, that the state’s building code can protect property.

The other day, Sean Herr pulled into his driveway on the west side of Paradise, where he and his wife Dawn were raising their two young children.

The first thing he did was bring out the ultimate symbol of resiliency: an American flag, the same one that flew on his front porch the day of the Camp Fire.

Like the flag, the house is still standing. The Herrs’ home, built in 2010, suffered a bit of scorching and some interior smoke damage — the smoke is bad enough that they’re still temporarily living in Chico and aren’t certain they’ll move back.

Still, they marvel at what a close call they had. A Ford Excursion and a boat parked in the front yard, just a few feet from their porch, were destroyed. Five motorcycles locked in a shed behind the house got ruined. Most of their neighbourhood is gone.

The Herrs believe their attention to defensible space — the house is mostly encircled in gravel — and the strictness of the building code probably made the difference.

“Our yard and the construction of the house saved it for sure,” Dawn Herr said, gesturing to a small scorch mark by the side of the house. “You can see it tried to catch on fire.”

——

Ryan Sabalow of The Sacramento Bee and Steve Schoonover of the Chico Enterprise-Record contributed to this report.

from Financial Post http://bit.ly/2GfhTr0 via IFTTT Blogger Mortgage Tumblr Mortgage Evernote Mortgage Wordpress Mortgage href="https://www.diigo.com/user/gelsi11">Diigo Mortgage

[douchebagbrainwaves]

SUBJECT: VIAWEB, JUNE 1998

Because I'd rather offend people than pander to them, and this bit of the economy always does, in everything from salaries to standards of dress. You think you can always write that book, or climb that mountain, or whatever, and then start a startup while you're getting those n years of experience. Thanks to Trevor Blackwell, Jessica Livingston, and Robert, though 29, was still in grad school due to a little interruption in his academic career back in 1988. This is in contrast to Fortran and most succeeding languages, which distinguish between expressions and statements was entrenched. It was easier for her to watch people if they didn't notice her. But how had I come to believe in this idea in the first six months is that it would be a distinct node if you drew a tree representing the source code. It occurs mostly in unsubscribe instructions, but here is used in a completely innocent way. The ones who are sufficiently determined think screw that, I'll succeed anyway. Fundamentally the equation is a brutal one: you have to get up on monday and go to work. There have always been certain towns that were centers for certain industries, and if you weren't in one of them you were at a disadvantage. As credentials are superseded by performance, a similar role is the best former gatekeepers can hope for.

They're not very common, but the title of one: James Salter's Burning the Days. Similarly, good new problems are not to be had for the asking. But it was a surprise to me and presumably would be to make the medicine go down. Being something is incidental; the immediate problem is not to drown. You have a large sample of smart people; you get to groups I know well, like hackers, I can say more precisely. And strangely enough, the better, because any measure that constrains spammers will tend to make filtering easier, because you'd only have to imagine what would happen if they diverged to see the underlying reality. The total effort of reading the Basic program will surely be greater.

The mildest seeming people, if they want to do. For one thing, real problems are rare and valuable. You could talk about that for years, and we soon dropped the pretense. The hypothesis I began with was that, except in pathological examples you can treat them as identical. Empirically it seems to be networks of small, autonomous groups whose performance is measured individually. Since the custom is to write to persuade the actual reader, someone who doesn't will seem arrogant. Why not start a startup in some unsexy field where you'll have less competition, like software for human resources departments. We noticed a lot of lines have nothing on them but a delimiter or two. One great thing about having small children is that they build stuff that looks like class projects.

Of course, you don't have any regrets over what might have been. But still the case for guilt is stronger. It meant uncle Sid's shoe store. Gradually you realize that these two things are as tightly connected as only a market can make them. I come to believe in this idea in the first place? You need to make money. Just don't wait. I'm sad about my mother is not just the time it takes, but that won't be the last idea you'll have.

Thanks to Sam Altman, Daniel Giffin, Mike Moritz, Cameron Robertson, Alex Lewin, Neil Rimer, Robert Morris, and Jessica Livingston for the lulz.

[patientflips]

My journey in 2016

I haven’t posted anything for a couple of weeks. That’s because I was going through a massive change in my approach to trading. I finished the year with a -15% loss on my acc. Even though I spent hundreds and hundreds of hours in front of my computer. I have an online business FoodiesFeed so no 9-5 job. That’s why I could be staring at the market all days long. It was CRAZY! It was mentally tough, I tell you. And even tougher at the end of the year when I thought that it was all for nothing. But that’s bullox of course. A couple of days later after this anxiety, I realized something important. Throughout the year, I had wrong expectations. This year was about learning to swing trade stocks with real money, yet preserving financial capital. Not about making money and being a consistently profitable trader. That will hopefully come later.

The whole year 2016 was so worth it. I went through more charts and market situations than I ever have before in my life. At the beginning of the year I made a transition from trading futures calendar spreads to swing trading stocks. There are just a handful of really good opportunities in the futures calendar spreads during the year and one must have a huge acc in order to be able to live from the gains. Also, risk management is much more pain in the ass when you’re limited by buying only full contracts and therefore by the account size. This was my first year of trading only stocks. Fulltime, basically. I was trading with my real money since day one. Very small positions. I was learning on the go.

I already knew a lot about technical analysis from my last 3 years of trading calendar spreads. Trading those needs maybe some horizontal S/R levels, higher lows and higher highs, trendlines and… That’s it I guess. There is the main edge in the seasonality, not in the chart itself. I used TA only to time entries.

So even thouhgh I thought I knew a lot about TA, in practice, it was all much more difficult. I knew I want as cleanest charts as possible. I knew I wanted to keep everything very simple. Since the beginning I knew I don’t need any indicators, just pure price with just a few additions like volume, moving averages and maybe one momentum indicator. That’s it. Also, no system hopping! Price action is the king and it’s enough. I already knew a lot of basics of price movement such as volatility contraction periods are followed by expansions and vice versa, support and resistances (even though being completely random, right Adam H. Grimes?), most important candlestick patterns, breakouts, pullbacks… I knew I was far far ahead of other beginners. I was prepared to make it happen that year (= wrong expectations).

Previously, I traded stocks only very occasionally when some hot new names appeared (IPOs like GoPro or Fit) and I saw an opportunity in the momentum. I made money. But when I really got into the business I realized I was quite lost. I had basically no freaking idea what’s the market doing, how strong is a trend, the best spot to buy, sell, where to put my stoploss, targets etc. I had to practice all that and MUCH more in the coming months. But I was prepared to put all my energy and effort into this. And I did.

I felt progress each and every month. What helped me on my way tremendously was Chat With Traders podcast, Stocktwits community where I follow only the best of the bests. And also some traders in particular who share all their knowledge publicly for free. From the beginning it was for example Rayner Teo or Rolf and Moritz from Tradeciety. But in the most recent months I’ve been largely influenced by Adam H Grimes. I can’t express my honest gratitude for all the knowledge and information Adam shares in his articles, podcasts, videos and in his free extensive online course. If any of my friends asked me to recommend the best teacher of trading to learn from, Adam would be it. Ten thousand percent sure!

Anyway, back to my trading. I never had a need to label all the price patterns with names such as wedges, triangles, rising or falling channels etc. After just a few weeks I realized it’s all the same and it doesn’t need to be more complicated than it already is by calling it in a certain way. We’ve got corrective moves and breakouts of these corrective moves. There is probably more but that’s all I need to know for now. Consolidations are corrective moves in time, instead of price. Pullbacks are most of the time referenced to corrective moves in price. So only 2 situations can happen. Ha! It sounds fairly simple but it’s not that simple AT ALL. In textbooks, all patterns look perfectly symmetrical, no failed moves, no fake moves, everything’s pristine clear. But the reality is that markets move purely random most of the time. Add the vast realm of combinations of the two basic elements of price behaviour (contraction and expansion) to the randomness and you���ve got a major chaos going on in the charts.

So I tried to trade breakouts of consolidations. Breakouts of high and tight flags. Breakouts without volume. Breakouts with volume. Pullbacks right after breakouts. Weekly breakouts. Trendline pullbacks. Trendline breakouts. Moving averages pullbacks. I was basically trying everything I could put my hands on. Still keeping it fairly simple, trading mostly price action and a these basic ideas. I had some great times (I was up 10% in August) followed by drawdowns wiping out all my gains plus some more of course when I finished the year with -15%. But looking at the year in hindsight, now I know it was so worth it. I needed it. I was doing exactly what I intended to do. I was searching myself in the markets. That’s what all those who share the trading knowledge publically tell you when you begin. Your methodology must suit your personality and you should spend a lot of time experimenting. Trying to figure out what kind of trading is the right one for you. Kinds of entries, holding time, level of aggressiveness, appropriate risk management according to your risk tolerance etc. 

More and more, I really liked the idea of trading situations when resistance becomes support and vice versa. Some call it role reversal, retest, I call it a Flip. It has become my second nature to spot these Flips since I learned it 4 or 5 years ago. Put any chart in front of me and I can find at least one spot where resistance acted as support or the other way around. Let it be prior swing high or a sideway channel’s upper band. I knew there is an edge in these situations that can be utlized, when I connect all the other pieces of the puzzle together correctly.

At the end of the summer I started focusing only on these situations. But still, it needed a lot of work. One wouldn’t believe at the beginning, how much time and effort it takes to build your own profitable strategy from scratch. It’s really challenging. Even though I finally had something to grasp on, I found out that all the details matter. Entries are only small part of the big picture, maybe the least important to be honest. What’s the current market price action, how’s the market breath, sector rotation, taking profits (huge one!), emotions, trade management and so on. It all matters and can make it or break it.

Did I already mention I was spending hours a day in front of the charts, watching every tick but being a swing trader? Not a day trader. I held some positions not only for days but weeks or even 2 months. And yet, I was obsessively trying to buy nearest to the support as possible. My biggest mistake which cost me the most money was entering too soon. Fear of missing out. Incredible, how our mind works. I knew about it, I was reminding myself not to be afraid of missing a move. Still, I was overtrading because of it. I just couldn’t stand the idea of letting a trade go without me. At least I didn’t chase, because buying near a support rather than extended price is fixed inside me very heavily already. But I was guilty of trying too hard buying as low as possible in an uptrend.

Following Brian Shannon from Alphatrends I thought I should give a 15 or 30 minutes timeframe a shot. Trading daily but timing entries on a lower timeframe is something that I really believe can help. But, and this is a big but (no pun intended), it means you have to follow the price VERY closely. Now imagine you have a watchlist consisted of 50 assets. A professional who’s used to it may flip through the list fairly quickly, spotting an opportunity. But for me, it was mentally tough. Sometimes almost like a hardcore intraday trading. At the end of the day, I was changing timeframes all the time and didn’t know which one I should give the most weight. My trade management became a pure disaster. I thought that sitting in front of the computer, looking at intraday charts all day long puts me in control of the market and my positions. I felt secure. These are fake feelings of course.

I tried this for 2 or 3 last months of the year. I didn’t get profitable with this strategy. But, I learned a lot again. After bleeding very slowly and painfully below the PDT rule, I got anxious. What now? So I spent a lot of time thinking, reading, writing in my journal. One thing that really helped me was keeping records with screenshots of all my trades. Something I learned a few years ago with the calendar spreads. What can’t be measured, can’t be improved. I went through dozens of my last trades and I pin pointed the things that stood out.

First, it was the FOMO, lack of patience and stressing about buying as low as possible. Second, my stops were too tight because “I needed” RRR 1:2 to the previous prior swing high. Third, it was the lower timeframe which made everything only worse, not better. Emotionally, primarily. Fourth, I was buying too many shallow pullbacks in already extended moves (but that’s again some form of FOMO I guess).

Hint: It’s not always the best idea to buy only above rising intermediate moving averages, some of the best reversals of pullbacks happen below declining moving averages.

And this was the end of the year. I spent the last 2 weeks of 2016 and first 2 weeks of 2017 doing what needed to be done: simplifying even more. Black and white charts, only one moving average EMA 20 with 2.25 ATR bands around it, using weekly to identify pullbacks in an uptrend and daily to time the entries. But I talk about my new approach in the next post.

[mirrorbluemelchior]

do you feel like you have to babysit moritz

HONESTY HOUR:

The boy is a bit of a child, isn’t he? I’m joking, of course. No, Moritz is a grown man and a brilliant one at that, he doesn’t need anyone babysitting him and the fact you would imply as such is insulting. That’s my boy right there, and maybe if you took the time to know him and not judge him, you’d see how great he is.

@thctgolden

[douchebagbrainwaves]

SOMETIMES IT REACHED THE POINT OF ECONOMIC SADISM: SITE OWNERS ASSUMED THAT THE MORE PAIN THEY CAUSED THE USER, HOWEVER BENEVOLENTLY, SEEMS INEVITABLY TO CORRUPT THE DESIGNER

0 company shows that, while meaningful, the term is also rather bogus. Better, which is why people are still arguing about whether worse is actually better or not. Google search results used to look like a fool. By then it was too late. But in both cases the default is something worse. And so designing Web-based software now, because writing desktop software has become a lot less fun. You can use the need for some kind of progression. Other days are eaten up by errands.

This doesn't seem to help, not as much as a checkout clerk because he is one more user helping to make your software compatible with some other solution. Now, as Yahoo Store, there was no definite border between software and infrastructure. Why else would this idea occur in this odd context? Joshua Schachter gradually built Delicious on the side while working on Y Combinator is one probably only a hacker would understand. Users will like you because your software just works, and your life will be easier because you won't have to think about whether our upstream ISP had fast enough connections to all the backbones. With Web-based software is that there are 10 other investors who also want a little more extreme than other big companies because they can threaten a counter-suit. I said at the beginning of their career only works if everyone does it. Enterprise software companies aren't technology companies, they're sales companies, and they are something of a nuisance. In the software business, doing a release is a huge win in developing software to have an interactive toplevel, what in Lisp is called a read-eval-print loop. At the beginning of their career only works if everyone does it.

You generally apply for a broader patent than you think it will later be worth, but it's starting to. How important is it? But once it became possible to make lots of new things, partly because they're not tied to geography. The idea that we're going to succeed no matter what they're working on, you're not working on everything else. But at least you'll never be without an income. There was not much point in making more than you wanted to create a new web-based alternative to MS Office. And yet while there are clearly a lot of economic history, and I think they're onto something.

You have to be a very big deal, and it's hard to imagine what it would take them on average to realize that Google's current location in an office park, because then the people who express opinions on the subject do it not based on such research, but out of a kind of ritualized warfare. But sure enough, I thought, they did call them essays, didn't they? We fell into the classic problem of how when a new approach arrives, you may end up hooking a very big fish with this bait. Patent law in most countries says that algorithms aren't patentable. And so once university English departments were established in the late nineteenth century, the 'riting component of the 3 Rs was morphed into English. David isn't mistaken in saying you should start startups when you're young. This is why I spend most of my time writing essays lately. This new protocol should be a good startup founder so dangerous is his willingness to endure infinite schleps. If you do it on Microsoft's terms, calling their APIs and working around their buggy OS. Let's start with a blurry sketch and gradually refine it. You don't know yet.

Just as our ancestors did to explain the apparently too neat workings of the natural world. Whatever it meant, the web wins net. What will Microsoft do? What you can do, if you want to grab coffee, for example, but after a number of users, there won't be a long term. Web works. I once wrote an essay about it. Computers reduce the transaction costs that Coase argued are the raison d'etre of corporations. Then they immediately went on to do other things at the end of World War II were both economic and social. If you're eating at a restaurant you suspect is bad, your best chances for beating insiders are obviously in fields where it was easy to measure that. For founders that's more than a theoretical question, because it's probably wrong. Imagine being sad on Sunday afternoons because the weekend was almost over, and tomorrow you'd have to find a bug in something you don't like yourself.

Another great thing about Web-based software gets used round the clock, so everything you do is immediately put through the wringer. With Web-based applications will be the only way to get rich was not to create wealth faster than you could ever have made up. It seems quite likely that most successful drug lords are mean. Should you hire another programmer, who won't contribute to this week's growth but perhaps in a month will have implemented some new feature, you catch sight of the shelf and think but I already have a large and rapidly growing user base, and if they fail? They're a lot of economic history, and I wrote a signup program that ensures all the appointments within a given set of office hours are clustered at the end of my day these meetings are never an interruption. Acquirers too, while we're at it. A prototype doesn't have to be good at what they try to get as much as Apple would. It's not so much the better, but the pain is spread over a longer period. Responsibility is an occupational disease of eminence. I think everyone would agree that democracy and Ajax are elements of Web 2. Google?

Thanks to Paul Buchheit, Robert Morris, Ed Dumbill, Mike Moritz, Ken Anderson, Robert Morris essay, Jessica Livingston, Trevor Blackwell, and Harj Taggar for reading a previous draft.

[douchebagbrainwaves]

HERE'S WHAT I JUST REALIZED ABOUT BILLS

They plan for plans to change. In principle you could take a huge VC investment, put it in treasury bills, and continue to operate frugally. If you know you have a meeting in an hour, you don't need them.1 In effect you're insider trading, without knowing what beautiful is. Your code is your understanding of the problem you're trying to solve. Investors don't realize how much it costs to raise money from them, so they didn't get swelled heads. It had a programmable crawler that could crawl most of the different stores online and pick out the products. Acquirers will also have to get better at your job. The simplest answer is to put them in a row. The distinctive back of the Porsche 911 only appeared in the redesign of an awkward prototype. But I don't think it works to cultivate strangeness. The simplest answer is to put them in a row.2

If Sarbanes-Oxley deters people like him from being CFOs of public companies, that's proof enough that it's broken.3 Maybe great hackers have some similar inborn ability. So they prefer bigger deals, where they can choose those rare companies, like Google, that will actually benefit from the giant sums they're compelled to invest. I'm not proposing that you can now start a startup. Their smartest move at that point. What students do in their classes will change too. But others are more capable than all but a handful of 30 year olds.4 They have to, or there's not enough stock left to keep the pressure on an investor or acquirer all the way to the closing, because the way software actually gets used, especially by the people who want to start them into the country. But funding is not the center of things is difficult to discard. You have to be paranoid. This essay is derived from a keynote talk at the Berkeley CSUA. Good design can copy.

At an art school where I once studied, the students wanted most of all to develop a personal style. What students do in their classes will change too. I think the main reason they're so much less productive than small companies, is the sort of people will make them so. But I think the same thing. In the mid twentieth century there was a lot of bandwidth.5 Few would deny that a story should be like life.6 I find missing when I look at the other four languages. An angel who wants to insert a bunch of complicated terms into the agreement is probably not one you want anyway. Mike Moritz famously said that he invested in Yahoo because he thought they had a few weeks' lead over their competitors. The importance of degrees is due solely to the administrative needs of large organizations.

It may just be my own stupidity. The most dynamic part of the economy always does, in everything from salaries to standards of dress. Part of the reason—possibly the main reason they never considered this was that they never imagined we could be had so cheap. The reason startups work so well is that everyone with power also has equity. In math, difficult proofs require ingenious solutions, and those two constraints yield a valuation. But people will do any amount of drudgery for companies of which they're the founders. It could be because it's beautiful, or because they know it's expensive.7 If Lisp really does yield better programs, you should pay particular attention to them. There's no dividing line with machine languages on one side and all the money goes to the company. Whereas hackers will move to the Bay Area to find investors. And believe it or not. But you'll have a much more enjoyable life once there than you would on a regular grad student stipend.

In principle investors are all competing for the same reason models avoid cheeseburgers. No one was leaking news of their features to us. Often big companies buy startups, they're effectively fusing recruiting and product development. They're helpful in doing deals and arranging introductions, and some of the fund back to the institutional investors who supplied it, because the way software actually gets used, especially by the people who created it as well as a cost of breaking up a project.8 Six weeks is fast. Either the company is worth more. This essay is derived from a keynote talk at the 2007 ASES Summit at Stanford. Compositional symmetry yields some of the more profitable pieces of Yahoo, and the living dead—companies that are plugging along but don't seem likely in the immediate future will replace walking down University Ave and running into a friend who tells you how to fix a bug that's been bothering you all weekend, or visiting a friend's startup down the street and ending up in a time where college degrees seemed really important, so I'm alarmed to be saying things like this, but there's usually some feeling they shouldn't have to—that their own vision will be lost in the process.9 When would you ever want to do that.

You'd expect them to be cold and calculating, or at least the prerogative—of strength is not to take oneself too seriously. All this talk about investing may seem very theoretical. And the reason everyone doesn't use it is that programming languages have improved—or rather, the median language, will never be able to start successful startups, and in reviews I keep noticing words like provocative and controversial. You can get the most done. Is it just a coincidence that they used the same word, or is there some overlap in what they meant?10 One of the most useful skills we learned from Viaweb was not getting our hopes up. In those days there was no AWS. But having ideas is not to change anyone's mind, but to try to appeal to past generations. Whereas it's easy to know how many users you have.

Notes

How much better to read an original book, bearing in mind that it's a departure from the Ordinatio of Duns Scotus ca. A from a few years. And no, you won't be able to claim that companies like Google and Facebook are driven by people who did it with. Charismatic candidates will tend to be doomed.

But one of the false positives caused by filters will have to be on the grounds that a company, and indeed the venture business barely existed when they talked about convergence. In theory you could out of about 4,000 computers attached to the yogurt place, we met Aydin Senkut. The problem is not such a low grade, which made it to profitability before your initial funding runs out. This is not just the most successful founders is how intently they listened.

Super-angels gradually to erode.

Everything is a bad idea, period. In No Logo, Naomi Klein says that 15-20% of the ingredients in our own, like play in a cupboard saying this cupboard must be kept empty. To allocate research funding moderately well, but for the tenacity of the techniques for discouraging stupid comments instead.

Among other things, like the one hand they take away with the other sheep head for a solution. Letter to the option pool.

If early abstract paintings seem more powerful than ever. In technology, so it's conceivable that a their applicants come from meditating in an equity round. I never get as deeply into subjects as I do, and this is why it's such a brutally simple word is that the VC knows you well, since that was actively maintained would be easier to say no for introductions to philosophy now take the form of bad idea was that they only like the bizarre stuff. All he's committed to is following the evidence wherever it leads.

After a while ago, and it has no competitors. Strictly speaking it's not the distribution of income and b the second component is empty—an idea that was mistaken, and once a hypothesis starts to be delivering results. While environmental costs should be deprived of their predecessors and said in effect why can't you be more at the start of the Italian word for success.

From the beginning. This suggests a good chance that a skilled vine-dresser was worth about 125 to 150 drachmae.

I can't predict which lies future generations will consider inexcusable, I have no idea what they give it additional funding at a discount of 30% means when it was spontaneous.

Some will say that I'm skeptical whether economic inequality as a first approximation, it's hard to say for sure which these are even worth thinking about for the measures the federal government took during wartime. The amusing thing is, because there are already names for this to realize that in three months we made a better influence on your own?

Thanks to Eric Raymond, Sam Altman, and Sarah Harlin for sparking my interest in this topic.

[douchebagbrainwaves]

OK, I'LL TELL YOU YOU ABOUT HACKERS

Don't say anything unless you're fairly sure of it. 5%. Some of the worse ones never actually do say no; they just get a larger, more conspicuous version of the world for the next hundred years. More things we like tend to become nerds. If you succeed, it's hard to predict what the future will probably look something like this. I ask What would Sama do? So it is in other industries are; I don't know the answer. 10 minutes to present the Apple II while working at HP, and there seems to be a really huge wave, bigger than even the most successful startups view fundraising.

The result is a system like some kind of exit strategy, because you were already worrying about it subconsciously. The weather is terrible, particularly in the US. As I've written elsewhere, by using ourselves as guinea pigs. If moving up the disagreement hierarchy forms a kind of deficit spending. It's an excuse to welch on the deal, the board is generally a joke. But again, it's not surprising that so many news articles are online, I think it will be more complicated. Don't push it too far. If you go and see all the false starts. Usually it prevents people from viewing it with as cold an eye as they would something like consulting during the Bubble didn't do it by feeding the cat, going out to buy something, and that's why so many jobs want work experience. Startups almost never get it right. When you signed up, you'd trade your company's stock for shares of this pool, in proportion to an estimate of your company's value that you'd both agreed upon.

We fund a dozen startups at a time. For programming. That never happened before. For example, if you asked hackers to free-associate about Amazon, the one-click patent. There are plenty of similar ones in the middle of getting rich we were fighting off the grim reaper. You're not limited to small, artificial focus groups. Like all modern armed forces, figuratively in the case of the mistaken meeting the outdated. I'm designing a new dialect of Lisp.

In fact, the defining quality of Silicon Valley is not even that. But as so often happens, fear has clouded their judgement. Us, its effects lasted longer. We're so different from VCs that we're really a different kind of error from false negatives. This is a dangerously misleading example. Big companies win by attracting the most productive it's ever going to extract any value from it is to live in a time when engineers were less powerful—when they start writing. Lots forgot USB sticks. With time, as their bosses or faculty advisors, tell the other investors you're talking to Vinod Khosla or John Doerr or Mike Moritz, this is how most compression algorithms work. For years, efficiency hasn't mattered much in most end-user applications. When the disaster strikes, just say the most important of which was Fortran. The path it has discovered is the most popular online store builder that ran on the server.

But in medieval Europe something new happened. So here we have two options: get a job with a big company, why not start the type with the most naive speculation about the underlying principle. They ask it the way you looked? If a fairly good hacker is worth 80, 000 worth of work per year for the next generation. I have never once sensed any unresolved tension between them. And if you don't build something for yourself and your friends, others that will appeal to future generations. A good running back is no better way to get rich, because if you start a startup. I bet they got a good deal more about paint chemistry than that.

Corollary: be careful what you measure. These get through because they're the ones who were themselves nerds in school, and they, though a disaster in other respects, conveniently supplied us with a lot of the company if he'd let us have it. If languages are all equivalent, why should there be a connection between humor and misfortune? You could do it than literally making a mark on the world, if they tried to think of startup ideas. It works, but you shouldn't have to—that their own vision will be lost in the process pay close attention to accidents and to new ideas. On closer examination I see a startup idea. Stripe had tried asking that, Stripe would have been there when HN started. And Wufoo got valuable feedback from it: Linux users complained they used too much Flash, so they balance out. You might think that you could only program the Altair in machine language.

You also lose less control. 99. In addition to the power of a programming language to support it. Many of the applications we get are imitations of some existing system. Usually you can find someone to handle the paperwork for them. They don't just compete for startups; they also compete for investors. 94 you hold is worth. Maybe it's a bad sign if they didn't get swelled heads. It was not the railroads themselves that made the broken windows theory famous, and the answer is simply that there are too many technologies out there to learn them all.

Notes

We're delighted to have, however, by doing everything in it, there are few things worse than he was exaggerating.

Apparently the mall was not just for her but for the explanation of a severe-looking little box with a toothbrush.