Posts posted by royiv
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Edited by royiv
7 hours ago, Bozo_Casanova said:Oh, you were looking for me to tell you about some plans?
There was the 2012 comprehensive plan, "Imagine Austin". Priority program #1 was to replace our city's broken and crippling land use code. That process has been started over three times since and is currently on hold, after two separate rewrites were killed by neighborhood cranks. As we sit here twelve years later it has taken 5 years longer to replace the code than it took to put humans on the moon with slide rules and graph paper.There was the 1962 highway plan, which included a massive innner city freeway network, on Riverside, 15th street, Lamar, 35th, and more
There was the plan to make Loop 360 an actual loop
There was the 2000 rail plan
My favorite to think about is the 1985 Highway plan, which would have built a set of true, viable bypass loops around the central city, but alas was gutted by a coalition of environmentalists and community activists by land speculators who then used that pretext to build 130 too far east to do any good.
@Samson's Wig already did a good job summarizing my thoughts at a high level, but at a macro level I don’t see how any of the plans you bulleted are world-class. Quite the opposite specifally on the 1962 highway plan that would have cut a freeway right through some of Austin’s most valuable land. I can’t imagine Austin being the city it is today with a freeway parallel to Town Lake going down 1st St and then crossing the lake in the center of downtown. The hike and bike, arguably one of Austin’s crown jewels and one of its most unique features would be adjacent to a gridlocked freeway. It would be analogous to the Pierce Elevated in downtown Houston that the state is about to spend billions to remove.
One point I will fully agree with you on is Austin’s outdated land use code. But given Austin politics since forever, the inability to make any meaningful changes is a feature not a bug of Austin city government.
This idea that Austin is a world-class city is far-fetched. Is it one of America‘s great large (not mega) cities? Absolutely. It’s a long way from being considered world-class and a lot of that is centered around the fact that Austin, outside of UT and the Dells, does not have a history of philanthropy. The wealth in Austin is relatively recent and built off of tech and those folks haven’t really given back in any meaningful way (again, the Dells being the exception).
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1 hour ago, Brisketexan said:
These are the exact same people who, when we mentioned a few years back that we were taking a trip to Paris, they said “you shouldn’t go. The Muslims there are waging war, and most of the city is a no-go zone.” Rebutting them with “so…the most dangerous part of our trip is our drive to ABIA” only confused them.
These people are abject morons with a complete disdain for all facts/data. Anecdotes and propaganda that feed the fear center of their lizard brain are literally the only info they can process.That’s one thing I’m okay with. Imagine how much more travel would cost if these people had passports and wanted to see the world.
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12 minutes ago, TornACL said:
Not only is Lance Leopold 1-2 but now he no longer has a line of people wrapped around the corner waiting to suck his fucking dick.
If Leipold can turn this around and get KU to a consistent 7-8 win season he can be career coach at KU making a few million. Win a bowl game here or there and he’s perfect for that job.
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8 minutes ago, Gil Bang said:
I don't know shit about fuck, but I think you'll reach more college dipshit males in an hour on a Rogan podcast than you will on a 50 hour campus tour...which will eat up a shit ton more than 40 hours. And, if you turn that idiot Rogan (and he's a fucking idiot), he'll talk for days about how awesome you are.
And that’s fair.
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Edited by royiv
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3 minutes ago, Tuco said:I've never listened to Rogan, but to me it is seems like his problem is being too accommodating to his guests, many of whom are dangerous nutballs. Is he shitty to people he doesn't agree with? If not, it seems like a pretty low risk interview. But, I don't know if you get backlash from giving Rogan more legitimacy?
In addition to my feeling that time is better spent elsewhere, my concern would be the backlash from giving him legitimacy.
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4 minutes ago, Gil Bang said:
That would be interesting. Meanwhile, we're dealing with thin margins here. We need to turn these meatheads 1 at a time.
I watched Carville today on a Bill Kristol podcast. He was talking about the WOW counties. He said every vote there counts as two votes, because every one you get takes one away from Dotard.
I’m up for every vote we can get and I won’t pretend to be any sort of expert. It just feels to me that the higher ROI for limited resources is getting the candidates out to places like college campuses to turn out the vote where the demographic is more favorable. Going on Rogan seems like a high risk (risk of some sort of gaffe) vs low reward. But what the hell do I know, I’m just trying to make sure my neighbors and friends have a plan to vote and that’s pretty easy considering the demographics of my social circle.
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1 hour ago, Gil Bang said:
And, feel free to pile on y'all:
Harris and/or Walz should go on Rogan. Why the fuck not? The entire audience is Trumpy? And Rogan, as ill-informed and dumb as he is, does seem to respond to new information. I think that there are yards to be gained with that playcall.
Again, call me an asshole. It's been done before.
I’d love to see some stats on how many of those guys actually show up to vote on Election Day. That demographic feels like a lot of super smart bros that have never parked their Super Duty at a polling place.
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5 minutes ago, Bozo_Casanova said:
Respectfully - I can only imagine what knowledge sounds like to the ignorant.
Let me say it again- we are world glass at planning- decades of very smart, well thought out and appropriately scaled highway plans, train plans, land use maps, the works. Then our voters and their chosen representatives kill them. That’s the story of how Austin squandered ridiculous natural advantages and doomed itself to gridlock over a 40 year period, because it’s probably too late to really fix anything.
I was born in and grew up in Austin and follow Austin very closely as it’s my hometown and all my family lives there. I’m serious when I ask what well thought out highway plans, land use plans, train plans, etc have been put forward? I can’t think of any brilliant plans that have been put forward and even if they had, the inability to push the ball down the field can’t be solely blamed on the taxpayers. Leaders and bureaucrats are also accountable to getting results.
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2 minutes ago, Bozo_Casanova said:
The first Project Connect bond election failed in 2013. Then they passed a way overdue and relatively modest bond in 2020, just in time for the cost of everything to rise and interests rates to go up. Shit happens.
It wasn’t just the cost of everything to go up, although that was certainly a big factor. It was lack of planning to know how to properly budget what they were asking for. They didn’t even fucking know about the CVCs and they way underestimated the cost to bore tunnels in Austin. I took one look at that proposal and knew they could never pull it off at that price tag and that was before the costs of everything to go up. It was never realistic and the city as a whole is going to suffer for it in the future.
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I think it demonstrates how hard it’s going to be to rank teams in preseason when rosters have so much churn in the portal era. Should probably reduce the preseason and first couple of week’s polls to 10 teams. That would allow for a little more churn in the next 15 teams until things start to shake out in the second month of the season.
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5 minutes ago, Bozo_Casanova said:
Nah. Project connect was underfunded and too small to begin with, because Austin votes down a lot of bonds. Voters here are penny wise and pound foolish.
100% agree with you on the rest of your reply, but disagree on Project Connect. It was poorly planned, has been poorly executed and, as a result, it’s going to have longer lasting impacts on future bond proposals further promulgating the idea that COA can’t be trusted. A proposal was put on the ballot that was DOA on day one. That’s not a way to build trust with voters.
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Just now, TOR said:
Counterpoint: does Arizona even have an NIL Foundation at this point?
Don’t know about the mechanics in terms of a collective or whatever, but there’s a reason they were able to keep so many of their key players when Fisch bailed for UW. Fisch pissed off some big donors and they stepped up out of spite.
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17 minutes ago, Bozo_Casanova said:
All you super serious citizens and fans of good government, I bring you glad tidings: you can make Austin better with my three step plan!
1) go to city county chambers and demand they double their own pay, and an across the board 20% increase for all non-police/fire/ems employees, because the talent pool is shit as is.
2) go to bond hearings and demand they think bigger. If it doesn’t have 10 figures demand they get there.
3) pay attention - read the Austin Monitor and council minutes and get to know your council member and their staff. Literally call them on the phone and get an appointment about the topic of your choice. It really is that easy.
bonus step: volunteer to serve on a board or commission and really get to know how a policy is made, eventually working up to a sovereign board or enterprise commission ZAP, PC, BofA, solid waste, utilities, etc. parks, public safety or bonds. Spend the next 10-15 years doing it. Then tell me whether you think the voters deserve better.
1. That’s a non-starter in the current environment of COA government and you know that. Any councilmember who takes on your proposal is writing their political death warrant. I’m not saying that you don’t have a point about you get what you pay for, but in a world where elected officials are concerned about being re-elected they know how exactly unpopular your proposal would be. Add to that, the backlash from APD, AFD and ATCEMS would be tremendous.
2. Project Connect has fucked future bond propositions. It’s going to be an uphill battle from now on. Sure, there was a confluence of issues, but the simple fact that planners totally forgot to take CVC restrictions into account on Congress Avenue is totally incompetent and, contrary to what you might believe, is negligence to sell something to the voters that is not possible given laws that are on the books.
3. Agree. If people paid more attention at a local level, our communities would all be better places to live. I’ve been impressed how accessible my city council member here in Houston is. Given, I do donate to her so I won’t pretend that I’m not buying some level of access.
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1 hour ago, Captainant said:
2nm is cutting edge process stuff, so that plus opening a new fab it's not super surprising they're having difficulty. 10-20% yield rates are pretty horrible though. That's a HUGE number of defects in their process to find and remediate
Yeah, that didn’t seem good to this guy who admittedly knows very little about chip manufacturing. What will this mean for the fab in Taylor? Just a delay in getting it up and running or will Samsung’s issues cause customers to move business to TSMC or others?


The situation in Springfield, Ohio- Haitians, Cats, and High Minded Rhetoric
in Cloak Room
Right on cue. Kyle Rittenhouse will be there shortly.