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Texas Jeff

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  1. He did not launch it. The FAA published guidelines trying to recruit more people with targeted disabilities in Feb 2013. He kept it going in his first administration. Elon has recently been compiling about the FAA DEI policy. I suspect that Trump had no idea that FAA DEI existed and didn't care that this was going on during his first term. But now Elon has Trump's ear, so we are all talking about it. Some reading: https://www.snopes.com/news/2024/01/15/faa-dei-initiatives/ https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/30/us/trump-dei-plane-crash-fact-check.html From The NY Times article, on the effectiveness of these efforts: and
  2. A 200 ft ceiling is pretty crazy. The UT tower is 300 ft high. Can you imagine flying a giant helicopter at night, wearing night vision goggles, less than 200 ft off a river that looks like a dark spot below, with bridges, cables and whatnot possibly in your way?
  3. My daughter needed a renewal just before Christmas. We made an appointment for the UT office on Nueces as soon as we could -- which was the next morning. Walked in with paperwork filled out. No wait because we had an appointment. Walked out 15 minutes later with an estimated delivery date of mid-February. The new passport arrived Jan 10th. Thanks Biden! BTW they don't take credit cards ... bring your checkbook or a money order if you have to go in. Most adults can renew online and pay via credit card, but not if you are in person.
  4. This is a problem with Lady Bird Lake aka Town Lake. Lake Travis is controlled by the LCRA. Longhorn Dam impounds Lady Bird Lake and is maintained by the City of Austin. LCRA is who you want to own your dam, if you care about your dam functioning well. Longhorn Dam (at the east end of downtown) has had problems in the past and has gotten stuck open and closed. It probably needs to be replaced. When the dam is stuck open, the lake drains. When it’s stuck closed, the SRV statue takes a swim.
  5. UT starts their long session in 2027 on Jan 11th. So the championship game will be held two weeks into that spring semester. CFP needs to conclude football season before the spring semester starts at most schools or commit to spending the money to fly everyone involved to playoff games. At Texas, Longhorn Band and cheer and the other student orgs get to go to these games, which is a fantastic opportunity for the students ... but they are being bussed to these games, which takes an extra day or two before and after the games. It was hard for the students to do this for the SEC championship during fall finals week, but they did it. It would be difficult for them to be bussed to Atlanta at the end of the fall semester and then miss chunks of the spring semester if Texas was still playing.
  6. The open was great and my wife and I loved "Bungee Fitness", which I have now discovered is a real thing. I'd be willing to bet that the bungee fitness people have record sign-up's next week.
  7. I work with a lot of South Asians in tech, and the women among them are carefully reading this part and worrying about their kids. Are their kids, born in the USA, citizens, they ask? These are women who left their home country with an education, came to this country, got an advanced degree, and are helping to make the tech that allows Trump to speak to us with his thumbs. Some got married and had kids here in the US while they were headed down the H1-B path. Now they are asking me for details about the 14th amendment and what it means and how to check on what it means and what it will mean in the future and if their kids are US citizens are not. And I'm like, well hey, we used to have people that owned other people and then we had a war and after that some folks didn't want people that didn't look like them them to be citizens so we wrote this 14th thing and then some folks still came up with corner cases to prevent people born here from being citizens so we had to work that out in the courts and we all thought we were good until MONDAY! I'm not exactly sounding a reassuring tone.
  8. How exactly would this work?
  9. I've been thinking about what a 25% tariff on Canada and Mexico and what it would do to the auto industry. The price of new and used cars is going to rise, along with the price of parts. New cars will be plentiful, but pricy. If half of the US automotive stuff is made outside the US and half is made inside, it's reasonable to think we may see a 12-13% rise in prices. Today, the average US car costs around $48,000, so we could see average car prices approaching $54,000 by the end of the year because of tariffs.
  10. They have moved on to coverage of an indoor parade.
  11. Ah, it's here: https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/815
  12. I looked, and didn't see it, although maybe this isn't the correct text: https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/7521/text However I am not a lawyer so perhaps it's in there in some way I don't understand.
  13. On the TikTok thing ... I am going to try to apply some logic to this situation which I am honestly hesitant to do, but here goes. TikTok is going dark because we have A LAW against it. We also have the first amendment, but set that aside like the Supremes just did. TikTok, as of tomorrow, is not legal in the United States. The law specifically calls out ByteDance and TikTok. The law gives the President the power to both designate new apps as "foreign adversary controlled" and determine that a foreign adversary controlled app is no longer controlled by a foreign adversary. The Supreme Court has just determined that this law is constitutional. Trump is taking an oath on Monday to faithfully execute the office of President. Part of the job description as stated in the Constitution is to "take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed." Where does he get the 90 day thing? We are a nation of laws. We have a law banning TikTok that goes in to effect on Sunday, our highest court has said it's constitutional, and we have a new guy on Monday that is responsible for executing the laws. He should not get to take an oath in the morning to do his job and then later in the day pick and choose which laws are OK and which should be suspended for 90 days. I'm not in favor of the TikTok ban but it's the current law of the land and he's the guy responsible for enforcing it, whether he likes it or not.
  14. Brentwood was below the flight path for the old airport, which kept families with children away. Once the airport closed, Brentwood was close to downtown with no airport noise and lots of old houses. I’m not familiar with the neighborhood, but I would guess that a lot of the old houses got knocked down and replaced with new. The removal of the airport traffic plus a modernized school led to a generation of kids in the neighborhood, which helped to fill the schools. Can it last? The demographic projections show a stable population for at least ten years, so I would say yes, but there is a chance that empty nesters won’t leave and the neighborhood will gradually see fewer new kids. The McCallum vertical is going through a wave caused by the airport closing and being redeveloped. Eventually it will fade but not yet.
  15. Well this may shock you but Trump has at times been both for and against the ban. For it because we don’t want China have our info and against it because it’s a great platform that many people love to use so who the heck would want to ban it?
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