Texas Jeff

Also, I would like to point out that Centenary of Louisiana beat Texas A&M in College Station on the same day in 1928, 6-0. Centenary holds a 6-3 all time advantage over A&M. Centenary is starting up their program again, so Aggies, this is your chance to even the score...

Vandy has had scoreboard on Texas since 1928, by 1 friggin' point in a game played at Fair Park. A chance for redemption awaits... Texas played OU the next year at the fair, the first game in the current streak of annual Texas/OU games in Dallas.

Killed the market for N95 masks. Doing what he can to prevent a wider war in Europe. Took a train to Ukraine while wearing shades. America is still paying bills when due. Dude is quietly driving the bus back to sanity, that’s his biggest accomplishment IMHO.

Outside of Omaha of course, which is the center of things and thus isn’t west of anywhere.. :-)

After next year, you’re unlikely to attend Texas baseball game west of I35. If someone in Lubbock owes you money, you might want to collect now…

Heartbreaking loss. Keep rebuilding and next year we can play at home with modern illumination...

Ain't nothing gonna happen.... I was around for the OJ trial. This will play out the same way.

We just went through this with a relative. I'm not an expert but here are some things to think about: Check your retirement account beneficiaries. If you have them set up properly, transferring these accounts will be easy. Consider setting up any other accounts that can be transfer-on-death as transfer-on-death with beneficiaries identified. Have printed account statements prior to death, especially showing who the beneficiaries should be or letters you received from management companies when you set up beneficiaries. Once you notify these companies that someone has died, you are likely to lose online access to their accounts even if you have the username and password.

https://skyscraperpage.com/diagrams/?searchID=101554192&page=1 That page shows 46 Austin buildings that exist or are under construction that are taller than the capitol. Some were built before the Frost building. Looks like the tower was the first. When finished, Waterline will be the tallest building in Austin, more than three times taller than the capitol.

Little noted from yesterday: Apple's new Mac Pro uses Apple (aka ARM), not Intel silicon. That's it for Intel at Apple. End of an era. The headset thing felt like the original Macintosh announcement. Well beyond what is being done today, but expensive for now. Cool for niche applications today, like visualizing a house on a lot prior to building it, but we'll see if a mass market app shows up. They need to convince every dad of a kid who dreams of playing professional sports that THIS is the one thing that will get them into the major leagues. If they can, sales will not be a problem.

The 20 runs from 5 am to about 11:30 pm, every 15 minutes from 5:40 to 9:40. It has many more stops that light rail will ever have. If Cap Metro were smart, they would call it the Airport Bus so that people might try taking it to the airport, but instead most have no idea it's headed that way. It doesn't have dedicated lanes but it moves pretty quick since few are riding it. It passes stops if no one is waiting. Downtown to the Airport is a 42 minute ride, plus up to 15 minutes to wait if you just missed the bus. The same trip by car is 20-40 minutes by car, depending on traffic. The bus is a little slower than a car but not much, especially if you have to park and ride a shuttle. At the airport, the bus isn't blocked by pickup traffic. It runs down the taxi/shuttle bus lane outside of the pickup curb and stops all .... the .... way .... at .... the .... end of the terminal, at a ridiculous $600,000 bus stop shaped like a giant guitar. The city cares enough about the bus to make a guitar shaped bus stop but not enough to put the stop in a convenient location. Total cost is $1.25 and you'll probably have the bus almost to yourself. Free if you are a child, UT student/faculty/staff, or city of Austin employee. Half price if you are a senior. Have I sold you?

The SSA produces a ton of information about the financial future of these programs, if you want to wade through it: https://www.ssa.gov/oact/pubs.html The short answer is that people are living too long and there are not enough workers for each retired person, so more funding or reduced benefits is in our future.

Tip for visiting Bandelier: The early bird gets to park. And hike in the shade. We heard parking was tight and we called ahead to ask. The person on the phone said to get there by 10:15 or risk not being able to get in until late afternoon. She said the shuttle wasn't running because they could not hire enough drivers to make it work. So we left Santa Fe just after 7am and got there just before 8am. You can pre-pay and pre-print parking passes before you go, but you need to know your license plate number. We bought a pass online and printed it out at our hotel. The visitor's center opens at 9am, but you can enter the park anytime after dawn. There is also a machine at the entrance that prints parking passes, but we didn't try it since we already had a pass. Our reward was plenty of parking in their tiny parking lot and a cool, shaded morning hike with plenty of solitude. All of the good stuff is in shade in the morning and we only saw two other hikers while doing the main loop. We got back to the parking lot around 9:30 and saw crowds headed out for the hike. We saw the last parking spaces fill up and there was a line to get in the park when we drove out. So if you go, arrive early. Mid-week crowds may be less intense than weekend crowds, but parking is a problem. Also, check the times and dates for every museum or restaurant that you know you plan to do. They all have different hours and are closed on different days of the week.

Watson has had five months to begin to repair the city after eight years of Cabo Steve. It’s going to take a while.

Social Security is insurance against being old and being poor at the same time. Think of it like that… The plan can be stabilized by some combo of raising the benefit age, taxing benefits for wealthier recipients, or raising the social security wage base. Medicare funding is probably a bigger issue.

There is a bill pending in the lege to require a second vote on Project Connect this November. The idea is that when Austin voted for Project Connect, we voted for a revenue stream for the project but we did not vote to give Austin Transit Partnership the authority to borrow money. If the bill becomes law, Austin will have a second election to authorize ATP to borrow money to construct the rail system. If that election fails, then it will be difficult or impossible for ATP to assemble enough money to build the rail system. If that happens, ATP will still be receiving tax money but will be unlikely to be able to build a rail system with what they collect.

There are two BRT projects in Project Connect, so it's easy to compare costs: Expo Center BRT line, 12 miles, 23 stations, total cost $35.62 million. Austin taxpayers split the cost with the feds, about $17.8 million each Pleasant Valley BRT line, 14 miles, 19 stations, total cost $36.56 million. Austin taxpayers again split the cost with the feds, about $18.28 million each That Expo Center line is pretty sweet if you live in Mueller. Goes right through campus and then downtown. Both BRT lines are fully electric. They are expected to combine for about 9000 "linked trips" per day now and 18,000 linked trips by 2040. About two-thirds of the projected rail ridership for a total taxpayer commitment of $35 million. Both lines are going to be operational by 2025. A similar line to run from the airport to campus down Riverside might cost the same, figure $17 million from you the taxpayer and the rest from the feds. Versus $5 billion for rail for the same route, except rail doesn't get you to the airport. The system might also be cheaper to operate, since we would have a lot of BRT in town and drivers could be swapped from route to route, rather than having some trained to run rail cars and some trained to drive BRT. Rail at grade really makes no sense when BRT is an option, IMHO.

There is no way in hell they are getting to 28,500 daily riders. Houston's Red Line is probably the best light rail line in Texas right now. It has 25 stops over 13 miles and runs through a dense area of town including a huge medical center. Houston is getting 34,000 weekday riders per day on the Red Line and under 20,000 riders per day on weekends. This proposed Austin line is 15 stations over 9.8 miles, including such gems as Yellow Jacket and Faro. The density along the route is nothing compared to Houston. How many people are going to walk through an HEB parking lot so that they can stand at a station in the middle of Riverside and Pleasant Valley? Most of the campus students are walking east/west and won't ride the rail on weekdays. I think they get 10,000 riders per day, and might be lucky to get 15,000. That would be more than Houston's other two rail lines, the Green and Purple lines, which offer 19 stops over about 10 miles.

If you missed it in theaters, it's now streaming on Amazon Prime. I really enjoyed it. Some cheesy callbacks to the original but a better story that the original, IMHO. Fantastic flight scenes. Tom Cruise owns and flys the P-51 flown in the movie. If it's your movie and your aircraft, why not?

The Lege is considering a $16 billion property tax relief bill. I was curious to calculate how much each teacher in Texas would get, if they just said screw property tax relief and let the teachers split the cash. There are about 344,000 teachers in Texas, so in my magical world, each teacher would get an extra $46,500. That would put them about where we pay Austin police officers. It is too bad that we can't just try that for a few years -- try to have a better educational system by paying people more to stay. See what happens. See who decides to be a teacher and stick with it. We are great at building high school indoor practice facilities for football because folks like to win football games. It just seems crazy not to fund the rest of it.

Prepared to be locked into the house you own .... if you own .... this plus higher mortgage rates means moving will become more difficult.

Fox News asked the question "What if we turned the national political scene into a pro-wrestling show, with good guys and bad guys, ignored the actual news, and aimed it right at the lizard brains of older Americans? Could we make money?" The answers was yes. How they made that much money selling pillows is beyond me. Other people noticed that Fox was making a lot of money doing this, but the liberal market was there for the taking. MSNBC was born. Truthier than Fox, but it was a clone aimed at folks who hated Fox. CNN then noticed that while they had built a worldwide empire to cover legitimate news, their audience had dwindled to just people waiting to catch a flight. So they pivoted. And now they suck too. All three mostly cover DC as a soap opera, interrupted only by wall to wall coverage of a soap-opera like trial. They are not news networks. CNN used to be the standard, but truthful, boring news can't keep the eyeballs.

The book appears to have a bookmark in it, some scrap paper. There is also some kind of sticker on the lower left side or the cover that makes it look like a library book. Someone checked a book out of the library and marked a page, and someone else has 30 mins to find the book, find the page, and record something about the page.

San Marcos ISD wants to spend $500,000 over three years. They have seven elementary schools. That's about $24,000 per school per year. Alternatively, they could give raises to their elementary teachers, or spend it all on an extra teacher for each of their two junior highs ($83,000 per school per year) or blow it all on an awesome teacher for their one high school ($167,000 per year). Or give six seniors a full ride freshman year scholarship to Texas or Texas A&M, housing included. Nice to know that San Marcos has the extra cash to blow on this kind of stuff.

The plan was for the first stage to have a "hard landing" in the ocean, probably in the Gulf of Mexico, and for the second stage to go mostly around the Earth and come down near Hawaii, also in the ocean.