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Texas Jeff

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Everything posted by Texas Jeff

  1. Everyone please vote. It may not matter, but vote anyway. I doubt anyone reading this fails to vote. It may not matter because our system favors one party for two and half branches of government. The senate is split 50/50 but Democratic senators represent more people than Republican senators. The system allows the president to win while losing the popular election. The president appoints justices and the Senate confirms them, creating justices that are not at the center of our population. Shenanigans in the Senate, plus RBG's attempt to outlive the Trump administration, have led us to the point where the Supreme Court has views that are out of step with the majority of the population. More voting in large blue states isn't going to help that. If Texas can become a swing state ... maybe that helps. A controlling minority can move us forward as a society, even if the majority disagree. The minority can also crap all over the majority. Right now they're crapping.
  2. I think we are in for the weirdest housing bubble of my life. Rates were low, housing shot up, lots of people with unrealized gains that they thought would be tax-free income with a chance for more. The more house you bought, the more you could make. Now rates are up and those same people could never afford to now buy they house they just bought. Demand will sink and prices will fall. Maybe not a crash, but enough to wipe out some equity for a while. People will be stuck in their current homes. They may make enough to pay the 2.5% mortgage on their million dollar home but not enough to sell it at a 100k loss and move into a 700K home with a 6% mortgage. Those folks are going to sit tight. We may get into a situation where there still are not a lot of homes on the market because not many can afford to move.
  3. So that UT can control the cost of housing for kids once they move out of the dorm. I have a kid living at 2400 Nueces right now, an apartment owned by UT. It’s not super fancy but I know that UT is going to lease to students and they are going to charge less than the free market would. Eventually the private dorms and the folks that build the tall buildings are going to figure out that they can rent places or sell condos to 20 somethings that want to be around younger folks but have six figure salaries and work downtown. The train is going to make the commute from west campus really easy for those folks.
  4. No more cars on the Drag ... the plan is trains and buses only between the former Dirty's location and the MLK/Drag intersection. I think they plan to route car traffic down Nueces, which will become a two way street. I saw a drawing which had the tunnel entrance right around Dobie, which means you'll be able to get on a train on the Drag and take tunnels all the way to South Congress. That's pretty cool if you are a pedestrian at the Co-op and you want to suddenly travel to South Congress. Most students are just walking from West Campus to campus and back. Car travel north/south on the remaining open streets will be pretty brutal, which I think is the main idea. UT should be buying up everything they can in west campus and building student housing. I think that entire area is going to gentrify like crazy with folks that work downtown but want to live near campus. Students are going to be pushed out.
  5. Send in Willie.
  6. They are replacing all of the water pipes in my neighborhood. Our current pipes were installed in the late 1940s and they would break 2-3 times per year, pouring water into the street. My neighbor had designed water catching containers with pumps to redirect the water into his yard during these events. It's just taking forever to do it. They've been planning this for at least three years and the streets will need to be resurfaced after they finish. The breaks and leaks were so bad that I'm a little worried for the trees after they fix the problem. It will be nice to no longer have crews digging up yards at midnight to stop a leak.
  7. Here is what I think I know of this as an AISD parent -- please confirm with your counselor: Austin ISD class rank is a function of best grades in core classes. Electives do not matter for class rank. The core classes are English/Language Arts, Math, Science, and Social Studies plus two years of languages other than English. I used to think it was top four in every core subject, but this document says it's four English/Math/Science, three for Social Studies, two for languages other than English . As an example, let's make up some math grades for a kid and assume the top four grades count: Algebra 1 (Honors): 91 - weighted class - 8th grade Geometry (Regular): 95 - non-weighted - 9th grade Algebra 2: (Honors): 93 - weighted - 10th grade Pre-calc: (Honors): 87 - weighted - 11th grade Calculus AB (Honors): 90 - weighted - 12th grade What is the lowest grade on that board? It's Geometry ... the non-weighted class. The other classes get a 10 point bump. Grades get converted to a 4.0 scale (5.0 scale for honors), so those grades look like this for class rank purposes: Algebra 1 (Honors): 4.1 - weighted class - 8th grade Geometry (Regular): 3.5 - non-weighted - 9th grade Algebra 2: (Honors): 4.3 - weighted - 10th grade Pre-calc: (Honors): 3.7 - weighted - 11th grade Calculus AB (Honors): 4.0 - weighted - 12th grade In this example, the first four grades would be used to calculate the math portion at the end of the 11th grade. In the 12th grade, that Calculus score replaces the Geometry score. Class rank for college admissions (Texas top ten percent, for example), is determined at the end of the junior year. So this kid would have received a GPA bump during their senior year -- which might have mattered for final class rank -- but not for top 10% rankings for college purposes. Electives don't matter for calculating the class rank GPA, but they are included in the overall GPA. There are also weighted and unweighted electives. You can take an elective pass/fail, but only if it is NOT needed for graduation credit. You need a certain number of electives to graduate, so you have to take some as numeric grades. You can take the others pass/fail if you wish. A weighted elective where your kid is going to receive a high grade is going to help your overall GPA quite a bit. If your kid is making really high grades, a non-weighted non-pass/fail course can reduce their overall GPA, but it won't matter for class rankings.
  8. A full lunar eclipse is happening tonight, starting in about an hour. It will be partial for a while before full. This is a "blood red" eclipse. Skies are clear in Texas, just look up if you want to check it out. Try to sell your Aggie friends on the special sunglasses they'll need to protect their eyes from the moonlight.
  9. The amount the school district collects in property tax is completely disconnected from the amount they get to keep ... sort of. Part of the collected taxes are "golden pennies" (about 8 cents) that the school district gets to keep, and these help pay teachers. Part of the tax is the "interest and sinking" fund (about 12 cents), which pays off AISD debt from school bonds. The rest of the tax, about 80 cents next year, is covered by Robin Hood. The property tax collected is simply the tax base times the tax rate. It has nothing to do with how many students are in the district. The money allocated for students is simply a state-provided formula times the amount of students in the district. It has nothing to do with how much property tax was collected. Change that formula and you can change Robin Hood. The amount of recapture AISD pays is just the first number minus the second number. If more money was collected than the state says AISD should keep, all of the excess goes to the state. If less money was collected, the state provides the rest. I don't fully understand why AISD does not lower the tax rate to the lowest possible number they can get away with, but the math works out to screw the district if they tried this. There are some complicated guardrails and formulas that ensure that property rich districts can't just lower their rates to the amount they would get from the state. Nothing in the funding formula addresses cost-of-living, which is obviously higher in Austin than elsewhere.
  10. Step 1: Collect $1.18 million from all of us. Rent goes up by a little bit for everyone. Step 2: Give about $150k of that to a non-profit from California to administer the program. Similar to the amount we give Jimmy Flannigan every year. Step 3: Give the rest to about 80 families who can't afford to live in Austin at about $1000 per month for a year. Step 4: (A year from now) Stop the money train .... or renew the program for another million bucks for those 80 families. It's a universal basic income program but only for 80 families. Everyone else, including those that are struggling to make ends meet, pays into the system. After a year, the support is taken away and the folks receiving the money will be in the same unaffordable position they are in now. The city is fighting economics, picking some random winners that they can say they helped and costing the rest of us just a little bit. It's not a scalable program.
  11. My wife’s AISD classroom topped out at 91 degrees in mid Sept. The district did nothing for a month, then brought in a refrigerator truck in mid Oct and fed it to the building with a giant tube. The next morning it was a cool 56 degrees in the classroom. They were able to open some windows to get it back into the mid 60s, and they used the windows as a quasi thermostat until the truck went away in December. The HVAC was declared repaired and life was ok … until a few weeks ago. Hot times are back and look to be here until the school year is over. That’s the condition of AISD schools.
  12. Needs more vuvuzela...
  13. SNL takes us back to 13th century England, to show us what it might have been like when some of Alito's quoted precedent was decided:
  14. My wife is a teacher and Amazon gift cards are the easiest thing to use. Especially for her, since she just gives them to me and tells me to figure it out. The other gift cards are in a drawer and some are nice and some are to places we would never go, so we give those to parents and friends. We got a Cabo Bob's gift card this year after my wife mentioned it in class, which was pretty thoughtful since some kid was paying attention and remembered. Notes are the best ... although for teachers struggling with low pay perhaps gift cards and cash would be the best. The best note talks about what the kid liked about the class and what impact the class has had on the kid. We have a giant folder full of past notes. Most of the notes are basically nice and talk about what a great class it was. But occasionally we get a two or three pager from a kid who pours it out and talks about how the class changed their life and those are never thrown away.
  15. eclipse simulator by location: https://eclipse2024.org/eclipse-simulator/2024/index.html Pick the place where you think you'll be and you can see what it's going to be like. You have to use the time sliders on the sim to get to the good part. Turn on the glare to get a more realistic picture of what you will see without eclipse glasses. The glasses will cut out most of the glare. It won't get as dark as the simulation shows, more of a twilight feel.
  16. Moving that 400 yds will give you a few seconds of totality, which wouldn't be enough for me. It's better than the 99.9999% thing, which will be kind of a cool event but after it is over you'll be thinking what was the big deal... This is a relatively long eclipse and probably the best one to visit Texas in our lifetimes. IMHO you want to be somewhere towards the middle of the track to get the most time in totality. You don't have to be right in the middle but you want to get 3 or more minutes to check it out. Somewhere between a year and six months out, stock up on "eclipse sunglasses" or welders glass or whatever makes you feel safe. If you buy too early, the material will degrade. If you wait too late, glasses will sell out. If you stick with the 99.99999% plan, you'll need eye protection to see anything.
  17. No need to speculate about what will happen in Texas. Here's the text of the Texas trigger law, which will go into effect 30 days after this decision is handed down: https://capitol.texas.gov/tlodocs/87R/billtext/pdf/HB01280F.pdf Abortion in Texas will be prohibited, unless a physician judges that the health of the mother is at stake.
  18. What is your favorite way to enjoy a football game? Sit inside the stadium and watch the game. Hang out right outside the stadium and figure out how it's going by listening to crowd noise. If you are "inside the stadium" person, you are going to want to have at least some time at 100%. Prior to 100%, you mostly see a crescent sun through protective glasses or a pinhole camera. Shadows look weird. At 100%, you have some amount of time to take off your glasses and look right at it. The closer you are to the middle of the ground track, the longer you have to look. At the one I saw, I would have been really pissed off to be at the 99% mark and never got to see the real deal. A rogue cloud can screw up the entire thing at the last minute, but you have to take your chances.
  19. This map lets you zoom in to any spot and determine when it starts and stops, and how long the sun will be gone: http://xjubier.free.fr/en/site_pages/solar_eclipses/TSE_2024_GoogleMapFull.html If you are bothered by things like goalposts not lining up with letters, you really want to be on the middle blue line or it's going to drive you crazy.
  20. Prepare for biblical traffic jams starting five minutes after it is over. I saw the last one in Georgia, had four hours to make my flight out of ATL, made it by five minutes. Without Waze I might still be there…
  21. Imagine the sun, but it’s black with a ring of light around it. The horizon looks like late evening, but all around, not just in one direction.
  22. Totally agree…. Lots of folks are working for the insurance. Decouple insurance from work and make the cost reasonable. You’ll see older folks making room for younger ones and more people starting small companies because they don’t need the health coverage.
  23. the appraisal can go up or down by whatever. If you have homestead exemption, they will only raise the amount of the appraised value that you are taxed on by 10% per year. For example, if your house was worth $100,000 last year, they can raise the appraised value to $200,000 or higher. But you will only pay taxes on $110,000 this year, then around $121,000 next year, and so on. Without the exemption you take the full hit.
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