Texas Jeff

1968? I think I'm wrong ... HH had a lot of delegates but did not win primaries.

I’ve seen tents between the railroad tracks and Mopac around Austin High. I also tried walking the shoal creek path from downtown to House Park and the smell under the bridges made me just go walk on the streets. Saw a few folks camping right near shoal creek. So they’re there, but mostly hidden unless you go look.

This is the plan. A few years ago the R's rebranded the Democratic Party as the Democrat Party. They mostly got away with that, as it's now OK for R's to use that term. The new plan is for the R's to rebrand them as the Socialist Democrat Party and say that over and over until it's OK to just say that all the time. The D's are going to have to defend NOT being the Socialist Democrat Party even though they never called themselves that. Some folks will vote R just based on hearing the Socialist Democrat moniker over and over. It will sink in.

On 538's primary model, "nobody wins a majority of delegates" just passed Sanders. Highest probability so far of a contested convention.

Well we may not need a 2020 thread in Travis Co. The Statesman is reporting that the Travis chief appraiser told some local school districts that the appraiser will not be re-appraising residential properties for 2020. Evidently TCAD is not allowed access to MLS data, but somehow they were deriving the data from other sources and the Austin Board of Realtors sent them a cease and desist order to stop doing that. TCAD says they can't do their job without this data (which, in theory, they are not supposed to have?) so they don't plan to reappraise residential properties this year. Seems like that is kinda their job. So, if you live in Travis County your appraised value from 2019 may be your appraised value for 2020. Will your taxes still go up? Of course! If you were limited last year by the 10% per year cap, your taxable value will rise even if your appraised value does not. Also, I think the new SB2 caps on tax (2.5% for schools and 3.5% for county and city -- I think) apply to tax revenue and not to tax rates. If true, this means that everyone except the school district can probably just crank up the tax rate to account for not having higher appraised values, to hit the maximum revenue values allowed under law. And they will. The school district tax works a little bit differently. I'm not sure if Austin ISD is currently maxed out on tax rate or if there is a little room left to crank it up.

It's Dr. Pepper, isn't it? Take it at 10, 2 and 4 for a week, you're good to go....

There are 428 Americans on the cruise ship docked in Japan. If I was Trump, I would send a military ship to get those folks off that boat. There has to be some US military base in the area where they could quarantine those folks and get them better care than being stuck on a cruise ship.

We are all one tiny little test away from having a pre-existing condition. You go to the doctor, say hey what's up with this? Doc orders a test. You're fine but hey look we found this little thing... Now you have a pre-existing condition and good luck getting insurance. Lots of folks are walking around today with pre-existing conditions that are undiscovered. And, when the condition is discovered, they will want treatment that covers it even though they have been paying less into the system for years. Many of them have been getting a great deal on insurance for years because their condition was not known. A younger me would have agreed with you, just pay for coverage for yourself depending on your situation. I'm older now and I've seen enough surprises among friends and family to know that there are always issues lurking about, waiting to be discovered. And you can't perfectly predict who will be affected or when it will happen.

The bottom 50% have very little, this from the CBO report on family wealth:

This should be obvious, but good software costs a lot more than $63k even for a simple app.

Smaht Pahk, now available on a Hyundai near you:

Here are some halftime show highlights with some interviews with those involved. The production designer talked to Prince before the show and said "Prince, it's raining". Prince replied "I know ... can you make it rain harder?"

This is a great idea. Think about our current single car commuter situation like this -- we are probably using 25% of the available seats to move people up and down Mopac. The other 75% of the seats are mostly empty. If there was an economic incentive to fill those seats, we could dramatically reduce traffic tomorrow without spending a dime.

There are subways in the US that have been built for just under one billion per mile. NY's 2nd Ave Subway costs $2.6 billion per mile. The proposed Austin tunnel is, I think, around $2 billion for the 1.6 mile tunnel portion carrying either bus rapid transit or light rail. Downtown to the domain is maybe 9 miles, so the cost might project to be in the $10 billion range based on other US systems. The Waller Creek tunnel project was originally projected to cost $25 million but actually cost $160 million, so you should add buffer to any cost estimate to get the real eventual cost. An alternative to a downtown to domain subway would be to run really frequent buses in the Mopac express lanes (think 3-4 downtown stops and maybe 2-3 stops in the Domain, service every five minutes). You don't get subway stops along Burnet but you do move people between those areas. You could also relocate Mopac freight rail and run trains along that corridor, from the Domain to about where Trader Joe's is downtown. That would cost billions but probably a lot less than $10 billion. Also, you can ride the Red Line today from the Domain area to downtown today. $3.50 for a 30 minute trip, $100/month for a pass. The taxpayer is going to chip in another $25 each time you get on that train.

They are voting on amendments to what I think are the rules for the trial. Amendments like should they subpoena various documents from the White House, State dept, etc. R's are voting no, D's are voting yes. So, R's have it

Hard to believe they were on the same frequencies or even using the same equipment. The SAM guys were probably not tuned in to local air traffic control.

I watched the joint city council / Cap Metro meeting, you can too if interested.. Some takeaways: They are talking about ridership in "capacity", not number of expected riders. So the capacity of the LRT system is around 300,000 riders per day but who knows how many actual people will ride. A bus system gets you to about 260,000 riders per day capacity but rail adds maybe another 40,000 per day in capacity. The current Red Line was originally forecast to have 17,000 riders per day by 2025, but they are currently running around 1300-3200 daily boardings, depending on time of year. There was a discussion about the length of a train and how a tunnel allows you to have a longer train, and thus more capacity. That makes sense. It was unclear if they were talking about running longer trains throughout the entire system or just the benefit of trains during the tunnel section. It's hard to imagine cars mixing with a six-car LRT train on north Lamar. CM Alter asked for a basic price tag for a typical Austin household, if we paid for this through taxes. No one was able or willing to give her a ballpark number. Either they are early in the process so they don't know or they do know are are unwilling to say. It's hard to believe they have gotten this far without calculating how much additional tax they would need to ask for. The plan has changed a bit from last year. Last year had an "orange line" on Lamar, a "brown line" on S. Congress, and a "blue line" from the airport to highland mall. The orange and brown lines have been combined into just an orange line, and the blue line seems to no longer go towards highland mall. They talked about having two new bridges over the river (one near S. 1st and one between S. Congress and IH-35, roughly aligned with Trinity St). It seems like the blue line is now going to come down Riverside, go to the convention center, go crosstown in the tunnel, and then go north following the same path as the orange line. There was some discussion that the blue and orange lines would double up on the north part, meaning service would be twice as frequent. Other maps showed the blue line going both crosstown through the tunnel and north, roughly up Trinity to campus. I"m not sure how the blue line goes both ways. The orange line would go north on S. Congress, cross the river by city hall, go into the tunnel and go north under Guadalupe, then to the surface somewhere maybe north of campus and then follow Lamar north. There was also some talk of a gold line to highland mall, maybe this is also the blue line or maybe not. The maps and station placement and tunnel location/entrances seemed still kinda vague but there was the core idea of a southern route on Congress, an eastern Riverside route to the airport, and a northern route up Guadalupe and Lamar. With a tunnel in downtown. I would be interested in seeing specific station locations and judging if development near the stations is likely, and if taxes on those developments could pay for this system. This is being sold as a "system" meaning that people will be able to ride the bus to rail or park at a park and ride and get on the rail from there. Personally, I don't see many people waiting for a bus, riding that to rail, getting on rail, riding that to their destination. People will do a park and ride or buy a nice condo next to the rail station. I was interested in how fast the LRT or BRT system would be, like how long would it take to get from the Triangle to the airport, for example, but I didn't see any discussion about speed. They are putting a lot of pressure on the Guadalupe corridor, meaning the performance of busses and rail in this corridor is going to determine the capacity of a large part of the Cap Metro system. Hence the desire for a tunnel.

Is the ridership increase number of daily customers or number of annual trips? Or something else? As a frequent Cap Metro rider, would you rather see costs stay about the same and maybe get more frequent bus service (like 5 minutes between busses) or pay possibly a much higher fare and ride a train rather than a bus? Today I think it costs Cap Metro about $6 in subsidies to put a person on a bus and $25 to put the same person on rail.

The answer is murky and probably somewhere in the 12th and 20th amendments. Normally the new Congress is seated on January 3rd and the electoral college meeting is on January 6th, so the new Congress decides. Since 1936 it has been the new congress, but before that it was the old congress. Imagine the shitshow if there is a tie, the electors meet, and a "faithless elector" votes for Kermit the Frog, thus throwing the election to the other side.

Cap Metro gets around 7% of their revenues from passengers, split about 1/3 each from fareboxes, from sales of passes, and payments from UT. The rest of their revenue comes mostly from sales tax, federal and state grants, freight revenue, and so on. Their ridership could drop to zero and they'd still have enough money to operate the system almost as is. No one is elected to the Cap Metro board, they are either people who were elected to other positions or appointed to the board. Those of you that voted for Delia Garza, Pio Renteria, or Ann Kitchen for Austin city council -- did you consider how they'd do on Cap Metro's board when you elected them? Are they doing a good job as Cap Metro board members? In the early 1990's, Cap Metro reduced fares to zero for a while. Ridership rose 75%, including a lot of "problem riders" that drove away "quality riders". I actually rode Cap Metro to campus during this time and the Duval bus was pretty much a rolling homeless camp. Cap Metro stopped the program because transit drivers were having trouble dealing with the "problem riders" and the increased ridership was causing too much wear and tear on the busses. They'll take and spend whatever money you give them, but they do not have much incentive to design an efficient system. We have plenty of examples of rail in Dallas and Houston, and our Waller Creek tunnel project here in Austin, to see what might happen.

Cap Metro runs 66 busses through my neighborhood every day to pick up 100 people. That's not efficient. Cap Metro has no incentive to make it better. The city has effectively weaponized Cap Metro. They can put a high frequency bus route anywhere in the city, then designate the bus line as an area needing density, then up zone the neighborhood. Developers will then build expensive yet profitable townhomes in the new zone and the new residents of the townhomes will drive their Teslas to work. It costs taxpayers $25 for each person-trip on the Red Line. That's $1000 per month per Red Line commuter ($50 per day round trip x 20 days a month). What is the price going to be per user for this system? I voted for the Red Line and I've been really disappointed that the city has not done more to develop the open land along the route into a real transit solution.

I took my young kids to campus to see Obama drive by, the time he spoke at Gregory. We found a spot standing on a curb on 21st street, across from the San Jacinto dorm. This policeman was forcing everyone to stand way back from the road. About 10 seconds before the motorcade came by, he looked at my kids and told them to come stand by the curb and told me I could stand behind them if I wanted to. Thanks to the cop, we had awesome views of the vehicles flying by and I had about the same view of Obama that that picture shows. Obama had a big briefing binder open and was obviously reading something. He went by and I thanked the cop for letting us get up front, and I thought, man the president just never gets a break. He's got to be on 24/7. And then we elected this guy...

Well, the 30 companies in the DJIA are worth about $6.6 trillion. The largest 500 companies are worth about $25.6 trillion. So those 30 companies are a big fraction of the market. The original idea behind the DJIA was to look at the biggest companies and see how they were doing and project that out to the entire market. Back before we had calculators this easy measure was nice to have. Add up the stock price of 12 big companies and divide by 12. But today the DJIA is still the number you see on the news the most. It's flawed because it is not based on market cap, just on the stock price for each company.

Yesterday, I set out to discover exactly how the DJIA is calculated. Turns out that it is pretty simple; it actually is an average. They take 30 stocks, add up the price of all of the stocks, and divide by a "Dow divisor". The value of the divisor is determined by the Wall Street Journal. It's actually less than one, which means that the sum of all of the stock prices is actually multiplied by about seven to get the number you see. So, the Dow changes if the company stock prices go up or down ... or if the folks at the WSJ decide to adjust the Dow divisor. They are suppose to adjust the divisor to account for stock splits, dividends and other events that affect stock prices, but I couldn't figure out who or what exactly goes into this. If the WSJ folks fail to take something into account, for example stock buybacks, the DJIA could rise or fall even though a company's value did not change. Consider two Dow stocks, Boeing and Pfizer. Boeing has the top price in the Dow today, around $330. Pfizer is dead last around $40. So a drop in Boeing of around $40 would do the same damage to the DJIA that Pfizer would do if it dropped to zero. But Pfizer's market cap is actually higher than Boeing. A $40 drop in Boeing would destroy about $22 billion in wealth, but a $40 drop in Pfizer would wipe out $220 billion. It seems crazy to base a well known index on stock prices rather than market cap. The top six Dow companies by price (Boeing, Apple, UnitedHealth, Goldman Sachs, Home Depot and McDonalds) combine for more than a third of the value of the DJIA. The bottom six (Intel, Coca-Cola, Walgreens, Dow Chemical, Cisco and Pfizer) have less combined influence than either Boeing or Apple do alone.

The NY Times is reporting that the plane stopped transmitting their transponder signal between 20-30 seconds before it was hit, and that the Russian Tor missile system treats the absence of a valid code as an indication that the target is a threat.