Texas Jeff

Just watched the Apollo 11 documentary on Hulu. This was in IMAX theaters in 2019. The director, Todd Miller, took footage you've seen and stuff you haven't and created a movie that follows the Apollo 11 mission. There is no narrator, there are no interviews and there is not much explanation of what is going on, just 90 minutes of fantastic footage from the mission with audio from astronauts and mission control.

Solid pick. I thought he had to be over 60. Seems like he’s been ranting on public access TV since at least the 80s, but I guess not.

I would like to predict that traffic in Austin in 2029 will suck big time. This is not a difficult prediction to make... TxDot wants to redo IH-35 through downtown. The toll road people want to put in a "Mopac South" tollway. Cap Metro evidently wants to put in an Orange line and a Blue line complete with digging tunnels through downtown, so I've heard. UT is shutting down Red River. The density people want lots more folks in and near downtown. All of that construction will be late, over budget and maybe going on at the same time. For a while we'll have a lot more people downtown with maybe Lamar, 183 and SH-130 fully operational to move people north/south. Also, Airport Blvd will remain Airport Blvd even though the airport moved back in '99.

What are your predictions for the roaring 20's? Where will we be by the end of 2029? In tech, I think we are at the end of the iPhone boom and we'll see something else go big in the 20's, probably AI or robotics. Tech comes in waves. Lots of folks worked on the first personal computers in the 1970's, but they went mainstream in the 80's. People started to get on the web in the 1990s, but it started to take over around 2000 followed by the dot-com crash. Apple was working on pieces of the iPhone throughout the '00s and it was clear that phones were going to change things by the end of that decade, but we spent the '10s really maxing out what an iPhone could do. It's time for something else. I predict that by the end of 2029 we'll see artificial intelligence start to make some decisions for us (choose medication or diagnose an illness), and that AI will pass the Turing test (seem as intelligent as a human) by 2040. What other predictions do y'all have for the 2020s, in any field or subject?

I was lucky to live close enough to our elementary school to walk my kids to school almost every day. Great way to meet neighbors, check in with the teacher and get a morning walk. Almost everyone in our neighborhood did this. Then we all walked home, got in our cars, and drove to work, one person per car.

Just curious, what do the fees fund? Do they fund the jobs of those who collect the fees or does the money go to roads & such? I once spent a summer in Chicago while they were considering converting toll roads to automated toll booths. One of the big arguments against was the unemployment of those who sat in the booths and collected the tolls. Never mind the endless line of cars each trying to toss 40 cents into a bucket, creating a logjam on the Kennedy. If they are going to charge fees for registration, perhaps they should give the poor some annual funds to cover this kind of expense. Those who drive will use it on car registration, those who take the bus can use it for bus fare. I think we used to do this with welfare and we do have food programs today to give people help, but I'm not sure how much of basic daily needs those programs cover.

Should have just gone ahead and named it Starfleet ... If you join the Space Force you are geeky person in a branch of the Air Force but if you join Starfleet you are a geeky person ... in Starfleet.

Yep. They didn't want to put 10 things out there and then have one get knocked over, and then have the R's say "see, one was bad so the bunch must be bad too".

House members are starting to harumph a bit. What are the odds of someone yelling out "You lie!" before the end of the evening?

This is new ground ... the first time that the same party has controlled the White House and the Senate during an impeachment trial.

Don't take a nap in a swamp during a rebellion. The rebels know the area well and they will light you up.

Fun fact ... no president has been re-elected after impeachment. Of course, that's not a long list, only Johnson could have been re-elected. However, both Johnson and Clinton ended up with a family member in the Senate, post-presidency. Johnson ran for a Senate seat and won, becoming the only ex-president to serve in the Senate. Clinton never became a senator but Hillary did.

Over the weekend, C-SPAN had some old videos from the Clinton impeachment. I watched the House Judiciary committee debate and vote on one of the articles of impeachment. The civility of that proceeding was amazing compared to what we are watching today. The R's were in the majority but both sides were participating in the debate. Each side was focusing on making an argument rather than just being angry at the other side. Both sides had people saying "I recognize the point you are trying to make but here is where I disagree with you". The R's were focused on the conduct of the president. The D's were focused on not overturning the results of an election. Sound familiar? Today seems to be really different than that day. I'm not putting blame here on either side for this -- or rather I think I am blaming both sides, but these hearings are substantially more divided and angry than those from twenty years ago.

uhhh... enjoy a live football game without being barraged by advertising? Is that asking too much?

These committee roll call votes really show the lack of diversity on the Republican side. They go through all of the Democrats first, and you see a lot of different faces. Then on to the Republican side and it's pretty much central casting of the same dude, with a few women here and there.

Trump will be impeached. He will not be convicted. He will lose in 2020, both the popular vote and the electoral vote. He will claim that the loss was not his fault, that it was because of the media or the dems or rigged elections or something like that. He will take whatever claim is made against him and try to turn it around in his favor, for example he might claim that he lost because China interfered in our elections. He will then milk his post-presidency period for as much money as he can make of it. He will sell tickets for rubes to come to rallies, sell merch, sell meet and greets, continue to tweet and rant against other Americans to get attention, do reality TV and generally try to stay in the public eye by attacking others and promoting whatever theory will make him a buck. There is a slight chance that the Senate will tire of him and convict him so that they can run with Pence in 2020, but it's unlikely.

Sondland comes across as a big-picture CEO guy, not one to worry about details. He seems to be trying to tell the truth as he recalls it.

JFC ... in WWII we had to break Enigma to read Hitler's texts ... now our enemies just need a rogue employee at WhatsApp.

Off topic, but why are gov't officials using whatsapp for messaging? Might as well mail copies to security agencies worldwide.

or he could turn on Trump and say yep all of this is true.

Does anyone else follow the Buffett Indicator? It is a measure of the ratio of the total price of the stock market relative to the US gross national product. In theory, the higher the ratio the more overbought the market is, and the lower the ratio the more oversold it is. Right now this measure is around 146, and historically it's been tough for this measure to exceed the 146-148 range. If you follow that indicator, we would seem to be at a market peak. To lower the ratio the total stock market price needs to drop, or GDP needs to increase. I've been looking at this for about two years and expecting a market pullback that has not yet happened. Getting this number back to 100 would put the DJIA down around 19,000, if dow stocks sank along with the larger market. There is nothing magical about 100, but there have been times when this number was above 100 and under 100, so it's possible. After the dot-com recession, this metric bottomed out in the low 70's, and during the Great Recession the number fell as low as 57.

Yes, it would .... I misread the previous post to say that the market was cooling.

Loss or limit of the property tax deduction may be having an effect...

I think it was Mike "Mr Chairman" Conaway there at the end. Conaway also complained at the beginning of the second half that the witnesses had paper copies of the slides everyone was seeing so perhaps the witness was working together with the Dems on the committee and wanted to know if they were working together. Schiff replied that the witness's TV was broken so they gave her paper slides since she could not see the slides on TV like the committee could. Conspiracy averted...

It's like they have an overnight shift that panics much more easily than the evening team. The evening folks say, you know, we could call it now and let everyone know before alarm clocks are set and everyone could have a nice morning sleep, but it looks like the weather's OK. Then around 1am they hand it off to a group of overnight folks hyped up on too much coffee who freak out around 3 am and start pushing all of the buttons, causing us to get phone calls at 4am. Twice in my case, once per student to the same phone number. C'mon AISD, everyone loves a late start ... call it early for once.