Jump to content

Texas Jeff

Legacy Members
  • Posts

    1371
  • Joined

  • Last visited

Everything posted by Texas Jeff

  1. Depends on the grocery stores staying open and stocked, utilities still up and running, and people having reasonable access to care if they need it. If we still have that, everyone not needed to run critical stuff is probably OK at home for a while.
  2. No way they cut taxes and benefits. Any payroll tax cut will just be a cut, they would be crazy to touch benefits. It just means the "trust fund", aka T-bills the social security admin owns, will run out sooner and screw someone around 2035.
  3. Drs. Fauci and Redfield talked to Congress today, lots of good info from Fauci. I had never heard of Fauci before this crisis but he seems to be the most trustworthy and apolitical person we have working on this. https://www.c-span.org/video/?470224-1/federal-health-officials-testify-coronavirus-outbreak-response
  4. That graph shows infections going up roughly an order of magnitude every ten days. South Korea bent the curve right around where the USA will be in seven days. This next week is critical. We need to slow it down. But, if it is going to grow by an order of magnitude every ten days and we assume 60% of us will get it, then it will look like this: March 11th, around 1000 cases March 21st, around 10,000 cases March 31st, around 100,000 cases April 10th, around 1,000,000 cases April 20th, around 10,000,000 cases April 30th, around 100,000,000 cases If the growth rate continues, somewhere between the end of April and mid-May we will have "peak corona" in the US, where the virus runs out of new targets. Most of the cases will be infected in mid-late April and recover sometime in May. After that we can turn the machines on again and resume consuming mass quantities... It's hard to believe the growth rate will continue at that pace. Most of the people I meet have stopped shaking hands and stopped sitting close together. Social distancing will have an effect, the question is how much and will it be soon enough to help the health system manage the strain.
  5. A cut in Social Security or Medicare taxes withheld from paychecks. Basically a reduction in revenue for the feds that normally funds Social Security and Medicare. Benefits are unlikely to be cut, so either the govt would take on more debt or the date at which these programs run out of funding would come in.
  6. Venus and the Moon are pretty close together in the evening sky right now. Check it out...
  7. CNBC is broadcasting live from the stock exchange ... where evidently they had a musical performance scheduled for after the close. The music sounds like someone screaming over and over...
  8. Sanders was born three months before Pearl Harbor. He'll be 79 at the inauguration. If you look at the social security tables, he'll have on average just under 9 years to live. Reasonable odds of making it through one term but maybe not two. Trump is younger but with his diet, weight and stressful job he is a cardiac case waiting to happen.
  9. 1968? I think I'm wrong ... HH had a lot of delegates but did not win primaries.
  10. 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.
  11. 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.
  12. On 538's primary model, "nobody wins a majority of delegates" just passed Sanders. Highest probability so far of a contested convention.
  13. 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.
  14. It's Dr. Pepper, isn't it? Take it at 10, 2 and 4 for a week, you're good to go....
  15. 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.
  16. 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.
  17. The bottom 50% have very little, this from the CBO report on family wealth:
  18. This should be obvious, but good software costs a lot more than $63k even for a simple app.
  19. Smaht Pahk, now available on a Hyundai near you:
  20. 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?"
  21. 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.
  22. 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.
  23. 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
  24. 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.
×
×
  • Create New...