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Texas Jeff

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  1. Also Burnet Rd, Lamar Blvd, the Bouldin Creek neighborhood, Barton Springs and other things that have names that might have been associated with someone who may have owned slaves or been involved with the confederacy. Here's the powerpoint presentation from the equity office: http://www.austintexas.gov/edims/pio/document.cfm?id=302508 How do you distinguish between someone in the past who did something wrong and thus should not be recognized by having something named after them, and someone who followed the customs of the day that are wrong by today's standards? Do you draw the line at everyone who owned slaves at a time when that was legal and a common source of labor for land owners, or do you draw the line at people who demonstrably abused people during that time?
  2. Are you old? Are you Republican? Are you old and Republican? If so you will really fit in. The "town" itself has a nice yet small one-street downtown just west of 281. It is surrounded by a lot of housing that is pretty poor. Meadowlakes is the exception close to town. Horseshoe Bay is really not "in" Marble Falls, it is a resort community on the south side of the lake. You can also live out from town a bit on a bigger lot maybe with a view, out 1431 or 281. There are traffic bottlenecks at 1431/281 and through downtown, but they're not anything close to Austin traffic.
  3. “Thai Hard” starring Bruce Willis as a cop on vacation in Thailand who accidentally ends up leading a soccer team into a cave ... which is flooded by terrorists as a distraction so that they can steal bank notes hidden in the back of the cave. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
  4. I think it is an amenities floor (the 34th floor of the building): http://www.independentaustin.com/the-building/ A fitness center, board room, theatre, outdoor lounge, owners lounge ... for residents only.
  5. Parking in the garage was $5 I think for the regionals. The worst part was getting out after the game, but the garage is a very short walk and folks are tailgating in left field and in the garage. You can also be entertained by watching about 60 people trying to sort out who's uber is who's. If you want free parking or want to leave quickly after the game, yep street parking is probably the way to go.
  6. SirusXM's online schedule says it will be on channel 84 (ESPNU). They have 12 hours of play-by-play scheduled for super regional games, noon to midnight.
  7. stubhub has tickets starting at $93 and rising over $100 in the grandstand. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
  8. One more thing regarding the Austin City Council ... the council may be denying the citizens their right of petition, a right defined in the city charter. You may remember the Uber/Lyft kerfuffle of 2016. City council passed an ordinance requiring fingerprinting of ride sharing drivers and Uber and Lyft left town. Two petitions were submitted, one to remove the ordinance and one to remove Ann Kitchens. One petition was ruled invalid and one went to the ballot, with some confusing language and a drumbeat against corporate control of Austin. Neither petition actually changed anything. Now, there is a petition to put CodeNext on the ballot, sort of. The petition calls for citizens to have the right to vote on CodeNext, up or down, at a future election. City council has the option of adopting the petition or putting it on the ballot. According to the city charter, they only have these two options. The council has chosen a third option, which is to declare that the petition proposes illegal action and thus an election should not be held. They voted 6-4 to not put this petition on the ballot (Troxclair was absent) in what was probably a proxy vote for how they will vote on adopting CodeNext. This, in my opinion, is absolutely wrong. This is the third time since 2016 that citizens have tried to initiate change and the third failure for that initiative to have an effect. It is OK for something to lose at the ballot box and OK for the city clerk to invalidate petitions that are wrong. A petition that is voted in could contain an illegal provision and could be challenged in court. But confusing ballots and invalidating on technicalities and saying that you think it might be illegal eventually add up to an indifference to the will of the citizens.
  9. I would say the first step is to stop calling each other assholes. CodeNext has winners and losers and people are fighting for their best interests. The people who mostly do not live in the affected neighborhoods want it passed. Developers want it passed because they can buy an older house in central Austin, knock it down, and build 2-4 small houses on that lot and sell them at downtown condo level prices and make money. Affordable housing advocates like it because they have studies that say that these smaller houses will be less expensive, or they are trying to get language into CodeNext so that developers would be required to build some cheaper units along with the more expensive ones. People that want to live central in a smaller home but currently can't afford what is on the market (think young single folks or a couple without kids) are in favor of it because they want to live central. The people who mostly do live in the affected neighborhoods do not want it passed. They moved into the neighborhood because they liked it, some a long time ago, and they do not want the family house next to them replaced with 2-4 houses with 4-10 adults living on the property. The new code requires only one parking space per unit and it's likely that this new form of living would put more cars on the street. Existing residents do not the area in front of their houses turned into perpetual parking by their neighbors. There are concerns that doing this will increase the cost of land for those that choose not to redevelop their lots, which may mean higher property taxes. Many of the existing residents worked on neighborhood plans at the urging of the city just a few years ago and they want the neighborhood plans enforced. If you tried this in any neighborhood in the region, you would get push-back from the people already living there and support from those that will profit from the change. In my opinion, the people that want this change did not work at all with the people affected by the change to see what they would support. Both sides are now entrenched. The process of creating the maps was not transparent and did not involve the people living in the affected areas. Many people felt that some unseen committee was redrawing their neighborhood without their consent. If I was in charge, I would stop the current proposal and see if we can create more communities like the West Campus overlay. Find areas of town that would welcome high rise density and then densify the heck out of that. The Domain area development could be redeveloped into a West Campus like neighborhood all the way from Mopac to Metric, with existing rail service. The Dell campus area around Parmer and IH-35 is about the size of downtown and it could be redeveloped into a high density area, with bus service to connect it to downtown. Most of the Robinson Ranch area is undeveloped and it already has a rail line running through it, it could be a "ribbon" shaped downtown with 3-4 frequent rail stops connecting West Campus like neighborhoods. Highland Mall is being redeveloped on the same rail line and the Texas DPS owns a large property nearby that could be a mid-rise or high-rise neighborhood, with bus service on Lamar and a short walk to rail service. I think we should focus on development like West Campus and downtown, and not try to disrupt our single family neighborhoods. We can create dense, connected neighborhoods without CodeNext. But doing that has different winners and losers than CodeNext, so you will find people opposed to my ideas. They are not assholes, just people with an interest in the outcome.
  10. In the midterms, the Dems will probably take the House but not the Senate and Congress will look like the last two years of the Clinton administration. Constant calls to impeach, constant hearings, constant revelations but never votes in the Senate to convict. Lots of dramatic TV and 24 hour coverage. Nothing will get done for two years. Nixon resigned under pressure; Trump will never give in. I think he's healthy enough to make it to the next election and he'll stay to the end of his term, then leave and complain forever that he got screwed but in spite of that he was the best president ever and did so much in four years. He will constantly be seeking attention for the rest of his life. He may lose in the primaries to a more moderate Republican challenger, someone like Kasich. If not, he will lose to whatever Democrat is on the ticket in 2020. I always thought that the 2016 winner would set their party up for big losses and a pendulum swing in 2020 and I still think that will happen. His last day on the job will be January 20, 2021. He may not come to the inauguration, might just skip it and call in to Fox News later that day. Trump can change his fate if he is seen as a big part of actually ending the Korean War, the economy stays hot through 2020, Mueller turns out to have not much directly on Trump, or some combination of that.
  11. I looked up the last few elections to see how popular vote led to number of house seats: Votes received for each major party for a US Representative, seats controlled by that party as a result of the election: 2016: Rep: 49.1%, Dem: 48.0% (R +1.1%), result is a Republican house 241-194 seats (55.4% R) 2014: Rep: 51.2%, Dem 45.5% (R +5.7%), result is a Republican house 247-188 seats (56.7% R) 2012: Rep: 47.6%, Dem 48.8% (D +0.8%), result is a Republican house 234-201 seats (53.7% R) 2010: Rep: 51.7%, Dem 44.9% (R +6.8%), result is a Republican house 242-193 seats (55.6% R) 2008: Rep: 42.6%, Dem 53.2% (D +10.6%), result is a Democratic house 257-178 seats (59.1% D) 2006: Rep: 44.3%, Dem 52.3% (D +8.0%), result is a Democratic house 233-202 seats (53.5% D) Strange that Congress is never closer than about 30 seats even though two elections have been within about 1%. The Dems held about the advantage they should have had in 2006, then were overweighted in 2008. Since 2010, the Reps have always held more seats than their national percentage and the percentage of seats has not varied more than 3%, even though the election results have varied by 7.6%. The R's in the house from 2010-2016 seem entrenched, regardless of the national vote totals. And, in response to the poster, the D's have not recently won more than 55% of the vote ... if they did that would be a landslide election.
  12. Take the survey at that link. Takes five minutes to say this is a dumb idea. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
  13. He had sex with a porn star soon after his wife gave birth! oh wait.... Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
  14. Well, we have a new central library that is free for all to use. Come downtown, stay all day if you wish... if you park your car there over 12 hours you'll pay $30 to get it out of the garage.The library has a 37 foot clock that looks like local birds. The clock does not actually tell you the time. It just looks like a clock. Not actually a clock. You can sit down a read a book if you can handle the creak creak creak creak sound of the Escher-like stairs that fill the lobby. Or ... you can drive over to Book People , eight blocks from the library, park for free and buy a book for less than a day's work of parking at the library. When the library opened, I asked how you could sign up to use the big room downstairs, it's really nice. The woman in charge said I could sign up now for a rental fee of something like $1200 for a few hours. I said "hey, this is supposed to be a free library" and she said "well, City of Austin departments and other non-profits can rent it for half-price!". So, we built a library for all to use, and the city can rent it from themselves for half price! Great, a nice meeting space for CoA groups that is mostly not affordable for outsiders. I know I'm nit-picking a particular project but in a town that talks about affordability, the new library seems to have the absolute best of everything, built at taxpayer expense and appears to have been built at maximum cost on a really valuable piece of land. it is made more difficult to access by charging for parking. I voted for the library when it was on the ballot, but after seeing the cost of what was included in the building and paying for parking at "our" library, I am hesitant to vote for similar projects in the future.
  15. Tiny warning for that job .... my kids never watch TV in hotels, they want the wifi password and that's enough for them. I've stopped watching TV on the road other than maybe the morning news when I travel for business. You may eventually find yourself selling something else...
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