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We’reTexas

Certifiably Surly
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About We’reTexas

  • Birthday 01/02/1989

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  1. Yes, Smith Rock is great (maybe too hot right now?). My AllTrails notes are not great but we liked Green Lakes and Tumalo Falls hikes.
  2. Bend Brewing is classic. I like Crux Fermentation Brewpub. Brook Closet is a cool tiny bar in the McMenamin’s Hotel.
  3. A few years ago we were heading to the Coliseum to see the Astros in town. Stopped at West Oakland Station and a very sketchy Richard Ramirez doppleganger walked on and tried to open the back door of the train. Old guy next to him noped the fuck out and I realized he had a gun tucked in his pants. Grabbed my very pregnant wife and made it off just before the doors closed. One of my regular bartenders likes to say that he doesn’t know how he is going to die, but he does know it will be on BART.
  4. Interesting. Oakland* had their Jason Williams-like DA controversy but with a successful recall, the new DA is a former prosecutor. *(Yes I know Alameda County)
  5. I’d say we are down to a 2019 sketch level.
  6. I will say, since several visitors have mentioned this to me, that the sketchy areas adjacent to Union Square and Moscone are night and day from what they were a few years ago. Yes it’s a performative push by the new mayor /no CR, but downtown is finally beginning to get some real momentum going.
  7. But with whistle tips.
  8. Sorry, it was a joke. We drive over to Temescal all the time.
  9. The airport area is legit bad but Oakland gets an unfair rap. It’s been over two years since they last found a body in the lake!
  10. That’s a very good point I concede - I come across a Republican on the ballot once every four years so I don’t think of the overarching goal as simply ensuring MAGA is not in office. But what I was really getting at by digging into housing - affordability being the issue underlying everything in blue states these days - is that scarcity politics is bad policy and not necessary. I would like us to be the party of results! Zohran discussed on Derek Thompson’s podcast how wrong it is that “efficiency” and “ROI” have become right-wing coded - totally agree with him that we should reclaim that. ?
  11. That’s interesting - why? I say this from the perspective of a Texpat in San Francisco (a market sometimes more expensive than NY, despite the assertions of some). Not to get too in the weeds on housing policy, but Mamdani’s platform consists of (1) doubling down on rent control, perhaps the most widely panned economic policy besides tariffs, (2) fully subsidized BMR housing (that’s going at around $1.3m per 1k sq ft unit in SF and DC - I’d assume NYC is the same and they need 1 million units in the next decade. The math doesn’t math.) and (3) allowing market rate development only to the extent it is weighed down by interest group concessions to the point it isn’t economically feasible. My apologies, that was still too much in the weeds, but the upshot is that the progressive approach has a very low likelihood of success because it is simply not realistic regardless of any level of support. More fundamentally, it is not designed to succeed because it is based on a politics of scarcity that favors incumbent residents at the expense of future ones, which is a fair summation of blue city progressive politics overall. I don’t think this scarcity mindset is necessary, so I vote against it. To his credit, Zohran is a very positive guy who, unlike most DSA types, tries to avoid the zero sum class warfare game when it comes to affordability.
  12. Thank you for the negs. My criticism of Mondami has nothing to do with New York City specifically. I live in a city equally as expensive and have been involved in housing advocacy for a decade. As we are both from Houston, I find your hostility confusing. Might you explain how the housing economics of NYC does not comport with the rest of America?
  13. What I am trying to explain is that both approaches are so utterly divorced from reality that they deserve ridicule.
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