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bschoolprof

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  1. Give me your credit card number, your cvv, and your address, and I'll tell you if your credit card info has been leaked in a hack.
  2. I think they give you some extras, like in a lego kit.
  3. The director of weapons and barbarian produced it. Definitely has elements of his style. Surprisingly darkly funny.
  4. companion was entertaining. Bit of a genre bender.
  5. They've spent about $330 million on the professional and admin thus far, mostly out of the capital fund. Money well spent I'm sure. The light rail capital fund will have almost nothing in it by the end of 2025. The operating fund will have about 300 million for future spending in it at the end of the year.
  6. Prop A was not a bond package per se. It was a tax package, like prop Q this year. It was implied that construction bonds wold be issued and the tax would be used to help pay for the bond repayments.
  7. To answer this question, Prop A in 2020 raised property tax rates (sound familiar?) and committed 8.75 cents of the rate to a newly created Austin Transit Partnership. Currently, ATP pulls in about $150 million per year as revenue from this tax - it's by far the key source of revenue. What does ATP do with this money every year? You can review the budgets here. Some of it has been squirreled away in various reserve funds. This fiscal year, about $120 million will be spent on consultants, engineering reports, and admin. ATP has about 55 full time employees and spends about 200K per employee on personnel costs. We have no idea the ROI on these consulting and engineering reports, as well as other admin. I'll let your imagination fill in the blanks. ATP has issued no bonds. The entire funding structure is being litigated, costs have ballooned, and the feds are not going to kick in shit under this administration. TLDR, tax money is being collected, some reserved, much of it spent. Citizens have little to show for any of this.
  8. There is literally nothing to cut in this budget folks. No fat at all. We have to give council an extra $100 million a year or else we won't have a real, grown up city.
  9. that first play was football chess porn.
  10. thank god Taeffe is coming back next year since he's the solution apparently.
  11. More enshittening. The cable companies have basically died and we're still getting fucked. They weren't the problem.
  12. UTD feels like a college campus designed by Lumon from Severance. Not a great vibe imo. Great engineering and business schools though.
  13. Show your work. In 2015, the city spent $286 million on non safety from the general fund. In 2025, it's 634 million! What grown up goodies are we really getting for that extra 350 million? You don't think a reasonable person could find 30 million to trim there? Only Austin would consider a permanent tax increase to cover this. It's insanity.
  14. Yes. If non-safety spending increased at the rate of the "overpaid" cops, fire, and EMS over the last decade, we'd have a surplus, not a deficit. I went through the last 10 years of budgets on the city website. Non safety EMS has gone up by about 7-8% every year for a decade. There's a lot of fat there. Easily 30M. This whole charade is laughable, and shouldn't be partisan. And in what way did I imply that the city should spend money only on police and EMS?
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