Football ...
Basketball ...
Baseball ...
Other Sports ...
Futbol ...
🤫995🤫 ...
Gambling ...
Movies & TV ...
Music ...
Hobbies ...
Lulz ...
Food & Travel
...
Daily Texan ...
Business & Markets ...
Cloak Room ...
Help ...
For Sale ...
Board Discussion ...
Advertise...
Tailgate Donations

Texas Jeff
Legacy Members-
Posts
1299 -
Joined
-
Last visited
Content Type
Profiles
Forums
Store
Downloads
Recruiting - 2020
2019-2020 Football Season
Football
Entertainment
Sports
News and Business
Cloak Room
Transfer Portal
Recruiting
Events
Everything posted by Texas Jeff
-
not real: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/bondi-springsteen-trump-boss/
-
Just got back from DC -- some thoughts for others: You probably don't need a DC Metro pass. Get an electronic SmarTrip card for your phone and add money as needed. Tapping my phone to pay was great. The monuments at night are awesome. Much better than doing them during the day. You can stand in the spot on the Lincoln Memorial where MLK gave the "I have a dream" speech, it's marked. We got timed entry passes for the National Archives when they opened. First pass was at 10:15. You can get in line early. There is a little exhibit when you first get in. If you are one of the first, bypass that and head for the rotunda. We were one of the very first people of the day to see the founding docs and we got a good five minutes to check them out before the hordes caught up to us. You can check out the docs online at the National Archives before you go and it will be easier to spot stuff. Visit your congress person and ask for House and Senate passes. We emailed them and told them we were coming, and they offered to walk us over for a tour. We had booked at Capitol tour for 2pm, but we got there earlier and the person that walked us over got us on an earlier tour. Getting to the House and Senate galleries is a pain, even with the passes. We got to the Senate during a vote and saw about 50 senators walk in and give a Roman thumbs up or down on a vote, which was very cool. We were able to get both House and Senate passes from our rep, which saved me a trip to the Senate side -- but you might ask them before if they have both. You need timed entry passes to the Air and Space Museum. About half of the museum is closed for renovation. Still worth going. We did the American History and Natural History museums right when they opened. Perhaps that was a mistake, because we were there with hundreds of school kids. The school tours flamed out around noon and the crowds seemed to lessen as the day went on. If I had to do it again I would visit in mid-afternoon rather than right at the open. American History was great. All of the computers from my childhood are now in the museum. Natural History was not as great, but the Gems and Minerals section was really cool. The National Museum of the American Indian had the best museum food and coolest building. We went there because we heard the cafe was better than the other choices, and that was true, but we stayed and did the museum too. At a minimum, consider it for lunch if you are choosing a museum cafe. At Ford's Theatre, we had to choose between a tour with a talk and a walk-through tour. We picked the walk-through only, but I feel we missed out by not picking a tour with a talk. We got an unofficial talk because we sat down next to a school group and the group's teacher did about 20 minutes for her class on the events of Lincoln's assassination. It was her time to shine. She had the entire place sitting quietly listening to her. The Southwest terminal at DCA is like the old Robert Mueller airport. It's a dump ... but it was a long walk, a bus shuttle, and then a short Metro ride into town.
-
I just got back from a week in DC and rode the Metro everywhere I went. I would not have ridden it if it did not go to the airport and required me to wait in the middle of Pennsylvania Avenue in the rain. We have the same problem here with the heat. Also, DCA was built either by a crazy person or by a committee. Here's my non-negotiables for an Austin transit system: The initial system should connect: * the airport * the convention center * downtown and the capitol complex * Guad/The Drag/West Campus * DKR/UT PAC/Moody/Disch Falk -- a stop near where the UT police station is today * something near the long center * branch out from there once you have the basics covered All stations should be protected from the climate. Either go underground like the DC Metro/BART/Seattle Link or go up with the gondola idea. No one should have to wait in the heat standing in the middle of car traffic. No one should have to wait at a station for more than 10 minutes before they can start their trip. Maybe a little longer at the ends of the system but the core system should be every 5 minutes or better. People should feel safe riding the system. The cars and the stations should be clean and in good repair. Fares should be affordable to all. All stations outside of the core stations above should be located in an area that is willing to accept tall buildings with office/retail/housing, at least in the 1/4 mile around the station. Domain, you're in. Circle C, you're out. These neighborhoods should be required to reserve the ground floor for retail. West Campus, you're tall but your ground floor retail sucks. These neighborhoods need some reasonably priced parking garages mixed in with the tall buildings, at least for the next 25 years. Maybe you live in Brentwood but you can drive and park in a dense new neighborhood where the DPS property now is and park and ride from there. Eventually Waymo is going to get you that last mile. The system should be designed like DC's Metro and BART, where lines come in from the burbs and then double up in the central core, so that trains run very frequently in the central city. Project Connect's original proposal did much of this, but Project Connect as it is today is not going to accomplish this. They dangled pretty pictures of downtown tunnels and folks getting on the system at the airport in front of voters, and folks bought in. Then they bait and switched down to a system that is going to end up like San Jose's VTA. We should re-vote, and if people still want the proposed system at the proposed tax cost, then we should do it. Otherwise we should think again. We have a Red Line that costs about $50 in tax dollars per ride. A pathetic tiny two car train every 30 minutes. The same crew that brought you that is going to bring you an underutilized train system. Is Cap Metro being introspective at all on the value of providing this service at this price? Or willing to change? No they are not. They just keep plugging ahead with Plan A even at a tremendous cost to the taxpayer.
-
Also, Hamilton warned us about this, but he used big words that are hard for us to understand: An avaricious man, who might happen to fill the office, looking forward to a time when he must at all events yield up the emoluments he enjoyed, would feel a propensity, not easy to be resisted by such a man, to make the best use of the opportunity he enjoyed while it lasted, and might not scruple to have recourse to the most corrupt expedients to make the harvest as abundant as it was transitory; though the same man, probably, with a different prospect before him, might content himself with the regular perquisites of his situation, and might even be unwilling to risk the consequences of an abuse of his opportunities. His avarice might be a guard upon his avarice. Add to this that the same man might be vain or ambitious, as well as avaricious. And if he could expect to prolong his honors by his good conduct, he might hesitate to sacrifice his appetite for them to his appetite for gain. But with the prospect before him of approaching an inevitable annihilation, his avarice would be likely to get the victory over his caution, his vanity, or his ambition.
-
Trump's gift makes no sense except as a way for a foreign government to buy influence over him. A summary: The Air Force already is under contract to buy two 747-8 aircraft. They were built around 2015 and have been undergoing modifications to make the Air Force One's since 2020. This process is evidently taking a long time because everyone who works on the modification has to have a high security clearance. The new delivery date is one plane in 2027, one n 2028, which admittedly is a long time to modify a plane. The new plane would either have to be modified to met the AF1 spec or not. This modifications, as we have learned, take a long time. Trump can't just step on the plane and call it AF1. Or ... he can and just ignore the security requirements of the nation. So either he takes the gift and flys in a luxurious new plane that was literally designed for royalty, but gives up everything AF1 is supposed to do other than basic transportation. Or he sends the plane in for retrofitting and he'll get it back around 2032. Or he takes the gift, updates the livery to his personal preference, flys in it a few times to make it "his" AF1 like a game-worn jersey, then parks it until he is out of office and now he has a free jet fit for a king. Somehow merely having a personal yet aging 747 that will go wherever in the world you want to go, when you want to go, followed by cargo planes with your limo and helicopters, fully stocked with the McDonald's menu, is not enough for the man.
-
Entered service in 1990 and there are two of them.
-
My theory: Trump does not buy stuff. Most of our leaders don't. If they want a hamburger they ask an aide and a hamburger appears. Trump does know what he thinks his net worth is, and higher is better. So, to Trump, having more money is the goal since he does nothing to get the stuff he actually uses. Rounds of golf, transportation on a private 747, food, clothing, shelter. He gets what he wants not by trading money for goods, but by asking someone else to make them appear. If the person fails to make the goods appear, they are fired, which he enjoys doing, and he has a person that will make a new person appear who will attempt to make the goods he wants appear. And if they don't, he will fire them too, which he enjoys doing. Along with many of our leaders, he is disconnected from the experience of the average American.
-
Can they hit?
-
Look at the example of Mendez MS here in Austin. Before COVID, they had an enrollment around 600-650 across three grades. And they did poorly on the STAAR. They were failing like Burnet/Webb/Dobie but a few years earlier. Austin ISD partnered with T-STEM Texas and then Third Future, who now runs the school as a charter. Teacher compensation is higher than other AISD schools. Enrollment has sunk to around 200 students in two grades. They have plans to expand back to 6-8. But, the school's academic rating has risen from an F to a B. The Third Future school has tests scores going up ... but are they rising because of what the charter operator is doing or have they simply moved kids that would struggle in their model to different schools? Why are so many kids that live in that zone choosing another school? The school has a capacity of 1,229. Even with a 6th grade expansion, the school will be 900 kids short of full. Long term, it's not efficient to have a bunch of middle schools with 300 kids and a bunch with three or four times as many.
-
They are going with a restart approach, with a charter safety valve. The schools are going to be restarted over the summer, with new administration. They are going to use something like the ACE model (Accelerating Campus Excellence). This will be their fifth year of possible F's in a row and they need a D to pause closure and a C to clear it for five years. They are going to test the students at the middle of the year and see how it is going. If it is not going well, they are going to seek an 1882 partnership with a charter school provider so that they can avoid getting the fifth F. They have to initiate this change by mid-Dec if needed, so the students have very little time to show progress in the fall. The ACE model does include hefty stipends, so it will cost an additional $1.7 million per year, per school, to implement. The district already has a deficit over $100 million per year. At their current spending rate, they will begin to violate their board policy of having 20% of costs in reserve this summer and will have no reserves by the summer of 2026. They have a lot of schools that are 1-2 years behind these three in getting their fifth F in a row, so they may have additional schools in the same situation by the 2026-27 school year.
-
Conclave 2025: All of the Smoke, None of the Brisket
Texas Jeff replied to GopherRock's topic in Daily Texan
Father Guido Sarducci chimes in with his thoughts and analysis: -
I've been paying attention to the last few Austin ISD bonds and various other bonds, and I can say that funding for sports improvements generally tops the list, followed by funding for fine arts. There is also a lot of money in there for basic maintenance and AISD is way behind in just maintaining what they've got. During the 2022 bond process, the team was divided into groups like athletics, fine arts, transportation, and academics. Everyone had nebulous goals except for athletics, and they had super specific goals like 18 scoreboards, 50 basketball goals, etc. The Hays bonds passed, which is great for them, and they include money for artificial turf at all middle schools and money for an outdoor covered sports "pavilion" at all high schools. A pavilion is an artificial turf field covered by a shade structure, like an indoor practice facility but without the walls. It's shaded but not air conditioned. Sports and fine arts spending, middle school to high school. They are also building a brand new high school. The Dripping Springs bonds passed, which is great for them, and they include a brand new high school. If you look at the plans for the school, you can see how much of the footprint of a modern high school is used for sports and fine arts. They have an "academic wing" and "CTE space" for the basics, and add to it baseball, softball, football/soccer that will someday be a stadium, two football/soccer/band turf practice fields, a band practice pad, (which is an overflow parking lot for the stadium used mostly by the band), competition and practice gyms, tennis courts and a performing arts center. The DS school is very typical of a new build high school. The academic footprint is small and sports/fine arts takes up a ton of space on the campus. Lake Travis is building one with even more amenities. Del Valle is building one. Hays is building one and they just built M&G Johnson which is similar. Austin ISD has not spent as much on sports and fine arts over the years, and I think the lack of spending has contributed to their decline. Surrounding districts did it and their campuses are much more attractive. Families get a cheaper house and better buildings. I wish it were more attractive to lead with academic spending, but I don't think it is.
-
I planted some new oaks a few years ago and used a tree gator to get them through the first few seasons. wrap it around the tree, fill, wait ... fill, wait ... fill, wait ... eventually the tree is OK without extra water.
-
It's hard to imagine higher costs than paying $7 billion for 10 miles of surface track that duplicate existing bus lines, connecting 15 stations, of which two are Travis Heights and Yellow Jacket and will yield almost no daily riders. Very few people are going to want to go wait in the median of a street for a train in mid-July. IMHO build what you can of a subway and start to create a ribbon of density through the city. We only have a few north/south streets as it is and almost no east/west. Our local leadership has no vision. The Red Line has been open for 15 years and it is attracting 1800 rides per day, which means about 900 people. Is anyone talking about shutting it down because it is just sucking transit dollars for little value? No way ... it's now pitched as prime soccer parking. The Red Line goes through undeveloped land that could be dense, transit-oriented, double tracked, exactly what the transit folks want. But there is no vision. The two Austin traffic -related positive changes since the 1980s are COVID/WFH and Waymo. WFH is on the decline but Waymo is growing. Waymo isn't going to get rid of cars but it is going to reduce parked cars and lead to fewer accidents. Waymo is going to eventually take the CapMetro market everywhere except for the few core lines in the heart of the city that have reasonable ridership.
-
Sounds like from the meeting that no students from Dobie, Webb, or Burnet are now being considered to move to Lamar, Murchison or elsewhere. The admin presented two plans, one involves a campus restart with a possible charter school option, and the other involves going directly to the charter school option. They don't have to choose the same plan for all three campuses.
-
Waterline is now Austin's tallest tower. At completion it will be the tallest building in Texas at 1022 ft. This is the big ass building under construction south of the convention center, near Rainey St.
-
Honestly pair it with an additional $500 million per year spending in school infrastructure and a promise to get rid of the sticks in the road and I'm all in... I know that the school and the city are different taxing authorities with different budgets but I would totally vote for that.
-
I am fine building safe reasonable housing with food, medical care and support. Anyone that is in that situation that wants a path out of it should have a path. Anyone who is not mentally with us should have a path to get help. It's harder to decide how to help folks that have given up and that is their lifestyle. I feel that Austin is trying to go it alone without support from the state or support from surrounding communities. The ask seems to get bigger every year. I don't see progress. The current ask is about $100 million per year to support about 6000 homeless. That is over $16,000 per year per person and it is more than we spend on education per child in this community. Our suburbs and state need to chip in.
-
Austin Transit Partnership issued a timeline last year that has trains running as early as 2033. I predict they won't get money from the Trump admin. There was never an unlimited pile of money for transit and Austin is competing with everyone else in the country for slices. Seems like the Feds are cutting stuff so I would suspect there will be a big reveal where ATP says that they are not getting a federal match for the train, so we are going to have to scale back the scale back ... or increase the tax going to ATP and pay for it ourselves. San Antonio got a transit project 60% funded but it's bus rapid transit, not rail, and it's an order of magnitude cheaper.
-
Liiving through the last 10 years or so, it seems to me that the more we spend on homelessness: 1. The more homeless we seem to have here in Austin ... when they count it seems to go up. 2. The fewer homeless I see anywhere else in the region ... nice for them because their spending on homeless can go to zero. 3. The more entrenched "homeless spending" becomes in Austin ... meaning more and more orgs and salaries are dependent on homeless spending. 4. The more homeless I see, particularly on streets around the rapid bus line routes. The Mobile Loaves and Fishes guy seems to have a plan to help. Everything else seems, just from what I see, to be creating a homeless industry. I don't see our tax dollars creating solutions to problems, but I may not be looking hard enough.
-
Well they are selling the old Rosedale campus and the closed Brooke Elementary site to the highest bidder, to raise cash that they can then immediately burn through on their way to zero. No district benefits to be had. They are doing something like what you describe at the old Anita Coy facility. I wasn't in favor of the change in zoning, but I will say it has advantages that Austin ISD could use it in their favor. They could buy properties close to their schools and redevelop them as 2-3 houses per lot. Then be the landlord to their teachers and staff. I *think* that would remove the properties from the tax base, so they wouldn't pay taxes on the property, which might make it even cheaper. The district could build a bunch of similar properties close to many schools and provide some teachers with a walkable commute and cheaper housing. They could give them a little less in pay because of this benefit, and spread out the savings to others.
-
I believe a district is limited to 50 cents of tax rate towards I&S. That does not tell you how much in bonds that will finance, because interest rates vary. So, a district can take its tax base, and each year raise up to 50 cents for each $100 in the tax base. They can use that money to pay the interest and principal on bonds. Austin ISD is currently around 12-13 cents in I&S, so they have a lot of room to raise more if they wished.
-
About school finance, you always have to remember that there are two buckets of money. One bucket, maintenance and operations or M&O, is subject to recapture and goes towards daily expenses like school supplies and paying teachers. The other one, interest and sinking or I&S, goes towards paying off debt created by bonds. Bonds are issued to build stuff like school buildings and football stadiums and I&S money pays them off, like a mortgage. So any time you talk about a vote or a tax rate change, you need to understand which bucket you are talking about to understand recapture. Last year, Austin ISD held a tax rate election so that they could add "copper pennies" to the tax rate. This was for the M&O bucket. This was NOT a bond. Nothing will be built using the money. Since it was subject to recapture, 75% of the copper penny money was going to go to the state. This was not a surprise to anyone. The district taxed you $170 million per year so that they could raise $40 million per year, but that gave them $40 million to spend per year. They spent about half on teacher raises and about half on other stuff. $130 million per year went to recapture, which went to the state, which went to the general fund, which is not required to be spent on education. Austin ISD is maxed out on their M&O tax rate, their "golden pennies" (money they get to keep without recapture) and their "copper pennies" (money they get to keep after recapture). They have a $110 million budget deficit and they are going to run out of money in about 15 months if they do not reduce spending. In 2017 and 2022, Austin ISD held a bond election so that they could renovate and replace buildings throughout the district. These WERE bond elections. The money was not subject to recapture. About 13 cents of your tax rate goes towards paying off these projects. The bulk of the 2022 projects are in the 'eastern crescent' of Austin, which includes many of the schools that now have an "F" rating ... and could be closed in the next few years.
-
It is both accurate and IMHO a bit misleading. It is accurate in that it shows the A and F rated schools in Austin, and it clearly states that in the label on the bottom. And, we know that TEA's rating system is biased so that wealthy areas are likely to get an A or a B and poorer areas are likely to get a D or an F. The division the picture shows probably extends beyond the ISD boundaries and probably exists in every city in Texas. Rich areas get the A's. Poor areas get the F's. It is misleading in that it omits schools that made a B-D score, so that it looks like Austin only has A and F schools. In Austin ISD: * 30 schools got an F * 19 schools got a D (and I will let you guess where most of them are) * 12 schools got a C (a group that includes Travis, Crockett and Akins, southside HS's are doing pretty well for their demographic) * 28 schools got a B (and I will let you guess where most of them are, but also point out Mendez MS as a southeast in-district charter with horrible demographics got a B) * 24 schools got an A So 54 dots are shown on the map, but 59 are not. The picture makes it look like the district is perfectly split between A and F. It's true that there is a split in Austin, but that same split likely occurs in other cities because of the way demographics factors into TEA scores, and the picture does not show any schools with moderate grades, which represents over half of the schools in the district.
-
I was curious about eco-dis population vs TEA score, so I created this for Austin ISD from the TEA data. The TEA translates the score to A-F grades just like you remember from school, 90-100 is an A, 80-89 is a B, 70-79 is a C, 60-69 is a D, below 60 is an F. Five F's in a row means the school closes and/or TEA can take over the school district, and a school needs a C to break the chain of F's. What is TEA really measuring here? Seems like they are locking low eco-dis schools into an A/B score and locking high eco-dis schools into B-F with a chance of closure. This would be OK if they were using this data to try to help the bottom dots, but they are using it to close schools, force chaos with school mergers and take over school districts.
Football ... Basketball ... Baseball ... Other Sports ... Futbol ... 🤫995🤫 ... Gambling ... Movies & TV ... Music ... Hobbies ... Lulz ... Food & Travel ... Daily Texan ... Business and Markets ... Cloak Room ... Help ... For Sale ... Board Discussion ... Subscribe!... Donate!... COOKIE MONSTER!