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Texas Jeff

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Everything posted by Texas Jeff

  1. They are required to send these kids to a school that has either an A or B grade on the state scores, and neither Webb nor Burnet score that high.
  2. I am a buyer on the secondary market and I don't get it. Seatgeek tickets tonight below the concourse level are about $100-$140. Tickets above that are $70-$100. Uncovered seats down the line are $50-$80. Ok great, demand is high, should be a packed house... But ... last night I paid for reasonable tickets in the 100's, looking down the line, and there were four empty seats next to me the entire game. I could see groups of 6-8 unoccupied seats all over the place. Who is eating these tickets and why aren't they putting them on the resale market?
  3. Public school funding is based on WADA ... or Weighted Average Daily Attendance. They get money based on a student butt in a seat on a given day. The basic allotment is based on the kid's butt being in the seat 100% of the days the school is open. Or ... on a school field trip or whatever. Being counted present for the day. So, if a kid lives in the Del Valle ISD but transfers to Austin ISD, Austin ISD gets the $6500 for that kid. If a kid lives in Austin ISD but is enrolled in Regents, a private school, Austin ISD gets $0 for that kid. The public school does not "keep" the allotment because the allotment was never made, because the private school kid is not enrolled in the district. If a kid lives in Austin ISD and attends Austin ISD, but the parents decide to pull the kid out of school for a week for a ski trip, the school gets $0 basic allotment funding for that kid for the days missed. The school still has expenses, lights, A/C, pay the teacher, pay the bus driver, provide the bus, they just don't have basic allotment funding for that kid for those days. If the Regents kid get a new school voucher, they have $10,000 they can spend at Regents. It does not affect Austin ISD's funding. Regents charges $21,000 per year in tuition. Regents can choose to discount tuition for that kid because they are bringing a $10,000 voucher to the school, or they can keep tuition right where it is and suddenly Regents has an additional $10,000. I have not heard of a WADA component for the vouchers, so it's possible that this is $10,000 per year, even if the kid misses school for a week.
  4. I showed this to my extended family at Christmas and laughed all the way through. And I was the only one. Turns out only I had seen the movie:
  5. Cap Metro spent $917,000 per electric bus in 2021 prices ... vs a diesel powered bus at $535,000. Now, some of the electric buses they got for that price had problems and are now in storage, but that's another story...
  6. Travis Co preliminary values now up for 2025 and in the mail... https://travis.prodigycad.com/property-search
  7. By October we are going to be waist-deep in soybeans.
  8. Trump took the time today to sign an EO entitled: "MAINTAINING ACCEPTABLE WATER PRESSURE IN SHOWERHEADS" which is all about reforming the definition of the word "showerhead". The man never stops working for America...
  9. What the hell is that butt-ugly yellow wildflower and how do we get rid of it?
  10. And another thing, right now everyone else is rooting for China to kick our ass. The Canadians, the Mexicans, the British, the sportos, the motorheads, geeks, sluts, bloods, wastoids, dweebies, dickheads, Greenland, the penguins on that tiny island ... they all want to see China stand up to us.
  11. All China has to do is ... do nothing. When your competition is tossing pick sixes and fumbling pitches into their own end zone, just take the points and kick another touchback and wait. Trump is a bully and he's doing bully things that have worked his entire life because so far everyone he's come up against has caved.
  12. The orange man has no plan...
  13. The nationwide protests are building, but they really need to be outside Mar-a-Lago and his golf courses on Saturdays and Sundays. Trump is pretty isolated from the world. He's in the White House most of Mon-Fri, then flys to Florida for weekend golf every Sat-Sun. His world is what he sees out of the Oval Office, the view from a helicopter, a Big Mac and Filet-o-Fish served onboard a 747, a limo ride, the patio at Mar-a-Lago, and weekends behind a golf cart. That's it. He's surrounded by yes-men and young blondes who love every suggestion he has. He needs to see the protests for them to be effective.
  14. What if "It's fun to stay at the Y.M.C.A." was simply foreshadowing?
  15. "I'm sorry Cory, the camera wasn't rolling ... could you go back and take it from the top? .... April Fools! .... ha ha ha we totally got you ... look at his face!"
  16. You are correct. If I were on the other side of the negotiating table I would do absolutely nothing. Accept the tariff and plan to sell a few fewer cars in the US. Watch Trump sweat as prices rise and people complain. Don't be the first to blink. Eventually Trump would cave to the domestic pressure to get rid of the tariffs. Americans like cheap stuff, new stuff, and stuff you can drive around. We're not taking the bus.
  17. *Only* female mayor. I think Austin has elected one Hispanic (Gus Garcia) and zero Black mayors. Austin, always a town for everybody.
  18. My theory: Waltz invited random cabinet members to the chat that he thought needed to be there. Some folks invite twenty people to a meeting when four would do. He thought, ok, this might be trade related so why not invite Jamieson Greer, who is the US Trade Representative in Trump's cabinet. So he invited "JG" to the chat, who was not JG the cabinet member but JG the editor of The Atlantic. Whoops.
  19. Bonds do not have a recapture component, unless there is some weird effect I've not heard about. Districts plan for bond packages, decide what they want to fund and how much they can afford to borrow, and if the voters approve then they start borrowing and building. The money stays in the district. There are two components of school property taxes: * Maintenance and Operation (M&O) -- this is the money that pays people and it is subject to recapture * Interest and Sinking (I&S) -- this is the money collected to pay off bonds issued by the district and it is not subject to recapture. I think the I&S portion is limited to 50 cents of property tax. Austin ISD is at 12.3 cents. Keller is at 33 cents. The M&O portion consists of a "regular" tax portion, plus optional golden pennies, plus optional copper pennies. The regular portion and the copper pennies are subject to recapture. The golden pennies are not. The maximum number of golden and copper pennies is set by the state.
  20. The four elementary schools being replaced were built in 1975, 1980, 1985 and 1987. Not young but not old. Austin's Bowie HS was built in 1987 and the current Austin High was built in 1975, about the same time span. Austin ISD, by comparison, is just now replacing Travis High School, which was built in 1952, leaving rodent-rich McCallum, also class of '52, as the oldest high school building in town. As part of that 2019 bond, Keller ISD built four indoor air-conditioned football practice facilities, one at each high school, for a cost of $48 million. By today's standards that is actually a pretty good price for that kind of building. I've been paying attention to the Austin ISD bonds since they started with the big bonds in 2017. Old elementary schools get completely replaced. At the middle and especially at the high school level, there is a lot of focus on improving athletic facilities and not as much focus on academic areas. This is not exclusive to Austin ISD, there is an athletics arms war going on all around the state.
  21. Trump gave Staubach the Medal of Freedom in 2018, along with Elvis Presley, Babe Ruth, Orrin Hatch, Alan Page and Antonin Scalia at the same ceremony. Miriam Adelson got it for donating $30 million to Trump's 2016 campaign, which seems like chump change by today's standards.
  22. A little more info on the Waymo accidents: https://www.damfirm.com/waymo-accident-statistics.html Waymo has indeed been in about 700 accidents from 2021-24, but 632 of the 700 accidents involved no injuries. Waymo was not at fault in many of these accidents. Only three involved serious injuries and there has been one fatality: * One in SF involved a Waymo stopped at light. Another car crossed a double yellow light and crashed into a SUV, which hit the stopped Waymo * One in LA involved a Waymo following a box truck. The Waymo had a driver. The Waymo was hit from behind by another passenger car. That car may have been changing lanes. * One in SF involved a Waymo stopped at a light, that proceeded into the intersection on green. A cross-traffic car ran the red light and crashed into the Waymo and another car. The red light car hit a total of two cars plus pedestrians. The fatality involved a Tesla in SF traveling at a reported 98 MPH that hit a Waymo, plus other vehicles. Everyone but the Tesla was stopped at an intersection. The Waymo was unoccupied at the time. The person killed was in a Lexus that was hit by the Tesla. The Tesla had a human driver at the time. Eventually self-driving cars are going to be much, much safer than humans, either Tesla or Waymo or whatever. We may already be there. Crashes and injuries and fatalities are going to go way, way down. DWI is going to go hopefully to zero. It can't get here fast enough, IMHO.
  23. Yes Waymo is more advanced. If you ask for an Uber in central Austin and you don't need to go on a highway, there is a chance you will get a Waymo as your driver. I used to think there would be two major driverless car companies five years from now, Waymo and Tesla. I now think it will be Waymo and someone to be named later.
  24. Here's a president hauling ass in an electric F-150:
  25. Tesla makes golf carts?
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