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Posted
25 minutes ago, hornian said:

I've never understood why the "Save our Springs" people aren't more up in arms about this. All that trash goes directly into the waterways when it rains/floods. 

They use the "Save the Environment" cause as a guise to fight change they don't agree with.  It's 100% NIMBYism being concealed by environmentalism, thus attracting both sides of the aisle to prevent changes to Austin.  It's like they took one from the endangered species protection playbook that keeps many greenbelts undeveloped in the area.

Posted
6 hours ago, Deej said:

 

rosemary.jpg

Ol’ Rosemary tried to “friend” Mrs. Brat on FB, but failed to notice her account was inactive and had never been used after the first day of registration. She was three years behind my wife at Taylor High School back in the day.
(Mrs. Brat’s cousins talked her into signing up for FaceBook, but when she looked at what goes on there she said “I’m not gonna participate in that bullshit”)

I look at that inactive account about twice a year to see what Mrs. Brat’s cousins have tried to message her about and check the friend requests. She doesn’t log in at all. She prefers to talk to them on the telephone like a civilized person.

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Posted
5 hours ago, ChickenSandwich said:

It’s a grift

Austin will need nearly $101 million — about $33 million of which would come from partners — next year to adequately fund emergency shelters and support services for the city's homeless population, according to the city's homeless strategy officer.

 

https://www.kut.org/austin/2025-04-30/austin-tx-homeless-population-city-council-budget
 

we failed with hundred million. Gonna need another. 

Does the CoA allow any independent auditing of where all that $$$$ goes?

Posted
4 minutes ago, Armybrat said:

Ol’ Rosemary tried to “friend” Mrs. Brat on FB, but failed to notice her account was inactive and had never been used after the first day of registration. She was three years behind my wife at Taylor High School back in the day.
(Mrs. Brat’s cousins talked her into signing up for FaceBook, but when she looked at what goes on there she said “I’m not gonna participate in that bullshit”)

I look at that inactive account about twice a year to see what Mrs. Brat’s cousins have tried to message her about and check the friend requests. She doesn’t log in at all. She prefers to talk to them on the telephone like a civilized person.

Now, Mrs. Brat's activity on her Onlyfans page, however......

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Posted
4 hours ago, Eskimohorn said:


This is not a solution, its a necessary safety net. It’s a stop gap. The assholes come here for the tourists, temperate weather, drugs, and lax policing.

You want to see metrics and results from social services, when they root causes cannot be addressed very easily. Welcome to fantasyland.

Between this topic and AISD’s funding crisis, you’re seeing Austin scramble to make the best bad decisions with the cards they’ve been dealt.

Austin has been the dealer.

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Posted

So....something that sounded a whole lot like a low-flying fighter hauling ass just flew by downtown (just west of downtown, I think, I never got eyes on it).  Sounded F-16-ish -- bottom line, it was a jet, close and hauling ass.  Anyone know what it was?

Posted
Well, it kind of did....in the central city.  We can thank that broader movement for the fact that our roads and infrastructure suck shit through a straw and haven't changed very much in 30 years, for example.  And we can thank them for making sure no affordable housing gets built where it can actually help (you know....in the actual city).  Instead, all that Austin builds is $500k minimum one-bedroom apartments in downtown highrises.
Austin's death of affordability and ascent to the World Tech Douchebro Capital owes a giant debt of gratitude to the SOS crowd.
As does the explosive growth of the environs (Kyle, Buda, Dripping, RR, Hutto, Taylor, Manor, etc.)  Thanks, performative leftist NIMBYs!

Yeah, im not owning all SOS decisions, but gentrification and affordability are universal issues now in all cities worth a damn. If you can point out a major city that is doing it right, I’ll hang up and listen.

The globalization of the housing market and expansion of toxic tourism is really working hand-in-hand. Plus, the obsession with passive wealth. People want easy wins. They dont want to lease their property to families or young people and have to do stuff. And, frankly, I don’t blame them. It’s hard.

SOS and NIMBYs are also blamed for our lack of planning and infrastructure. I largely blame that on underrepresentation and underinvestment at the state and federal levels. The days of LBJ and Jake Pickle advocating for Austin and Texas are long gone. The opposite is true. They’ve been starving the “beast” for 40 years. Less spending per person on everything except border security and defense.
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Posted
11 minutes ago, Brisketexan said:

So....something that sounded a whole lot like a low-flying fighter hauling ass just flew by downtown (just west of downtown, I think, I never got eyes on it).  Sounded F-16-ish -- bottom line, it was a jet, close and hauling ass.  Anyone know what it was?

Three jets. Probably a test run for graduation later.

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Posted
1 hour ago, Larry T. Spider said:

There is a lot of anti-charter sentiment in the public education world. This is especially true in AISD where they have pulled students away and made the funding crisis much worse. 

My guess is the administration wants to be able to say they tried everything before going that route. It’s a political move as much as anything.

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.

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Posted
1 hour ago, Texas Jeff said:

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.

I think it's largely the same reshuffling of the deck chairs that AISD has been doing going back to at least the '80s with the bullshit busing they did then.  These same demographics struggled academically back when AISD was flush with cash, and they struggle today when AISD is broker than the Austin homeless population.  All the administration ever comes up with is shuffling kids around to meet testing metrics and never considers how to actually educate challenging student populations.  Administrators worry about their jobs first, the teachers second, and the kids dead last, if at all.  A complete rebuild of public education, starting with how it is funded and how central offices are staffed and operated, would have to be part of it, but that won't happen in this state until there is a massive overhaul of leadership at the state level. 

The public schools that perform well in this state do so because parents carry a huge chunk of the load.   Parents from the past have no clue how involved parenting is now, especially what is involved in making a school run smoothly.  How schools operated just fine in the past with hardly any parent involvement is beyond me, but I'm sure an educator here will have some insight.  Schools today would collapse if parents weren't carrying half the load for the educators and admin.  At our kids' rate infested school, the parents are paying the salary of at least one science teacher for fuck's sake (but we're supposed to be a "privileged" school).  It's like we live in a backwater instead of one of the wealthiest cities in the world in a state with the 8th largest economy of any nation in the world.  We should all be ashamed of ourselves for letting this happen.  

For schools in socioeconomically disadvantaged areas, it can be harder for parents to get involved financially and with their time.  For most of them, it just isn't possible to do more.  It shouldn't be ignored, however, as it so often is in this discussion, that there is less effort from parents in the aggregate in those communities as well.  It's not entirely the fault of the schools.  Broken social systems is not a problem that an educational institution can fix unless we can magic ourselves back in time to a public school system that doesn't rely so heavily on parental support.  But that circles us back to funding, doesn't it?  It's a disaster for all of us, as Texas will get dumber, and we will have fewer and fewer competent people to create jobs, build and operate infrastructure, police our streets, teach our children, serve in the medical professions, etc..  I think it's Brisket who often compares Texas to Mississippi, and boy is that going to be more and more the case over the next ten to twenty years.  After that, Mississippi might look like a brain trust compared to this place.  We have already failed a couple of generations of poor folks in this state, and that failure is a multiplier generationally.  The floodgates are open.

I don't know if there is even a way to fix it at this point, but if anything will do it, it has to start with placing a focus on educating future generations instead of looking for ways to steal tax dollars from schools to line the pockets of politicians and their buddies.  This country was started by a revolution triggered by less disgusting taxation without representation than we see in Austin.  Some states handle public education very well (although not many).  Massachusetts is the obvious example, but the shocking one is Florida.   Fucking Florida has a rock solid public education system.  Florida.  That should embarrass the shit out of every single Texan.  Fucking Florida.

Posted
4 hours ago, Brisketexan said:

Because...and this is important....the "Save our Springs" movement is 100X more focused on performative, self-congratulatory bullshit than actually producing environmentally beneficial outcomes.  It's much more gratifying to just hate "developers" and all "development" than to actually examine the threats to the environment and water quality and tackle the low-hanging fruit.

Like many causes aligned with the traditional "left," being performative is more important than being pragmatic and getting the best result reasonably obtainable.  See, e.g., muslim voters in Dearborn, Michigan.

That describes my affluent left leaning circle of friends perfectly.

Dinner parties with that lot are fucking insufferable.

Posted
3 hours ago, Brisketexan said:

So....something that sounded a whole lot like a low-flying fighter hauling ass just flew by downtown (just west of downtown, I think, I never got eyes on it).  Sounded F-16-ish -- bottom line, it was a jet, close and hauling ass.  Anyone know what it was?

Just flew over again.

Posted
20 minutes ago, MissingInAction said:

That describes my affluent left leaning circle of friends perfectly.

Dinner parties with that lot are fucking insufferable.

But....I mean....there's THREE types of hummus available!

3 minutes ago, HenryJames said:

Just flew over again.

Heard em again, missed seeing em again.

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