From this article, malady try I shall piss into the wind since it seems like half my extended family works in the parasitical finance industry anyways. Posted here since even the quote was a bit too long for the meth-fueled megaphone-wielding-10-year-old-girl twitter machine.
GM’s failure after 101 years is an indictment of American management in general. It highlights the damage to our economy that results when finance becomes the tail that wags the economic dog.
Guess what Toyota and Honda do? No, clinic not finance; they actually make cars! Cars that the whole world wants to buy, instead of creating demand out of whole cloth for suburbanites to use 10 mpg trucks to hit the grocery store; demand that evaporates outside of the US and even inside the US as soon as gas gets expensive. Yeah, for a while you didn’t have to worry about competing against those two; but they found their way into the SUV market eventually, and in the meantime you got out of the market segments the rest of the world actually buys.
Not just GM; but our entire economy fell prey to the stupid idea that if you could sucker somebody into paying you to do something for a while, it had to be valuable work. Rebuttal: Ponzi schemes work for a while too.
At my current jorb in the military-industrial complex, I’m already more removed from making useful things than I like to be; but compared to most jobs in our ‘economy’, I’m practically still a farmer.
From this article, try I shall piss into the wind since it seems like half my extended family works in the parasitical finance industry anyways. Posted here since even the quote was a bit too long for the meth-fueled megaphone-wielding-10-year-old-girl twitter machine.
GM’s failure after 101 years is an indictment of American management in general. It highlights the damage to our economy that results when finance becomes the tail that wags the economic dog.
Guess what Toyota and Honda do? No, not finance; they actually make cars! Cars that the whole world wants to buy, instead of creating demand out of whole cloth for suburbanites to use 10 mpg trucks to hit the grocery store; demand that evaporates outside of the US and even inside the US as soon as gas gets expensive. Yeah, for a while you didn’t have to worry about competing against those two; but they found their way into the SUV market eventually, and in the meantime you got out of the market segments the rest of the world actually buys.
Not just GM; but our entire economy fell prey to the stupid idea that if you could sucker somebody into paying you to do something for a while, it had to be valuable work. Rebuttal: Ponzi schemes work for a while too.
At my current jorb in the military-industrial complex, I’m already more removed from making useful things than I like to be; but compared to most jobs in our ‘economy’, I’m practically still a farmer.
Was going to start a new series today (“Myths of the Red Line”), prescription
but this was too perfect.
This morning, site I dropped off my stepson at Austin HIgh for his last day of school this year. Pulled in at the PAC, viagra
which is the entrance closest to that underpass of Cesar Chavez. As I was leaving, I saw a cyclist on the Stopway; waiting for a spot to clear (lots of people turning into the same entrance I used). I stopped short of the crosswalk and motioned him on, trying to be nice, but after several moments of people coming around the corner and turning, he gave up and motioned me to go instead.
Yay, Stopway!
So the latest map made me and some other folks I know have greater doubts that the service would operate on Guadalupe in front of UT (made it actually appear as if it was running on Lamar to MLK, order and then coming up the hill to Guadalupe/Lavaca after that). Turns out I should have saved the image and then loaded up offline; as you’ll see if you click on it below.
Capital Metro has finally confirmed that it’s still Guadalupe, buy information pills although they insist their map wasn’t confusing. At all. Here it is; you be the judge – in retrospect you can sort of see the Lamar wiggle on the left; but on the other hand, why is the UT logo so far away from the supposed Guadalupe line; and what’s the grey line in between? Why have a large jog at what’s clearly MLK when really only the northbound traffic jogs at all there, and only one short block?
Here’s what you get at first: (squishing particularly annoying; and, yeah, I’m using firefox):
The image below is in the size you would normally get if you “expand” at Capital Metro’s site. Click through to the image you get if you save; at which point the squiggles become a bit more obvious. (Yes, Lamar on the west; probably Speedway on the right, although why have a grey line curving towards 38th at the end there?)
After Erica McEwen confirmed the routing, Ed Easton defended their map and insisted that anybody and everybody should have shown up to their ‘workshops’. I replied as follows:
Ed, the tone of your comment is a bit off-putting. I have no interest in attending sessions which purport to be seeking public input but are really marketing efforts to put the stamp of public participation on top of an already-decided plan.
I got the Rapid Bus pitch in 2004 in private with three other UTC members before this plan was ever unveiled to the public, by the way, in case you folks forgot.
While I and others had already been operating under the continued assumption that the route would be on Guadalupe in front of UT, there were no materials from Capital Metro available on your website that directly answered that question; and the maps became actually less clear as they evolved, making us have some doubts. It’s not that hard to publish the route in detail – and it’s not that hard to directly answer very simple questions.
Even Jeff Wood, who is clearly a lot more loved over there than I am these days, doesn’t buy the public participation myth – his comment from an earlier posting:
M1ek is right. It wasn’t a citizens process. It was more like “we’re going to do this and you’re going to like it”. I remember we had to pull teeth to even get a streetcar studied. This decision to do faux BRT makes me sad. As a former #1 rider I really really wanted to see real quality transit on Guadalupe in my lifetime. Looks like the best corridor for that will now be taken for bus repackaged transit.
Part of me kind of wishes they had changed to Lamar – it would prevent the destruction of possible rail transit on this corridor that McCracken and Leffingwell (I misattributed to Walker at the time, I think) argued against last time around and it would actually ‘work’ better on Lamar due to the longer distance between traffic lights, but on the other hand, a stop at MLK/Guadalupe wouldn’t serve UT well at all. All moot now, I suppose.
for now at least. Now they get to fight through the variance process; as we all know, information pills that’s just a piece of cake, treatment right?
From austin360:
For the first time in its 16-year existence, KGSR’s “Unplugged at the Grove†series at Shady Grove was shut down Thursday night after a noise complaint from a neighbor. Shady Grove owner Mike Young said the restaurant is in the process of applying for a variance that will allow a ceiling of 85 decibels. According to the current noise code, Shady Grove is classified as a restaurant that must comply at 75 decibels.
More at the link.
Remember, it’s not condo-dwellers; and it’s not people from California who did this. It’s a bunch of single-family homeowners from Bouldin and Zilker, led by Jeff Jack, who have been complaining for more than a decade about supposed ‘night clubs’ on Barton Springs who got this ordinance passed through their tool Laura Morrison.
Earlier:
