Jump to content

editor

Administrator
 View Profile  See their activity

  • Posts

    13,027

  • Joined

  • Last visited

  • Days Won

    31

 Content Type 

Everything posted by editor

  1. editor
    Ugh. I lived in a building that was ⅓ apartments, ⅓ condos, and ⅓ Radisson Blu. Shared amenity spaces are awful.
  2. editor
    There have been plenty of newspaper articles in the last year about backlash against the term "Latinx" in the Hispanic community. I don't speak anything well enough to have an opinion on it. Unless you count gibberish. That I'm fluent in.
  3. editor
    Good to have another coffee option. The Greenway coffee at the Finn food court has been my go-to lately, since The Star no longer has free coffee, and lately I find my usual Starbucks drink too sugary for some reason. Hopefully the sandwich joint works out, too. Most of the food options at Finn try too hard. They take good food and turn it into nothing more than a big pile of mismatched ingredients because they're doing too much while trying to be as pretentious as their neighbors. If you have good food, let the food speak for itself.
  4. editor
    If it's a regular, I offer them a granola bar. If it's someone I don't recognize, lately I've been trying out the response, "No way, man — you're a cop!" So far the response has been mostly confusion.
  5. editor
    That design also discourages skateboarders from using them as launching and sliding pads.
  6. editor
    I learned a new word today.
  7. editor
    Then you'll love the Garage Mahal in Vegas.
  8. editor
    I hear that in San Francisco there's a wheelchair-bound lawyer who earns a pretty good living suing over the sorts of things that are common in Houston.
  9. editor
    I wouldn't mind if it was for a homeless shelter, or a soup kitchen, or a school, or even a park. But for a parking lot? Terrible. Maybe five or ten years from now, or whenever the Pierce Elevated goes away, that parking lot will sprout a residential skyscraper. In Chicago, at least three churches (Old Saint Pat's, Annunciation, Holy Name Cathedral) sold their parking lots to developers. In exchange, the churches got several floors of dedicated parking, and a smattering of meeting space.
  10. editor
    You don't have to look any further than America's own history, and the way business works today, to understand that population decline will mean people moving into cities and large towns, and not spreading themselves thinly across the landscape. Texas is littered with dried up small towns that didn't make it. People who live in small towns across America today constantly complain about the kids moving to the big city and leaving their towns to die. That's been going on for at least the last half century. From a business perspective, if I'm opening Ed's SuperSud Washateria, I'm going to put it as close as I can afford to the most people, I'm not going to put it out in the middle of a mouldering suburb with few people and no future. From what I've read, I think Japan and South Korea are at the leading edge of the depopulation trend. Their governments are giving the last remaining people in suburban villages incentives to consolidate into larger towns and cities. It's just too expensive to maintain infrastructure (roads, water, sewer, police protection, fire cover, etc…) for a declining population spread out over a large area.
  11. editor
    I'm surprised that it's coming down in the future, since the general manager and the disc jockeys on the air yesterday kept mentioning the new Caroline building like they're proud of it and expect to be there a long time. Go figure. Go out to the sticks to the west of Houston, and you'll see it on billboards put up in cow fields by local wantrapeneur real estate developers trying to convince people to move out of Houston.
  12. editor
    It might be easier to just create new threads.
  13. editor
    Heck, even people not from the suburbs don't know where downtown is. I know someone who lives in Rice Military, and thinks she lives downtown. She says, "I love living downtown because of my view." To which I ask, "What is your view of?" "Oh, the downtown skyline." When I told her that if she can see the downtown skyline she doesn't live downtown she got unhappy. Not a bad goal. It assuages the car fans, and scratches the density itch at the same time.
  14. editor
    Boarding a Carnival ship is a lot like walking through a big warehouse, which is what I suppose the building used to be. Visuals aside, I can't say enough good things about how incredibly organized, and orchestrated the whole process is. You would have to be a complete dingbat not to get where you're supposed to be, Carnival (or the port?) has so many many people all over the place helping people get where they should be, grabbing luggage, directing traffic. It's Disney-grade customer service. The only deficiency is that if you want to get an outbound ride hail (Lyft, in my case), you have to walk a bit of a distance across the train tracks and down to the end of the block. It's not awful, except for a few details: A good number of people take cruises because they are elderly, infirm, or otherwise not very mobile. The pick-up area is a good three blocks away. It's in the blazing Texas sun Once you're off the boat, all of the helpful people evaporate and there are no signs directing you to the ride hailing area. This seems to be a known problem, as the people operating the parking garage on the corner were loudly complaining about it and shouting at the Uber/Lyft drivers, even threatening to write them tickets, as if a parking garage attendant has some kind of law enforcement power. But as cruise experiences go, Port of Galveston exceeded my expectations.
  15. editor
    I didn't realize that she can only work on one thing at a time. Maybe she could hire someone to help her out with things, so she can deal with two issues at a time.
  16. editor
    I once lived in a city with a full-time AM gospel station, and an FM that played it on weekends. The AM just sounded better, I presume because that's how the music was engineered. It's like how one of those flimsy mass-produced pop records from the 1960's sounds better on a crappy old 1960's turntable than it does on current-year high-end gear. Dean Martin's music (for example) was recorded and mixed with AM radio in mind. FM makes it sound flat. Digital makes it sound sterile.
  17. editor
    No one said any such thing, but if you enjoy living out in a field like a farm animal that's your choice to make, so you have to live with your decisions. Moreover, the "hive" thing is just a real estate industry meme spread by desperate low-end agents who can't come up with any logical arguments. It's the real estate equivalent of calling someone a "poopyhead," and reveals more about the writer than the position being argued. I hate to break it to you, but the notion of continuously building vast expanses of single-family homes is last century's thinking. Population decline is a thing, and has already arrived in many developed countries. Who's going to live in all those empty suburbs? To @Ross' point about moving because of his job, moving around for work is not unusual. In the 70's and 80's, there was a joke in the tech industry that IBM stood for "I've Been Moved." From 1994 to 2006, I had a job that constantly moved me and my family not just from neighborhood to neighborhood, but across the country. I lived in about 11 states because of it. But it was a choice I made. I never thought, "We should spend billions of tax dollars building freeways to accommodate my chosen way of life."
  18. editor
    Agreed. Chicago has a lot of similar situations. Houston seems to have held on longer than other cities, it's just catching up to some other places.
  19. editor
    It's all about hyperscale serverless free trade machine learning immersive VR robot dogs now.
  20. editor
    That's a choice you made. Why should the rest of the people on the planet suffer for your lifestyle?
  21. editor
    Loss of habitat, and lack of food. In other words, single-family suburbs bulldozing the world, and people spraying pesticide everywhere.
  22. editor
    I was surprised to read recently that grackles are close to being classified as a threatened species. Freaking grackles! We used to have millions of them. Their population has declined 60% in recent years. I hope I don't have to live long enough to see a world without birds.
  23. editor
    The company my wife works for put a bunch of people in there for a while while in Austin on business. They loved it. She wanted to stay there on our last trip to Austin, but availability was a problem.
  24. editor
    Maybe they want to build it now while the land is cheap, and sell it later when the area gets more demand.
  25. editor
    I think you're confused. The point is that some people don't need cars anymore if they can just jump in a driverless car for a few minutes of a ride, then it goes off and gives someone else a ride. It also means that the car can be on the road more, doing things more than with the 1 car to 1 driver model. Instead of using public property (parking spaces) to store private property (cars), the cars can be doing useful things like making automated food deliveries. It takes more cars off the roads, making traffic easier for people who choose to drive. That said, while I've taken a couple of driverless rides in Nevada, I think we're still 20 years away from driverless cars being everything they're hyped to be. My experience was similar. Very cautious driving. Most of the route home from work was an 8-lane surface street, and people were passing us on both sides.
×
×
  • Create New...