editor

31 minutes ago, august948 said:

I always wonder if people who get up in arms about gender usage in English have their heads explode when they find out that in much of the wider world languages can have distinctly patriarchal patterns deeply embedded.

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.

1 hour ago, IntheKnowHouston said:

New dining options are on the way to Finn Hall. One is Three Keys Coffee Bar. The other is Artistry, a sandwich eatery serving paninis.  

The food hall is located in the Jones at Main at 712 Main St.



https://www.instagram.com/threekeyscoffee/


https://www.artistryhouston.com/
https://www.instagram.com/artistryhouston/

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.

16 hours ago, hindesky said:

I have been asked for money, if I know a lawyer so a crack head can sue a music video producer for stealing his idea  for a rap video and if I'm FBI surveying drug sales. 🤷‍♂️😎👮‍♂️💵🕵️‍♂️

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. 

On 5/8/2023 at 5:43 PM, Big E said:

There are in fact outdoor seats specifically designed to discourage people doing things like sitting on them for long periods of time or laying down on them, to discourage the homeless for congregating. Japan uses them all the time. These seats may not be designed with that in mind, though they probably should be, to encourage people to sit while not encouraging vagrants to congregate.

That design also discourages skateboarders from using them as launching and sliding pads.

On 5/14/2023 at 12:56 AM, __nevii said:

silvicultural

I learned a new word today.

On 4/19/2023 at 6:48 PM, wilcal said:

It's called the Parking Vault? Most Houston downtown development ever.

Then you'll love the Garage Mahal in Vegas.

1 hour ago, j_cuevas713 said:

If they leave the ROW like that, then I'm going to go crazy

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 hours ago, Texasota said:

I thought my opinion of the archdiocese was already as low as it could get. I can't completely believe they're doing this.

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.

9 minutes ago, august948 said:

It seems more likely that such decline would increase ruralization as people return to greater self-sufficiency out of necessity

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. 

30 minutes ago, hindesky said:

I'm surprised they let KPFT move in to their new building on Caroline St. because he mentioned that it would be coming down too sometime in the future.

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.

7 minutes ago, august948 said:

I'm not in the real estate industry and so wasn't aware that "hive" was a real estate pejorative. 

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.

It might be easier to just create new threads.

2 hours ago, ChannelTwoNews said:

https://www.galvnews.com/news/port-of-galveston-extends-contract-with-carnival-for-17-years/article_3f3d4a4d-ebdc-5648-a06e-398b9b4b792e.html

"The Wharves Board of Trustees at a special meeting Thursday approved a 17-year renewal of its contract with Carnival Cruise Line that will increase passenger fees the company pays to the Port of Galveston.

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.

On 5/10/2023 at 11:08 AM, Ross said:

There are a myriad of other issues the County Judge needs to be working on. The Astrodome is at the bottom of the list of issues to be considered.

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.

On 5/10/2023 at 9:06 AM, Blue Dogs said:

I know they had some Gospel stations on FM too back in the day.

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.

15 hours ago, august948 said:

So is the ideal a place where everyone lives in 100sqft rooms in giant towers connected to other giant towers that contain work/shopping/entertainment?  Sort of a hive?

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."

3 hours ago, Houston19514 said:

I think it's just a timing thing.  We just happened to have two large ones go delinquent during the month of March.  Pretty much a non-story.  Pretty sure Dallas, for example, has had more major office building delinquencies and foreclosures than we have in recent years.  And of course there's something in the blood of Houston journalists (and Houstonians in general) that just loves to latch on to any negative stories about Houston.

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. 

1 hour ago, BeerNut said:

I guess blockchain and web3 aren't cool anymore

It's all about hyperscale serverless free trade machine learning immersive VR robot dogs now. 

On 5/6/2023 at 11:34 AM, Ross said:

Are you saying I should move every time my work location changes?

That's a choice you made. Why should the rest of the people on the planet suffer for your lifestyle?

1 hour ago, BeerNut said:

Was there a cause listed?

Loss of habitat, and lack of food. 
 

In other words, single-family suburbs bulldozing the world, and people spraying pesticide everywhere. 

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.

6 hours ago, gene said:

St Cecilia in particular is my favorite hotel in Austin...it really does have this cool, homey, but luxury vibe...it is just incredible.... and the first time i ever went was during sxsw and got to meet Jake Gyllenhaal who was staying there! made my whole sxsw haha

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.

3 hours ago, bookey23 said:

I guess all that is true, but I'm just a little skeptical of this portion of downtown improving in the next decade. The Astros entertainment district isn't currently expected to expand north of Minute Maid and I haven't heard about them extending the bayou trail beyond the Jose Campos Torres plaza. Also, I don't think the i45 Cap Park is going to extend this far north.

Again, I would love for this area to take off and for this development to do well, but personally I would have tried building apartments directly on the Austin bikeway, closer to Minute Maid, closer to the Bayou trails, etc. Just my 2 cents tho

Maybe they want to build it now while the land is cheap, and sell it later when the area gets more demand.

3 hours ago, bookey23 said:

This is such a terrible idea that I hope doesn't catch on. As if traffic isn't congested enough as-is in most major metropolitan cities, now we have to add fleets of cars with no one in them? And if this is successful, the money will go directly to a massive corporation, with no individual workers making any profit. Boo!

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. 

2 hours ago, Urbannizer said:

My first ride was fine- direct route to our destination, only problem we had is that it was very hesitant to turn right at the end of our trip.

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. 

1 hour ago, Houston19514 said:

They will only have the preferential rights for 10 years.  What then

Considering how fluid many industries, including aviation, are these days, it's probably a good idea to keep terms short.

Who knows if there will even be a United Airlines a decade from now?  It might go away.  It might get bought.  It might move.  Sure, today that sounds stupid.  But at one time nobody thought that Northwest, Pan Am, Continental, Braniff, Eastern, and dozens of other big names would cease to exist.