Nate99

one from the Aggie Athletics facebook feed...

Other states do this with high registration fees on vehicles brought in from other states, which strikes me as skeevy, but then again, so do most political solutions.

Yeah, it all has to go through the political process one way or another though so someone will be pissed off no matter how you fund it. Hybrids are tiny, they do very little damage to anything. It's the trucks that tear stuff up disproportionately. I'm as much of a small government guy as you'll ever find, but we need to pay for the stuff we actually use. To the extent we can correlate it with usage and keep it efficient I'm ok with doing it that way personally. Cut out the BS from the budget and taxes elsewhere to offset.

Or Clear Lake or Kingwood, yeah, stick it to those suckers twice! If you can't fund roads with existing gas taxes, raise them. Commuters should pay for their share of wear and tear through that; it is purely usage based and consumption generally increases with vehicle weight as does damage to the road.

They look to be digging fairly deep all the way around, so it will all go eventually, but with the crane where it is now, they would have to do some creative excavation. Maybe after they take it down.

Thanks. I'm wondering if they will have to fill in the basement with rubble a bit to get over to the part of the building still standing closer to Fannin. We should find out over the next couple of days.

Lemme see if this worked... It did, ha. Quality is not the best, so sorry about that. What you see is the excavator breaking through the floor in to a basement for the first time. He picked up a big steel beam off the trash heap and dropped it on the floor support beam two or three times and got it to buckle. I managed to be up there when he was doing it.

Interesting that they seem to be building around the cranes. Not sure I've seen that, except in pictures of super-duper talls like 1 WTC/Burj-Khalifa. What do they do with t he hole left behind.

Texas state spending has increased 12% since 2010. I travel frequently and do not find our roads or traffic to be worse than any comparable city. Our schools are on par with any in America that must teach large numbers of students that do not speak English or choose to attend through High School. These are not factors that can be corrected by spending more on them. School performance in Texas and the nation as a whole do not correlate at all with per pupil expenditures. Extend that analysis internationally and the results are even more laughable. Pre-ACA, The United States paid more public dollars per citizen for health care than any other country except Germany and Iceland, we may have passed them by now, they weren't that far ahead. In metrics where we score poorly in health rankings, they are largely influenced by factors unrelated to medical care like obesity, substance abuse and violence. In survival rates of treatable conditions we rank at the top consistently. In a study of Oregon Medicaid recipients, their health outcomes actually got worse once they received coverage compared to a group that did not. Our healthcare system is not the problem with our health, it is our culture; that we have technology at our disposal to mitigate many of our self inflicted issues is a blessing, but a damned expensive one. Ditto education. At the federal level, upwards of 60% of all spending goes to social programs. Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and interest on the debt to pay for them are crowding out anything else that we might want to do. Discretionary spending outside of military is essentially all paid for by new debt every year. You can't have taxpayer funded amenities or even the basics when you have already promised all the revenue away, something has to give. Non-discretionary spending was an actuarial time-bomb when the various and sundry programs were established. We chose to let future taxpayers pay for current benefits, so now we have fewer options. The costs of these programs have increased well beyond any other cost or our ability to pay for them, finding this scheme or that to manage to fix that shortfall on paper for a while rather misses the fundamental issue to me. I don't have a problem with taxes going for better infrastructure, but the entire pie and then some is already spoken for. Infrastructure spending could be tripled and it would still be dwarfed by other governmental spending priorities, but even if we could raise the additional revenue, those more favored priorities have political clout behind them, they are the first in line. Getting a politician to rearrange the priorities is a tall order. Under a myriad of taxing approaches and rates, the only time tax revenue has grown significantly and sustainably has been when the economy as a whole grew. Raising rates just shuffles activities among jurisdictions and structures. One can simplify the tax code and make it more efficient and pull in more of the economy, but that is hardly without tradeoffs. Western Europe is no Utopia in this regard either. Many borrow more than we do and have lower growth to pay it back in the future. Just because Sweden can manage a homogeneous population of fewer than 10 million in a socialist system doesn't mean we (or the UK, or Belgium, or Italy, or Ireland) should attempt the same tactics and expect the same results. I deal with economics, numbers and budgets professionally. To say that the fiscal situation of our government at all levels is dysfunctional would be a comical understatement. The entire enterprise is based on an approach that would get anyone in the private sector thrown in jail. Deception is baked in to the language they use intentionally. Actual positive economic outcomes are only going to happen out of dumb luck when all of your planning, analysis and communication is based on a system that ignores plain reality. This is a bit of a peeve of mine, if you can't tell.

I mostly see people skulking across Kingwood Drive heading to the Randalls from that complex. Interested to see what might materialize.

Solar generation isn't the answer yet. California is dealing with some fairly rough issues with the amount of solar it has on its grid. You end up with a significant amount of generating capacity going offline as soon as the sun sets right in the middle of the peak usage time when people come home from work and crank up the ovens and air conditioners. To avoid service interruption, you have to have as much back up generation equal to what you would need if the solar never existed in the first place. With the panels dispersed throughout the grid, you don't necessarily have the generation in a place where the power can be dispatched to whoever wants to use it. And of course everyone still wants 100% reliability, so the grid as a backup will be needed in some capacity. What the cart shows is that you have to generation capacity that is used during the night sit idle as the sun is at its brightest and then have additional capacity on top of that able to spool up very quickly to meet peak demand to run for a few hours in the evening. It is incredibly expensive and inefficient to have the infrastructure in place when a lot of solar is on the grid, to say nothing of the operational challenges of managing the system. Efficient electrical storage would solve a ton of problems, but it is not there yet. As for taxes overall, as property values rise along with the volume of property and population, so will revenues of all types. Keeping infrastructure up is one of the few proper duties of government, and if it takes more taxes to manage the trajectory of the economic wherewithal of the state, I don't have a problem with that.

If I looked at my own picture, I guess I would have seen that. Now that I think about it more, there is one of DT's few alleyways between the Magnolia and this building. Upper floors would have the Eastern view too. It would be wide enough for a hotel with a hall down the middle and rooms on each side, I would think. Managing a lobby and any amenities might be more of a challenge, but I'm sure it has been done.

Unfortunately, you would not have any windows in most of the rooms if this were made in to a hotel. I think there is a telephone switching building right behind it. You could do residential, I suppose, but one would need to outfit each floor as a separate unit (or maybe two, max) unless people didn't mind living in a windowless cave. Does anyone remember it ever having a tenant?

Talk about combining all of the lurid HAIF fantasies in to one idea! HSR in to DT would require so much infrastructure planning that I think you would have a whole lot more smoke around that first, but hey, anything is possible with enough money.

The strip is for an elevator, now installed:

They still have not plugged the peephole The lobby of this thing does have some serious potential...

Found an undated .pdf about the building when googling about (http://har3.commgate.com/photos/pdf/fs/174981_3.pdf) after taking the pic below. I have ever heard anything about the building, but thinking about Texas Street (referred to as Avenue in the link and formerly on the side of this building) development that is coming along, I wonder if this will ever be worth anyone's while to renovate. A website called loopnet states that it is off the market. http://i60.tinypic.com/14bnye.jpg

I wander around DT frequently. I even go up in the garage across from the old Macy's to take good pics of that site, so I'm not sure why it did not occur to me to do as you suggested earlier. When I read your post, I decided a quick stroll was in order.

There was quite a stink about the construction plans. Some options included a season at Reliant/NRG in Houston while they did the redevelopment in one whole shot, but at the end of the day, the University listened to local hotel owners (and other businesses) that basically only make a profit because they can charge max rates for 16 nights a year. To accommodate, they decided to do this phased with the West side to be completely rebuilt and tied in to the rest prior to the 2015 season. The plan is to have everything on the new South end and East first deck/NE corner to be fully open and operational. It will be a bit mismatched with the existing West side for the 2014 season, but otherwise construction going on during the season should just be limited to peripherals, not the structure itself. Here is a video uploaded yesterday, feel free to mute if you don't want to hear the War Hymn. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kpAqoidLQTo

The interior is much smaller than you think it should be, that's for sure.

No, they will be playing at Kyle. The still standing old West side will come down in its entirety via "controlled collapse" in November after the 2014 season.They are moving crazy fast on this.

They have chipped out a piece of the outer wall right at the very top, you can sort of make it out here. I intend to be a demolition expert after this...

He was using a cutting torch. I'm guessing that he would go through the beam nearly all the way with the torch and then they cable it up to the crane once it is about to let go.