Went to Boiler 9 at Seaholm for Austin Restaurant Week.

I have read a lot of articles like this one over the years, but this one seems to cover pretty much everything I remember from similar articles and lines up with what I hear from colleagues from other countries.  Always interesting to see an outsiders view of your society.  Of course, this is a guy in Silicon Valley, but it all seems pretty accurate.  From Business Insider:

The most surprising things about America, according to a Silicon Valley engineer who moved from India 7 years ago

I was in high school and still remember the Time Magazine cover with Howard Jarvis.  I remember thinking he was a scary looking guy, but lookking at it today he seems less so.  I am not sure if I have changed or if public figures have. Maybe a little of both.

I did live briefly in the Bay Area and saw the high real estate prices and heard the complaints about taxes.  Yet the schools and infrastructure were looking pretty strained by the time I got there in the late 1990s. People told me it was all because of “Prop 13“, the tax revolt in the late 1980s that limited increases in property taxes.

All this was true, but the bit I didn’t learn until another decade later was that commercial rates were essentially frozen since 1987.  That is 40 years without a tax increase in commercial properties.  When I originally heard this I didn’t think it could be true.  A google turned up nothing but articles about how bad it would be to raise taxes on job creating businesses (thanks google) like this nonsense written by a commercial real estate broker in the Orange County Register:  How would splitting Prop. 13’s tax rolls affect California’s commercial real estate?

An article from the San Francisco Chronicle from late 2017 explains it all a bit better (but not completely, as I understand the loophole — and surely the costs are higher than $9b a year).  So this is how “reform” goes, at least in modern Tax Cutting Conservative America. Read it and weep, especially if you are in California.  I am sure there are similar “loopholes” (can you really call this a “loophole”?) in other places, especially here in Texas.  The upshot is the “little guy” pays more and gets less.  So much for grass roots, populist revolutions.

Close the Prop. 13 commercial property tax loophole

“California’s property tax system is broken. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Prop. 13’s corporate tax loophole. Big corporations such as Chevron are able to take advantage of protections that should be reserved for small businesses, homeowners and renters. These big corporations are paying taxes on property valued at the same amount it was in 1978 — 40 years ago! Meanwhile, startups and newer companies sometimes pay 10 to 20 times higher property tax for identical properties.”

Thought I would have a go at repairing one of the chairs from my grandmother’s pre-war dining room set.  Figured I would put some glue on a dowel and clamp it all together (even bought a real carpenter’s clamp).  Hit some nails and broken pegs.  A hour later, after some drilling and nail excavation, I seem to be done.  We will see if this works.

Facebook Loses More Than $100 Billion In Value In Worst Stock Market Wipeout In History

Going to miss this cat.  Lots of stories I can tell about this fellow.  Truly the cat with nine lives, and one of the smartest and best tempered animals I have ever seen.  I will leave it with one story that anyone who has had dinner at our house knows.  At the end of every meal, we pull out a chair and Latte would jump up and patiently wait for a bit of food.  He would gently eat it and then sometimes wait for more, other times hop down and go about his cat business.  Tonight it was sad to have dinner and realize we wound’t be sharing a bit with Latte at the end of the meal.

I like books, and I like lists.  I like PBS, too.  So the PBS Great American Read list was irresistible.  One thing:  these aren’t necessarily American authors, though many are.  I am guessing I have read half of these.  Some of the usual suspects (The Great Gatsby, Catch-22, The Catcher in the Rye).   More than a few popular authors (Stepehn King’s The Stand, Agatha Christe’s  And Then There Were None, Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, Michael Chriton’s Jurassiac Park).  Some nice surprises (John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces, S. E. Hinton’s The Outsiders).  More than a few I never heard of, and a few on my list (like Things Fall Apart).

I keep thinking of this quote.  Wish I had heard it sooner in life.

Do you not know, my son, with how little wisdom the world is governed?

Axel Gustafsson Oxenstierna af Södermöre

Back in September I started this experiment as an alternate to Facebook (Welcome!, Facebook Problems, Early Thoughts).  I like it and have decided to pony up and pay the good folks at WordPress for their services.  This means no more ads (as it should be).

I also learned that there is a Facebook-like feed for other blogs that you follow (sorry, only WordPress).  That button called “[Reader]” at the top of the page when you log in shows all the blogs you follow with postings in chronological order, quite a bit like other more popular social media sites.  Nice stuff!