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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • Are you comparing raw dollars or percentage of property tax?

    Raw dollars. I paid $2980 to HISD in 2019 and $2035 to HISD in 2024. Incidentally, my housing price has increased 20% over this same time.

    Texas government is actively trying to prove that public education doesn’t work so they can justify privatization, and bring back legal segregation plus religious schooling funded by taxes.

    Yup






  • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.worldtoMemes@lemmy.mlWorking weak
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    3 hours ago

    Or you just stagger your workforce.

    Definitely possible but also harder to manage. You need more redundancy in your workforce. You need good documentation of workflow and roles. You need a system for handing off work between staff and people roll on and off a project.

    It’s all possible. But it takes effort and some marginal degree of expense that a lot of admins don’t want to put forward. Bosses are naturally cheap and lazy. That’s why union leadership is necessary to improve the workplace.


  • Again, under a Liberal government.

    The Republicans controlled every branch of government in 2003, as well as a majority of state legislatures and governorships.

    What broke for gay marriage in 2003 was a libertarian strain of conservatism defecting from the mainstream. Liberals accepted the change with the same passivity as they accepted the status quo.

    It had a 60% approval by the public in 2015 when it was fully legalized.

    Again by a majority conservative court. The Obama legislature dragged its heels.

    Liberal governments can be forced to do these things by popular will.

    They can be forced to do things by powerful socio-economic interests. In this case, a big chunk of the legal community broke for gay marriage and Obama didn’t try to get in the way.

    But they didn’t do anything. They just let the change happen.



  • One part of the thing is that oil interests are far too powerful and people are far too complacent.

    We’ve seen a number of crashes in the O&G sector in my lifetime, typically paired with sharp downturns in the economy leading to contractions in consumption.

    The COVID shock in '21 illustrates a big part of the problem is the Just In Time supply chain. We have relatively few places to store energy, so a crash in demand can create a big backup in supply. The end result is -$43/bbl oil, because nobody has a place to put the excess. That triggers huge layoffs and creditor liquidations that can rapidly reduce industrial capacity.

    there is an overpowering collection of voices saying “I don’t wanna” that need to be overcome. The natural disasters are still going to have to get worse before people want to do something about it.

    I can easily see a future in which US domestic production or Saudi Gulf exports suddenly tank out thanks to a war or another pandemic or a super-storm.

    But the end result of a crash like that is enormous human misery for an extended period of time. Would prefer to do things the easy rather than the profitable way.







  • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.worldtoMemes@lemmy.mlWorking weak
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    4 hours ago

    Plenty of employers do take this approach. 4x10 isn’t an unknown work schedule. But a lot of firms are client facing and demand business hours coverage. What do you do when a client needs something on Friday (or Saturday or Sunday)?

    What do you do with staff for the back half of the 10, when clients aren’t around demanding support because the business day is over?

    4x10 works best when everyone you work for is either also 4x10 or on such a time delay that it doesn’t matter.