I’m okay with that.

We were required to read Ayn Rand.

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I have seen a divorce caused by the presence of a kid.

Coworker and her husband adopted a teenager who had issues. He started physically assaulting my coworker and she didn’t feel safe in the house and wanted the kid gone. Husband said they’d made a promise to care for and love him. In the end, he chose the kid over his wife and they ended up divorced.

Also - I first heard this story from her when she had a breakdown about it on my first day at the job when I went to ask for the key to the supply closet.

In some martial arts classes in college, we messed around with chokes 1 day and I never went back. I was knocked out once, and when trying it on someone else for “a few seconds” to be safe I put my partner in a choke and it was eerily fast. They ragdolled on like a second. They were conscious but dizzy like 10 secomds later, and I was like “nope.”

Exactly. There’s no good option.

They’re gonna get fucked either way, so might as well tell Trump he can get fucked too.

While that’s accurate, there’s also IT.

The book has a completely unnecessary, random pre-teen orgy in a sewer.

The cool thing was, when the biggot-wing left, the United Methodists were able to finally fully embrace inclusion!

Be careful now.

The methodist church had a schism recently. There’s the “United Methodist” and the new “Global Methodist.”

The Global Methodist church was founded specifically to exclude gay people. They also have much smaller apportionments (church’s equivalent of taxes that the individual churches pay to the organization and is used for things like relief work), and allow the congregations to directly hore and fire clergy so the preachers can’t get all uppity and tell them not to be prejudiced or to be kind or welcoming to people who aren’t like you.

The only thing it’s useful at is shit that isn’t necessary.

We had a P&Z member at the city I work at get butthurt because we corrected him at a meeting, so the city manager asked me to write an apology letter to him.

That was the one time I loved ChatGPT. It was bullshit that didn’t need to happen that I didn’t care about and achieved nothing, so I let the fucking bot write it.

Lots of hospitals were started by churches.

One of Texas’s biggest medical providers is the Methodist Health System, with 12 full-fledged hospitals and over 100 clinics that started as a hospital in Houston founded by the Methodist church. For most people, it’s just another hospital. The church doesn’t get any of the money or anything.

Catholic hospitals, however, are a little more notorious for denying care based on religious principles - with abortion and birth control being the big one. They won’t do abortions, offer contraceptives, or perform vasectomies, for instance.

Well, it’s a Seagate, so it still comes out to about a hundred bucks a month.

Texas did this bigtime in 2003. The GOP, for the first time Texas history, had control over the house, Senate, and governor’s mansion. They gerrymandered the fuck out of Texas.

In 2002, the majority of US House Representatives from Texas were Democrats. After the redistricting in 2003, the 2004 elections gave the GOP its first congressional majority out of Texas, with 2/3rds of the seats.

Texas isn’t that red. Its shift to the right is fairly recent, and it was driven by having a Texan run for President and GOP fuckery with the elections.

But that’s the thing with the GOP. You give them absolute power one time, and they’ll never, ever give it up.

It’s a great play.

Every single Democrat running against these assholes next November will be able to say the Republican candidate voted against the release of the Epstein files. That’s their headshot in the debates. “Representative X voted against the release of the Epstein Files” is an easy campaign strategy.

You should watch Jon Stewart’s monologue from yesterday.

Stormwater management is very complicated, important work nobody thinks about. It’s like backend software - if you aren’t thinking about it that means it’s working.

Usually, when you see a building being built, what you see as the beginning is actually the result of years of work by engineers and planners designing and reviewing drainage, transportation, utilities, emergency access, environmental impacts, and more before anyone even talks about any structures. Lots of the time, this work is performed via subdivision improvements that will incorporate a storm sewer system going to a big detention facility (e.g. that lake that’s in the middle of every suburban neighborhood) that accounts for a certain amount of impervious cover on every lot in the development and is built before the land is developed.

I work in a small enclave for the mega-rich where every residential home is essentially its own subdivision, and homeowners are shocked that the drainage design and review takes months or even years of work and requires individual drainage ponds or ranwater collection vaults, while the building itself takes a day or 2 for approval.

There’s some nuance on whether it’s floodplain or floodway.

It gets technical, but the easy answer is that floodplain us where the waters will rise, while floodway is the path along which water is intended to travel. Lots of the time, the floodplain and the floodway are the same thing, but not always.

Development in the floodplain can sometimes be achieved through a floodplain development permit with a no-rise certification (there will be no net rise of water level in event of a flood caused by the development in the floodplain)

Development in the floodway is generally a hard no, because the floodway is where you want the water to go, and you want water flowing fast in the floodway to clear space for the water coming in behind it. Putting structures on stilts increases friction and slows water down, causing it to back up more upstream.

I have a separate cell phone for city business, so I don’t have ANY cross-contamination between personal and city data.

And it’s been handy in Open Records requests where reporters have asked for my phone and text logs. With the personal and city info being separate, I don’t have to worry about needing the state AG to authorize reductions.

I black out sensitive data (there’s a list of what kinds of data should be redacted without an AG opinion), and I hand it over.

To what end?

We can’t just kick people out of their existing homes or shut down businesses because the maps changed around them. We allow existing structures to remain, but if they’re wiped out in a flood we don’t allow them to be rebuilt.

The tricky part is when you get outside of cities into counties, where there’s generally no permits required for building structures. It’s the utilities and subdivision improvements that get attention because they require government involvement.

And strictly speaking, development in the floodplain is prohibited by FEMA, not the county. So the county will tell you “no” if you ask, but they aren’t actively hunting for it.

In cities with code enforcement and building permits in a smaller area of land it’s a little easier, but even then in my tiny city it’s hard to find everything that gets done illegally. It’s usually spotted when the neighbors complain, or if our inspectors happen to see it while looking at a neighbor’s property.

Just last week we found someone that had filled in a detention pond, scraped all the trees out of the back of their lot (trees provide erosion control and friction to slow down and spread water), and added about 1500 square feet of concrete (speeds up water flow and reduces amount absorbed into ground) when the neighbor asked our arborist to identify which trees needed to come down for fire safety.

I’m published in watershed analysis - specifically stormwater discharge. I work in a municipal development office in Texas and specialize in drainage plans.

That’s simply not accurate.

You generally can’t build in the 100-year floodplain. What happened here, from a drainage engineering standpoint, is a combination of 3 factors:

1. Many of the buildings in question were built prior to the flood plain being defined in that location, and existing non-conforming structures are generally allowed to remain.

2. New buildings were built a few years back, but out of the 100-year floodplain. Part of that was a floodplain map revision. These can be obtained through FEMA if an engineer provides an analysis showing either that mitigation techniques will change the floodplain area or that the flood maps are incorrect. Many flood plain maps are decades old, and the actual flood areas are different for a variety of reasons.

Unfortunately, there are also engineers who will stamp whatever you put in front of them if you pay them, and there are in fact engineers who specialize in saying “yes” and providing bad analysis to get around drainage, detention, and floodplain requirements. Lots of them are foreign-based, which is why most Texas jurisdictions have started requiring engineers licensed in Texas so we can go after their credentials when their bad engineering leads to failure. The reality is FEMA doesn’t have the resources to double-check the analysis of every project, and they must rely on the engineer’s stamp as evidence that best practices have been used.

3. This wasn’t a 100-yr flood event. If all the cabins had been located outside of the 100-yr it likely wouldn’t have changed anything.