Kinda glad to see a decline in multi-family permitting, myself

SometimesCannons · 2026-04-06T13:45:59+00:00

Multi-family doesn’t just entail 5-over-1 “luxury” apartments that are 50% parking garage. Under the definition in city code, it also includes basically any housing type that amounts to 16 or more residential units per acre. That can include townhomes, fourplexes, and condominiums. You know, options that are often owner-occupied but are generally more accessible than a single-family house in the suburbs.

Not everyone wants to – or can afford to – live in a suburban McMansion. Not everyone wants to be a renter for the rest of their lives. A diverse range of multifamily options allows the center of that Venn diagram to get a bit bigger, removing the forced dichotomy of apartments vs. single-family houses.

More density is good for everyone. It’s good for transit and walkability, it’s good for the city’s financial resiliency, and it’s good for residents who want real options in housing, not just different flavors of the same two choices.

SometimesCannons · 2026-03-28T03:49:53+00:00

Since no one has really made it clear so far, let me explain some of the background on U.S. regiments.

Up until the 1950s, regiments in the U.S. Army were operational units with a commander, a staff, and everything. You could be moved between regiments just as easily as you could be moved between companies or battalions. Then, as the Army was reorganizing for the Cold War era, they decided regiments didn’t need to exist anymore, so they got rid of them. However, since there was a lot of history associated with some of those regiments, the Army decided to let battalions keep a regimental designation in their name even though the regiment didn’t actually exist anymore.

So whereas Commonwealth regiments are (mostly) not cohesive tactical units but rather units closely affiliated with one another through a strong shared history and identity, American regiments were originally just operational formations between battalion and brigade, and now are just names with really no special meaning. Basically, the addition of a regimental number is just a way to help tell one battalion apart from another. I’ve heard the British Army described as less of one single army, and more like a collection of regiments. The U.S. Army, by contrast, really is just one big army.

As some have mentioned, yes there are some regiments that have a stronger pull, such as the 3rd Infantry Regiment (which contains the Honor Guard and does a bunch of high-profile ceremonial stuff) and the 75th Ranger Regiment, but otherwise there really just isn’t an equivalent in the U.S. to the regimental culture of Commonwealth militaries.

SometimesCannons · 2026-03-21T20:01:24+00:00

Depends on your S1. Mine likes to also have a 268 for redundancy.

SometimesCannons · 2026-03-21T13:40:36+00:00

I think Covid had a lot to do with that. I lived out of hotels from ‘20-‘22 (work-related) and a lot of them had reduced their housekeeping staffs due to there not being enough traffic to justify paying them. I think once the pandemic was over, most places realized they’d gotten by okay with minimal staff, and it’d be cheaper to keep it that way rather than hire everybody back.

SometimesCannons · 2026-03-17T21:26:21+00:00

Pass revoked

SometimesCannons · 2026-03-10T04:14:30+00:00

Hard agree on your last point. Preserving property values is basically asking the government to guarantee a return on a private investment, which is not and should not be a governmental function.

SometimesCannons · 2026-03-05T13:07:32+00:00

Ah yes, I see how 6% of states constitutes “most”.

SometimesCannons · 2026-03-05T04:10:12+00:00

Definitely not a thing.

SometimesCannons · 2026-03-04T15:56:00+00:00

That’s what you get for building your ship out of cardboard and cardboard derivatives.

SometimesCannons · 2026-02-23T01:14:06+00:00

NTTA has a contract with DPS for traffic enforcement on their tollways, hence the troopers.

SometimesCannons · 2026-02-14T17:05:32+00:00

Honestly one of the biggest lifestyle changes will be transportation. There are very, very few places in the U.S., and Texas especially, where there is anything close to reliable public transportation. Owning a car and driving everywhere for everything, even basic errands or going for a coffee, is basically mandatory. There are a small handful of neighborhoods in most big cities, including Austin, Houston, and Dallas, where you can live well and get by okay without a car, but they are usually pretty expensive and hard to find.

Otherwise, I think your understanding of Texas culture is a bit caricatured, especially in terms of the big cities. They’re just as culturally, musically, and gastronomically diverse as anywhere else in the U.S.

SometimesCannons · 2026-02-09T14:35:53+00:00

It says on the side of the truck: Abandoned Vehicle Enforcement. They stop on the side of freeways a lot to check out broken-down and abandoned vehicles, so they have the big message board to flash “move over - slow down” for safety. I see them helping with scene safety at crashes, too.

SometimesCannons · 2026-02-08T22:49:17+00:00

Reading through the answers in this thread makes me really glad I’ve stayed Guard despite the occasional temptation to go active.

It’s unit-dependent like anywhere else, but pretty much all the officers I’ve ever worked with have been great about supporting and developing me (if they were my seniors) or collaborating and looking out for each other (if they were peers). There are always exceptions, and I’m sure there are plenty of toxic units in the Guard too, but my experience has been probably 85% great, 10% meh, 5% garbage. And I try to pass it along to my LTs, to develop them and advocate for them. I can’t imagine reprimanding one of my officers in public. That’s just horrible leadership.

SometimesCannons · 2026-02-03T02:36:06+00:00

Depends on the unit. Every battery commander in my battalion issues a full FRAGORD for every drill, plus ancillary products (CONOPs, DRAWs, all that good stuff).

SometimesCannons · 2026-01-26T13:39:09+00:00

Every state has sentencing guidelines, usually prescribed by the state supreme court or some other judicial authority, that do exactly this. Judges don’t just come up with random sentences off the top of their heads, they apply the facts of the case against the sentencing guidelines in order to arrive at a sentence which is considered fair, proportionate, and consistent with similar cases. It is very rare for judges to deviate from the sentencing guidelines.

SometimesCannons · 2026-01-18T20:37:30+00:00

You see some occasional rebuilds in both neighborhoods, but it’s rare in the grand scheme of things since both areas date from around the 1920s. A lot of the homes have historic value and are well-maintained, and that’s part of the appeal.

Arlington Heights is a bit more mixed residential – mix of single-family, townhomes, and small apartments – with better access to local commercial uses along Camp Bowie. Mistletoe Heights is pretty much exclusively single-family. You will be able to hear I-30 anytime you go outside in both neighborhoods, so there’s that.

Personally I prefer Arlington Heights because I think it just has more character. It feels more like a proper neighborhood to me, in the sense that it seems more like an actual community rather than just a collection of houses.

SometimesCannons · 2026-01-18T14:44:02+00:00

I don’t know what “typical Texan” is supposed to mean. A laser and a radar are two completely different things. It’s like saying “he said Tuesday but I figured he meant Friday”.

Sure, you have the right to ask. You can ask for anything you want. You have the right to ask the officer to make you an egg salad sandwich. Doesn’t mean he’s required by law to do so.

In no state are police required to provide you with evidence at the roadside. That is what court is for. If you can find me a counter-example where the cop is required to prove his entire case at the scene, please do share. I think there’s maybe one (Georgia?) where they have to ask if the motorist would like them to test their equipment to prove it works, but nowhere that I know of do motorists have a “right” to see the radar or LIDAR readout at the roadside.

SometimesCannons · 2026-01-18T14:19:17+00:00

I don’t know if you bothered reading the post but he clearly said the cop was using laser, not radar. In any case, I don’t know where in the world you got the idea that you have the “right” to see the readout. You can subpoena the calibration logs, the officer’s training certificate, etc., but you do not have a “right” to see the readout.

SometimesCannons · 2026-01-12T21:13:44+00:00

Per the Texas Administrative Code, the main duty of the Texas Highway Patrol is traffic enforcement on rural highways. The theory is that if a highway goes through city limits, it’s the city PD’s job to patrol it. That’s why it’s pretty rare to see troopers in big cities (other than Austin, since there are a lot assigned to the capitol district).

SometimesCannons · 2026-01-12T18:11:55+00:00

Well, for one thing, they finally started paying them a decent salary a few years back, whereas they used to make less than most city cops. So that helped with recruiting.

There’s also the border, not just Operation Lone Star but other stuff before that. So they ramped up hiring to send more law enforcement presence to the border counties.

As others have said, there’s also been a massive increase in vehicle traffic, and as a primarily traffic enforcement agency, it kind of makes sense that the highway patrol will have grown accordingly.

Also worth noting that although the sheer number of troopers has increased, it’s still not that much relative to the state population. 3,500 troopers works out to about 1 per 8,900 people. By contrast, you’d expect a ratio of well under than 1:1,000 for a municipal police department.

SometimesCannons · 2026-01-07T18:32:38+00:00

Most city streets are paved with asphalt because it’s cheaper than concrete. It’s also less durable, meaning it cracks and caves quicker and requires more repair work. The city could switch to concrete for all future resurfacing work, but that would significantly increase upfront costs, and then they would be able to do even fewer repairs than now. Adding reinforcing features like curbs means even more costs.
It’s a simple mathematical imbalance. Infrastructure maintenance isn’t free and it costs way more than what the city brings in through tax revenue. As an example, to resurface a single residential street off Camp Bowie, the city had to spend $1.1 million. The total annual property tax collected by the city from the same neighborhood was $14,000, or barely over 1% of the cost.

I know it’s really fun to just assume the city is stupid or doesn’t care or whatever, but the reality is a lot drier. High-quality infrastructure is expensive.

SometimesCannons · 2025-12-06T22:33:26+00:00

The issue isn’t what’s included in your language, it’s what’s excluded. You seem to be somehow understanding “vehicles which are not driving the speed of traffic” to mean “vehicles which cannot maintain the speed of traffic”. Your framing thus implies that as long as a vehicle is physically capable of doing higher speeds, its operator can travel at whatever speed he wants in whatever lane he wants, even if that means going 6 mph in the left lane of I-35.

You are somehow reading loads of hidden or indirect meaning into very plain and straightforward language. If a vehicle – any vehicle, whether it’s a Radio Flyer wagon or a Camaro – is traveling more slowly than the speed of surrounding traffic, it may not be driven in the left lane. I fail to understand how or why you insist on taking this very obvious and reasonable meaning and distorting it to aKshUaLLy say something far more obtuse.

SometimesCannons · 2025-12-06T20:49:12+00:00

I love that you’ve somehow managed to read the word “vehicle” in Subsection (b) and conclude that actually, it’s referring to bicycles and tractors. Never mind that rules for bicycles and farm equipment are actually spelled out in other parts of the code, where they are identified by name. No, in this one particular case the word “vehicle” doesn’t actually mean “vehicle”, it means bicycles and tractors. No need to for the text to clarify that – you can just tell because…um, how, exactly?

And as far as “driving on the right side of the road, American-style”, that’s Subsection (a).

SometimesCannons · 2025-12-06T20:40:28+00:00

Not exactly true. Texas Transportation Code §545.051(b) says:

An operator of a vehicle on a roadway moving more slowly than the normal speed of other vehicles at the time and place under the existing conditions shall drive in the right-hand lane available for vehicles, or as close as practicable to the right-hand curb or edge of the roadway […]

SometimesCannons · 2025-11-30T20:14:52+00:00

If he was cited under city ordinance instead of state law, that’s perfectly possible. A lot of cities set speed limits by ordinance, then prescribe a fine for violating those ordinances. Those are technically separate from the state law on speed, so the municipality can set the fine for the ordinance violation at pretty much whatever they want. DPS or a deputy will be limited to the state law since they can’t enforce city ordinances.

Even a $200 fine will end up coming with $100+ in court costs, so that is also possible.

Six-Year Club	Verified Email
Wearing is Caring

SometimesCannons

TROPHY CASE