14 Comment

• NotCommonsense February 24, 2015 at 9:49 am

  If the hipsters have their way the bicycle museum will require 3 ft clearance from all the exhibits! Why can’t I touch the bikes? Is there no Freedom left!?
• Ian February 24, 2015 at 9:54 am

  Could I possibly be more excited about the Citgo turning into a great spot for tacos and beer?

  No.

  No I could not.
• GoogleMaster February 24, 2015 at 10:03 am

  Yay Joy! And Laura, who I believe is a semi-regular commenter here.
• Rex February 24, 2015 at 12:56 pm

  Re: Economic Segregation. I found a interesting conclusion from the original study that seems to be absent from every article on this trending topic. “The Overall Economic Segregation Index is positively associated with liberalism and it is negatively associated with conservatism…” I love the hypocrisy of the elite.
• ZAW February 24, 2015 at 1:12 pm

  Re: Exxon&Conoco Phillips lawsuit. This is why I get so pissed at hypocrites. Honestly, what else can you call the men and women who run these big oil companies? And their lawyers are even worse!
  .
  They’re hypocrites because they whine and cry and stomp their feet about regulations, but how many of them even have their corporate offices much less their homes near a refinery? No, they’re happy to make other people breathe dirty air, but they themselves won’t ever buck up and do it. It’s sickening – literally!
• Progg February 24, 2015 at 3:11 pm

  @Rex:
  Perhaps you stopped reading once your confirmation bias was fulfilled. There also this:
  .
  “The correlations are relatively similar for all the major segregation measures, though once again the associations for the segregation of the wealthy are statistically insignificant..”
• joel February 24, 2015 at 3:17 pm

  Rex, all that means is that on average liberal cities are expensive to live in and conservative cities are less expensive. it’s a story about rich folks being able to separate themselves from the other classes and doesn’t relate to politics. i’d imagine the heavy presence of texas cities here as a lot to do with our long-running school financing issues and dependence on personal automobile transportation.
  ***
  ZAW, there’s a famous saying that is quite apt here, “don’t hate the playa, hate the game.” I can find it easier to let companies off the hook with an understandable drive to find better margins than I can the lawyers and judges that peddle in the subjectiveness of our court systems. these companies have a right to lodge a formal complaints, it’s our poor judicial system that actually gives them legs to run on and win back cases like this. this is more a failure of the american system than it is a immoral stab at blatant greed by corporations. it’s all about checks and balances and these are what are broken in this case. if it’s not oil companies there’s always someone else doing the exact same stuff.
• ZAW February 24, 2015 at 4:39 pm

  Joel: that’s a statement of willfull naivitie, when you consider that the people who play the game are the ones who made the rules for it. I know that sounds like it’s straight from the Occupy Wall Street platform, but when it comes to environmental controls here in Texas, it’s absolutely true, I never believed it until I saw some of the things we have to put up with here: CES Environmental’s mess. The Concrete Crushing plants in Sunnyside and at the Willow Waterhole (same people behind both). The Waller County dump….
  .
  Now let me be clear. I am not blindly raging against the men and women who run oil companies. But I’ve found that often the only way to get your point across in these matters, is to personally insult the developer. Nothing racist or profane – keep it G rated and dont raise your voice (let them do that). A well researched bit of truth they don’t want to come out is the first go to. Beyond that….. Sadly this is a byproduct of the game these companies are playing. If thanks to their lobbyists and lawyers, the State won’t regulate them, and the City can’t, what’s left?
• TheNiche February 24, 2015 at 10:20 pm

  @ ZAW: I have a modest proposal that I think you’ll love. The United States should modify its environmental, tax, labor, fiscal, and monetary policies in order to effectively ban all heavy industry and garbage dumps (and maybe some other things, too). We will import our dirty manufactured goods and export our garbage using trading partners with even fewer environmental regulations and weaker and even more corruptible governments than our own. Doing so will probably result in a great many cancerous and black-lunged Asians or Africans, and the living will be subjected to the whims of the corrupt power structures that have benefited from the trade; but we will not pity them because — we’ll have electric cars with such excellent range (well, maybe) that we can now drive them to our over-sized houses in the suburbs where the good school districts are (which is certainly important, regardless of whether we use internal combustion engines, and that’s just the way it is and such a lifestyle is clearly ethical because MY children are special). We’ll name our subdivisions and the streets within them after the forests and glens and meadows that they replaced and then give ourselves a pat on the back because we’re so incredibly awesome because we said so. Our bodies will outlive our minds and saddle our children’s generation with our caretaking, which is important because we’re firm believers in the sanctity of life — unless you’re foreign and/or brown — and then we can’t be bothered to wish you good luck toward dealing with the cancer and dictators and probably the war(s) that we will wage against you at some point in order to undo the unintended consequences of the things that we ourselves were responsible for doing to you in the first place. That’s your problem. But hey, you’d do it to us if you could. Don’t hate the playa’ hate the game. Am I right?
• ZAW February 25, 2015 at 2:18 am

  @Niche – so you want more hypocrisy? That’s really rich. And sadly, it’s already happening. The same people who rail against environmental regulations at home, have a nasty habit of completely ignoring the environment overseas. Look at the toxins they’ve dumped into rivers in the Niger Delta, and the ongoing smog problems in parts of Asia.
  .
  This is about regulations, and people with a lot of money who don’t want to follow regulations. It’s not about some ethereal, proverbial “game.” To address your hyperbole directly: of course we need industry in this state. But the environmental regulations on industry are already weaker than they should be. By trying to preempt local governments from enacting their own regulations to fill the gaps – the men and women behind the lawsuit are proving themselves to be hypocrites.
  .
  It’s sad that I’m the only one who’s willing to call them on ot.
• Rex February 25, 2015 at 7:45 am

  I am glad yall liked that part as well. My main point here is that people love to talk about one or two cherry picked parts of all these studies. I just thought I would play the part. I think the overall study has value but it does have limitations. Much is dependent on the census tracts area. The other limitation is that the index can only look at the two extremes.
• Fernando February 25, 2015 at 11:27 am

  For those interested in the Bicycle Museum, it’s grand opening is this Thursday from 6-9. Hope to see some of you there:
  http://bit.ly/1zdLwuz (Houston Matters sound bite)
  http://bit.ly/1Aw5Z1i (CW39 video spotlight)
• TheNiche February 25, 2015 at 11:28 am

  @ ZAW: By and large, the men and women behind the lawsuits are employees and want a decent career for themselves. They’re only hypocrites if they haven’t made a peace between their various ideals — but the fact of the matter is, if they don’t do it then somebody else will. And furthermore, the machine has many cogs and to pretend that one does not aid the machine by way of not being the final cog that churns the meatgrinder but rather one of the cogs deeper in the anatomy of the machine — that is a delusion. It is a delusion most easily held by those that are the furthest from the action, for instance by an architect that has moved to far-flung suburbs and expends a great deal of money and energy and other commodities in order to ensure that his children are separated from the children of ‘undesirables’.
• ZAW February 25, 2015 at 12:59 pm

  Oh please, Niche. We all know the people bringing lawsuits aren’t low or mid level employees who just want to make a living. These are higher level People, Vice Presidents, Presidents, CEOs.
  .
  Me? I’m moving out to the suburbs, true. The inertia against making mid range neighborhoods more livable – beautifully captured in your posts – has driven me away. But that doesn’t really enter into this issue. I’m not actively trying to eliminate someone else’s regulations because I don’t feel like following them,