BFF69

Body. Finance. Family. Have some fucking fun.

[Charles Adams @bigangrylaw]

Walked to the Austin Central library yesterday. I spent countless hours alone starting at 9 at its predecessor developing my love for reading and learning. Any parent allowing a child to be there unattended nowadays would be incredibly negligent. It had the fetid smell of stale urine and 80% of the places to sit were consumed by someone with a pile of filthy bags and luggage. There are shelters all over this city that taxpayer have spent hundreds of millions on, why must the public spaces and public transit also be allowed to become Mad Max unsafe hellscapes?

[BFF69 @flywheel25]

@YIMBYLAND It’s a bit in the nose, but we all know you are talking about Tokyo here 😉.

[BFF69 @flywheel25]

I don’t disagree at all, and I think several cities in the USA have made tremendous progress on that front. My only point is that politicians who say “we are going to solve homelessness” don’t have the guts to have the difficult conversations and do the difficult things it takes to address those who refuse help.

[BFF69 @flywheel25]

Your entire post is about “differences” in primary schooling, ignoring where children spend most of their time — family and friend networks. Why do Asian children, for example, dominate gifted and talented programs? Because it’s all their parents talk/obsess about. Do Black and Latino parents talk about that when they get together? No.

[BFF69 @flywheel25]

@mnolangray Sorry, “Nolan”! 🙏🏽

[BFF69 @flywheel25]

@mnolangray Many of these folks don’t want help, Noah. The pull of drugs is too strong. Yes, let’s be empathetic. But we need a very heavy dose of tough love as well or the situation will never get better.

[Austin Justice @AustinJustice]

Travis County DA declined to prosecute a man who shot someone in the chest over a joke. The county next door then gave him 25 years for the burglary he committed after Austin let him go.

Living with crime is a choice.

[BFF69 @flywheel25]

@data_atx There’s nothing out there and the schools aren’t good. No way people will move out there for $750,000 +, unless they bring in a ton of retail first. This is gonna take years, if not decades.

[BFF69 @flywheel25]

@StretchGoat_ “You do not own my attention 24/7.”

My mantra everyday (except for my wife!)

[Austin Justice @AustinJustice]

AUSTIN MAN shoots a guy in the chest over a joke, and Travis County DA lets the case quietly die.

Dec 2023: Ellis Henderson is making rap music with a guy named Ortiz. Ortiz, sitting cross-legged on the floor with his iPad, makes a joke -- riffing that there's a $50,000 price on Henderson's head. Henderson stands over him and fires a single round into his shoulder. The bullet shreds a lung, snaps three ribs, and fragments inside him. Ortiz survives surgery with pieces of it still in his body.

APD charges aggravated assault. Then the case dies as Henderson sits in jail with no indictment, bond slashed from $100,000 to $20,000. In April 2025 the DA drops it cold.

Henderson was no stranger to Austin’s prosecutors. A cocaine felony downgraded to probation. In 2016, he went on a rampage on UT campus -- accosted a female student, beat the parking officer who stepped in, tried to steal his car, then fought the cops so hard they had to tase him. His robbery and escape felonies both got quietly knocked down.

Paying no consequences, he drove north and kicked down an elderly couple's front door in Killeen, storming in with his fists up.

Unlike Travis County prosecutors, Bell County prosecutors didn't blink. They took his priors and put the floor at 25 years, and planned to use the same 2016 UT attack Austin ignored to push a jury toward 40. He didn't risk it and pleaded guilty the morning trial began. 25 years.

The county next door built its case out of the crimes Travis County wouldn't touch.

[Heather Long @byHeatherLong]

Big news: New Fed Chair Kevin Warsh just announced the members of his 5 tasks forces.

It's a mix of academics, central bankers, and biz/tech leaders. Also a mix of left and right leaning

[BFF69 @flywheel25]

This just isn’t true. Many of them will be offered a bed/home, and then voluntarily leave. And the Garzas refuse to put them in jail. Ergo - Austin is a great place to come to if you are severely mentally ill, which is largely a result of drug abuse, because you are allowed to do whatever you want, wherever you want.

Even if the state provides funding and legal cover for involuntary confinement to mental health facilities, I am not convinced Austin council will support that. Some of them will call it “cruel and unusual punishment.”

[BFF69 @flywheel25]

There really is a fundamental difference though between the wealth of a single family home and, say, a multifamily building one might own. The former is straightforward; the latter, in practice, can be incredibly complicated, both in ownership structure and also in value determination. Trying to implement a wealth tax would just be a logistical nightmare, and we all know billionaires would have a cadre of accountants and lawyers to skirt it, while families worth a “modest” (I’m serious here) $1-5MM would get royally screwed. And the wealth tax would absolutely come from them as well.

[Lyn Alden @LynAldenContact]

In related news, July 4th 2026 was intended to be the original end-date of DOGE, where they would have cut over a trillion dollars from the annual federal budget.

But instead it dismantled, because nothing stops this train.

[BFF69 @flywheel25]

@heif There is the is very profound, simple idea called “tragedy of the commons.”

You should go look it up. 💋

[BFF69 @flywheel25]

@AngloSaxonAxe @atxREpodcast @austintexasgov @austinenergy Yea but you would have access to purchasing energy from one of the dozen + providers in the state. Shop for the one that works best for your household needs.

[BFF69 @flywheel25]

@commbankerguy Office is def still a problem but I see it more on vintage assets. Class A, brand new office? This is what the vultures are waiting to scoop up via fire sales from the banks. So long as the bank didn’t lend at 60% LTV + out of the gate, they are prob fine.

[BFF69 @flywheel25]

@sjdedic @mert lol - the “prolonged runway,” with another $150,000 to spare. Get a life dude.

[Haseeb ＞|＜ @hosseeb]

People often ask what makes Silicon Valley culture so special and hard to replicate.

It's not the talent or the capital. There are many places with both.

The secret sauce of Silicon Valley is that it doesn't punish failure. This is rare to the point of being basically unique.

Failure is already its own punishment. Spending years of your life trying to build something that goes nowhere is a deep and unforgiving grief. The time, the energy, the money, the opportunity cost, it's impossible to erase that.

But what SV startup culture strips away is that second layer of punishment: the shame that society stacks on top. The whispers at the next party, that you've embarrassed yourself, that you should have known better. In SV, there's no shame in winding down a startup, it's the mark of having entered the arena and taken a swing.

But then there's stuff like this. This is how it works almost everywhere else in the world. This founder failed, therefore the salary he paid himself is a disgrace (if he did OK, no one would ever bring it up).

Silicon Valley VCs would never post anything like this about a wound down startup. No mention of the founder's background either: Was $200K a paycut for them? Do they live in NYC/SF where $200K is ~$100K take-home? Do they have kids, a mortgage? And come on, no seed-stage company is running out of money because the founder is paying themselves $200K~, seed rounds are in the millions. $200K/yr is like a single engineer's salary. Yeah $200K is on the high side, but really? If you think this founder embezzled from the company, then sue them. If you thought $200K was unconscionable, did you mention that when you invested? Otherwise what is the point of this?

This is why in Silicon Valley (and China and Israel too), startup culture is a gem that's almost impossible to replicate anywhere else in the world. People can't help themselves to rub salt in the wounds of failure, and they don't think about the wider culture reverberations of that attitude.

[BFF69 @flywheel25]

@raqisright Which is which?! 😆😜👀