2024 LC Thread

Melk making up for his wife’s vegan hubris by ordering double animals.

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Is that Hokkaido or Jinya? The menu looks familiar

Its been trendied. Ramen used to be poor peasant food. Set the pork to boils for hours, hit it with a quick sear, use the boil water with some soup base to make a broth and mix with noodles, bam, cheap, delicious, awesome.

I mean, shit, the noodles are essentially just flour water salt, so literally every person can make them.

Extra bonus points if Hermione has a penis in this one.

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My wife has a vision to open a British pasties food truck in the LA area. I think there may be one or two there already, but yeah meat pies seem like a pretty perfect food for that clientelle

In the US, ramen has to compete with pho, which is usually at a much better price point.

Dollar general has produce?

Also you got to use apps. Most chains have an app and the app can have some decent deals with bogo and other offers. Just ordering off the menu with no deal is a suckers bet.

Why have foot soup when you could have Ramen?

I’ve been telling my friends that Pho is the only thing that hasn’t made me angry when I go out to eat… but, the local Pho joint I frequent just raised prices after keeping them pretty reasonable for the last few years. Now it’s $20 for a bowl of bun bo hue with tip :( .

I guess I’m just going to be angry eating Pho too.

First, man am I glad I dropped from my school board run. The district is facing declining enrollment and a change in how the state funds education so they are having some financial difficulties. The district announced the possibility of school closures a few months back and has opened the process for public comment and all that jazz. The community of course is extremely upset and is convinced the board really wants to close schools and this isn’t a last resort. One of the schools up for closure is the school my daughter went to for elementary. Her middle school isn’t on the list but it probably will be next year if enrollment continues to decline.

Has anybody else gone through this in their local district? I’m assuming that the process and the reaction is going to be similar to any other community that has gone through this, but I wanted confirmation…

I don’t have any kids but I used to live in a high growth area where they build a bunch of cathedral schools. But in DFW this pattern keeps repeating. A bunch of families move into one of these areas then the kids cycle through and new families don’t come in and they end up with a bunch of massive schools and no kids.

In Dallas Fort Worth I have seen this happen to a half dozen or more cities/districts in the last forty years. I really don’t know what they do with the schools. I live in a much older area now that doesn’t have the same issues.

My daughter’s previous elementary school is a very walkable school as it’s right in the middle of a residential neighborhood. But there’s also 0 available land to build anything new, and the only way for it to gain enrollment is for people whose kids have graduated and moved out to sell their house to an incoming family. I suspect this will happen when either housing prices or interest rates drop, but short of that I don’t think it’s changing any time soon. The only area within that schools catchment area is downtown, and the only housing they’re building there is high prices mixed-use apartments that I doubt we get any students from. There’s 57 new mixed-use downtown apartments being built now, and there’s nothing in the permitting pipeline for additional housing (and there isn’t actually any undeveloped land available to build in this catchment area).

My district is made up of a lot of small schools, which is a selling point and used to be able to be funded before the state capped how much a local levy could raise and be spent locally.

We have 9000 students and 19 schools. My daughter’s prior elementary school is under 200 students. It’s built for 250 (or 300 with the portable classrooms). I don’t see how the district continues to provide the level of programs it does and keeps underpopulated schools open, but the rest of the community doesn’t see it like that.

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It’s definitely going on in Seattle and Bellevue. Did some searching around and this article touches on all three districts, and it sounds like it may be talking about your particular school in the article. Bellevue and Seattle have had 11% and 9% declines in enrollment since COVID. Bellevue consolidated two elementary schools last year and considering more. Seattle is considering consolidations for 2025-2026 year.

Basically, the price of ramen and pho in these areas is too damn high which crowds out young families.

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Thanks. I was aware and have read up on those two districts. Was hoping for some direct info from someone that has gone through it.

In Olympia, the city is so difficult to develop in that a lot of developers won’t do it. As an example, the one piece of undeveloped land in the elementary school’s district I was talking about is (trying) to be developed by Habitat for Humanity. The project is going to build 12 cottages on a small piece of land. They went in for a permit presubmittal meeting and the requirements the city put on the would basically double the cost of the on-site improvements:

According to Kim, the project will require frontage improvements. She outlined the following requirements as per the city code:

  • Dedicating a portion of 8th Avenue as city right-of-way. This dedication would include constructing a section of 8th Avenue to meet the local access standard.
  • Chamber Street has approximately 30 feet of the existing right-of-way, which cannot accommodate the local access standard and required frontage improvements. A dedication of a portion of the street would be necessary.
  • Chamber Street has a pavement rating of 55. Based on the current code, a street overlay would be required for those improvements.
  • Another transportation requirement outlined concerning frontage improvements includes the widening of Chamber Street between 8th and 9th Avenues. The widening would need to increase the width to at least 20 feet. The existing width is currently less than 20 feet wide.

Kim explained that the required widening of Chamber Street between 8th and 9th Avenues is to ensure safe emergency service and solid waste access.

  • The city also requires widening 7th Avenue between Boulevard and Chamber Street to a minimum of 20 feet width. This widening work is intended to fulfill transportation standards for the development.
  • The city code also requires widening 7th Avenue between Boulevard and Chamber Street to a minimum width of 20 feet. Another widening requirement to Chamber Street as it turns the corner from 7th Avenue, heading north towards the project site.
  • Kim also noted that establishing safe walking routes along Chamber Street and Seventh Avenue would need to be addressed as an off-site requirement. She said there is an existing bus stop in the area serving Madison Elementary School within a mile distance.
  • The city requires a public shared-use pathway to provide a bike and pedestrian connection running east-west towards the underdeveloped property to the east.

Tyrell Bradley, the civil engineer for the project, seemed taken aback at the extensive off-site improvement requirements. “That’s an impressive amount of off-site improvement. I think this is the first project I have worked on where the off-site will probably be double the cost of the on-site development.”

The community is convinced that the enrollment study that a consultant did for the district is wrong and enrollment will increase, but I don’t see how it happens without some systemic changes in how the city approaches development, and lower housing prices/interest rates so people can afford to move here.

It doesn’t help that this is the state capitol and the largest employer is the state, and the state has very much moved to and accepted a “work from home” strategy so there’s no need to live here if you work for the state anymore.

A lot of their newer stores do.

I’m probably ponied on this, but Coke floated the idea of demand-based pricing 25 years ago, and it went over as disastrously as this Wendy’s idea is/will.

Frosty with a prize inside imo.

Went through a similar issue in November, when our school district was trying to get a levy passed. (It succeeded, but the tiniest of margins.)

The story for us was a little different. We have increasing enrollment, but the school board was terrible at communicating exactly what the issue was, so a bunch of people were convinced that it was simply financial mismanagement that SHOULD NOT be rewarded with a new levy.

The real issue was (@riverman alert) that new developments were being built (therefore increasing enrollment), but the developers were getting tax abatements, so that the district wasn’t seeing an inflow of revenue from these new developments.

What was really stunning to me was how many people seemed willing to cut off their nose to spite their face: the primary reason that people are willing to pay to live in my area (Dublin OH) with its relatively high property values and property taxes is for the perceived quality of the public school system. If they had successfully tanked the levy, it would have meant, among other things:

  • Ending the International Baccalaureate program
  • Reducing the number of AP classes
  • Eliminating other small-enrollment programs, like foreign languages
  • Imposing quite high participation fees for athletics

I feel pretty confident saying that the net result would have been, yes, saving some money on taxes but more than offset by decline in property values. I feel somewhat bad for the school board in navigating this, but they did an absolutely terrible job explaining their position. As a result, basically everyone was angry.

Similar story for Columbus City schools, where people are even more convinced that it was gross mismanagement leading to the need for a levy.

don’t they all do this? they just call it “financial aid”

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