we like guns here in florida
Stupid
we like guns here in florida
Associate Member
Try NH or VT. I live in MA, too, and if I had the means I would up an leave as well. State tax will be increasing soon and this state is so democratic it's incredible.
Originally Posted by TITANIUM
I was born in mass.Thinking of moving to Texas.To many liberal socialists here for me. I like freedom, low taxes, and "GUNS".I'll be 44 this month.I was thinking Austin.My wife hates it here also.Does anyone know what part of Austin to rent in???I don't want to live in the city.A 20 mile commute each way is fine.I just don't know where to look.Don't want to move into a shitty place.Feedback welcome.Thanxs Titanium
Knowledgeable Member
What type of shooting do you do?
CHEMICALLY ENGINEERED
The Woodlands are about 30 miles north of downtown Houston.
Senior Member
That was written by somebody that has never been there. I live about 25min away. Used to live there. I hate that fvcking city.Too many snobs in Johnson County. I love where I live now. Full of gun toating meat eaters!
Member
Its not The Woodlands ARE bro, its The Woodlands IS bout 30 miles north of downtown, jeez
CHEMICALLY ENGINEERED
lol, yes sir, don't get your panties all twisted up now.
Member
Well i grew up there :P and hearing it put that way just sounds really strange, cause its not like your driving to some LAND of WOODS, your driving to the woodlands! gah
Banned
Titanium, PM me and we can talk on the phone if you really need info on the austin area. I am in the business so to speak and will hook you up with any info you need. Too much to type though. You tell me what you are looking for in a place to live, and I will get you some contacts that will take care of you.
Banned
ph34, now I know where you stay huh? Man the woodlands is the upside of life. Firen of mines parents liver there, you may know him, Chance Mock? Little younger than you but very popular guy round these parts.
That don't kill me, can only make me stronger
austin texas is so much fun
Banned
You too? Beautiful city eh? So much to do so little time to do it in! Just got off the lake a few hours ago. Man it is low. I am burnt to a crisp too!.
Member
I would love to live in Austin
“SIS PACIS INSTRUO PRO BELLUM”
The Woodlands look really cool.I'm moving for alot more than political views.Taxes, cost of living, insurance, you name it.Everyone around here drives their car like idiots.They just smash into each other in 128.The cops have really poor attitudes also.The politicians are out of their f*cking minds.It's like a complete moral kill, never mind the money aspect of it all.I could make a laundry list of reasons why, but it would be pointless.Thanks for all the input on this post.it's very much appreciated.
“SIS PACIS INSTRUO PRO BELLUM”
higherdesire-I will PM you.WE need to save some money up for moving costs.I hate moving.Probably spring time, may be sooner.Have to start figuring where a to look for a job, and such.Definitely getting out of here and going Texas bound.Thanxs for the help.Titanium
Anabolic Member
Austin is ok...it is beautiful and compared to mass and pretty much anywhere in the socialist north, it is heaven. But It's relatively a small city and filled with alot of college kids who don't know shit about shit yet. I personally would rather live in the outskirts of houston than austin. But it is a very humid city. Woodlands is nice, there is also humble and if you really want some isolation there is Magnolia but that's more like a 30-40 minute commute but if you are a houstonian, an hour drive isn't sh*t anyway :P
Associate Member
come on down to Kentucky.
Knowledgeable Member
austin california?
Anabolic Member
There's not much difference between the total tax burden for residents of Texas vs. Massachusetts. Sure, Texas doesn't have a state income tax, but our sales tax is even higher than the just-raised sales tax in Mass. Property taxes are a lot higher here in Texas, mostly because local property taxes pay for most of local public schools.
Texas insurance and electricity rates are among the highest in the US, if not the highest. Deregulation was supposed to fix that, but instead, the rates just went higher.
Texas Republican Party complaining about high insurance rates:
http://www.texasgop.org/site/News2?J...s_iv_ctrl=1402
Members of a House-Senate committee said Tuesday that they are growing impatient with the fact that Texas homeowners pay the highest insurance rates in the nation year after year.
Despite assurances from state Insurance Commissioner Mike Geeslin that the situation is improving, several members of the Texas Sunset Advisory Commission said the Legislature should consider a new round of insurance reforms next year to make the market more competitive and bring rates down.
Sen. Kim Brimer, R-Fort Worth, said insurers have recorded five straight years of solid profits since lawmakers passed a major insurance reform law in 2003 that was supposed to stabilize the market and reverse a series of record rate hikes.
"These profits indicate to me that insurance companies are not sharing with their customers the cost savings they received" under the law, Mr. Brimer said, citing in particular the three biggest insurers State Farm, Allstate and Farmers for increasing their rates in recent months.
"This is a fat cat on the prowl that we need to rein in," he told Mr. Geeslin. "We are going to give you the tools you need, and you can fix the wreck."
Sen. Juan Hinojosa, D-McAllen, said that while Texas homeowners continue to pay the highest rates in the nation, insurance companies have paid out just 43 percent of premiums over the last five years to cover losses in the state well under the national average of 60 percent and the break-even point of about 65 percent.
"Insurance companies are not responding to the market, and homeowners are being gouged," he said. "Something is not right."
Mr. Geeslin said his figures show that homeowner rates have decreased 6 percent in the last five years. He also noted that 29 insurance companies have entered the Texas market during that period.
"The market has improved better than what people thought it would back in 2003," he asserted.
But he also acknowledged that protracted legal fights with some companies have hurt efforts to bring rate relief to consumers, and he also cited the tightening insurance market along the Texas coast.
Industry spokesman Beaman Floyd said the new insurance regulation scheme approved by lawmakers the so-called "file and use" system needs more time to work. That system gave companies more freedom in setting rates.
Mr. Floyd, of the Texas Coalition for Affordable Insurance Solutions, also contended that in most cases, premiums have stabilized or dropped in Texas in recent years even as home values increased.
The sunset commission which includes five senators and five House members will make recommendations to the 2009 Legislature on the Texas Department of Insurance and changes in state insurance laws.
Rate comparisons by the National Association of Insurance Commissioners indicate Texas has the highest homeowner rates in the country.
(there's more).
http://www.kwtx.com/home/headlines/39322102.html
AUSTIN (February 9, 2009)-- Electricity rates have soared higher in Texas than in any other state with open competition, but the former Central Texas state senator who sponsored the deregulation law a decade ago says he still considers the bill a success.
A report commissioned by the nonprofit Cities Aggregation Power Project coalition of Texas municipalities released Monday based on numbers from the U.S. Energy Information Administration says residential electricity rates rose 64 percent between 1999 and 2007 in the state.
Before that, Texans paid rates that were well below the national average.
The Legislature passed a sweeping deregulation law in 1999 that sought to break down electric monopolies and remove strict government control over retail rates.
The idea was to allow competitive market forces to drive down prices.
The sponsor of the legislation, former Sen. David Sibley, the former Waco City Councilmember who used to represent the area in the state Senate, acknowledges rates have gone up but says he still considers the bill a success.
Sibley now lobbies for power companies and others.
He blames the hikes on increased natural gas prices and says Texas is far too dependent on natural gas.
He said Texans would pay lower rates if the state diversified to coal, nuclear and other energy sources.
====================
Think twice before you assume that Texas government is better than what you have in Massachusetts.
Massachusetts provides its citizens with pretty good public services. But Texas ranks last (or close to last) in spending for services, and has a horrific track record when it comes to making sure that public services are provided on the up-and-up. And when you try to prod someone in state government to make things right, you may as well talk to a dead dog for all the good it will do.
Remember the last peanut butter scare? The feds tracked part of the problem to a filthy, rat and cockroach infested peanut processing factory in West Texas that had been operating for the past 5 years without any sort of permit, and without any sort of state inspection.
I dunno how long it takes for a gas pump to start pumping incorrect amounts of gas, but here in Texas, they're supposed to be checked every four years. When they get inspected, they're supposed to get a shiny new inspection sticker on them. But if you stop to look at Texas gasoline pumps, a lot of them haven't been checked in 6 or 8 years (I saw one in west Texas that hadn't been checked since 1995). There's no telling what other responsibilities the state of Texas is slacking on . . .
http://cbs11tv.com/investigators/gas....2.800323.html
Aug 21, 2008 6:41 pm US/Central
Hundreds Of Gas Pumps In N. Texas Cheating Drivers
An investigation by CBS 11 News and the CBS Evening News uncovers hundreds of malfunctioning gas pumps in North Texas and an inspection system that is far behind the rest of the country.
Using information from the Texas Department of Agriculture, we've created a database of all pumps that have had problems from January 2008 to July 2008. Click here to see it for yourself as a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet (see below for an explanation of the terms used).
A Plano gas station, in the 600 block of Ohio, is on the list of stations with pump problems. Customers filling up at that station are being shorted. One inspector said the counter on the pump doesn't zero out.
Owner Andy Misgun says his new pumps weren't properly calibrated and that the state fined him $700. Misgun says he contacted a company to re-calibrate his pumps and they later passed inspection.
Texas law requires gas pump inspections every four years. Not enough says weights and measures inspector Henry Oppermann. "When an inspection period would go beyond let's say a year and a half, I think that's really going beyond what regulatory oversight should be."
Ed Burbach, an attorney at Gardere, Wynne & Sewell, represents Sunmart - a company with a number of stations reported to have pump problems.
Thursday he released a statement that said, "Sunmart is glad that its pumps are back in operation providing gasoline to Texans. We strongly deny that we did anything to harm our customers. Like all gas retailers in Texas, we are required to rely upon calibrations of our devices performed by State licensed technicians. We and others are concerned that State employed inspectors utilized different methods to test the devices than the nationally and legally recognized methods used by State licensed technicians. We are working hard with Texas authorities to determine why these discrepancies exist. We are proud to call Texas home and will continue to serve Texans and business and community projects as we have for nearly 40 years."
State figures show there are 72 inspectors for more than 290,000 pumps.
Texas consumer complaints have skyrocketed with 1,511 reported in 2007 and 1,344 so far in 2008.
(there's more at the web link)
Any child who is sent to live in a State School is probably going to be horribly abused, unless lasting changes are made. Ya, the Feds investigated the Texas State Schools, and found stuff like employees forcing "slow" kids to fight each other, and sexual abuse.
Gripe all you like about taxes and liberals and etc (I'm not too wild about 'em myself), but at least folks who genuinely can't take care of themselves in Massachusetts are not neglected and abused the way we treat 'em here in Texas.
For further reading:
http://www.texasmonthly.com/2009-07-01/btl.php
Failing Darla
For too long, the considerable needs of developmentally disabled Texans have gone unmet. It’s time to end the abuse and neglect.
When you live here long enough, you become inured to certain things that might otherwise drive you crazy, like the fact that we rank, among all states, near or at the bottom of too many lists: dead last in health insurance coverage, forty-ninth for children living in poverty, well below average in the incarceration of nonviolent teenagers, and so on. So when the Legislature gets infatuated with a nonpressing issue—this session it was voter ID—instead of trying to improve dire situations that have persisted for decades, the public response isn’t outrage but a collective shrug. It’s our way to embrace the bright side of the Texas myth (independence, individualism) while ignoring the dark side, which leaves the less fortunate to fend for themselves. Some of these evils have been with us for so long that we’ve come to believe they’re intractable, even though other states have proved they aren’t. And when outsiders say we’re backward in our nonapproach to social ills—what else would you expect from Texas?—the historic response is to circle the wagons in collective defensiveness.
Those were the kinds of thoughts running through my mind this spring when I happened to meet Darla Deese, who is fifty and “developmentally disabled” (the polite term for “mentally retarded”), at the precise moment, after decades of abuse and neglect, that the Legislature had budgeted $507 million for care of people like her. “It’s going to create a lot of opportunities for people . . . to stay in their homes or a community setting,” state representative John Zerwas, of Richmond, jubilantly told the Houston Chronicle. If only that were true. Of the 66,000 developmentally disabled Texans who have been waiting up to eight years for services in their communities—some trapped in institutions, some with families stressed to the max—a mere 7,000 will have their needs met. It is a measure of how bad things are (we rank forty-eighth in funding for the developmentally disabled) that some who fought for the increased appropriation and accompanying reforms are grateful for what they got.
In truth, most people do not care about the fate of the mentally retarded. Adults with developmental difficulties are children in grown-ups’ bodies, which means that they are expensive and time-consuming to care for. In Texas, they and their families have two choices: institutions, which, at best, serve as human warehouses, or community services, which are available to only a lucky few. “I believe waiting lists are immoral,” says state senator Judith Zaffirini, of Laredo, who has done more than any other legislator for the developmentally disabled. In general, the strategy of our state government has been to lurch from crisis to crisis—or lawsuit to lawsuit—while maintaining a dysfunctional system that is outdated, underfunded, and incomprehensibly bureaucratized.
The $507 million came about in response to a 2008 civil rights investigation of Texas’s thirteen state schools by the U.S. Department of Justice. The findings read like something out of a fifties horror movie: residents put in straitjackets, overly and improperly medicated with psychotropic drugs, and worse. “More than 800 employees across all 13 facilities have been suspended or fired for abusing facility residents since fiscal year 2004,” the report notes. “Over 200 of the facilities’ employees reportedly were fired in fiscal year 2007 alone for abuse, neglect or exploitation of residents . . .” Injurious falls went unnoticed, claims of rape unprosecuted. “The mortality rate for some of the facilities raises serious concerns regarding the quality of care that facility residents receive. In recent years, one of the facilities averaged two resident deaths per month.” It’s worth noting that the now infamous “fight club” scandal at the Corpus Christi State School, in which employees pitted residents against one another, occurred months after the feds released their report. In other words, at least one school investigated and found wanting was in no hurry to clean up its act.
This fact would come as no surprise to Darla and her sister and lifelong advocate, Esther Hobbs, who is sixty. The women now share a sun-drenched house in the Montrose section of Houston, where Esther runs a public relations business. New people sometimes make Darla nervous; she shook her head and was reluctant to make eye contact when Esther introduced us. Until a few years ago, she slept with one eye open and often threw her hands up in the air, as if warding off an attacker. “We don’t know what she’s been through,” Esther said of Darla’s 31 years in the state’s care.
Darla’s story is typical of many developmentally disabled Texans’. She was born in Beaumont, into a strict Southern Baptist family of modest means. Her father was a car salesman, her mother a homemaker. A beautiful girl with blue eyes and blond ringlets, she was the last of four children. Her mother had had a medical emergency when she was pregnant that resulted in a loss of oxygen to Darla’s brain. But her oldest sister was more than willing to take her on. “Darla was like my baby doll,” Esther told me. “From the time she was born she was my responsibility.” Even so, this was the late fifties and early sixties, when there was much shame and little hope associated with mental retardation. The family’s doctor urged that Darla be institutionalized, and her parents agreed. “I came home one day and she was gone,” Esther told me. “They didn’t talk about things then.” Darla had been sent to the Mexia State School. She was five.
Her decline there was as predictable as her interminable loneliness. She lost the ability to speak in anything but single words and almost always seemed afraid. When Esther came to visit with her parents, Darla leaped into her arms and wept wretchedly whenever it was time for her family to leave. Then, less than a year into Darla’s stay, her parents got a middle-of-the-night call from a state school worker. “I’ll probably lose my job over this,” she told them, “but your daughter doesn’t belong here.”
For the next year Darla lived at home and attended special-education classes at a Beaumont public school. Esther left home at eighteen and not long after discovered that her parents had moved her sister to the new state school, in Richmond, just south of Houston. Darla would spend the next thirty years there. Initially she lived in a dayroom with thirty or so girls, sleeping in a cubicle and sharing hard wooden chairs. “They had nothing to write on, nothing to read,” Esther said. Darla came home every other Sunday, on holidays, and on her birthday, but she was more like a wild animal, Esther remembers, than a human being. Often she had cuts and bruises; when Esther asked staff what had happened, they always said that Darla had fallen down. Who really knew? The turnover among her direct care staff was high; most worked for minimum wage and had little or no training. Around age twelve, with her parents’ assent, Darla had a hysterectomy; there was sexual activity at the school, they were told, and no one wanted her to get pregnant.
In 1991, when Darla was 32, she was moved to another part of the school. At that point, her female caretakers were replaced by men; even more worrisome to Esther was the fact that some prison inmates purported to be mentally retarded had been shipped to state schools in an effort to ease prison overcrowding. On visits Esther sometimes found her sister’s face smeared with makeup or bruised. Darla developed a fear of trees, which led Esther to suspect that she was being raped in the woods on school property. After Darla’s caseworker reported that she had been sexually abused, Esther complained repeatedly to the state school staff and to the Fort Bend County Sheriff’s Department, but to no avail. (This outcome is unsurprising in cases involving the developmentally disabled: Claims by them or on their behalf are routinely seen as lacking credibility, even though the Justice Department’s Office for Victims of Crime estimates that nearly 83 percent of developmentally disabled women will be sexually abused in their lifetime.) About a year later, Esther was called by a caseworker who reported that Darla had a human bite mark on her back. Esther went to the school looking for her, and she found her huddled in a corner, inconsolable and “beaten beyond recognition.” “She was the saddest person in the whole wide world,” Esther told me.
By the mid-nineties, Esther could no longer live with the situation; she persuaded her mother to allow her to become Darla’s guardian. By then, her own health was suffering—her skin itched as if it were on fire—and when her doctor diagnosed stress and asked about the possible causes, Esther told him about Darla. She remembers his response as if it were yesterday: “Everyone in the medical profession knows what they do to those kids. You need to go get your sister right now.” She did. “It was two years before she would let me hug her,” Esther told me.
If this were a movie, Darla’s life would have taken a dramatic turn for the better. That’s not what happened. She joined the proverbial waiting list to take advantage of government funds and services, but it was eight years before she got any. In the meantime, Esther put together a patchwork of private day care programs, some of which kept Darla no safer than she had been at the state school (a large bruise on Darla’s inner thigh was diagnosed as, yes, evidence of repeated sexual assault). For several years, out of desperation, Esther ran her own school, but she had to close when grants dried up.
It doesn’t have to be this way. Zaffirini and other advocates believe that $1 billion is needed to solve some of Texas’s worst problems, like inadequate training and low staff pay at state schools. More important, though, is the way money is allocated: Too much of it goes only to large, outdated, expensive institutions instead of smaller, cheaper-to-operate community-based programs, which many developmentally disabled people and their families prefer. (The Mexia State School, for instance, is the largest employer in town, a problem for any politician who wants to improve care but remain in office.) Overall, says Zaffirini, it will take a change in the popular will to create a system—from home care to institutions, with many alternatives along the way—that can help the developmentally disabled live decently and safely, earning money and contributing to society.
Until then, the waste of human potential, and human life, continues.
Last edited by Tock; 06-22-2009 at 04:51 PM.
Knowledgeable Member
property taxes are a btch, but austin is a nice place to live
“SIS PACIS INSTRUO PRO BELLUM”
Well,First, thanks for the replies.I do defensive shooting and long range target.My knees are both replaced.There made of titanium.Hence my screen name.They love humidity.Texas may have it's problems.But I guarantee it's nothing like mass.Plus, I want to rent first, then buy a house.I'll be 44 this June.So, there is a retirement component to throw in also.I want to retire when I hit 65.I'll work out and run gear to the very end!
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