mrCharlie

I guess the only good news (and perhaps part of what puts an end to this idea) is that this would probably hurt those charter/private/religious schools as well, since our state legislature keeps finding ways to send them more and more public funds. Someone posted an overview of this proposal on our local community Facebook page earlier this week. We live in a very good school district that heavily relies on very high property taxes, thanks to the current school funding formula. The only question anyone asked is "what will replace property taxes to fund schools", to which there seems to be no idea of any answer. That universal skepticism has me someone optimistic. This sort of sounds like a reasonable proposal at face value -retirees don't have to pay taxes to keep living in the house they own. In practice, it would mostly just be a huge handout to McMansion builders, real estate investors, and landlords.

I believe the state only requires transportation for K-8 students living more than two miles from their assigned school. Thanks to the way district consolidation went in the 1950's, I went to a large, low enrollment, very red rural school district in SW Ohio. After a few failed attempts to pass a operating levy, the district pulled high school bussing right as I started high school (along with eliminating any classes that weren't state requirements). School was 10 miles from my house via curvy, 55mph US 50. Walking wasn't an option, neither was biking - so freshman year my second-shift working mom had to interrupt her sleep in the morning to drive me, then pick me up right before going to work. Sophomore year was a bit less awful since we carpooled with a friend in the morning. We finally passed an income tax before I entered junior year. Busses were restored, but not much else. I was pretty excited about the DeRolph ruling my senior year, hoping to prevent future generation from repeating my experience. Glad the state got that all figured out in the years since...

As much as I'm never excited when ODOT (with zero hesitation) fires the money cannon at the latest highway project, two-lane 33 in Athens/Meigs does feel a bit sketchy when traveling southeast. Certainly better than it used to be before the super 2, but cars (and lots of trucks) traveling full highway speed makes it feel like a head-on collision is imminent. While US 50 is now divided and bypasses Parkersburg, that route looks to be an extra 27 miles. Guess the good news is it does look like the alignment would allow the current bridge to be twinned without too much trouble.

Excited my next Mac or iPhone could very well have a locally-sourced CPU.

This bill solves a non-existent problem, at the expense of making faculty uneasy for their future, and ability to tell the actual truth. The quality and respectability of our state universities is going to suffer when professors are forced to teach "both sides" of every controversial issue (conspiracy theories and holocaust denials). This will make it very difficult to convince high-quality out-of-state students and faculty to come to Ohio in the future. Really hoping that includes football players. Our horrible state legislature has been trying to pass this for years, but the real surprise is that Dewine signed with a big smile on his face. My wife started applying to academic jobs out of state earlier this year when this was proposed yet again. We don't expect much to come of it, blue state institutions have their pick of applicants looking to leave red states. Fortunately we do have other options - she would have no problem getting a job outside of academia, probably for much more money, or at a private institution. Regardless, if that happens, it won't be in Ohio. I've always defended my home state and wanted to stay here, but this (after redistricting reform losing in November - my last real hope for the state) has me more than ready to live someplace else.

I was definitely hoping Sundance would land in Cincinnati, but this was in the back of my mind the whole time. The festival would have lost its prestige and importance over the years just by decline in the industry (aided by "elitists" ignoring it after the move), but Cincinnati would have been the scapegoat. Pretty much the only movies we watch anymore are kids movies, or bad movies on Rifftrax. Neither of those types of films are Sundance material. The rest of our viewing is TV shows.

In five years of DAAP, most of that time spent in studios overlooking Burnett Woods, I think I visited Burnett Woods with friends once or maybe twice. About as many times as we visited the roof of Crosley. I think once was looking for different stuff to draw in our freshman foundation class, and maybe just killing time between classes. I remember skipping rocks on the lake, and climbing around on the Chamber of Commerce Stonehenge structure. MLK is pretty intimidating to cross, not something you want to do without a good reason. Burnett is also on the opposite side of campus from most of the dorms. I commuted, but many of my friends did not.

We considered that, but then it's hard to bail a few days early.

My mother-in-law used to live in North Myrtle Beach. It was a surprisingly annoying drive, really not great route from here to Columbus. I wouldn't exactly advocate building a highway to it though - and one you are there, it's kind of awful.

I haven't tried this one yet, but I do know it has a big fanbase and generally considered superior to the other two Brazilian steakhouse chains we have in Columbus. We actually only tried churrasco for the first time a few months ago. My wife had a great idea to get us trying new restaurants - we dine alphabetically. Basically, either the nationality, cuisine style, or name of the restaurant we go to on the weekend has to start with the next letter of the alphabet. For "B", we went to Brazilian Grill & Bakery off Cleveland Ave. Not only was the food great, but it felt like an authentic cultural experience. All you could eat meat (we mostly had sirloin) and buffet (which included an amazing chicken "pot pie" called empadão de frango) was $25.99 each. The kid ate for half price, despite eating more steak than we did. Everything was super high quality and absolutely delicious, and the atmosphere lively. We truly were the only ones in the place not speaking Portuguese. We got some desserts to go which were also incredible.

Heath is in the process of annexing a very large parcel of farmland to allow a developer to build 600+ single family homes, and that parcel is in Granville schools. Granville is at 95% capacity, this will force at least one or two new buildings. Granville EVSD will need to pass a new bond issue to pay for it, so all residents in GEVSD will have out already very high school taxes go up even more. • Heath is moving forward because this benefits Heath with new middle-upper income residents to pay the city more income tax. One option would be a special assessment to pay for a school, but Heath is already doing this to pay for infrastructure improvements. • GEVSD residents have no say in this process, despite the fact we will be effectively heavily subsidizing this development. Granville estimates that the new subdivision will all 960 students, produce $3.3 million in property and income tax revenue, and create an operating expense of $12 million a year. • Granville has a cost per pupil of $14,400, below the state average of $15,427. With the recent changes in the state funding formula, GEVSD receives $2,200 per pupil in state funding. The rest is all paid in local taxes, which are almost entirely residential. (There are ongoing efforts to attract more commercial development within the district.) • Private Granville Christian Academy receives an average of about $8,000 per student in state funding, thanks to the state's EdChoice Scholarship program. Full tuition there ranges from $9600-11500. The biggest problem here is overlapping jurisdictions with competing interests, a thing the doesn't seem like it should exist. This is really all benefit and no downside for Heath and its current residents. The state tax formula is garbage. Property values in Granville are high in no small part because the schools are good, which also means incomes are high. In our state's usual goal to cut state taxes so local entities get to be the bad guys and ask voters for money to actually pay for things, the state decided we have the ability to pay a lot locally, and cut state funding way back. While that is technically mostly true, it does have limits. School levies are become much harder to pass around here lately, and I'm very concerned my son's schools will be overcrowded in the coming years. I'm a little of torn about the EdChoice scholarships, and the fact the state provides such a comparatively large amount of money to Granville Christian Academy students. I'm not holding anything against those who choose to take advantage of that program - I went to an absolutely garbage largely rural public school in Clermont County, my parents could not afford private school so I was stuck there. This might have given the option to go elsewhere (though realistically I'm not sure where I would have actually gone instead - I would not have liked any sort of religious school). But I don't think it's a huge stretch to say that money is probably coming in part from state money that could otherwise be supporting public schools. That doesn't seem right- the state is often providing significantly more money to private, religious schools (and private charter schools) than it is to some public schools. The actual motives here are even more suspect when one looks at how this program became a reality. It would be MUCH more fair if the state provided all districts with, as a baseline, the same amount per pupil offered for EdChoice students. Additional funds could be paid locally for communities that want better schools, just like private school parents often still pay something beyond what the state scholarship covers. Good schools and education are critical to having a good, working society, and it feels lately like we might be paying the price for some of those cutbacks. https://www.thereportingproject.org/big-crowd-hears-details-of-proposed-600-home-subdivision-and-how-granville-schools-are-preparing-to-manage-growth/ https://www.thereportingproject.org/granville-officials-urge-heath-city-council-not-to-bulldoze-over-granville-schools-with-housing-development/

The Apple Music top artists list is a bit deceptive because it's not close to my only music source, but it's the only one that makes a list I can post. It ends up being mostly stuff I haven't bought yet (I've since dropped $$ at Shake It on Wussy albums), and the shared family playlist for in the car when. I still hear a lot of LCD Soundsystem on the two radio stations I listen to most (Cincinnati's Inhailer, SiriusXMU on satellite). I'm definitely a fan - but the real fan iat our house is our 7-year-old son. They are his favorite band, so they are featured heavily on the family playlist.

I keep telling myself the extra space probably won't matter too since it will still probably cost less to heat and cool than the current house. It's better sealed now, but the energy audit we had done a few years back included a blower door test. Essentially, they seal a strong fan across the front entrance and measure airflow to see how tight the building is. A first for the crew running the test, the now-gone wall-to-wall carpet in our upstairs bedroom ballooned off the ground several inches during the test. At this point we're not in a big hurry to move, unless something changes it will mostly revolves around my wife's job (since I WfH). I'm not entirely opposed to a purple neighborhood as long as there is some sense of community, amenities like sidewalks, and they value public education.

We've "browsed" for houses on and off since the kid was born, mostly just open houses. Our current 3BR 1776 sq ft house is in perfect location right in town and we love it overall, but it was built in 1906 so storage is minimal, and we have the usual old house maintenance. The downstairs is divided into multiple smallish rooms, which means some go underutilized while others are crammed. When we bought our house, I definitely had the "new houses are junk" mentality because most of the ones we saw in our preferred price/size range were indeed low quality, despite their often more usable layouts. Now that we have some more flexibility on what we can afford, we have found well-built newer houses do actually exist. Problem is they are usually twice the size of our current house, not even including finished basements. Maybe justifiable if an older parent were to join our household at some point, but feels excessive otherwise. Plus, most of the quality newer houses are in 1990s-2000s yuppie boomer neighborhoods with HOAs and manicured lawns, and a majority of residents we don't agree with politically. I think the only exceptions were in Gahanna and Worthington. Still too big though.

Facebook really could have been great, but they just can't seem to help themselves. I joined in 2009 when we moved from Ohio to New England (then later back to Ohio) as a way to keep in touch with family and friends I wouldn't necessarily see or talk to otherwise. I did post a lot of "check out this great restaurant" or "look at this project I'm working on" type posts relatively early on, as did a lot of people. Then I think they started getting greedy. They've constantly made it harder and harder to see a clean, chronological feed of only people and pages your follow, as @Gramarye noted above. That's around the same time the ads started getting creepy and intrusive. And I started seeing lots of political posts, which no doubt engage a lot of people but aren't what I'm on Facebook to see. As seems to be the case with most of my friends, I rarely post anything anymore. I don't want Facebook doing any additional data mining to sell more ads, and I don't feel like dealing with hyper-partisan responses on non political posts from people who clearly follow nothing but political pages (boomer uncles). The main I really use Facebook anymore are groups, which I still feel are largely inferior to traditional forums (ahem) but do have the advantage of a much larger user base - especially geographically. The only way to really know what's happening around Granville anymore is to follow the most popular community Facebook page, since local media has declined so badly. I follow a few regional mountain biking pages for trail updates and such. I also follow a few local businesses, since that seems to be where they most actively post updates. Those sorts of things are what makes up the bulk of my feed lately, and that's approaching unusable with the AI slop Facebook keeps trying to shovel in there to keep up the engagement.