Letters are posted as we receive them during the week, and before they are printed in the paper, so check back frequently to see new letters. If you'd like to send a letter to the editor, use this postmarks submission form, or email your letter directly to [email protected]. Thanks for your patience.

Dear Editor,
    Kudos for your diligent research and informative reporting on Austin's secret police [“APD Tracks Social Media,” News, Sept. 4]. At taxpayer expense, APD is apparently targeting “technical violations” of those on probation, parole, registration, and anyone else they choose – actions that have little or no correlation to bona fide public safety. Subsequent APD arrests divert limited resources from more needed services such as burglaries that are always backlogged. These new arrests additionally clog the jails, courts, prosecutors, and probation personnel with trivial regulatory matters – further expending public funds, leading to even larger public safety budgets demanded each year from taxpayers. Where are our elected officials who alone can demand accountability of APD? Are they also afraid? We are not safer, rather poorer, and our basic freedoms of expression are now subject to this anonymous (perhaps illegal) police monitoring of social media. Shame also to Snap Trends that betrays their own community by making all this possible, for profit.

Dear Editor,
    UT-Austin is currently reviewing bids to contract out several services in the Dell Medical School’s new medical office building to private corporations. These services include maintenance, custodial, and landscaping. We, the Austin community, cannot allow this to happen. This new medical school was funded, in part, by city taxes with the understanding it would create new, quality jobs for our city. Instead, UT’s attempting to turn the facility into a cash cow for corporations that pay unlivable wages and provide little to no benefits.
    The lowest-paid employees always face the most dramatic effects of privatization, and that isn’t a burden we can bear. I’ve worked at UT for seven years, and I make less than $12/hour. While it’s a nearly impossible wage to exist on in Austin, the university pension and health care provide incentive for workers.
    The public suffers too: Instead of having a reliable workforce, our institutions become revolving doors of inexperienced workers. Further, privatization has wasted millions of Texans’ tax dollars in the past, like the $244 million mess Accenture made of the Children's Health Insurance Program.
    We’ve seen this at UT before. Two years ago, administrators planned to privatize all food service positions. The Texas State Employees Union formed a community coalition, Save Our UT, with student and community groups. Together, we defeated that privatization attempt. Today, that fight is renewed.
    The state and the university have the means to give all UT workers a living wage, a pension, and good health care. But they’ll never do it out of benevolence. We will always have to fight to defeat that threat. We must demand an end to this privatization scheme, for the good of our workers and for the good of the services they provide.

Dear Editor,
    One reason not to let children read the Chronicle is the level of obscenity and vulgarity in your pages. Another is the occasional poor science. In the “Best of Austin” issue, the Waco Mammoth Site is described as containing dinosaur bones of mammoth, camel, and tiger. Those animals are not dinosaurs. They are mammals that lived 65,000 years ago. Dinosaurs are reptiles that went extinct 63,000,000 years ago.