81. He is a bleached sarcophagus.

He didn’t get better.

Mail in voting across the board could be better than a federal holiday. In Washington, I get everything I need to vote in the mail: a ballot, a voter’s guide, a postage paid envelope. I literally don’t have to wear pants to vote. I can take a week to make a decision about something before I wander over to the nearest mailbox to drop off my ballot.

Never having done it, voting in person sounds awful.

I’m right handed but I use my left hand to type and navigate my phone. I also have my number pad on the left hand side of the keyboard.

I didn’t imply assassination attempts of the vice president when I was an 8 year old boy. This guy is a lunatic.

Say it isn’t so!

Get a dish towel wet and use that to swat at the fly. The weight of the water and the extra length of the towel let’s you get it going faster than the fly can react.

Put one foot in front of the other And soon you’ll be walking cross the floor Put one foot in front of the other And soon you’ll be walking out the door

Sorry. That’s the best advice I can give

This is correct, but they do make portable units with two hoses. Those will be as efficient as a window unit. Costco sells dual hose models for a few hundred dollars. I have one and it works well for heating and cooling.

It’s not ageist to say that young people do not vote at the rates of older people. It’s just a fact.

Good for us for voting in record numbers. They’re still poor numbers.

+52

And replace him with who?

According to the state salary database, there are about 3 dozen UW employees who make more than $500,000 a year in 2022 (the most recent year published). A few are administrative staff, many are coaches for sports (which is very dumb), and a few are professors.

Their total salaries sum to $32 million, which is a lot. But when you divide that across the total number of students, it comes out to about $580 per student per year. So even if you stopped paying these people, tuition would only go down about 5%.

That’s assuming that these staff members don’t bring any value, which is not a good assumption. Many of these highly paid people would be highly compensated in this private sector–for example the manager of UW’s investments makes $1 million per year–so rightly or wrongly, the university must pay very high to retain them.

As I said before, the university has received $400 million less from the state (adjusted for inflation) today than it did in the 1980s. The expense of highly paid staff is a drop in the bucket compared to the drop in state funding.

In 1986, my mom paid $386 ($1,106 in 2024) in tuition for a quarter at the University of Washington. In 2015, I paid around $3,700 ($4902 in 2024) for a quarter at UW.

In 1986, UW got $440 million dollars from the state. That’s $1.2 billion in 2024. In 2015, UW got $644 million from the state. That’s $0.8 billion today.

It’s hard to find enrollment data for some reason, but there were less than 30,000 students at UW in the late 80s. In 2015, that figure was closer to 55,000.

Using inflation adjusted figures, the state was contributing $41,000 per student in 1986 compared to $14,500 in 2015. Adding in yearly tuition, the total cost was $44,700 in 1986. In 2015, that’s $29,300 per student.

Importantly, this analysis leaves out private contributions to the university’s budget which makes up a large portion of its funds. However, those funds are usually restricted in how they can be spent.

Most of the buildings on UW’s campus were built in the 50s or 60s. There were some that were from the 20s and 30s or older. Forget cosmetics, most of those need renovations just to remain usable. There were thousands of good, usable computers in the libraries that were always in use. Keeping that fleet running is an expense that just wasn’t around 30+ years ago. Labs equipment has gotten better and more expensive. I used a $100,000 high speed camera when I was in school. My mom sure didn’t have access to that.

Based on my quick, back of the envelope math, education has not gotten 3 to 4 times more expensive, but the state has been contributing less and less money to fund it.

Second, the only reason for the massive amounts of student debt is due to universities massively inflating the cost of an education to milk the government of their federal student loans.

I can’t speak for everywhere, but that’s not true for my alma mater. Tuition has been rising because of a lack of state funding. 20 years ago, state funds made up 2/3 of the University budget. Now it’s 1/3. The difference has to come from somewhere.

Go to an in-state school. Prices are lower. Go to a community college to take your desired program’s prerequisites and transfer to a state university. Or just finish up a degree at a community college.

I take a 30 to 40 minute walk (2 miles) every day at work. Sometimes it’s to clear my head. Sometimes it’s to think about work. Sometimes it’s to think about not work. No one cares, and if they did, I’d argue it’s time well spent for the company. I can’t get anything done if my brain is overflowing with crap.

Man, a work LAN party would be pretty cool.

Here’s a school bus going up for auction. 117,000 miles. Sitting for 2 years. Current bid $643 with 3 days left.

I invent something. Since there are no patents, my idea is put in the open. A big company sees my idea and uses its much bigger budget to advertise and out sell me, putting me out of business. How’s that not abusive?

Patents prevent theft. Patents on medicine based on publicly funded research is stupid. I could be persuaded that it’s theft in that particular instance. But in general, no patents are not theft.

For those who don’t know, like me, the Aitken Bible was the first English edition of the Bible published in the US. It was approved by the Congress of the Confederation (the government before the Constitution was signed) in 1782.

I’m sure the judge and the judge’s family’s lives would be immediately threatened by his deranged followers. So that could be part of it.