k310

Try undoing Prop 13. It only benefits long-standing businesses and the few who never leave their home in 50 or more years.

For everyone else, the tax base resets upon sale, and people sell and buy homes.

Surprise.

That usually marks a peak. The old saying was, when cab drivers brag about their market success, it's over. You described speculation.

The worst career and life killers are "woulda, coulda, shoulda."

I so wanted an academic career, say, in astrophysics or such. Then a "here's your uniform" war, and later various jobs in aerospace, university (staff), investment banking (unix servers), sales engineer for said servers, a startup or two.

I could have blamed that war for trashing a Nobel career, but I supported their computing. Not spectacular like the zucks of the time, but honest work, and I never harmed or took advantage of anyone, not in the service (USCG) nor in aerospace nor others.

A guy at Sun said that he bought a TV for a quarter millon. He sold Sun stock to buy it, and it went to the sky with the dot com boom.

If you want a coulda, I owned an Apple-1 and traded it at a swap meet for who knows what. I could never get a cassette tape working. They sell for over $600K now. So it goes.

Real value is often delivered by teams rather than an individual. I was the Woz kind of guy whose Jobs never showed up. I'm not griping. That's life.

Try to win in other ways. That cabbie probably blew the money gambling, and there's the story of a new IPO millionaire who drove his Ferrari off the road in Los Gatos.

Money? There's always someone with more, to make you jealous, except for one person, who is extremely unhappy and fearful of losing his money and his race being obliterated (It isn't). He only gripes and bitches about whatever.

Drugs? Sure.

Am I jealous? Hell no. The only thing I kinda envy is that my kid never smeared a booger on the president's desk. My own pranks were smaller, and my kid always was and is, very considerate.

Happiness from within.

I have pictures, slides, official documents (a few) and some negatives from family in pre-internet and pre cheap disk drive times. And Dad's paintings.

Legible media were a way of "preserving what's worth preserving" via what wasn't thrown away, and give or take disaster or deliberate shredding.

A kind of quality ranking, but what do we do in the age of bot clickbait "quantity over quality?"

Must we keep everything? I'll keep my slides even after that are scanned, but I already sorted out the best out of space and access concerns.

Sometimes constraints nudge us in the "right" direction.

Looking at my disk drives (seriously in need of sorting ) very little is unique (my products) [0], a lot of photo files and scans, and a ton of material I downloaded from the internet, of which a tiny bit is really still useful.

And books and music score downloads, which will probaby be safely archived by others.

I don't regret giving away hundreds of pounds of printed musical scores. They never laid flat, anyway. The ipad does.

[0] even when 100mb disks were common, one author said that his writings would fit on a floppy.

Social Security, plus IRA RMD and one pension, some small mutual funds, don't come close to that number.

The act is dated July 15, 2026

Is this coming up for a vote just now? Is congress actually in session, or has Mike Johnson called for yet another vacation, in order to stall embarrassing motions from being introduced?

I looked for reasons but couldn't find any.

Tell PG&E. We've got helicopters buzzing about the countryside, checking power lines.

Whereas, from my ridge I can see 10 or 12 poles. I'll report for cheap.

Just my entire electric bill.

I was going to say One, Two, Three, Infinity by George Gamow, but that's not a textbook, so what stands out in my mind are the Feynmann Lectures.

When I started out in computing, think 8080 and 6502, there were basically no books. On the optics end, which eventually gave way to computing, probably Modern Optical Engineering, by Warren Smith.

Oh the irony.

> A ... senior Trump administration official allegedly told Via The Independent that “if a bunch of kids who have just started a company can do this, then potentially the Chinese aren’t far behind.”

And who are that "bunch of kids"?

> The company in question is called Cathedral, which was founded by former members of the defunct US Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), a US government initiative established to reduce federal spending and bureaucracy, while modernizing government technology and operations.

The same "kids" that hacked every government computer system they could get their hands on. With Trump's blessing.

Note: this was via a bug bounty program.

Maybe it's something I did, but lately, Firefox won't write "print to pdf" files to external drives. (mac)

There was an update last night, Oops, same deal. No message, no file.

Writes to the Documents directory.

I do have lots of extensions and window manager tweaks going on, though I cleared history yesterday.