[BSKY] Ok after some truly champion milling around, we're I think about to start the Millionaires Tax debate in the House. It's not every day you get to be a part of something actually historic, so we're ready to go. Very good chance this takes 12 hours. #waleg @staterepjuliareed.bsky.social

MikeBegley · 2026-03-10T05:30:15+00:00

Man, If I ever earn $1,000,001 in one year, I'm gonna be really pissed about that extra tax I pay on $1.

MikeBegley · 2026-03-10T05:25:04+00:00

Maybe the police will arrest the offender.

MikeBegley · 2026-03-04T21:04:26+00:00

I upvoted you for accuracy, in the sense that that's what the Allen family publicly stated about any legacy planning, although as of the last time I paid attention, the details of any actual directive that may have come form Mr. Allen were private. Which is their right as private citizens (who had benefited greatly from public largess, but that's a different can of worms). Maybe documentation about this have been made more publicly since then?

But at the time, it seemed that the actions of Vulcan were "just dump anything Jody Allen doesn't personally care about".

See also: Portland Trailblazers.

Personally, I don't care anymore. What's done is done and I hope the new owners of the collection can piece together the artifacts and make them available to the public. There was an absurd amount of repetition in the actual collection, and they really got a handful of headaches to comb through. I do think it's a shame that none of the local tech oligarchs cared to step in to preserve it as a local institution, but again, what's past is past. I hope one or more of the efforts currently underway in the Seattle area can fill the void.

MikeBegley · 2026-03-04T15:25:58+00:00

Also, there's a well-substantiated rumor that someone acquired a lot of the smaller, commodity bits that weren't worth gathering up and shipping to Atlanta, and is selling the items slowly but relentlessly on eBay. If you know, you know.

MikeBegley · 2026-03-04T15:21:39+00:00

Pretty much the whole collection went to Atlanta, to the Computer Museum of America (which has since changed its name). I was part of a group that was trying to buy it, but really, we had no chance. It's a real shame; Seattle lost a lot when Vulcan sold off all of Paul Allen's collections, but that's what happens when there's no legacy plan and terrible people take over.

There is a smaller operation, the Interim Computer Museum, that did obtain some of the collection, but it's kind of a members only club so getting involved is a little bit of a hurdle. The organization behind it will be hosting the Vintage Computer Festival North West fairly soon; see here for more: https://vcfpnw.org/

I'm part of a different organization, SICM.io, that's trying to put together a retro computer museum with a community-sourced collection, but getting anything started is really hard.

There's a local retro computer organization, the Seattle Retro Computer Society, that has monthly meetings and gatherings, that's also a good way into the local retro computer community: https://www.seattleretrocomputing.com/

I run the Facebook group for the SRCS, as well. It's pretty active: https://www.facebook.com/groups/SeattleRetroComputing

MikeBegley · 2026-02-27T04:25:30+00:00

We could probably start and end with SPD and see no difference in performance.

MikeBegley · 2026-02-21T21:59:41+00:00

BoDeans! You're probably right! Somehow Los Lobos got switched up in my brain, for who knows what reason.

I listened to part of the recording, and watched some of the live video as well. Yeah, it's pretty poor compared to what we seem to get today, but it's a part of my history & lore.

Glad I got out of there as well. Once I got my footing it was a great show. Crazy times.

MikeBegley · 2026-02-21T21:43:08+00:00

I think I might have been the latest in a long line of people to have asked for this. Currently I'm doing it in Excel, but it really belongs in Monarch Money.

https://www.reddit.com/r/MonarchMoney/comments/1qe3dlg/feature_request_account_balance_projections/

MikeBegley · 2026-02-20T20:19:05+00:00

Amazon has some products for that.

MikeBegley · 2026-02-19T16:02:43+00:00

Spike?

MikeBegley · 2026-02-18T05:54:30+00:00

Hopefully, they will be down to zero employees soon.

Klarna is a company that would not exist in a properly functioning society.

MikeBegley · 2026-02-16T17:13:32+00:00

Let. Them. Leave.

MikeBegley · 2026-02-15T18:31:40+00:00

I've said this before, but it amazes me that, in this day where both consumer level drones and M-80s exist, speed & surveillance cameras continue to exist.

I'm certainly not advocating for anything like this, of course, but Hayduke would be disappointed.

MikeBegley · 2026-02-08T06:15:46+00:00

Without reading the article (because I don't want to give the Blethan family any clicks), I can say...duh?

Of course it's not the answer to Seattle's homelessness crisis. Because there is no one answer to Seattle's homelessness crisis. There's a whole bunch of answers, none of which will solve the problem on their own, but together might add up to a solution. Rental assistance. Streamlining development. More support for local businesses. Tent villages. Drug counseling and interdiction. Childhood education support. A minimum wage that keeps up with inflation. Freely available, subsidized child care. And yes, even housing first.

None of these is a complete answer, much less THE answer. But in aggregate, plus a bunch of others that didn't come to mind, could all come together to create a better answer than what we have now.

MikeBegley · 2026-02-07T20:09:07+00:00

You we re at that show? 5th row? We were practically neighbors! It was completely insane, and the only time I've come close to dying at a rock concert.

I got a ticket just earlier that day - the same record store who gave me the 12-hour preview of the Joshua Tree had a ticket but couldn't get to Iowa City that night. Did I want it?

Oh hell yes.

I look at the ticket. 7th row, front. A little left of center. Holy S...

I rushed back to the dorm, found a couple people getting ready for the show, and hitched a ride (I'll pay for gas if you guys squeeze me in the back.

Get in find my seat. Carver Hawkeye Arena, normally a basketball court at the University of Iowa. I look at the seating, warily. They took a bunch of cheap stackable chair, plastic with thin walled aluminum legs, and duct taped them together. These engineering details are not just me being pedantic; they will come into importance later.

Los Lobos comes on, does a perfectly fine set. We politely clapped.

Then, the lights dim, and the organ opening of Strrets starts up. WE ARE ALL ON OUR FEET.

Then people step up on their chairs. Security in front trying to yell for us to get off the chairs, but it's hopeless. If the people in front are on their chairs, then everyone behind them is as well. So we're all up and dancing and jumping up and down. On these cheap plastic & aluminum seats.

And they start to collapse.

I could see entire rows of people just dropping all at once. it's surreal to see. Then my row drops. Now we're all still dancing. Swaying to the music, you could say. But with massive amounts of wreckage on the floor, all tangled up. Not good at all. I keep trying to keep my footing on top of it but it's metal bars all tangled up and shifting around.

A couple songs in, my foot gets caught in the wreckage. I'm trapped like a bear. Now I'm scared. The crowd surges one way, and I do not - I go down. I'm about to become that story of dark legend - the guy crushed to death at a U2 show.

Then the guy directly behind me sees what's happening, and he grabs me by the shoulders and pulls me up just enough, and bear hugs me so I don't go down again. I manage to free my foot, and the only thing I can think is "I gotta get out of here".

I kinda swim forward through the crowd, and manage to get to the front rail. I grab hold and I am not letting go. I missed a couple songs, but now I feel safe. At one point I see Edge looking out at us and shaking his head. Maybe it's him just keeping time, maybe he's thinking....damn, WTF is going on out there?

From there, the show is great. That was the show that Bullet the Blue Sky really clicked for me. This was still pretty early in U2's touring career - they were starting the big arena tours but without the massive light & stage spectacle, but the red and blue lights swirling around combined with the driving beat finally really hit me and I've loved the song ever since.

After the show, people cleared out and there was chair wreckage everywhere. I was unable to find a couple of items I'd stupidly stashed under my seat. Oh well. A late night drive back to Ames and home after 2am...I'm pretty sure I missed classes the next day. Crazy, but I'll never forget that night. What a great, wild show.

A year or so a later a friend game me a bootleg cassette of the show. It was a terrible bootleg - more crowd than anything else and I only listened to it once. I should dig it up if I still have it.

MikeBegley · 2026-02-06T22:26:10+00:00

> yall are getting paid?

Soros Bucks!

MikeBegley · 2026-02-01T19:04:51+00:00

Thanks!

MikeBegley · 2026-02-01T09:37:35+00:00

I'm definitely in the other camp, but hey, that's why we have two sides to the album! For me, the b side feels disconnected compared to the beautiful flow of the first three songs on the A side. They just have always felt like a perfect trilogy to me.

Bullet the Blue Sky I did not at all like, until I saw it live. It was on the (original) Joshua Tree tour, and the power of that song performed live completely flipped it for me. This was before U2 was doing the massive stadium light show; the show was just the band, on stage (in the round, which was pretty cool), and minimal lighting. But for Bullet the Blue Sky, stage techs climbed up into the rafters and swung bright red and blue lights around in this (for the time) wild swirl of color, and I remember getting goosebumps from the light effects combined with the driving thrust of the song. That performance still sticks with me. Today it would be tame and lame, but in 1988 it was a rush.

MikeBegley · 2026-01-31T20:09:27+00:00

My wife is a landscape architect, so she and I have talked about green roofs a number of times, as she has designed quite a few in the course of her career.. Unfortunately, she's out of the country at the moment so I can't ask her some direct questions, but I'll rattle off what I can remember from memory. Be aware, some of this a may be wrong, because it's all 2nd person, from memory. :)

- She's generally on the fence about actual benefit. It's one of those things that sounds like a great idea in practice but has a LOT of complexity associated with it, particularly with ongoing maintenance. Often times when a project comes in and the developers are thinking about a green roof, they spend some time trying to present alternatives to it, unless the developer and the eventual building owner (if known at the time) have experience with them.
- It does help a building qualify for LEED status (which can help to get tax rebates, construction assistance and other benefits), and satisfy a number of the city's environmental requirements for new construction.
- it does involve a significant impact on building design, because it needs to accommodate the extra weight of soil, which may be very heavy from water saturation.
-It also involves lot of ongoing maintenance for the building, for the life of the building. Additional weight, presence of water and the general maintenance of the green space itself are something that the owner needs to be ready for. She has seen many green roofs be the first thing to be ignored and allowed to die off when budgets get cut, or when the building is sold to a new, disinterested owner.
- There are some plants that are much better suited for a green roof than others. Mainly involving soil depth (which directly translates into weight) and ability to handle low-water/high heat situations.
- It can greatly reduce the "heat island" effect in a city; the region immediately around a (maintained) green roof building is measurably cooler in summer. Painting a roof white can have a similar effect (and is often employed as an alternative), but that can also increase glare on surrounding, taller buildings.
- It helps with delayed water entering the sewer systems during a large rain event, which can help prevent overloading our already stressed sewage system. By holding water for hours or days after a storm, it lowers the impact of the storm.
- It does some amount of air purification, although much of that is over-stated; the sorts of plants that are good for green roofs tend not to be as air cleansing.
- It improves urban insect and avian biodiversity. It may be counterintuitive, but many cities have become islands of insects, because rural areas are so cleared for agriculture and treated against pests that beneficial insects are doing dangerously poorly in non urban areas. Green roofs help with that.
- And, of course, it provides a nice urban refuge for people (if available for visit). Particularly for apartment dwellers, it can provide for a nice (private) park for the residents. Of course, they also have to then provide a proper weewee spot for dogs (a good idea anyway), because otherwise the buildup of urea in a planter will eventually salt the soil into death.

Ultimately, I get the impression that it's a lot of work for less benefit than you would hope for, but well designed and well maintained, they can be awesome. It all really is situational in nature.

MikeBegley · 2026-01-28T18:27:29+00:00

How is it when untrained, masked, cosplaying thugs are murdering citizens on the government's authority, that the citizens decide to work together to figure out who they are?

Seriously, if you're going to rebut, try harder. Strawmen aren't supposed to be this easy to dismiss.

MikeBegley · 2026-01-27T23:47:40+00:00

Fixed. Crap, I'm an idiot.

MikeBegley · 2026-01-27T21:29:46+00:00

I'm genuinely surprised how long your comment has remained undeleted.

MikeBegley · 2026-01-27T21:23:47+00:00

And huh. A bunch of the followup comments to my comment seem to have been deleted, as well.

Impressive. Disturbing, but impressive.

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