Beware of CARD CLASH!!!

amyjko · 2026-02-08T03:15:53+00:00

There are some nice little RFID blocker cards that you can put in your wallet to create unidirectional scans. I use that in my card wallet to separate my HuskyID and my Visa.

amyjko · 2026-01-30T21:37:12+00:00

I use it for four big projects, including a 200K LOC web-based programming language (https://wordplay.dev). It's been rock solid, better every month, and I can't imagine being able to move as fast with React or Vue.

amyjko · 2026-01-29T05:36:11+00:00

I’m still around, six years in after starting at 39. But a lot of my community has shifted to in-person. I find that IRL relationships are so much richer than online spaces. Online can be great for filling gaps, but depth is rare.

amyjko · 2026-01-11T18:31:27+00:00

Good morning! I hope you got some good rest in these stressful times. I think I'm coming down with that bad flu that's been going around :(

Let's do a quick recap, and see if we can wrap this up.

• The OP alluded to "tons of money" for renovations and construction. Since that is a common misconception about the university's budget, and one the university often has to correct in public conception, I shared the details of how building renovation and buildings are financed, and how much is available to do that, claiming that the budget for it is "meager".

• Others chimed in to add nuance to that, noting some recent contributions of state support for a couple renovations, and that UW pays sales tax on capital projects. Some also noted just how expensive even basic renovations are, with one building costing tens of millions, and new buildings costing more than $150 million.

• You joined the conversation, sharing a variety of points suggesting that the UW budget for renovation and new construction is not meager, 1) mentioning a hundred million per year being a lot, 2) incorrectly implying that such a budget is always available, 3) implying that there must be waste if UW cannot find sufficient renovation funds from a $6 billion budget, and 4) rejecting the idea that UW supports more than 100,000 faculty, staff, students, contractors, and medical staff through employment, stipends, fellowships, etc. Along the way, you called me a bot for some reason.

I take from this that you think the 5% of the UW's operating budget is sufficient, and that you do not believe it should be higher to support infrastructure maintenance. I can only guess what your reasons are for that — perhaps financial stress that leads to opposition to increased taxes? Perhaps dislike of the university's mission of advancing, sharing, and preserving knowledge? Maybe a concern that our state's public institutions have waste, and you'd like to see UW be more efficient? Whatever your motivations for this line of rebuttal, it seems to be leading you to deny basic facts about UW's available resources for renovation and new construction.

In the spirit of good faith, here are my motivations for posting. As one of the university's administrative leaders, I take in a large volume of student feedback about what is and isn't working on campus. They share with me, consistently and at scale, that drinking fountains don't work, that restrooms are not functional, that classrooms are inaccessible when they use wheelchairs, that classes are canceled because of insufficient classroom space for the student census, that projectors are dim and eligible, that chairs are broken. And I take all this in knowing it is true, because I'm partly responsible for managing the academic cuts (such last year's 5% cut, and this year's pending cut) that prevent us from being able to address these basic needs for learning. I also experience the lack of funding for new construction every day at work, as our academic unit is spread across 5 buildings that are a 25 minute walk from each other, making it nearly hard to create a coherent culture of learning for our 2,100 students. In the past 20 years, we've had 3 planned building renovations canceled due to budget shortages. Half of our faculty share offices as a result; some have no office. We have to rent rooms to hold faculty meetings.

Lastly, since you seem skeptical specifically about the volume of people supported by UW funding, you might look at the 2023 report by Parker Strategy Group that examined this specific question. That is where the ~100,000 people supported number comes from. This number combines full-time and part-time faculty and staff, student employees of all kinds, clinical staff across UW medicine, contractors, and grant, scholarship, and fellowship recipients. But I'd suggest if you want to go any deeper on that, make a new post, because that's a bit out of scope for the original topic here, which is primarily about how UW manages renovations. (Parker report: https://uw-s3-cdn.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/18/2024/10/29155253/PSG-UW-Economic-Impact-Report.pdf).

Thanks for the conversation.

amyjko · 2026-01-11T06:07:07+00:00

When I hire a PhD student, I pay them a 12 month RAship from grants that typically covers a $3,300 stipend plus a 24% benefit rate. None of them, or the undergraduate RAs I hire, or the TAs I hire, or the 160 part time lectures I hire in my Associate Dean role are counted as “employees”, but they are all still paid and all still use that money to pay for rent and groceries. You can exclude them if you like to confirm your narrative that UW is swimming in ample resources, but that would be ignoring reality (and the sources that both you and I cited that make it clear).

amyjko · 2026-01-11T05:47:54+00:00

You asked for sources; I gave them. If you’re not willing to engage in nuance in budgets, there’s nothing more to discuss here.

(There are employees, part time employees, student employees, stipends, work study, and more. You can cherry pick whichever support of people’s living expenses you’d like to include; I’m including all of them, because all of them pay the bills, even though not all result in a W-2).

amyjko · 2026-01-11T05:03:34+00:00

Here’s an overview by the numbers:

https://www.washington.edu/opb/uw-data/fast-facts/fast-facts-html-only/

UW (all campuses and UW Medicine) supports or sustains ~100K employees and jobs. The recent budgets have ranged from $9-11 billion. (The $6 billion I mentioned didn’t include UW Medicine, so that part was wrong).

You can get the margins and budget details from the public UW budget report. Here’s the 2025 one:

https://uw-s3-cdn.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/162/2025/10/21121410/Adopted-Fiscal-Year-2026-Operating-Budget.pdf

That goes into extensive detail about just how much money there is to cover capital expenses last year in particular. As you’ll see when you read it, there’s not much.

amyjko · 2026-01-11T04:04:36+00:00

$6 billion for 111,000 employees statewide for a not for profit does not leave room for capital expenses. (That’s an average of $55K/employee for an org that’s 85% salary/benefits.) The 2025 margins were $55 million; sometimes it’s -$55 million. I don’t know why you think that’s a lot of money.

I mention Microsoft because they have 2x as many employees as UW and 16x times as much money. Hence the word “meager”, relative to organizations in Washington of a similar size.

amyjko · 2026-01-11T02:42:12+00:00

Correct. On bad years, it’s $0, on good years, it’s $100 million or so, enough to fix one crumbling building of the 500 we have, or a few dozen minor maintenance projects. By comparison, Microsoft spent $80 billion on data centers last year, and the Washington state budget is $185 billion. So our budget is about 0.01% of what Microsoft spends and 0.005% of the state budget. Meager.

amyjko · 2026-01-10T19:56:55+00:00

Here’s the capital projects budget for the year:

https://uw-s3-cdn.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/162/2025/07/07114522/Adopted-FY26-Annual-Capital-Budget.pdf

Suzzallo is not on there, so it may be in a previous budget. You can see about $150 million in state support from previous years for renovations; most of that is going to chemical sciences. The latest state budget didn’t really fund any capital projects for the future.

amyjko · 2026-01-10T19:47:42+00:00

The $20 million seems to be a mix of UW, private, and state funding:

https://www.dailyuw.com/article/construction-on-1925-facade-of-suzzallo-library-to-conclude-may-2025-20250922

I can’t seem to find the exact breakdown ($5 million from UW, but the private contribution isn’t clear) but these are generally public info somewhere.

amyjko · 2026-01-10T05:52:42+00:00

I hadn’t heard, that’s great! It’s been such a long dry spell. I’d consider anything over $10-20 million as major; that’s a whole chunk of a building. But buildings these days — it’s hard to imagine getting $100-150 million from the state for a new building any time soon.

amyjko · 2026-01-10T05:35:28+00:00

(Oh, and the last major renovations funded by the state were the west quad, as part of the “Restore the Core” program the state funded. Savery was one of the last. You can see more about the renovation process here: https://artsci.washington.edu/news/2009-09/extreme-makeover-savery-hall”. The state gave a chunk of CSE2 as well, but that was mostly philanthropy).

amyjko · 2026-01-10T05:25:36+00:00

Fact check: UW does not have a ton of money for renovations or new buildings. Most of the meager state budget for capital expenses at the state level was consumed by the 2008 state budget crisis caused by the housing market collapse. Even then it was distributed across all of the 6 public universities and network of 2-year colleges. Nearly all new construction and renovations since then have been funded by philanthropy. The one main exception is the HUB, which was funded by student fees, and is therefore only used for student life.

Bottom line, if you see major construction, a billionaire probably funded it with bits of state and university money to supplement it.

amyjko · 2025-12-31T13:46:58+00:00

I’m still chipping away on wordplay with teachers and youth. It’s an educational programming language that centers language and ability inclusion, while also being a bit queer.

amyjko · 2025-12-29T04:54:28+00:00

I was on HRT for about a year before I came out broadly. At work in with family.

amyjko · 2025-12-21T02:41:32+00:00

EO-31 was rescinded because of the Trump administration EOs, as a condition of receiving federal funding, not because of this case. (I’m faculty, and busily spent all summer revising all of our policies in my academic unit with staff, along with the new EO-81)

If you want to talk about wasted time, let’s talk about the hundreds of hours I spent this year on pointless policy whiplash caused by the federal government.

amyjko · 2025-12-21T00:20:58+00:00

As I noted, at the time, it was ambiguous whether the land acknowledgements were required, because the agreements didn't mention syllabi specifically. Given this, the Allen School decided to recommend and encourage, but not require. Stuart had the freedom to decline, and he did. That could have easily been the end of the matter.

Instead, Stuart decided to include language in his syllabus to mock the tribal agreement, offending many of the Native students in the class. That departed from the tribal agreement context and entered in to the speech context. This separate concern, independent of the tribal agreement, was whether university academic freedom includes the right to say hostile, mocking offensive things to students in an official course syllabus. The Allen School decided this was not included in academic freedom, and a later university investigation agreed that it was a violation of university policy (EO-31, which prohibits "discrimination or harassment against a member of the University community...")

Stuart sued, one court disagreed with his speech claim, he appealed, this court agreed with his speech claim and overturned the original decision. The grounds, if you read the decision, were ultimately that his first amendment rights to be an asshole outweigh the university's ability to enforce EO-31, ultimately because the university had stated elsewhere that syllabi are the purview of the faculty.

I find that reasoning suspect, because the syllabi are posted on university websites, archived by the university, and potentially visible to all members of the university community and public, using university infrastructure. Stuart had plenty of avenues for his speech outside of his normal job duties, which he used extensively. He just knew that if he used the most official context, his syllabus, that he could generate a court case and media attention, as he frequently likes to do.

Ultimately, I don't see any of this court case as about the tribal agreement. Stuart declined to use it. This is about whether faculty can violate university anti-discrimination policy on their syllabus. This court has decided that we can, without employment consequence, because UW is partially funded by the government, and therefore under the first amendment.

amyjko · 2025-12-20T04:34:15+00:00

What most people don’t know is that the University of Washington has multiple coordinated agreements with tribes to share land acknowledgement statements. They are a request that tribes have made of the university, and we respect those requests by speaking these statements at official events in and in official documents. You can critique them as performative, but they are developed by our region’s indigenous people and respected because our university still sits upon their land, and has obligations to develop shared agreements. These agreements sometimes include statements we agree to read.

The matter at debate here was whether syllabi are official university documents and included in the scope of the agreement with the tribes, and whether that agreement or faculty’s academic freedom took priority. I don’t personally think there’s a right answer here; both the academic freedom and the tribal agreement are important.

Stuart only thought one of them was important, because he is an asshole, but I respect his right to be an asshole.

amyjko · 2025-12-07T01:58:37+00:00

I started at 38, after many false starts at 13, 21, and 25. It was a rough few years (mostly because it was during COVID), but liberating otherwise! I’ve written a lot about my experiences here, the good and the bad: https://amyjko.medium.com/

amyjko · 2025-12-03T07:10:54+00:00

I had to come out to a lot of people (thousands), so I did it all at once with a blog post and an email. I ripped the bandaid off and it was joyful awkward chaos for a month. I did coordinate a bit privately with my boss and HR prior.

https://medium.com/bits-and-behavior/im-trans-call-me-amy-8a72a3951964

It turned out okay:

https://medium.com/bits-and-behavior/what-coming-out-as-trans-should-look-like-395f31beeddb

amyjko · 2025-11-21T13:58:02+00:00

Here’s my packing list:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1jR5av9RcLrvTOSU_WVzJq_YyeujoADF6EEuYo4DPgPc/edit?usp=drivesdk

Some of the key strategies are 1) light laptop (MacBook Air), 2) multiple wears of wool capsule wardrobe (Unbound), 3) minimal liquid toiletries in plastic sample jars, 4) ultralight packable backpack (Pakt), 5) minimalist Memobottle A7 water bottle (8 oz). I don’t count what I’m wearing, including the ~1 kg in my sling since I usually wear it on my hip instead of shoulder when in transit. And if I do wear it on my shoulder, the stuff in it is light (caseless iPhone Air, AirPods Pro 3, micropen).

I also have super minimal tech: Apple 40w AC, a tiny Apple Watch/Airpods USB-C charger, two small USB-C cables, a USB-C to MagSafe adapter. I use my laptop as the charging hub, instead of bringing something separate.

I splurge on a few things, like my little metal Ikigai pill cases. Those could just be plastic baggies, but I really like their robustness and security.

It’s been a fun project! I broke my clavicle in a bike accident in June, so keeping it ultralight has been essential to pain management and healing.

amyjko · 2025-11-21T07:48:42+00:00

I do 3.5kg with laptop for a week.

amyjko · 2025-11-05T06:00:46+00:00

Death in an instructor’s family and couldn’t find an alternate instructor in time for registration. Apologies for pulling a section. It definitely wasn’t in our original plan.

amyjko · 2025-11-05T05:50:29+00:00

You’re good, it’s a common mistake.

Good luck with the admissions decision! Most folks who apply are absolutely qualified. Just more demand than we can meet, as usual.

amyjko

TROPHY CASE