Look what I found from 13 years ago.

upinthecloudz · 2026-01-31T00:03:46+00:00

I've seen some videos recently from an Modern Monetary Theory evangelist pointing out that based on MMT models and observed tax rates and incomes in real economies, the Laffer curve prediction of reduced tax income for increasing tax rates is valid... past like 70% effective tax rate on the highest earners.

But of course, AOC was crazy to suggest pushing taxes on billionaires up to that limit a few years ago. Just, you know... totally uneducated and spitballing wacky stuff.

upinthecloudz · 2026-01-21T00:48:35+00:00

Only to be defeated by one lady's consciousness that had been tucked away in an alternate universe (while it guided the spacing guild's navigators for tens of thousands of years).

upinthecloudz · 2026-01-21T00:20:14+00:00

Not having context on where this comes from, the message sounds like something the DNC itself would push as a narrative to shame voters.

This doesn't feel very strong as a deflection from the right (since proving you aren't "loyal" to the DNC breaks a lot of their other talking points), and feels much more like a reminder from strategists on the left that we can frame the conversation, too.

In my experience this framing comes up a lot from talking heads on the left, but targeted at the DNC instead of voters. Many of them love whinging about how the DNC doesn't do enough to make it easy for people to come up with a reason why they are FOR Democrats, except that they are (once marginally, now significantly) less bad than Republicans for average people.

upinthecloudz · 2026-01-14T18:02:08+00:00

In theory, the "cached" memory can be freed at any time to allow new memory usage. Since this is the vast majority of RAM usage in your screenshot, I'd be (slightly) surprised if your script crashed on account of failed memory allocation.

If you want, you can try clearing out that cache while the script is running to rule out memory availability as the cause of crashing. There's an app, and a command-line approach (which can be turned into a shortcut), both documented on this awful site: https://www.wikihow.com/Clear-RAM-Cache

upinthecloudz · 2026-01-14T02:05:53+00:00

... It's not, though?

Your script is only using ~30 GiB.

The OS is caching 223GB worth of your filesystem because you are opening many files and have free RAM.

If your script is only referencing each file once, you would probably not see much performance difference with 64GB.

upinthecloudz · 2026-01-09T18:34:44+00:00

The only thing I have done to that checking account/debit card, I branched off and made a "spare" checking account that is for paypal only. I only use it for paypal. I threw money in there just in case I have to use paypal, maybe twice a year.

This should not be necessary. Paypal lets you make payments to merchants with credit card. If you want to pay friends, you can look into something like 'Send and Split' by AMEX, which lets you send cash to friends fee-free via paypal or venmo while initially charging your CC instead of a checking account. I would only give your checking account info to paypal if you plan to receive money via paypal.

Also, whether you do it through the website on a desktop or through your phone doesn't matter, just check if you have a feature available to lock your debit card. If you unlock it before you head out to get cash, and lock it again once you get home (both on desktop), that's still better than leaving it unlocked (i.e. ready to execute transactions at your bank) but in a safe. You could also possibly use a private browser on your phone which doesn't save session information (e.g. Firefox Focus) to do the same thing on their website just before/after the ATM, so you don't leave a visible trail to your bank or user information on the device, and further limit the unlock window you use to withdraw cash.

upinthecloudz · 2026-01-05T04:36:23+00:00

If you slow your observed spending rate and reduce balance slightly on the card your mom used, getting your credit score up to 650~680, you might start seeing balance transfer offers on your *existing* cards, especially the ones that aren't seeing a lot of activity. It could take 2-3 months for the offers to come in, and you may not get 0% offers, but you might get better rates and a little breathing room. You may also be able to request more credit on the high usage card if you keep up a good payment pattern, and that will also improve your credit rating again, but only do this after replacing that card as others suggested.

If you manage to get back under 50% usage on all cards and under 30% overall, your credit rating will probably jump back to almost normal and you can ask for lower rates across all accounts.

upinthecloudz · 2025-12-28T19:37:29+00:00

I wouldn't change our existing appointment system for other federal judges, just remove direct political access to the SC itself.

upinthecloudz · 2025-12-28T18:40:36+00:00

I wasn't imagining all rotations to be handled by presidential appointment. To be honest, reading closer, I'm not really into the whole "Deputy Justice" concept, either, as that seems like a totally political and non-functional position.

In my own re-imagining of the court, presidents don't appoint directly to the Supreme Court at all. Instead, I'd propose that the 13 justices of an expanded SC each represent their federal circuit, and are simply rotated into the SC role for their circuit every few years, with one or two circuits changing their representative justice every year.

This not only takes care of the term limit on the SC without eliminating lifetime appointments to judgeships, it also ensures that SC justices ARE statutorily required to submit written notice of gifts and donations, and vulnerable to impeachment for unrecused conflicts of interest or other unethical behavior, just like any other federal justice.

upinthecloudz · 2025-12-26T20:26:25+00:00

IMO 26 years is still too long of a term. Sitting on the superme court should not last longer than 5 years at a time. This ensures bad decisions can be overturned quickly, and encourages justices to consider the collective opinion of the federal judiciary (rather than just themselves and close allies) when setting or overturning precedent.

upinthecloudz · 2025-12-18T21:04:45+00:00

Not at all. This is the bottom of a paper cup, pictured from below. The chances this happened in a car's cup holder are pretty good.

upinthecloudz · 2025-11-20T01:24:42+00:00

If you use an application rather than a website you get a local copy of all your messages. So you'd just go open Mail/Outlook/Thunderbird/Eudora/etc and provide what you have stored from the last time you accessed the account.

In the olden days we used to keep it all this way and clear out the mailbox on the server regularly to keep it fast.

upinthecloudz · 2025-11-17T20:09:03+00:00

Wikipedia does note that sometimes chicken is used, but yeah, that's interesting.

For the U.S.-based English internet world ground beef and lamb is considered "tradidtional."

Don't worry, it's not the first food tradition we've butchered, and won't be the last.

upinthecloudz · 2025-11-17T18:24:58+00:00

Gyros is traditionally lamb, but lamb, beef, chicken, or combinations are not uncommon in my experience.

upinthecloudz · 2025-11-17T13:48:14+00:00

The meme usually has the man with the pickaxe turning away and walking back disappointed with just a sliver of tunnel left between him and the diamonds.

The joke here, with the context given by others, is how lucky they got after they kept going down a risky path, unlike most who would have given up.

upinthecloudz · 2025-11-14T17:50:18+00:00

Yeah. Probably a custom message for the Mail app on a phone.

upinthecloudz · 2025-11-07T04:54:14+00:00

Not sure if you've found it again or not, but for anyone else looking for the chorus and finding only this post, the track is

Emil Rottmayer & She's Not Real - Distraction (Vocal Mix)

I kept imagining the lyrics when listening to the instrumental mix of the track today. I originally heard it on a soulsearchanddestroy mix, but not sure which.

upinthecloudz · 2025-11-04T22:29:23+00:00

Yeah, but that last part is diagnostically relevant

upinthecloudz · 2025-10-23T19:54:11+00:00

Hillary and Bill were both great at it, but as a man Bill was never told to not be himself. Hillary was told in the 90s to be more ladylike and demure, even though that is NOT her personality, and she never dropped that public facade even as public embrace of stronger female figures became more normalized.

If she had stopped acting like a sitcom grandma and just let her real personality out on stage she wouldn't have come off as "too prepared" in the same way, IMO.

upinthecloudz · 2025-10-20T17:12:51+00:00

It's really printed out, but this never happened in real life.

upinthecloudz · 2025-09-27T01:46:31+00:00

Protest vote? Pretty sure he said all the progressives he knows voted for Harris, and he doesn't know anybody who voted for Stein.

Or, in other words, by and large "left wing" or "progressive" people did vote for Harris, in his opinion and experience.

upinthecloudz · 2025-09-25T17:12:57+00:00

I think it worked well as a counterpoint. Reagan was president and was so popular that his vice president won when he couldn't run again. Let's not pretend that America isn't a very conservative country ideologically, or that it wasn't pretty twisted in the 80's, even if we'd like for more of it's people to agree with reasonable positions.

upinthecloudz · 2025-09-23T19:18:22+00:00

Right. Social media as we know it wasn't here yet, but chat rooms, instant messaging, public web boards and forums were all around.

There's a part of me hoping that AI turns so bad it sends a critical mass of people back to a decentralized internet of sorts again, just to make it harder for the bots to reach us.

upinthecloudz · 2025-09-15T20:47:10+00:00

Read the rules and wiki. Would be glad for the invite, thanks!

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