Good morning hubski. It’s ridiculous sitting in this pub and writing on a tiny phone, but it’s so good to be back chatting with ButterflyEffect and lilyboy who sent me a DM 253 days ago and I only saw it now. _refugee_ sent me by SNAIL some gorgeous prints she made (birthday prezzie). steve randomly texted me from church a few months ago. He does that from time to time. It’s always great to be in touch with hubskipals from Early Hubski. Onward onward - ''And so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.''. (last line of The Great Gatsby)
Lil, I really enjoyed your bday performance. It's insane that you wrote an article titled, "My Brain Tumor," decades ago (about someone else's potential brain tumor) and then actually had one yourself. If this were a movie as a viewer you'd think, "this would never happen in real life." I have never considered whether Dylan Thomas' father was like, "Um... I'd rather not rage." It was heartwarming. Loved the audience participation. Happy belated bday, my friend!
Miss you, miss hubski, but well, you know. I hope things are good with you. I have five years to work on my next one-woman show. Whatever the topic, it will still be a comedy, always dark (the human condition) but always comedy. It’s so great hearing from you. I have many questions for you. To be continued.
Logo by veen. That's the servo drive. I'm pretty much three chunks of stainless away from motive power. At that point it's all done but the wiring and tuning. The wiring of course is something else. I realized I didn't have any DB9 backshells, and that there are no good DB9 backshells anywhere on any of the services, so i spent an hour and a half whipping out DB9 backshells that are better than anything on the internet. Then I did DB15 and DB25 'cuz I need those, too. On the plus side? They're only a mm and a half wider than a standard molded DB9, and they're strong. On the minus side? I didn't really contemplate the other side of the connector field when I laid out the ECM so uhhhh yeah gotta redesign that. And on the minus side, doing simple things like "I need two DB9s from two different devices to terminate to DB25 and GX12-4" takes two days and looks like this on the outside But on the inside it looks like this And needs to be wired three times because the pins say one thing one way and one way the other way and are in 0.12 point font and the females go backwards and the males go forwards and the GX12s go counterclockwise and the pin reference for the manifold starts at zero and pins start at one and 0-1 means pin 1 but 0-2 means pin 2 and. But fuck you it works. Ninety minutes from idea to connector. I'd call my dad up but he'd say something charming like "I wanted to murder you all most of the time" and then whine about the fact that a drug addict nark village idiot yokel doesn't show up for thanksgiving dinner even though he's got a free house to live in and another to steel copper wires from. Shit with the in-laws has devolved to the point where we did group counseling Monday. They were 40 minutes late. We actually passed them in the car, as they were busily getting lost and being old. The funny thing is this pretty much started with "I know you're not mad at me, are you okay?" which was the most offensive thing I could have said, apparently, and has now devolved to spitting anger where I am the proximate cause of everything wrong in her life. I made the mistake of saying "contemplating suicide" before they arrived which, combined with a thick family history of suicide, means you need to spend ten minutes doing the tedious ideation dance. Then they showed up and the counselor did a yeoman's job of beating the shit out of me in front of my mother-in-law because we knew ahead of time we were up for it just so my wife has better tools to deal with her parents while we all knew we needed to hook the mother-in-law or she'd never come back again and, by anyone's estimation, this is a situation entirely of her making. Didn't feel good tho I just spent six thousand dollars getting a spindle rebuilt such that its runout is guaranteed to be less than a tenth of a micron. I don't have anything that will measure a tenth of a micron. I can measure a micron. I'm the only person I know who can. It takes 20 minutes to explain why that matters and I only know a couple people who care to listen.
It's a bitch to do it optically, too. I have the equipment to perform optical metrology down to the micron. The reason I care is surface finish. quarter wave of 380nm is a tenth of a micron. If I can hold a tenth of a micron I can mirror polish with the machine. "measurement" is utterly pointless for what I'm doing other than verifying the machine.
Thoughts on the debt cancellation, anyone? I'm super confused as to how they arrived at the $125,000 number, and why it isn't scaled to a cutoff. If I make $125,001, do I not qualify? What if I get married real quick to qualify for the $250,000? What if I'm a physician in residency and I make $60k, but I'm going to make $300,000 next year? What if I'm enrolling in college this year at a $50k/yr university? All-in-all I think this is moronic at best. Just change the law to make student loan dischargeable in bankruptcy court and get on with it.
Because it covers 80% of the United States, or four quintiles. Quintiles are big in policy. And because it's the 24% head-of-household income tax bracket. Because they want bumper-sticker simple going into the midterms and they don't want to penalize higher-paying degrees. If you spent $200k getting a poetry degree from Vassar, $100k getting an engineering degree from Georgia Tech or $20k getting an AA in accounting from the community college, you get $10k. 'member GWB's "have a playstation" tax rebate? same-same. You do not. If you make $100k, having $10k of student loan debt forgiven is "cheers." If you make $40k a year, having $10k worth of student loan debt forgiven is potentially life-changing. If they put the cutoff at "poverty line plus some arbitrary number" there'd be accusations of class warfare. Let's be honest. If you make $125k, you have a fuckton more than $10k worth of student loan debt. If you make around $125k, you now have eight months to shave a little bit of taxable income in order to get your magic number. Hire an accountant and STFU. Meanwhile the vast, overwhelming sea of student loan borrowers, who have less than $25k in debt and are largely reliant on student loans, get their debt completely wiped out. Then $10k is $5k less than the $15k lid you're going to be paying if you do income-based repayment so you also need to STFU because that number has come down by like 80% or some shit. Also, if you're a resident? you already have like $300k in student loans and fuckin' $10k is yours anyway. Then any future $10k a year forgiveness is going to be the equivalent of like half of a minor in something nobody cares about focus, man. LOL you're establishing a biomedical startup. Your side hustle has an S1c. Nobody cares what you think. Then you get to deal with the nightmare that is bankruptcy court. Prolly wanna reform that first, chief. Or wait a minute - do you want to shine a light on how 46% of bankruptcy cases are related to medical debt? I dunno, homey, that sounds like 2nd term shit. Maybe get the first one first. $10k for everyone middle class, $25k for everyone with stafford loans is a fucking jubilee. It's a jubilee for people who file 1040EZ, for people who drive Uber on weekends, whose dreams have become an Etsy shop. Frankly? It allows people to take the money they were throwing at student loans, which paid for tuition, and throw it at credit cards, which paid for living expenses. There's zero basis for trickle-down economics. There's plenty of basis for trickle-up. This is trickle-up, and it's designed for the same part of the brain that likes "a chicken in every pot."I'm super confused as to how they arrived at the $125,000 number,
and why it isn't scaled to a cutoff.
If I make $125,001, do I not qualify?
What if I'm a physician in residency and I make $60k, but I'm going to make $300,000 next year?
What if I'm enrolling in college this year at a $50k/yr university?
All-in-all I think this is moronic at best.
Just change the law to make student loan dischargeable in bankruptcy court and get on with it.
Basically all of those questions were rhetorical, attempts to be illustrative about how arbitrary this appears. Let me be crystal clear: I think helping the poor is the mark of a civilized society. That's one of the main reasons I continue to vote democrat despite my best judgement. I think helping a relatively rich person become relatively richer is not my mission. I am against the mortgage interest deduction, and I think the SALT limitation from Trump's tax plan is one of the very few of his policies I can point to that was grounded in good reason (even though he probably liked it because it fucked blue state residents harder--sometimes the blind squirrel finds that nut after all). I say all this to point out that I'm not reflexively against things that don't directly benefit me, even if I can confess to a level of sour grapes, having gone to community college for 3 semesters on a tiny scholarship, then transferring to a third rate state school while working as a night janitor at a restaurant all in service of not accruing onerous debts, but I digress. I am disappointed in this decision for two main reasons, one specific and one general, and I will try to articulate them below. First the specific. That is what I was getting at with the not-so-rhetorical questions above. There are plenty of people who play the lotto and lose. I do not feel any amount of grief for someone who racked up $100k in debt getting that FIT degree in textile design only to find that their job prospects may include folding clothes at Old Navy. Sorry to sound like a republican there, but learn the market before your journey of self-discovery. There are plenty of ways of making it in the world that don't require accruing massive debts. Beyond that, however, is that fact that most people with tons of college debt are doctors and lawyers and management consultants, exactly the type of people who don't need the help, even if they're in the dawn of their career and may be below the 125k cutoff. This edict is arbitrary and arbitrary is exactly what the law is supposed to not be. Want to help people? Take the bottom two quintiles and give them each $3,000. That would work out to about the same $330 billion price tag. Of course that would require an act of Congress, and literally 0 members of Congress will vote for that in an inflationary environment. But Sleepy Joe thinks he has the executive authority to do this, so he'll do this instead. Which segues into my much bigger problem with this action. Executive authoiry. It's out of control and getting worse with each presidency. What's good for the goose is good for the gander, and if you can dream of something that democrats despise and think it immoral, but republicans love, then you can think of the next executive action that's going to occur as soon as President DeSantis decrees that it shall be. Rightness has fuckall to do with it. How about DeSantis instructing the FDA to define personhood as "heartbeat". Can he do it? Probably not 30 years ago. Today? Why the fuck not? Congress is derelict, but that doesn't mean that the president gets to fill the vacuum. Or rather, it does mean that until Congress reasserts its authority as the First Among Equals. Since at least Wilson there's been executive creep, but (much to Liberals' dismay) Obama just straight blew it up, and that clearer the way to Trump to shit on the rubble. Executive orders are supposed to be about instructing agencies how to prioritize limited resources among the many competing interests. They're not supposed to be an alternate avenue for law-making. But that's what they've become. it has to stop somewhere, because it's ripping us further apart. Laws that can't get passed as laws shouldn't be laws. Process matters as much as substance, because process is how to help to root out arbitrariness. A dictator is literally defined by dictating what becomes law. So if a "rule" or an "order" or a "regulation" is sufficiently indistinguishable from a "law", then what the hell do we have lawmakers and representatives for? And if arbitrarily changing the terms of a contract isn't lawmaking, then I don't know what the hell is. Look, all this isn't to say that many people got a raw deal with college. All this isn't to say that college shouldn't be a lot less expensive. And all this isn't to say that many people don't deserve a break. I just wish that we could put some effort into things that are hard, like consensus building, or needs-based forgiveness. People like teachers, police officers, nurses, other essential workers who do the shit jobs for shit pay because they love them. Those are the people, in my opinion, who we need to give a break. But if we want to do it for all, fine. Just fucking do it legally. Not because you can stretch the law to buy votes.
^^^Theme from West Wing plays softly in the background You are also whatabouting the shit out of this, because you identify with Democrats, which is abundantly clear from your disdain for them, and Democrats are supposed to be better, right? So allow me to scratch the record and speak from a place of raw, sardonic cynicism: There's a feckless party and there's an evil party and those are your choices. Anything anyone can do to get people to vote "feckless" means "evil" loses power, and the more energy that gets poured into "feckless" the less feckless it becomes. I'm so old I remember when the Inflation Reduction Act was called the Green New Deal. It exists entirely because young angry democrats demanded something that doesn't come directly from the mind of Larry Summers. Are the socialists happy with it? No, they're not, because that's the game - the Republicans give no fucks about policy, their main animus right now is making fun of Alexandra Ocasio Cortez, so if AOC likes it obviously it's bad for democracy. For fuckin' 40 years, the Democratic refrain has been "if you want change, vote" and for fuckin' 40 years, young voters who show up have had the football yanked by a set of rich wax dummies out of Madame Taussaud's. Lately? Lately the Democrats have been primaried by a bunch of kids whose principle refrain is "what have you done for me lately?" where "lately" is defined as "in my parents' lifetimes." Likewise, higher ed has been a lie since 2001 and we have done very, very, very little about it because - wait for it - capitalism. It's a market problem, pay no attention to the vast oligarchy profiting from protectionist market doctrine. So go ahead and wring your hands about "principles" from executive orders when the whole reason we got suckerpunched by Bill Barr is his philosophy is "the president is God." Go ahead and talk about precedent when Mitch McConnell has been leaning on the fuckin' Bork nomination as his justification for "fuck you I do what I want." But beyond that, the people who "play the lotto and lose" are every bit the citizens as the people who got engineering degrees or whatever. Know what? If you racked up $100k in debt getting a degree from FIT, $10k or $25k isn't gonna solve your shit. If you racked up $8k or $20k or $25k not-quite-finishing that degree, though - hoo boy homey you just got a fucking concrete reason to vote blue in November. As if Alito in your uterus wasn't enough. $10k? That's 1/8th of a Javelin missile. $10k for a millennial who has experienced two once-in-a-lifetime recessions and is told she can't buy a house because she eats too much avocado toast? $10k for a millennial who was shown in 2020 that her lack of healthcare and living wage is a policy choice not a limitation of the market? Look, man - if these people made some bad decisions and robbed a fucking bank 20 years ago they'd be out, off paper and living their lives. Instead they've racked up $50k in debt on a $12k principle that goes to private equity. You act as if all this money is going to people who weren't paying attention last Thursday rather than people in their 30s and 40s whose lifetime earnings potential was kicked in the nuts by 2001, 2008 and 2020. And I know you don't think any of this? You're merely riffling through the filofax of NYT columnists and WaPo Pundits concern-trolling their way through Capitalism Lite. What Would Krugman Do? And they're fucking stupid, too. Two bits of news across my transom this week: (1) median age of first pregnancy crossed 30 (2) median cost of rearing a child to 18 crossed $300k. Do you think that's good for democracy? Or poor people? Or minorities? If only we could target some aid and largesse in their general direction. Hell, they might even vote for the party that helps them out. So. Yeah. Executive authority bad. I think you should print out a bunch of bumper stickers that say "decrease executive authority" and see if it changes anything. Or, I dunno, give life-changing amounts of money to an educated demographic too poor to start families that has been betrayed by the political party that ostensibly supports them for their entire fucking lives. I guarantee you - Bill Barr will be mad either way.
Half of Congress made it a platform to not pass any laws. I'd rather Congress worked but failing that, the only other option to executive orders is accepting that literally nothing will get done. And I'd rather Biden do what he can, especially since the Republicans will abuse orders anyways precedent be damned and have the supreme court backing them up
I'm ambivalent. The tuition bubble was fueled by loans, and this is a temporary fix for breaking the model by saddling the next generation middle class with debt when they need to buy houses and stuff and pay taxes. It's ugly, but nothing new. Ultimately, it's buying votes, and boomers are freaked that their votes aren't the ones that politicians are buying first anymore. Millennials can point to countless boomer entitlements that fuck them, and can feel justified saying "Yeah, it's not exactly fair, but fuck you we need it." Boomers ran the table, and now Millennials will, and it will continue to be rationalized by those running the table, because the difference between buying votes and giving the people what they want is very hard to pin down. In this light, I see wokeism as a no-less-justifiable generational flex or cultural unionization as the boomers counter-culture revolution in the 60s. It's Millennial time. As a GenX, I feel like I have two friends that don't like each other because they are too similar.
Just, you know, for discussion. What that graph says is that in 2014, forty percent of asset-backed securities were fucking student loans. Now? A little over 20%. Guess at the cost of student loan forgiveness? $300b over ten years. Total outstanding student loan debt in the USA? $1.75 trillion. Apparently when you create a "student loan asset backed security" you call it a SLAB. As of 2016? $200b in SLABs from a total market of $1.4T at the time. Even as student loan debt is increasing, market participation in those loans has dropped by 50% in the past seven years, which to me? Says "capitalism" has fully expected student loan relief since Obama's first term.
You'll never hear me argue that loans aren't a racket. And you'll never hear me argue that a moral society saddles its young people with unpayable debts. I'm only arguing that this policy, with these qualifications, made in this way looks a whole lot like Biden trying to appease and buy votes than it does like the good governance that he promised us during the election.
And I have no argument with that. This policy, with these qualifications, made in this way, IS Biden appeasing and buying votes. MY point? Is that the democratic party is in deep, unsustainable, unconstrained political debt to its base and that, considering the behavior of their counterparts, fuckin' paying down their tab is far and away the best possible move they can make. These votes aren't being "bought." They're fucking OWED. They've been owed since NAFTA.
Well, my wife just got $20k, basically. She'll probably try to give it to her mother. Hopefully the attempt is successful, but I doubt it. At least the debt foregiveness will be an experiment in economic stimulus. Frankly, some of the folks on the receiving end are bad with finances, so on the one hand, you're encouraging bad habits, in a way, but you also know that probably almost every penny will be spent. It's really sad that one of my first reactions is "if people buy up speculative assets, hopefully it's in stocks and bonds instead of crypto". Still, a lotttttttt of it will go towards "real goods". And other debts, which is kinda like "future real goods". But ultimately, the real problem is the cost of secondary education, and instead of trying to solve that problem, we're in the middle of dismantling the public education system.
This statement has no basis in truth. COVID spending by the quintiles under discussion went straight into credit card debt. Anecdata? I mixed bullshit reality TV for twelve years. Every contestant - every.single.contestant - who discussed what they would do with the prize money if they won (and that was, say it with me, every.single.contestant), started with "pay off my debts." Down to the stipends, dude. People being locked in a sound stage or a hotel room or a tent or WTFever by unscrupulous reality television producers and making $75 a day for the privilege? ALL OF THEM planned to pay down debt with the money. I'd say my n is between 300 and 500. Besides which, it's not like we're giving them a check and saying "hey pay down your debt with this." They never see the money. What they see is less pressure on their money which, to really drive the point home, is their fucking money. If they want to spend their new disposable income on fucking NFTs get off their dick about it. hahahaha Biden is such a pussy with a 1 vote majority in the Senate, an 11-vote majority in the House and a Supreme Court slightly to the left of Goebbels he didn't utterly and totally reform higher educationFrankly, some of the folks on the receiving end are bad with finances, so on the one hand, you're encouraging bad habits
But ultimately, the real problem is the cost of secondary education,
and instead of trying to solve that problem, we're in the middle of dismantling the public education system
I should have explicitly stated that I think the debt cancellation was a good idea, that's on me. And I do believe that demand-side economics largely works much better than supply-side. I also said myself that people would use a lot of the debt relief to pay off other debts. Jesus, dude, did you think I converted to Nazism in the last 24 hours or something? Friendly fucking firing into the crowd, there. College enrollment rates are now dropping faster than ever. I don't think saying "Oh that's just the market naturally responding to how expensive college is" makes for a good argument, because having an increasingly less educated populace can compound into other problems. Neither is fixing the natural inclination towards exclusivity and reputation easily accomplished, if that's even possible. To state something else explicitly: The Problem is that our system of education is now serving as another medium through which to perpetuate wealth inequality. I'm not accusing Biden of anything, but it would be nice if someone that isn't a Heritage Foundation-funded "think tank" did a study aiming to understand and potentially address the ballooning cost of higher education, and how it relates to wealth inequality. Maybe I just haven't seen existing studies, but surely we're at least due for a new one in the post-covid era. I see your explanations of the problem elsewhere in these comments, and largely agree, but what is your solution(s)? I'm working on a "final solution", because hah, pranked ya, I was a Nazi this whole time after all.
I savage because I love, you know that. And because when attacked frontally you resort to less oblique language so it's mostly self-serving laziness. So my basic problem with your reasoning, if it remains unclear, is that you're viewing an economic stimulus as an educational reform. Which is preposterous. It's not "we'll forgive $10k of future debt" it's "we're forgiving $10k of existing student loan debt" which is sops for the proles every bit as much as the mortgage interest deduction, only targeted to people who view real estate shopping as a spectator sport. And my problem with your argumentation, if it remains unclear, is that there's no experimentation here. None. We didn't even run it in small numbers. We threw two point two TRILLION dollars at it barely an electoral cycle ago. Fifty million people pulling down stimulus checks. And we know exactly what they did with them. Bottom decile? Paid off debt. Next decile? Paid off debt. Next decile? Put it in savings. Top decile? fucking invested it in the goddamn stock market. It's a settled point. What do we do about education? Totally different problem. Issue right now is that there's two entire generations with no fucking money. Fuckin' 15% of student loan debt is held by parents of students ('cuz they cosigned 'cuz they're chumps). You wanna lift the economy, you give income to people who will dispose of it. Look - I think it's awesome your wife was lifted by $20k. Apparently our stimulus as a corporation was a good $20k under the average and I was getting emails that said things like "if you can tell us the exact dollars and cents we just airdropped into your bank account you get to keep it!" What did we spend it on? Salary. If we hadn't had that money? We would have... kept paying salaries because we're essential workers so, yeah. We gave out like a quarter of it as hardship bonuses, like a quarter of it went into medical equipment that we needed 'cuz we couldn't get people in to see doctors anymore and the rest? Fuckin' padded the wallet, G. Would I rather see poor people get money than rich people? Yes I would. I think anyone who truly understands capitalism understands that if you give a college student $10k it's all going back into the economy whereas if you give a schlub like me $10k I'm gonna go "uhh thanks for the money I'll put it with the rest of my money." And to pretend this has anything to do with education is silly. It has to do with the fact that we've told seven generations that they'll be ditch diggers if they don't go to college and for the last two generations it turns out they'll be ditch diggers anyway. Enrollment is down because the latest generation fucking figured it out.
Yeah and that would be a good idea in another year or 2 when we’re in there middle of a depression/recession and we need a bunch extra money to jump start the economic activity. But right now with real inflation somewhere in the teens and official only 8% the extra money isn’t going to help with the inflation at all.
And it is dopey comments like this - fully liberated from logic or even a basic understanding of the topic at hand - that forced me to mute your account originally, and reinforces that I have made the right decision. Good lord, man. Think for even half a second before posting whatever flows out of your head. (It's not "extra money". Nobody has been - or will be - given a check. Their student loans will be simply reduced by $10k.)
It is extra money 6% (actual rate might be higher) of 10k is 600 annually or about the same as the stimulus check. There is a bit of an assumption that the amount was being paid which in some cases it wasn’t but it’s real money that will go buy groceries, gas or Nikes or PlayStations. It does contribute to inflation as before it was money that was being pulled out of the economy and now it’s available to spend. Inflation is caused by for the most part having more money chasing a fixed number of goods. This will increase the amount of money just not by an immediate 10k but a percentage of it. There is no free lunch.
Idk how large the amount is probably not any worse than renewing 7k credits to Tesla buyers. There are a lot of folks with debt though and they only build some tiny number of Teslas. That money is all going to go right into circulation though instead of pumping equities or real estate though.
No it isn't. It's anchored by the market drivers, which are the ivys and the ivy-associated. Jeff Selingo divided colleges and universities in the United States into two categories: Buyers and sellers. "Buyers" are colleges that have more applicants than slots and they can make you do whatever they want, proportional to their exclusivity. "Sellers" are colleges that have more slots than applicants and have to use their endowments to provide scholarships. Selingo broke down how much more you will earn from a "buyer" college than a "seller" college (on average, none) vs how much more the buyer colleges cost (no average, the price differential is insane). Harvard and Yale have a sticker price that nobody pays. A preposterous, vanishing few get in on scholarship and the overwhelming majority get in because their parents donated to the school. $250k is the floor to get their attention. $2m or better is encouraged. And people pay it because if you used to play dolls with Tim Draper's daughter you get to launch Theranos without so much as a freshman's understanding of blood chemistry. It's Mandarin squares all the way down and pretending there's an economic basis for it is bullshit. The SAT was created to keep Jews out of the Ivys - Selingo gets an admissions official at Yale to state, off the record, that the purpose of admissions at Yale is not to provide opportunity to people by making them Yale graduates but to ensure that only Yale graduates are admitted. And so long as the system is organized around corrosive bullshit that justifies the status quo the cost will increase proportionally to the Gini coefficient.
Yeah (edit: to the second sentence only). Dems probably just kept the House and are improving in the Senate, though. I wish the circumstance was better. Yeah, Biden campaigned on this, but the timing is intentional. Thank God. Almost nothing will continue to get done, and we'll preserve the status quo a little longer before the inevitable fascist subversion.
I am having a weird week and almost had a bit of a cry session in my car today when KEXP played this song.
School started back up today. Have no classes Monday and Thursday, but two online asynchronous classes that I'll be working on during those days. But it's the last year of school (hopefully forever). Thesis stuff slow going, apparently IRB is super backed up, 2+ months for review. So I can't start for a while yet. Work still sucks, nothing new there. Girlfriend had a wedding a little north of my parents' house so we drive up there together and she kept going north and I stayed with the family. When she came back down she was trying to meet up with a friend of her's and didn't know when exactly she'd be back and my mom told me I needed to call my girlfriend and tell her she wasn't allowed to see her friend. I set that boundary hard that I'd never do that and my mom got super pissy as she does. So that was fun to deal with. My dad, while on my side for that one, said that he and my mom view a pattern of disrespect from me which I see as boundary setting, but they don't respect my boundaries so it makes sense they see it as disrespectful. But as a consequence they're likely going to stop helping me financial in the same way they have been, so I get to really dip into savings with the power combo of inflation, stock market downturn, tuition owed beyond student loans, aging out of insurance, and the end of the student loans payment pause (end of December this year), so I'll probably get the luxury of selling off old investments at the market bottom but should do it this year since next I'll have income so taxes will be cheaper this year. So that'll be fun. But I should be able to dip into just the brokerage account and not the retirement accounts (having a financial advisor father actually proved useful I guess). Therapy going well, my therapist is a good fit. After a lot of talking and exploring of shit that has happened in my life we're starting to explore how it's impacting me and tools to combat it. I'm cautiously optimistic. But by this time with my last therapist I was on a hard downward spiral and I'm actually feeling good and even looking forward to it a bit which I take as a good sign. In an attempt to be more attentive and hack my attention span back to being good and focused, I've blocked my big time wasters (reddit, hacker news) in my apartment through pihole and deleted the apps from my phone. Going to hopefully read more, but also just hoping to focus better on everything. It's only been a few days so far but it's been nice. Hope I get more used to it and it proves fruitful. 9 more months of this educational hell and then I'm free, making money again, more independent, have more free time. It can't come soon enough.
100ft of active USB 3.0 works for my webcam without issue and without the need for the AC option at the device end. It also works with my 65ft USB 3.0 cable. It does not work with the two together in any fashion, however, AC provided or not. For now, I think that version 2.0 of my underwater camera will have a 100ft depth limit. It will be nice just having a laptop and the submersible without another power source. Maybe I'll get a hubless 3.0 cable around 15ft or so and see if I can get just a bit deeper.