leowyn.bsky.social
Gen X dad to a kid with ADHD/anxiety, husband to an immigrant wife. Data analyst in healthcare/public health by trade. Politically liberal on pretty much everything. Pro-truth, honesty, and transparency.
159 posts
133 followers
131 following
Active Commenter
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Looks a lot like one of ours, Katniss. (She’s a highland lynx, thus the curled ears) Happy #caturday!
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They can keep state gifts, but for gifts over a certain dollar value they have to buy them from the government at fair market value. And all classified or otherwise restricted tech that will need to be installed for it to serve as AF1 would need to be removed too.
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I think you mean sometime in the 80's for Reagan, but otherwise agree. We need to go back to the 1970's tax rates on higher earners. That way if they want to pay themselves $10m, we get to spend $9m of that on the people they screwed over to be able to pay themselves that much.
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It will make it harder for insurance companies to know when to cancel policies or pay claims, for researchers to track mortality rates, etc.
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This data is used in medicine, public health, insurance, etc. It has never been perfect, but it’s the closest thing the US has to a federal death register. Deliberately adding false data will make havoc for any companies or agencies using it and have effects beyond just banking or having an SSN.
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The same folks would be losing their shit, rioting in the streets, and screaming for impeachment if any Democrat president even contemplated a quarter of what Trump has already done.
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My working theory is Elon helped Trump with more than money in the election (ie. Illegal acts) so has leverage. As long as Elon wants to stay Trump can’t get rid of him because Elon could blow the cover on the whole thing and ruin him.
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Nothing says "weaponizing the Justice Department" like politically and personally motivated firings as soon as he takes office, though. He's using the empty accusation he levied against Biden to DO the very thing he claims he wants to stop. How can so many people not see this?
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I came here to say the same. Bias (as a statistical concept) is common in scientific literature. It had nothing to do with any of their culture war boogeymen in most cases.
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He just created an entire class of people (citizens who were eligible to, and would have used this service) who now have standing to bring suit against him, a private citizen, for denial of service or something similar. I'm not a lawyer, but beg some actual lawyers to take this up.
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If you are directly harmed by his decisions, I would consult a lawyer. See if you can sue for damages. Sue for wrongful termination. For denial of benefits owed under law. For violation of privacy. Anything and everything. Make him come out of hiding into a courtroom to defend his lawlessness.
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If we ever make it out of this, every single congressperson who refused to do everything they could to stop this unconstitutional power grab needs to be impeached, replaced, and if needed, charged for their dereliction of duty and failure to uphold their oaths.
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How it is that we are quite literally watching a coup take place before our eyes and apparently nobody can do anything to stop it? I get the federal government is compromised, but can’t something be done to stop this? State charges? Musk is committing felonies by the minute and we just let him?
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This needs to be a bigger story than it is right now. He is not a federal government employee, has not been vetted or confirmed in any way. Him even having access to the agency and its data certainly must violate numerous laws, yet we are going to just allow it to happen?
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I mean, it couldn’t be your party or positions or candidates, right? Everyone wants to live in a fascistic kakikleptoligarchy!
/s
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This is just a cloture vote. Whether they will keep debating or just vote to approve or not. I know the filibuster makes cloture votes seem like a big deal, but in this case it’s not. See how she votes on the nomination tomorrow. That’s the vote that matters.
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I don’t think they plan to try immigration cases in court. They plan to just deport people, regardless of their due process rights. They are ramping up prisons and law enforcement, not judges and lawyers.
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Sorry, 2x life + 40 years, fat fingers and no edit button.
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TWO life sentences + 140 years. $183 MILLION in drug sales alone, not to mention all of the other shady stuff. But it's all A-OK as long as you like Trump.
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www.cnn.com/2025/01/21/p...
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His mom. Really. His mom was a libertarian and big Trump supporter and asked for his pardon after she shilled for Trump this cycle. So we are OK with.. well, anything, as long as they support Herr Trump.
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IANAL, but it seems to me this would violate the equal protection clause. You can't make one group of people do something to get gov't benefits without expecting it of all of them. Of course, we need a way to make sure the requirement is not just "vote red".
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This. She was saying reporters who were leaving should point out the problems at WaPo on the way out, but that’s assuming the editors let them publish it. If they are being silenced, you can’t blame them for not speaking up.
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We had a cat named Loki too; he picked me as his human, but sadly we lost him in 2021 to cancer. Here's the four we had in 2021, from left to right - Katniss, Loki, Thor, and Fluffy. We still have the other 3, but had added a newer kitten Mulan since.
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Tell me how, in any reality, one human being's value could possibly be worth 130,000 times more than the average person? Nobody is that valuable. Nobody becomes that wealthy without taking from or exploiting others. Nobody should be given that much wealth and power.
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The average family income in the U.S. (about $100k per year) is 1 cent every 3 seconds. And they only collect that during their working years, not since birth. Elon has made about 75,000 times that much since his birth, or 130,000 times that much if we only include typical working years.
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And that's just for $1B. Elon.. well he's got so much ($417B) that that's the equivalent of making almost $250 per SECOND since he was born. $15,000 per MINUTE. $900K per HOUR. $21.5M per DAY. No single person could possibly be that valuable to humanity.
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We need to put this kind of wealth in perspective. If we assume these folks are an average of 50 years old, they would need to have made $20M per year since they were born, over 200 times as much as the average American. Do we really think they are worth that much? Who needs that much money?
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The median family income in the U.S. is around $100k per year. To make $1 billion, you would need to make that much for 10,000 years. The typical American won't see more than $5M in total income in their entire lifetime. All of these people have at least 200x that much.
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and businesses reinvest profits in the business (incl. employees) to reduce tax burden, and businesses pay executives less since most of it would go to the gov't anyways. Higher taxes encourages (re)investment and job creation. Low taxes just lets rich people get richer. Pass it along!
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This is INCOME, not wealth. $1M income a year is not 99% of "small" businesses. It's medium-large business executives. Anything more than that is just rich people. And incentive to invest? Job creators? Businesses pay taxes on profits. Individuals pay taxes on income. Raise those taxes, 1/2
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Just FYI, Justice Elena Kagan is a woman. But I agree, she probably doesn’t understand how Bluesky differs from X/Facebook/etc.
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Raising tax rates on highly profitable businesses and high income individuals allows us to reduce the burden on smaller businesses and lower income folks, and helps to support small business as they compete against mega-corporations. It's a win-win.
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Too many low-information voters don't understand how marginal tax rates work, or assume they are just temporarily poor and may someday need to pay higher tax rates. Reality is we let billionaires get away with paying next to nothing, and the middle class shoulders the tax burden.
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This is why "the good old days" were so good for most workers; not because of immigrants or social wedge issues, but because we taxed the crap out of rich people so they were forced to share the wealth more equitably. It made companies invest in their people and products rather than profit-taking.
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The solution is taxes. Higher taxes on profits means corporations need to spend those profits reinvesting in their business, or else they end up giving most of it to the government. Higher individual taxes discourage them from just giving it all to executives too.
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Not that she is a saint or anything of course; she is still terrible, but this one time she made the right choice.
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I think the difference is who appointed each. Roberts was appointed by Bush. He’s probably a RINO to most of TrumpLand. Barrett was appointed by Trump, though, so when she does not do as der Fuhrer commands, it’s a problem. They picked her expecting loyalty, not free thought.
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He has more money than the GDP of most countries. He doesn’t just think he can buy elections; in most cases he simply can. Simple resistance probably won’t be enough to stop him, but taxing the crap out of him in the US certainly won’t hurt
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My sincere hope: when we eventually overthrow the fascists, she (and all of them) will face the equivalent of Nuremberg 2.0 and all of them will pay for their crimes against this country. She should have been disqualified from holding office 4 years ago.
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I was only 5 when Carter left office so it was a long time before I really heard much or learned about him, but of all of the presidents in my lifetime he seems to be the most truly Christian and most selfless. He was a great man and we could all learn from his example.
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While Twitter was far from perfect pre-Elon, I wouldn’t have called it a troll-infested hellscape. That part is all Elon’s doing…
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LOL. Is this even his real account, or a parody? If it’s a parody, good on them, you made me laugh. If not, why should anyone care what this charlatan thinks about anything at this point?
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Too many people see black and white when the world is shades of grey. I fear that under Trump we will abandon all pretense of being the good guys in favor of supporting those who support Trump. And with the overwhelming strength of the US military I worry nobody may be able to stop us.
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It’s not like we have always been the good guys. WW2, sure. Since then our record has been mixed. It’s the people that can’t see that because they start with the assumption that we are always the good guys that is part of the problem.
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I agree, but it is way closer than it should be because both are incredibly strong in the hypocrisy too.