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beckya.bsky.social
Mental health, unapologetic liberal politics, ukulele, PNW, outdoors, cats, baseball and Bowie. She/her. No DMs unless I know you, please.
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General inside baseball from pharma: Lots of layoffs at places that aren't Eli Lilly. Instability around especially mRNA technology platforms is causing some reshuffling. Best guess is small molecules (already happening, especially macrocycles) and DNA stuff gets hot again, but who knows

I mean, there are other platforms that do cool things other than the mRNA technologies, and they'll be able to rebrand them enough by next year that they won't draw the ire of the idiots running things. We just were doing lots of mRNA stuff because there were lots of break throughs.

I mean, I guess the thing I would say is I'm still working with a company handling a pile of stuff that involves brand new cancer therapeutics that are super promising on a whole bunch of hard-to-treat lines. Medicine isn't ending, folks, a few billion of cuts in fed programs is a drop.

Every single major biotech I am aware of is looking at outsourced R & D right now.

And there's reasons for that. Saudi Arabia and Singapore are both funding a full 50% of salaries for all employed workers in biotech R & D.

I mean, from a human cost thing, we have software engineers from India and from China, and all of them have expressed some level of freaking out.

I mean I guess maybe the upside is it won't take twelve years to get a green card if you're from India in a couple of years? 🫠

I mean I actually think this shows a pretty savvy understanding of the situation. People who are willing to use the military to restore order when things are out of hand realize it's not happening in LA.

They would however have to staff and hire these positions, and agency morale per @reichlinmelnick.bsky.social is in the tank. Just handing an agency multiple billions doesn't turn into people - you have to hire them. It's a magical thing people seem to forget.

Every single time I talk about personnel in federal agencies, I get a few posts that are basically the same thing: "They'll just lower standards." And it's like, have you people ever tried to hire a shitty job? Do you not understand it has nothing to do with "standards"?

The one thing I will say about all this is there is no democratic politician who is more in touch with positioning himself where the winds are proverbially blowing than Newsom, we've seen it. If this is where he is, I don't think there's any justification to not be finding any camera you can.

The really dumb thing about this exact moment is Newsom has correctly recognized that being arrested by Trump on some bogus charge, getting released, and having the massive fist pump picture on the front page of every newspaper is going to absolutely cause our orange boy to go apoplectic.

Netanyahu wanted to strike Iran when Obama was president. Obama said no and he didn’t. Netanyahu wanted to strike Iran when Biden was president. Biden said no and he didn’t. Netanyahu wanted to strike Iran when Trump is president. Trump said no and he did.

Iran, natural disasters and e Stuff like SALT is how you cleave the gop coalition and Trump starts to lose ground in his own party.

Lol the second truth was 100% Miller.

Its important to note that MAGA types never actually "show up" to things. They held inauguration indoors for the same reason.

Yeah, these people want to watch fox news, drive their giant trucks, and have cheap toys. They are not, by any measure, interested in mass protest or any discomfort to themselves.

lmao this would absolutely murder for profit colleges

Oh Miller is gonna be so mad.

Seems like a not great idea to infuriate the military you need to do the authoritarianism.

Lmao Miller is getting rolled if this is the case.

anyone who works for ICE is a bad person imagine clocking in at the child traumatization factory every morning and thinking that’s an acceptable thing to do as a human being just unconscionable

This is the "aha, but what if the words meant something else instead?!" approach to legal argumentation

the nomination of this moron is, by itself, grounds for presidential removal

This evening one of the very kind con organizers took us to the Vigeland Sculpture Park in Oslo, which is amazing and you should go and Gustav Vigeland was extraordinarily talented and probably does not deserve the narrative I constructed looking at his work. But Bluesky! You deserve EVERYTHING!

From a dear comrade who was kind enough to let me share their video. Veterans stage a sit-in on the US Capitol steps and say, “Military off our streets!” Hell yeah!

As expected

If you stand with @padilla.senate.gov, stand with @replamonica.bsky.social. Tell your Reps & Senators how you feel about the charges against her. 202-224-3121 And call the DOJ comment line: 202-353-1555

Right folks. Feeling rather down at the moment so bringing back an oldie Please Quote this with your most minor celebrity interaction

I feel like “the president is illegally deploying the military on domestic soil” is maybe something we should not be giving this administration the benefit of the doubt on, or moving with anything less than lightning speed but apparently the courts do not agree with me

*whispers* liberals and leftists making alliances to take power away from centrists is good, actually

absolutely true one of the hardest things about this moment is feeling like you’re alone against this huge oppressive fascist machine, and online can help but actually going out in person and joining a big crowd of people as upset about everything as you are feels great

it is hard to find better examples of the danger of not throwing fascists in jail when you have the chance than Netanyahu and Trump

apropos of nothing in particular this seems like a pretty good time to get going on the "my family was ejected from Austria because of the Holocaust, please give me citizenship" process

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Most “Bluesky bubble” complaints come across as “I can’t stand leftists, but don’t mind fascists.” Do some people on here suck? Sure. But if you know of an active social network where no one sucks, I’m all ears. And if you think X or Facebook are models of free exchange of ideas, I have questions.

The US was already deporting criminals who entered illegally, prioritizing those who committed the worst crimes. Had for years. Trump’s pitch was always to be harsh to noncriminal migrants, or treat “criminal” and “immigrant” as synonyms, including legal ones and naturalized or second gen citizens.

This is more than possible. It's the likely outcome. You're talking about a President who reverses himself on domestic policy a half a dozen times in a single week. That's not how war works, of course, but Trump is dumb enough to believe he could proclaim it over after launching an attack.

When energy costs spike due to war outbreak—like when Russia attacked Ukraine in 2022, and likely will after Israel's attack on Iran—overall costs rise and gas prices jump, which you may recall is such a dire predicament that it calls for empowering corrupt criminals to end Constitutional democracy.

YMMV, but I am not so sure about any of the stories suggesting that Trump tacitly gave the Israelis a green light and it seems plausible that the post-hoc talk to this effect is BS. The Israelis know as well as anyone else that Trump is out of it and can be played.

Preregistering my take: Bibi thinks he can chain gang Trump into war, but Trump knows that his base absolutely does not want it, and couldn't care less about dead Israelis. Trump talks tough, supplies Iron Dome + maybe engages in some symbolic form of offense, but mainly keeps the US out.

RE: confusion over whether Trump "greenlit" this, never think of him as a decision-maker. He's Lord Raglan ordering (or not ordering? Who can say! Up to you!) the charge of the light brigade. Everyone around him hears what they want, he takes credit if it works and says "Wasn't me!" if it doesn't.