anniekoh

[anniekoh]

Federal spending

via https://www.foodpolitics.com/2025/05/weekend-reading-the-us-governments-budget/

[anniekoh]

@elbarto Further surveillance - even for the noble cause of slowing cars down!! - is deeply fucked up and can and will be used by the state in service of horrible things.

[anniekoh]

Ways to brush up on my Korean language skills. Looking at cat posts.

Image 1: https://bsky.app/profile/owo-erang.bsky.social/post/3lqhqx2qx622d

[anniekoh]

May 31, 2025:

@manruss.bsky.social

The lesson people infuriatingly never seem to master is that there is no creating a police state just for other people. If you create a police state with no due process for immigrants or accused criminals, then that's the system you've created for yourself.

Pulp & Politics‬ ‪@pulpandpolitics.bsky.social‬

There's a quote from the film Touch of Evil I often find myself thinking of. "A policeman's job is only easy in a police state. That's the whole point."

[anniekoh]

Burrowing Owl!

[anniekoh]

As far as a safer food ecosystem is concerned, Kennedy and the MAHA movement might claim they care, but their actions demonstrate they don’t. For example, the circus of taking red food dye number 40 out of the food supply. While that sounds like a good thing, what’s actually happened is they have hyped it up well beyond its actual significance, and then are banning it is a performative way to act like they are doing something while actually having no real impact on access to healthier food...

What does affect access to healthier foods? Poverty. What is the Trump administration proposing? Reducing eligibility under the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP. Making it harder for people to get food, isn’t making anyone healthy again. As for saving children from chemicals, the Trump administration has cut tens of millions of dollars in grants to study the impact of pesticides, pollution, wildfire smoke, and forever chemicals on the food supply. How exactly is that cleaning up our food system?

[anniekoh]

The Navarinou Park in Exarcheia, Athens.

From Stavrides, S. (2016). Common Space: The City as Commons. Zed Books.

[anniekoh]

Translating Falasteen (Palestine), in collaboration with The Sameer Project, launched a fundraising campaign to support families in Gaza facing severe hardships. Our mission is to provide essential aid to those who need it most, especially families with specific and urgent needs. The aid is bought from existing products in the market and is NOT being brought in through any border.

[anniekoh]

the terrorism is the Trump immigration regime

Above: Screenshot of a post from Anat Shenker-Osorio on why we should say abduct and disappear instead of deport or arrest.

Below: Screenshot of a post from Jessica Pishko on how ICE (and other agencies) can make arrests in plainclothes. A post by Aaron Reichlin-Melnick that shows a photo of masked ICE agents in the hallway of a Seattle courthouse (May 21, 2025)

50+ Venezuelans Imprisoned in El Salvador Came to US Legally, Never Violated Immigration Law by David Bier (May 2025)

Shortly after the US government illegally and unconstitutionally transported about 240 Venezuelans to be imprisoned in El Salvador’s horrific “terrorism” prison on March 15, CBS News published their names. A subsequent CBS News investigation found that 75 percent of the men on that list had no criminal record in the United States or abroad. Less attention has been paid to the fact that dozens of these men never violated immigration laws either.

The fact that I'm including a Cato Institute link is a surprise, given how thoroughly I disagree with libertarian economic ideology and because they are actually consistent with pre-Trump beliefs. I also appreciate that they don't fall into the trap of using the misleading language of "deportation".

[anniekoh]

medicaid, covid vaccines & public health

Time sensitive news on vaccine access and Medicaid funding

FDA’s new proposal would require placebo-controlled trials for healthy young adults every time a new variant emerges. But it’s already spreading by the time a new variant is identified. Public health uses predictive modeling (like the flu model) to stay ahead and be proactive (rather than reactive). This is also unethical and not feasible. Scientists can’t give people a saline placebo when we know a vaccine offers protection. No ethical review board would approve this. Also, running an RCT in the seasonal timeframe is unrealistic.

Medicaid Is One of America’s Strongest Economic Engines. Why Don’t We Treat It That Way? By Marko Mijic (California Health Care Foundation, May 2025)

Each year, the federal government alongside states invest billions of dollars into Medicaid. That money doesn’t sit in government accounts — it moves through communities. It keeps hospitals open, supports hundreds of thousands of jobs, sustains rural health systems, and fuels a growing workforce of home care aides, behavioral health providers, and community-based service workers. For every dollar spent, Medicaid generates ripple effects far beyond health care. It helps the restaurant worker stay employed, enables older adults to remain in their communities, and gives entrepreneurs the security to open their small businesses.

[anniekoh]

The terrible tax and immigration bill, in bar charts

@jacobbogage.bsky.social‬

What's in Trump and Republicans' massive tax and immigration bill? Here's a breakdown for you. I'm the econ policy geek in Congress for @washingtonpost.com . I read the whole bill (really, I did) so you don't have to

..

This is the legislation that Trump calls his "big, beautiful bill."

Its main purpose is to extend the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. That law cut tax rates for every income bracket, but concentrated the most gains among the wealthiest folks.

The individual portions expire at the end of 2025.

...

This bill is very aggressive on immigration.

$50 billion for the border wall and other barriers

$45 billion for detention centers for immigrant families

$14 billion for deportee transportation

In total, it's $140-some billion for deportations and border security.

Source: New @centeronbudget.bsky.social analysis of the draft GOP tax plan released yesterday: Unsurprisingly, it provides enormous tax cuts for the wealthy—including an average annual $65k cut for the top 1%—while doing little for low- and moderate-income families in 2027 (and even less by 2029).

..

The House GOP is taking a page from 2017 playbook & making the most regressive pieces permanent (i.e. estate tax/pass-thru deduction) while making new tax cuts for families temporary.

[anniekoh]

A Matter of Words What can university AI committees actually do Megan Fritts (The Point, May 2025)

Our frustration is not merely that we don’t care about what AI has to say and therefore get bored grading; it is that we actively miss reading the thoughts of our human students.

…

Popular theories of mind would have us think that we learn words and attach them to ideas that we already have, but the opposite is closer to the truth: to learn to use language just is to learn how to think and move about in the world. When we stop doing this—when our needs for communication are met by something outside of us, a detached mouthpiece to summon, describe and regale—the intimate connection between thought and language disappears. It is not only the capacity for speech that we will slowly begin to lose under such conditions, but our entire inward lives.

…

If, on the other hand, the aim of our disciplines is the formation of human persons, then the real threat AI poses is not one of job replacement or grading frustration or having to reimagine assignments but something entirely different. From this perspective, language-generating AI, whether it is utilized to write emails or dissertations, stands as an enemy to the human form of life by coming between the individual and her words.

[anniekoh]

rhetoric vs reality: ride hailing

Uber Lyft -

https://twitter.com/henrygrabar/status/1158400377118711808

http://gizmodo.com/lyft-thinks-its-exciting-that-a-driver-was-working-whil-1786970298

Lyft—the ridesharing app that most people only use when Uber surge pricing is too high—does something a lot of tech companies do: it runs a blog. It’s where the company publicly celebrates its own excellence, for things like new featuresand anniversaries. It’s also where, earlier this month, a story appeared praising one of the company’s drivers for picking up a rider while en route to the hospital to give birth.

What a cute story! What a trooper, that Mary, who almost certainly wanted to be working while 9 months pregnant at a job that does not provide its non-employee drivers with basic amenities like healthcare or maternity leave. Ignoring birthing contractions to make an extra buck is not cute—it points to how fundamentally lopsided contract jobs are in the euphemistically-named sharing economy.

Inspiring teen Chick-fil-a

dystopian

https://twitter.com/dwdavison9318/status/809585073217531906