A tax season reminder that Intuit TurboTax lobbied the government for years to block free public tax-filing.
Trump then terminated the free IRS Direct File program established under Biden, just a year after the tax prep giant gave his inauguration fund $1M.
Do you see how this works?
Activist who pushed 2020 election fraud claims convicted of election fraud www.nbcnews.com/politics/pol...
Bar chart showing the change in the number of providers — social workers, psychologists and psychiatrists — from the third quarter of 2023 to the end of 2025 on the x-axis and the number of providers from negative 400 to 800 on the y-axis. The trend starts with a peak of about 700 social workers and around 200 psychologists added in the third quarter of 2023, followed by a steady decline across all groups, dropping below zero by the first quarter of 2025 with social worker losses eventually dipping around 400.
The VA lost about 700 social workers and 500 psychologists and psychiatrists over the course of 2025 — a significant change for an agency that was adding mental health staffers nearly every month leading up to Trump’s return to office.
Read more: https://propub.li/4rBUJOV
Unlike information obtained from cellphone providers, this data can be accessed without a warrant — and used to track anyone.
This one hits hard.
The richest man on earth owns X.
The second richest man on earth is about to be a major owner of TikTok.
The third richest man owns Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp.
The fourth richest man owns The Washington Post.
See the problem here?
The NCA5 Atlas, an incredible resource introduced for the fifth assessment, is available here: nca-atlas-nationalclimate.hub.arcgis.com
An archived version of NCA5 is available here: nca2023-globalchange.govarchive.us and the USGCRP website is here: globalchange.govarchive.us. Thank you @webrecorder.net!!!
For a split second, I thought she was wearing an Iggy Pop suit.
Chatbots — LLMs — do not know facts and are not designed to be able to accurately answer factual questions. They are designed to find and mimic patterns of words, probabilistically. When they’re “right” it’s because correct things are often written down, so those patterns are frequent. That’s all.
It also tries to distinguish between "patient care" and "psychosocial support", as though those are different things, and treats the latter as "munchable" This is insane, particularly given the trauma veterans experience and the hard work that has been done to expand VA's work in this area.
Erin McDonnell's (@profmcdonnell.bsky.social) amazing new paper "Bureaucracy in Action: The Sociology of Public Administration" is online now at the Annual Review of Sociology. Check it out!!! @ndsociology.bsky.social @artslettersnd.bsky.social @asanews.bsky.social
doi.org/10.1146/annu...
In light of the new article on AI and higher education, here are my 6 pedagogically-defensible ways to assess in the era of generative artificial intelligence.
Cost-cutting tactics The secret bonuses were just one of many maneuvers UnitedHealth devised to track and cut expenses in its nursing home initiative. Internal emails show, for example, that UnitedHealth supervisors gave their teams “budgets” showing how many hospital admissions they had “left” to use up on nursing home patients. The company also monitored nursing homes that had smaller numbers of patients with “do not resuscitate” – or DNR – and “do not intubate” orders in their files. Without such orders, patients are in line for certain life-saving treatments that might lead to costly hospital stays. Two current and three former UnitedHealth nurse practitioners told the Guardian that UnitedHealth managers pressed nurse practitioners to persuade Medicare Advantage members to change their “code status” to DNR even when patients had clearly expressed a desire that all available treatments be used to keep them alive.
UnitedHealth secretly pressured nurses to change patients' records to include DNRs (Do Not Resuscitate) without their consent, so those patients would die instead of being saved with medical interventions that could cost UnitedHealth money.
This is murder.
www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...
While you highlight it, please note is the product of local journalism, which has been carrying a lot of the burden in an environment where national outlets simply can't cover everything everywhere all at once. Support your local journalists!
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Whatever fraud there is in Medicaid is largely on the provider side, not beneficiaries. It's health insurance, its not cash.
"Fraud" here means going to a doctor if you are unemployed.
What are the main differences between this and the ABLE Act? Is it that this would cover any assets, not just disability-related?
Val Kilmer tweeting I once tickled Lou Reed. I regretted it for the longest while as he spoke to me few times after that dinner. But I'm glad now. He needed it.
RIP King
The entire staff.
“Also terminated was the entire staff of the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program.” An expert said “he doesn’t see how the agency can ‘allocate the remaining $387 million in funds for this year without federal staff.”
And that’s not to mention next year!
Disability experts I spoke to expressed that the decision reflected a lack of awareness of the Administration for Community Living’s crucial role for disabled and aging Americans.
A broad conclusion is that if you study anything related to the US government, join with colleagues to make a credible and accessible second home for the data you use, now.
In 2023, an SSI client told me if she didn’t call Social Security early in the morning, she faced absurd waits.
“I actually ended up hanging up a couple of times simply because I was exhausted, or hungry, or had to go to the bathroom.”
DOGE’s changes (incl firing thousands) would make this worse.
"When you hear about patients surviving stage 4 cancer because of immunotherapy, that was based on NIH research over many decades. When you hear about sickle cell disease being cured because of CRISPR gene editing, that was built on years of research supported by NIH"
apnews.com/article/nih-...
First, they said postponed; now the meeting is canceled. That means no flu shots next year.
“'It’s a six-month production cycle,' Dr. Offit said. 'So one can only assume that we’re not picking flu strains this year.'"
Fundamentally, that's a form of mass murder.
www.nytimes.com/2025/02/26/u...
