Issues You May Know, 3 January 2025.
A list of things you might want to know about - or write your reps about.
📍 Note: the newly elected people to Congress took office today Friday January 3rd 2025 at Noon US East. Be sure to look up the current contact pages of your representatives and bookmark them in your favourites.
By around 3pm I had my first letter submitted on an issue to my newly elected member of congress, and by 5pm I had my first casework request to get his office to help with dealing with trying to get information on policy rules from the IRS, which I may need to file a FOIA request to get, which is entirely bonkers. This is what these people are there for, to take input from constituents, and to help constituents with issues regarding our government. We hire and pay them to do this with elections and taxes.
Housing First is: housing and — and it works.
Brittany Page gave a good explanation of the actual homelessness reports, described what housing first actually means, and where TYT went wrong on reporting about it.
My letter to reps:
I’m pleased that veterans homelessness has been reduced by housing first policies which have shown effectiveness also in some regions where they are reducing suffering in the community. I’ve been horrified about stories of patients unable to complete cancer treatment because of lack of housing, and of the story of the widow who had her late husband’s ashes confiscated from her and thrown in the garbage by the authorities. There’s no reason for any of that in a modern respectable civilization — just make sure people have a place to live and keep their stuff FIRST — it’s obviously the right approach. Intelligent and ethical leaders should be implementing housing first policies everywhere.
Please feel free to copy-paste or repurpose a portion of the contents of my letter for your own letters to reps at all levels of government.
I agree with Brittany Page, that the TYT folks seem like they've revealed that they’ve never actually interacted with people who actually experienced loss of their independent accommodations.
I have worked interacting with people experiencing this misfortune, and the key distinction I observed in my personal experience was that what seems to separate people who’ve hit hard times and were struggling, and people who hit hard times and became unhoused, is that people who wind up in homeless shelters, including veterans shelters, sleeping rough, in tents, or couch surfing night to night from house to house of family & friends – is that the people who are unhoused typically have friends and family who are also working class and living paycheck to paycheck and unable to rescue others. Because when someone hits hard times who comes from more generational financial stability, with a social network of middle and upper middle class extended family and friends with some money – generally those family and friends open their wallets so the person can hang onto their own domicile, or they have the space and capacity to have the person move in with them in a more long-term temporary basis.
And most people I ever talked to who were experiencing misfortune with their housing situation had no major mental illness nor any addiction issues, and many times they were NOT unemployed. I’ve also known many people with substance addictions who never had any issues with housing at all, in fact many lived in fancy places throughout substance use that took them near death.
I think it’s really unhelpful to mishmash all these issues all in together just because sometimes some people are just so unfortunate to have a great many problems, and of course any other problems are always exacerbated by being unhoused — which is exactly why housing first just makes sense — for those people especially!
Doctors to strike with nurses in Oregon
Oregon Providence health care workers announce strike By OPB staff (OPB) Dec. 30, 2024 11:54 a.m. Updated: Dec. 30, 2024 8:58 p.m. “This is new,” Moreno said. “Replacing physicians, midwives, practitioners - nobody has any experience with this.”
Maybe healthcare corporations need to start coming to the bargaining table more easily in this case? Just a thought!
H1B visas are bad for labor and really anyone outside of the tycoons who game the system.
Why the Muskrat is wrong about opening America to skilled workers from abroad I refused to bow to industry pressure 30 years ago, and my reasons are as legitimate now as they were then. Robert Reich Dec 28, 2024 Allowing many more skilled workers into the United States reduces any incentives on American business to invest in the American workforce. Why do so when they can get talent from abroad? Allowing many more skilled workers into the U.S. also reduces the bargaining power of skilled workers already in America — and thereby reduces any incentive operating on other Americans to gain the skills for such jobs. And opening America to skilled workers also reduces the incentive on foreign nations to educate and nurture their own skilled workforces. Why should they, when their own skilled workers can easily migrate to America? The major beneficiaries in the U.S. of opening the nation to skilled workers from abroad are CEOs and venture capitalists like Musk and Sachs, whose profits and wealth would be even higher if they could siphon off cheaper skilled workers from abroad.
This is my first letter to Republican Rep Rob Bresnahan, newly sworn in representative in Congress for the 8th District of Pennsylvania.
I’m opposed to the H1b visa system and the obvious exploitation of the program and the workers in the program, and the workers displaced by the apparently allowed illegitimate use of this guest worker program. Many of us have heard decades of accounts from people we know who had to train their H1b replacements — who were not more skilled than the people they were replacing, they were just willing to work for less just to stay in the U.S. with a sort of Sword of Damocles hanging over their heads that’s leveraged by managers for their bottom lines as well as their whims. We all know what this is about and the many ways it’s corrupt. In recent weeks many people have criticized the H1B visas including such usually politically opposed people such as former Trump administration White House Chief Strategist Republican Steve Bannon and former Clinton administration Secretary of Labor Democrat Robert Reich. As such this would seem like an easy bipartisan win for Americans. H1B visa reform would be widely popular for its own sake, and should be the prioritized immigration issue.
Please feel free to copy or repurpose the contents of my letter for your own letters to reps.
Scuttlebutt is that the new Congress is hot to try the SAVE Act again.
LWVUS Opposes SAVE Act 5/16/2024 LWVUS joined coalition partners to oppose the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act, which would require citizenship documentation to cast a ballot, despite the fact that voters in every state are already required to affirm or verify their citizenship status when registering to vote.
My letter to senators and congressperson:
Voters across America are already required to verify citizenship status in order to register to vote. Please don’t waste time and taxpayer money to politically posture on this bs SAVE Act nonsense.
Please feel free to copy or repurpose the contents of my letter for your own letters to reps.
Youtubers respond to comments because it pleases the algorithm.
404 Media - YouTube “Enhances” Comment Section With AI Slop Emanuel Maiberg · Dec 12, 2024 The job is taxing not only because churning out a lot of videos helps them get picked up by YouTube’s recommendation algorithm, comments on those videos and replies to comments helps increase engagement and visibility for those videos. YouTube rewarding that type of engagement incentivises the busywork of creators replying to comments, which predictably resulted in an entire practice and set of tools that allow creators to plug their channels to a variety of AI that will automatically reply to comments for them. YouTube’s AI-enhanced reply suggestions feature just brings that practice of manufactured engagement in-house.
Letter to reps:
AI created fakery online for monetary gain needs to be reigned in. We need laws that at a minimum require companies and influencers to disclose when they’re using automated systems designed to fool people into thinking they’re genuine human interaction.
Please feel free to copy or repurpose the contents of my letter for your own letters to reps.
Fossil fuel PR operative claims Harris lost Pennsylvania because people want more burning coal.
HEATED Tim Ryan is a paid fossil fuel mouthpiece Public records reviewed by HEATED show Ryan received $250,000 in 2023 from a fossil fuel lobbying group to hype up methane gas. Emily Atkin and Arielle Samuelson Dec 12, 2024 “We did not give them enough of, ‘We are reindustrializing, we are talking about American competitiveness. We are moderate on things like natural gas in Western Pennsylvania,’” he said. “We can’t even be for natural gas replacing coal,” he added—a perplexing remark given that Kamala Harris fully embraced methane gas during her campaign. The comment becomes less perplexing, however, when considering Ryan’s day job. The former congressman is a spokesperson for a group called Natural Allies for a Clean Energy Future, a fossil fuel lobbying group that brands itself as a climate group.
Write your reps and tell them how their constituent voters are not these big coal burning fans. There have been public hearings here in Pennsylvania with numerous people organizing against a coal burning plant that wants to also burn tires. The idea that the election hinged upon people wanting more coal burning is absolute nonsense PR by the fossil fuel industry which is obviously getting so desperate with this off the wall messaging. That said, elected officials can be clueless people who listen to the last person who buys them lunch or the last corporate pitch that lands in their inbox, so we the constituents need to definitely counter this messaging.
My letter to elected representatives:
I want all fossil fuels phased out, especially starting with coal burning. Renewables are the future. We need to transition.
Please feel free to copy or repurpose the contents of my letter for your own letters to reps.
Egregious levels of health insurance denial.
This guy’s sister was approved for the same genetic condition drug, while he was in decline and being denied. He had to go on the Today Show in order to get the attention to get life saving medicine approved by the health insurance, and then the insurance company, after being contacted by the Today Show, actually threatened him that they'd give him the medication, but not if he went on the interview.
Whole interview is worth listening to, because I’ve heard about things happening in one state but not another, because some states are better than others. And there are time limits on appeals, and a lot of people don’t know the rules, so I’m sure a lot of people don’t even try.
My letter to reps:
AI or any type of automation should be prohibited in the health insurance claim denial process. We always need a human in the loop when a human life is on the line.
Please feel free to copy or repurpose the contents of my letter for your own letters to reps.
Stories about healthcare in the Altoona area of Pennsylvania.
There’s a reddit thread in R/Pennsylvania about healthcare in rural south central PA region, and it’s not a pretty picture painted.
Reddit comment from R/Pennsylvania, Saturday, December 21, 2024, FaithlessnessCute204 • 3d ago • not a healthcare story directly but i got to talk to a DCNR ranger that was quitting the other year because a big part of his job had become doing welfare checks on people that moved from harrisburg/allentown/state college up into the mountains and then couldnt cope medically with the 2 hr drives for medical issues. dude found like 4 people dead on his route alone the year i talked to him.
DCNR rangers are law enforcement park rangers who work in Pennsylvania state parks and forests.
It’s not always that great in Scranton Pennsylvania to be honest. My own plan is so limited that though I have Geisinger insurance, not all Geisinger providers and facilities are even covered in my plan. They sent me a letter saying that I was a second class citizen basically, and marked as such - they said my insurance card was color coded to alert healthcare providers of my limited network. I’ve often had to drive 1-½ hours to Danville to see specialists without a 4-6 month wait. At least some specialist appointments can be done via telehealth at a distance. This is why ending telehealth for Medicare sounds like an outrageous situation that’s fortunately been postponed, but will still need to be addressed before the deadline at the end of March 2025. There’s concern that if Medicare stops telehealth, private health insurance companies will follow suit.
My letter to reps:
Telehealth services via Medicare must not expire. Telehealth service should be a permanent option for all patients, and covered by all insurance, including Medicare and Medicaid. Access to in-network healthcare providers isn’t always easy, especially for people living in rural areas.
Please feel free to copy or repurpose the contents of my letter for your own letters to reps.
Don’t fall for AI hype
Yahoo Finance - ECB warns of 'bubble' in AI stocks as funds deplete cash buffers - Reuters November 20, 2024 The central bank for the 20 countries that share the euro noted the stock market, particularly in the United States, had become increasingly dependent on a handful of companies perceived as the beneficiaries of the AI boom. "This concentration among a few large firms raises concerns over the possibility of an AI-related asset price bubble," the ECB said. "Also, in a context of deeply integrated global equity markets, it points to the risk of adverse global spillovers, should earnings expectations for these firms be disappointed."
Letter to reps:
Please don’t fall for AI hype and corporate propagandists who just slap AI onto everything to make it sound fancy. AI doesn’t really exist, automation is really nothing new, and chatbots are horribly prone to generating errors and misinformation. ECB has warned that the AI boom may be an asset price bubble that’s putting integrated global equity markets at risk.
Please feel free to copy or repurpose the contents of my letter for your own letters to reps.
📍 Vaccines: the benefits outweigh the risks, and that’s how all medical decisions are made.
Letter to reps:
The government needs to fund vaccine research and vaccine promotion and deployment.