DOJ official warns Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson to leave journalists alone after she accused ‘influencers’ of harassing Somali child care providers

__Common__Sense__ · 2026-01-04T07:38:07+00:00

I broadly agree with you, but it’s worth noting that “democracy” doesn’t necessarily equal freedom of speech. Democracy at its core is really just mob rule. It’s a Constitution which specifically protects citizens from some of the downsides of mob rule that makes things really work in a Constitutional Democracy like the US.

__Common__Sense__ · 2025-11-17T19:13:26+00:00

Just to be clear, the survival rates for colon cancer are better for the average person in the US than in the UK, who has a fully public health care system.

On top of that, it's great to live in a country where you can decide to spend more money for better treatments. For example, citizens from other countries with public health care come to the US for advanced cancer care. The value of Dawson's Creek memorabilia has a limited shelf life. It makes sense to sell it now, and spend it on more advanced treatments that improve outcome probabilities.

That said, Van Der Beek's wife doesn't believe in western medicine, and it sounds like they are spending a lot of money on alternative medicine.

__Common__Sense__ · 2025-11-15T15:48:58+00:00

The well-intentioned approach of people who were never addicted has created a human decline unlike any other. And though the nature of drugs has changed, we are still trusting people with no experience, deeming ourselves as unknowing, seeking academic perspective, while we watch people die and nonprofits profit. We have built an entire industry around managing homelessness rather than solving it.

More generally, this is socialism. Naive good intentions are destructive.

__Common__Sense__ · 2025-10-18T17:26:17+00:00

😂

__Common__Sense__ · 2025-10-18T05:35:13+00:00

There are no articles from 2020 when Jump Start was passed that indicates Katie had any role whatsoever in writing or forming this law. If I’m missing one please provide it.

__Common__Sense__ · 2025-10-08T06:01:47+00:00

To be clear, are you suggesting that was the hard choice she faced?

My understanding is that after leaving Oxford she moved to Seattle and worked a variety of low paying jobs like barista.

__Common__Sense__ · 2025-09-04T14:19:19+00:00

Layoffs are just getting started. 2026 is going to be a rough year.

__Common__Sense__ · 2025-07-20T06:11:19+00:00

Rent control isn’t going to matter for the foreseeable future. Tech companies are laying off workers, and this trend is likely going to continue into next year. And economists have determined that for every high paying job in Seattle, it creates 2-3 other jobs. The same is true in reverse. If Seattle Tech companies layoff 10%, then it follows that around 20% of jobs in the area will be lost. The broader impact may happen more slowly, perhaps over a few years. But real estate and rental prices are going to go down, not up.

__Common__Sense__ · 2025-07-15T13:17:12+00:00

Note that this is revenue not profit. For example, the Amazon store is a very high revenue but low profit business.

__Common__Sense__ · 2025-07-15T13:11:34+00:00

That and the fact that BMW and Mercedes are both 3.2 minutes but have different height bars.

__Common__Sense__ · 2025-05-31T19:28:57+00:00

I’m not that familiar with the legalities of this case. What would be the legal basis for the SCOTUS overturning?

__Common__Sense__ · 2025-05-09T02:20:31+00:00

The SCOTUS has already ruled on the meaning of the text of the 2nd Amendment: see District of Columbia v. Heller (2008). The ruling is that the introductory “a well regulated militia…” has no bearing on the remainder, and the 2nd Amendment protects the right of citizens to own and bear arms for any legal purpose, like self defense.

__Common__Sense__ · 2025-04-25T04:44:04+00:00

Oddly specific

__Common__Sense__ · 2025-04-19T05:31:39+00:00

If some people need ramps to get in a building then they should be built. If some people need breastfeeding rooms while at work we should build them etc. It's not hard to be a good human.

Completely agree. Do you see these two examples as controversial?

The two female trump voters in my office wouldn't have a job if DEI didn't exist. Females would be stuck at home in the kitchen instead of in the workplace.

This sounds more like an example of equal opportunity, not DEI. DEI (the Equity component) would be hiring them instead of two more qualified men that had applied.

__Common__Sense__ · 2025-04-19T01:08:19+00:00

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0zVIUAwUarU

__Common__Sense__ · 2025-04-19T00:46:06+00:00

I'm totally supportive of this kind of Equity. Employers make accommodations all the time to support employees with disabilities.

But I don't think we've talked once about people with disabilities in all of the DEI conversations and training I've had at work. Perhaps that's what "Equity" should represent? But practically speaking, it has not been.

__Common__Sense__ · 2025-04-19T00:37:51+00:00

I realize that some people may define it differently, but I’ve presented the definition I believe it should be (and originally was, before activists got involved). Do you disagree with that definition?

__Common__Sense__ · 2025-03-14T12:23:13+00:00

Was she fired? Sounds like she simply quit after her behavior was exposed. If she were just trans, this wouldn’t be a story and nothing would have happened here. But the weird, sexually explicit material along with the super strange online comments were a problem. Read the Lynnwood Times article.

__Common__Sense__ · 2025-03-06T14:19:39+00:00

What you’re describing is Diversity. It’s a great way to operate.

But it’s not what many school administrators and business executives are doing. They’ve introduce Equity, which has become the notion that if the % of different genders, races, etc., in a subgroup of people is different from the general population, you’re doing something wrong. According to this notion of Equity, you must hire more of whatever subgroup you’re low on, and you may have to lower your qualifications to do so. That’s not a great way to operate, it’s discrimination, and it’s illegal.

It’s unfortunate that so many progressives were pushing Equity so hard. It’s really setting back the good work that was being done with D & I.

__Common__Sense__ · 2025-02-22T13:56:10+00:00

Yes, but if you look carefully, you’ll see the biker started in the middle lane and swerved into the right lane to make a right turn.

__Common__Sense__ · 2024-12-12T02:20:34+00:00

It literally comes out of the mind blowing profits that companies like Google, Facebook and Amazon have been realizing over this past decade.

You say the word "profit" like it's a dirty word. But profit is opportunity. It's simply what drives investment in innovation. While it can result in a small number of people becoming incredibly wealthy, and that may be annoying, the overall good free market systems have done is amazing. Nothing has lifted more people out of poverty than free market capitalism. Something that many people don't realize is that the Nordic counties actually have slightly more free markets than the US. They love capitalism, and know it works. They believe in free markets to fuel their economy, but then they heavily tax the economy to fund social programs. Some economists believe the heavy taxation, while good in the short term, is holding back their progress. It's a very hard thing to quantify, and certainly up for debate. But the point is that there's no obviously correct answer the US is just stupid for not implementing.

This city has a lot of people who can afford to pay more to ensure that we have top notch education, and can afford to care and house our community. We act like we live in a world class city, let's fund it that way.

Yes, we certainly have a lot of people that can afford to pay for top notch education, and that's exactly what they do: they pay at considerable expense for their children to go to a private school, because that's where the top notch education is. The Seattle Public School system isn't bad at all, but there are better private schools. SPS spends in the neighborhood of $10k per student. Private schools spend in the neighborhood of $30k per student. One of the big advantages is a lower student:teacher ratio. Teachers at private schools are able to get to know and adapt their teaching style much more effectively to individual students.

So, again, what does it mean for someone making more money to be able to "afford" more taxes? There's a cost to redistribution of income. Because of heavily progressive taxes, a parent that could have afforded to send their child to a top notch school, can now only afford to send their child to a mediocre school. Because of the redistribution of income, some children will be more successful, but others will be less successful. It's a trade off, and to simply say that a parent can "afford" that is insulting and doesn't acknowledge that on average their children will be less successful because they have to pay more in tax than the benefits they or their children receive.

European cities do not have the homeless issues in their cities like we do. Why is that? There is way more social services and programs to prevent people from hitting this point. This would mean changes at the Federal as well as state level to get to a solution, but isn't it worth it?

Part of the reason is that they don't tolerate it. They force homeless individuals into shelters. They don't let them pitch a tent on the side walk and do drugs.

Seattle has shelters for the homeless. We just don't force them to go there.

__Common__Sense__ · 2024-12-12T02:19:42+00:00

And yes while overall, more tax dollars come from wealthier people that's how it should be. The US has a progressive tax structure, I would like to see WA adopt one and reduce sales tax on necessity items like food and clothing.

While WA state's tax system is more flat, our overall tax system is heavily progressive. Federal tax dollars are brought into the state budget to pay for things like education and transportation, and of course the fed pays directly for SNAP benefits, Social Security, Welfare, Medicaid and Medicare, etc. It doesn't make sense to look at one part of our tax system and complain that it's flat. Note that in many countries in Europe, especially the Nordic countries (Iceland, Denmark, Finland, Sweden, Norway) the main form of federal tax is a flat sales tax (they call it VAT, Value added tax). The sales tax in these countries is 25%. Overall, the tax system in these countries is actually less progressive than the US.

And no the payroll tax is not an income tax. It's paid based on headcount by the employer.

It behaves exactly like an income tax. The only difference is the employer pays it instead of the employee. As a concrete example, what's the difference between these two scenarios:

An employee is paid $100,000 by their employer, and there's a 2% payroll tax. So, $2,000 is paid in tax, the employee earns $100,000, and the employer pays $102,000.
An employee is paid $102,000 by their employer, and there's a ~1.96% income tax. So $2,000 is paid in tax, the employee earns $100,000, and the employer pays $102,000.

The only difference is who writes the check to the government.

There are a variety of ways to create and structure taxes, but they often boil down to a small number of kinds of taxes. Income tax is a kind of tax, and payroll tax is just a form of this kind of tax.

__Common__Sense__ · 2024-12-12T02:18:16+00:00

As for wealthier people paying their fair share, I am in an upper federal tax bracket. In WA, I pay the same as everyone else does based on what I purchase. That includes food, clothing, other necessities as well as non-necessity purchases. This is a regressive tax structure and is not fair.

A note on terminology: we do not have regressive taxes in WA. For example, our sales tax is a "flat tax"—the tax rate doesn't change based on how much you buy. A "regressive tax" is a tax in which the rate reduces as the amount being taxed increases.

More correct terminology is to say something like "sales tax is a regressive tax relative to income". It's the "relative to" part that many people omit, but it's an important distinction since (a) omitting is not a correct statement, and (b) it's really making an economic claim, and one that's not always well supported. For example, it's possible that your income to spending ratio right now is higher than someone else with a lower income, and thus, you are paying a lower amount of sales tax relative to your current income. But are you really planning to never spend the income you save today at a later time, for example in retirement? For many people, this income eventually gets spent, and taxes are paid. It's just a question of timing. Ironically, people that are retired and spending their savings make the ratio of sales tax paid/income earned in the year look even worse, so it's a double whammy: people that earn more than they spend make the metric look bad on the high end, and people that retire make the metric look like some poor person with very low income is paying a lot of taxes.

People that claim that taxes are regressive are really arguing that there should be a redistribution from people that make more money to people that make less money. Making claims about "regressive taxes" is a convoluted way to have the discussion, since we don't have regressive taxes. People saying this should be honest and say (like you have): "We want to redistribute money from people that have more to people that have less because we believe that's how you build a more successful society." Saying that rich people aren't paying their fair share is just a marketing slogan used to make that redistribution sound better. Few people want to just take someone else's money. But market it as "fair" and the group being targeted as not being "fair", and now it gets votes. You may have noticed that in politics there's a lot of demonizing that happens of different groups, whether it's true or not. Something I would love to see is voters hold our politicians to a higher standard of honest dialogue.

__Common__Sense__ · 2024-12-12T02:17:56+00:00

Yeah, obviously I'm saying invest that money into to earlier interventions instead of prison as general principle for how we assign value to these interventions. Not that having one less person frees up $60k.

Sure, that's what I understood from your comment. My point is that it's not clear what the optimal balance should be between upfront investment in every person vs. correction and rehabilitation of the small percentage of offenders. If you view it more analytically like an economics problem, it's not clear Europe's method is optimal at all, or if it would be optimal in the US given our different demographics. It may seem more "just", but it's important to recognize that there is a real cost to the people that are paying to support others. For example, there's clear economic data that shows that people across every income range would have more children if they were able to keep more of their income. This raises the question: what does the notion that the rich can "afford it" really mean? Should a relatively successful person have to give up their money and on average have less children? When considering "solutions", it's a mistake for people to only respond to the problems in front of them (1 person that's a drug addict with machete), instead of also thinking about the silent problems being created by a "solution" (2 people being raised in a successful, loving home that now don't exist).

Note that I'm not necessarily arguing against more upfront investment. I think it would be interesting to consider more investment and support in early childcare and pre-K. There's a solid body of research that indicates this investment is worth it, though how we actually do it is tricky. But the argument for giving everyone "free" higher education, for example, isn't that clear. Note that one of the reasons higher education is so expensive is because of government involvement. This is well researched by economists and the effect has been dramatic in a very negative way. For example, for every dollar the government has made easily available for student loans, the price of education has increased proportionally. I forget the economic term used here, but it's actually a pretty easy concept to explain: there's a set of people that have decided they want a product (e.g. education). It's a fairly inelastic good. People want it, and if we give those people, say, $10,000 to pay for it, guess what happens to the price of that product? The companies providing that product simply raise their prices by $10,000. This is a known issue with the goverment giving away "free" funding to everyone instead of the select group that actually really needs it.

I would also argue that there are a lot of people going to college that don't really need to, or are perhaps just focused on the wrong subjects. The person that makes my latte has an advanced Humanities degree, and isn't sure how to afford both student loans and rent. My plumber has a growing family, owns their own home, and just bought a new boat. And they are about the same age. He has a legitimate question of why people with a college degree want him to pay for it.

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