Archive for May 2025

That, by the way, is the good news for DOGE. The bad news is that the project seems quite likely to expand long-term budget deficits. Slashing IRS enforcement will embolden tax evasion and reduce revenues by hundreds of billions of dollars over the decade. Laying off Department of Education employees who ensure collection of student-loan repayments will increase the deficit. Illegally terminated federal employees are already being reinstated with full back pay, leaving the government with little to show for its trouble besides mounting legal fees. Even if DOGE somehow manages to end up in the black, any modest savings it achieves will be completely overwhelmed by the GOP’s push to expand the 2017 tax cut at a cost of roughly $500 billion annually.

Incoming Association of Directors of Adult Social Services president Jess McGregor talks about influencing the Casey Commission and ADASS’s mission to change the doom-laden narrative around social care

I am watching a video of the woman in the office of Philip Nitschke in Haarlem, the Netherlands. It’s November and it’s getting dark. He’s trying to show me that the woman died lawfully by euthanasia in the pod, which he invented…. Nitschke facilitated the world’s first legal assisted suicides in the 1990s. He’s devoted his life to making death on demand as easy as possible, for anyone who might genuinely want it.

The interior of the new Nancy Cooper Social Work Studio.

Effective implementation will require more robust research with larger and more diverse populations, greater transparency about how models are trained and constant human oversight to ensure safety. Regulators must also step in to guide the ethical use of AI in clinical settings.

Not only are birds rapidly vanishing from North America, but humans also need clean air. Simply put, government agencies burning millions of acres of public lands throughout the year is continually poisoning the air in much of the West. Above: Red Tail Hawk in Deschutes National Forest