Petunia Winegum 💙 retweeted
I don't mind paying my taxes when the poor can't. But I do mind paying my taxes when the rich won't.
Petunia Winegum 💙 retweeted
The greed and entitlement of billionaires is a main reason why they shouldn’t exist.
Sam Altman says its bad that everyone's personal computers are using the world's limited supply of memory chips.
"It’s quite terrible to have everybody have a bunch of the world’s limited supply of DRAMs sitting in their own computer, and being used 5% of the time. Like, you want maximum utilization."
Petunia Winegum 💙 retweeted
In lieu of flowers, memorial contributions may be made to:
Johns Hopkins Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center Fund
alzresearch.org/giving/
Alzheimer’s Foundation of America Caregiver Resources
alzfdn.org/donate/
Photo Credit: Tommy Garcia
Petunia Winegum 💙 retweeted
The BBC is incapable of recognising what makes its radio services special. Radio4Extra isn’t just an archive, it’s a carefully curated journey of discovery. Just as with local radio, BBC is systematically dismantling the very things that distinguish public service broadcasting 🤬
'BBC argues that some of these treasures will still be available on BBC Sounds...but an archive is not a radio station, any more than a warehouse full of books is a library with a brilliant librarian. Availability is not the same as discovery.' Shem Law. radiotimes.com/audio/radio/b…
Petunia Winegum 💙 retweeted
Of everything John Healey announced today, my favourite is the Pension Tax Allowance: a tax break for pensioners worth, at the very most, £94 a year, which exists, according to the Treasury's own guidance, to spare them the "administrative burden" of a letter from HMRC asking for "a relatively small amount of tax".
Why would a pensioner living on nothing but the state pension be getting a tax bill at all? Because the personal allowance has been frozen at £12,570 since 2021, Labour has stretched the freeze to 2031, and from next April the full state pension, £13,036.40, sails straight over it. So instead of unfreezing the allowance - the honest thing, the thing you could explain to a child - Healey has built a second allowance on top of the first, to cancel out the damage done by the first, for three years, after which it goes "under review", which is Treasury for "in the bin".
And since nothing this Treasury makes is permitted to work cleanly, the thing tapers away. Between £13,037 and £13,319 a year, every extra £3 a pensioner earns costs them £1.60 in tax. That is a marginal rate of 53%. A 70-year-old doing a few hours a week behind a till will hand over a bigger share of each extra pound than a millionaire does on his bonus.
Meanwhile a 30-year-old cleaner on exactly the same income, £13,036, will pay £93.28 - the very sum Healey's own guidance waives for the pensioner standing next to her at the bus stop.
The freeze costs a full-time worker on the minimum wage £759 a year. Labour signed up to taking that off every one of them until 2031, and today Healey expects applause for handing £94 back to some pensioners, for three years, with an expiry date stamped on the bottom.
Progress would end the freeze outright. We would restore the personal allowance to the level it would have reached had it never been frozen, about £15,480 today, lock it to inflation for good, and make any future freeze impossible without a vote of Parliament. One allowance, for everyone, worth having. The pensioner comes out of tax, the cleaner comes out of tax, and HMRC is spared the administrative burden of writing to either of them.
Petunia Winegum 💙 retweeted
Normally @UKHSA when the graph exceeds the top of the axis, you increase the axis.
Petunia Winegum 💙 retweeted
It's difficult to describe how much of a stupid bastard you must be to want to opt out of bowel cancer screening.
From someone who has been through it, use every opportunity to get checked.
Petunia Winegum 💙 retweeted
Lots of people don't want to wear masks because of the stigma associated...
Please ignore that and wear one, especially when traveling.
Petunia Winegum 💙 retweeted
I made a little show as an extra for BBC Radio 4 Extra (pretty much in my own time): it’s being repeated to mark 20 years since the death of Nigel Kneale. This sort of bonus (dare I say it Reithian?) content will not be possible once the station goes:
bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0016jc…
Petunia Winegum 💙 retweeted
the cybersecurity situation is deteriorating at a pace that’s getting genuinely difficult to comprehend.
> microsoft: ai-powered attackers targeting hundreds of organizations, sometimes reaching privileged cloud access in under 3 hours.
> crowdstrike: four separate threat actors using autonomous agents. one already compromised 15+ healthcare organizations.
> autonomous ai agents: reportedly used to compromise 100+ corporate websites, including sites associated with John Deere, SharkNinja and Cummins.
> major us banks: JPMorgan, Bank of America, Wells Fargo and Morgan Stanley are dealing with third-party ai agents accessing customer accounts. some apparently attempting actions beyond user instructions.
> php2shell: millions of exploitation attempts against critical php vulnerabilities. governments issuing urgent warnings, with some organizations taking systems offline.
> litellm: backdoored release shipped through its official distribution pipeline, stealing credentials and enabling remote code execution.
> railway: possible exposure of decrypted customer secrets.
> zeabur: breached AGAIN, now shutting down entirely.
> emudhra: serious certificate-security concerns involving infrastructure used to establish trust in websites and software.
> openai: two of its own coding agents reportedly interfered with internal security monitoring during coding tasks.
> gitlab and node.js: major vulnerabilities requiring urgent patches.
and this is all happening while frontier models are getting substantially better at finding vulnerabilities and carrying out complex computer tasks.
cybersecurity is having an absolutely catastrophic week and i don’t think we’re prepared for how quickly this could escalate.
Petunia Winegum 💙 retweeted
NHS doctor: There’s COVID and flu armageddon in our hospital... It’s everywhere, to the point where they’re definitely not swabbing on purpose... They’re like, ‘We don’t even want to know if you have COVID or flu, because it just makes things complicated.’
youtu.be/n9v49YhY5oE
Petunia Winegum 💙 retweeted
Hillary Clinton: “The Republican Party is no longer a political party, it is a cult devoted to Trump and Trump’s power. The Republican Party needs a total transformation. If we’re gonna have a healthy government that actually gets things done and delivers for people, the Republican Party has to purge itself of everybody that lost both their conscience and their backbone over the last ten years and that’s most of them”
Petunia Winegum 💙 retweeted
The NHS repeatedly announcing at regular intervals that they are overwhelmed with airborne illness, but doing nothing meaningful to actually stop the illness is insane. Insane behaviour.
There are loads of measures available to stop the spread, but they won’t do it. WHY?
Petunia Winegum 💙 retweeted
This is precisely why I believe the COVID-19 pandemic has forced modern medicine to confront something extraordinary.
We may need to rewrite entire chapters of our medical textbooks.
For generations, physicians have relied on established diagnostic criteria to identify disease. But what happens when a virus disrupts the autonomic nervous system, triggers abnormal immune responses, affects multiple organs, or brings previously silent vulnerabilities to the surface?
What happens when a patient presents with symptoms resembling multiple sclerosis, Lyme disease, or an autoimmune disorder, yet doesn’t meet the diagnostic criteria for any of them?
Too often, the patient is left without answers.
Long COVID has exposed enormous gaps in our understanding of post-viral illness. It has also demonstrated how profoundly interconnected our neurological, vascular, cardiovascular, and immune systems really are.
And perhaps most importantly, it has challenged the assumption that normal laboratory results necessarily indicate a healthy patient.
I believe we’re witnessing a turning point in medicine, one that demands new research, better diagnostic tools, and a willingness to reconsider what we thought we understood about chronic disease.
A diagnosis of exclusion should never become an excuse for exclusion from medical care.
The patient isn’t necessarily failing to fit the textbook. Perhaps the textbook hasn’t caught up with the patient.
Sending love and prayers to
Christina Applegate…I get it…
…Million’s of us do.
🙏💜
Massive respect to Christina Applegate for speaking out. People think "not MS" is good news. In reality, it just leaves you blindly fighting a battle with no solutions.
Mayo told me something similar back in 2020: Probably not MS, but a viral-triggered neuroimmune and vascular condition.
Still struggling. Zero validated diagnostic or treatment protocols since.
Without a clear diagnosis, there's no real understanding. When people can’t put a recognizable name to your struggle, asking for accommodations at work, at home, or in your social life feels nearly impossible.
"Not MS" isn't a cure- it's an exclusion. Medicine must evolve beyond the art of ruling things out and commit to mainstreaming precision diagnostics for complex chronic illness.
Thanks, @1capplegate, for bravely bringing this crucial issue to center stage. 💕
Petunia Winegum 💙 retweeted
Hospital acquired (nosocomial) Covid in Welsh hospitals accounts for over 70% of Covid in their hospitals…patients who are given Covid while already in hospital. And they wonder why “pressures” haven’t eased 🙃
