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Sara MacKian

@saramackian.bsky.social

Artist, writer, lecturer with a curiosity for how people interact around issues of health, wellbeing, and the otherworldly. All views my own.

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Reposted by Sara MacKian

Emma Monk

@monkemma.bsky.social

We all know what the headlines would be-and rightly so!

And you wonder why people are so aware of crimes committed by asylum seekers or black or brown people?

Because the headlines scream it from the rooftops

Yet this white guy barely gets a mention and it’s given an “he’s a science nerd” spin
8/

October 29, 2025 at 1:06 PM

Reposted by Sara MacKian

Emma Monk

@monkemma.bsky.social

If he was an Arab with a device labelled “throw at swarm of Jews”

An Arab with a stash of ammunition, white Phosphorus, radioactive materials and suspected improvised explosive devices?

If all other factors had remained the same?

Would him being a “nerd” be the focus of the headline?

7/9

October 29, 2025 at 1:06 PM

Reposted by Sara MacKian

Josiah Mortimer

@josiahmortimer.bsky.social

Lib Dem leader Davey: “The Government needs to block any future contracts with Tesla, and block Musk from being granted a license to supply energy to British homes

“Ministers should make clear that if you are egging on violence on the streets of the UK, you are not someone we can do business with.”

September 15, 2025 at 1:34 PM

Reposted by Sara MacKian

Scott Santens

@scottsantens.com

Universal Basic Income recognizes the social determinants of health like stress. What we treat in hospitals is largely the result of people having insufficient incomes or too much financial insecurity. This is how the Dauphin pilot reduced hospitalization rates by 8.5%.

www.cmaj.ca/content/190/...

A 2011 analysis of a guaranteed annual income experiment conducted in Canada in the 1970s found several public health benefits. The experiment was conducted at several locations in Manitoba from 1974 to 1979. There were fewer hospitalizations among the 900 families in the experiment, especially for mental health problems and injuries from accidents, than in a comparison group of 467 families matched by age, gender, geography and family size. One theory suggested to explain this finding is that workers receiving a basic income were less likely to suffer from stress related to financial worries and, therefore, also less likely to compromise personal safety in the work environment for income.

The authors suggested that guaranteed incomes, if implemented broadly in society, would likely improve health and social outcomes at the community level. “At the very least, the suggestive finding that hospitalization rates among Dauphin subjects fell by 8.5% relative to the comparison group is worth examining more closely in an era characterized by concern about the increasing burden of health care costs,” stated the authors.

December 5, 2024 at 5:42 PM

Reposted by Sara MacKian

Scott Santens

@scottsantens.com

Babies born healthier may be the most transformative of all Universal Basic Income effects. Epigenetics shows that healthier babies will be healthier adults, who will have healthier babies, and low birth weight is correlated to less healthy adults who earn less.

www.science20.com/news/correla...

Among the key findings:

Compared to their normal birth weight siblings, low birth-weight children are 30 percent less likely to be in excellent or very good health in childhood. They also score significantly lower on reading, passage comprehension, and math achievement tests. Low birth-weight children are roughly one-third more likely to drop out of high school relative to other children.

Low birth weight has significant negative effects on adult health, equivalent to being 12 years older in one's 30s and 40s. Weighing less than 5.5 pounds at birth increases the probability of being in fair or poor health as an adult by over 70 percent. Not only does birth weight have large and lasting effects across the life span, the researchers note, but its effects become larger later in life. For example, low birth weight children are nearly twice as likely as their normal birth-weight siblings to be in problematic health by ages 37–52 (23 percent versus 12 percent).

The earnings penalty for being born low weight also increases with age, from 10.2 percent at age 25 to 15.6 percent at age 35. Low birth weight is linked to a 10 percent reduction in hourly wages from ages 18–26, compared to the wages of normal birth-weight siblings, but a 22 percent reduction in wages from ages 37–52. Low birth-weight children, relative to their normal birth-weight siblings, work 7.4 percent fewer hours in adulthood. These effects of poor infant health persist, in sibling comparisons, after accounting for the independent effects of birth order, mother's age at birth, birth year cohort, race/ethnicity, family structure, parental income, and parental fertility timing.

December 5, 2024 at 5:13 PM

Reposted by Sara MacKian

Laurie Dunkin Wedd

@ldw1.bsky.social

We waste ludicrous amounts of time and resource on who should get THIS benefit or THAT benefit. What we should be saying is that *everyone* should has enough to live on.
Which is #UBI.

bsky.app/profile/scot...

Scott Santens @scottsantens.com · Jul 9

New podcast appearance! Recorded yesterday. Max has over 217k subscribers on YouTube. We chatted about universal basic income for about an hour, covering the usual bases, but really digging into explaining universal basic income versus negative income tax.