Posts — Page 285

I was working through ESSB 6346 (WA's 9.9% tax on income over $1M, starting 2028) and I think I found a strange edge case. Please check my reading. WA already has a capital gains tax: 0% on the first ~$278k of long-term gains, 7% above that, 9.9% over $1M of gains. The new income tax is 9.9% on income over $1M (federal AGI, with tweaks). To avoid double taxing gains, the bill first removes all long-term gains from your income, then adds back the WA-taxed gain plus the $278k deduction. See section 302(3) here: https://lawfilesext.leg.wa.gov/biennium/2025-26/Htm/Bills/Session%20Laws/Senate/6346-S.SL.htm Here is the problem I see. The bill says the add-back "applies only to taxpayers owing tax under chapter 82.87 RCW" (the capital gains tax). So: Gain under ~$278k: you owe no capital gains tax, nothing gets added back, so the gain never touches the income tax. Gain even $1 over: you owe capital gains tax, so the *whole* gain gets added back, including the first $278k that was previously free. Example (single filer, $1.2M wages, 2025 deduction figure): Scenario 1 Long-term gain: $277,000 Capital gains tax: $0 Income tax base: $1,200,000 Total WA tax: $19,800 Scenario 2 Long-term gain: $279,000 Capital gains tax: $70 Income tax base: $1,479,000 Total WA tax: $47,421 A $2,000 bigger gain costs about $27,600 more in tax, because 9.9% x $279,000 of extra income suddenly counts. It only affects people whose other income is already over $1M. Caveats: I'm not a tax pro, this ignores the other credits in the bill, and the tax faces a repeal vote in Nov 2026. I found this while building the rules into a planning calculator, and I checked the wording against the session law text rather than a summary. Does this match how you read Sec. 302(3)?

Hi there! I am a returning student. My partner works nights so it's been hard to find a good spot to study that has both a power oulet and available table space, especially at the library. I've been hopping around different libraries but I just haven't found much. I can only sit in a cushy sofa seat with no comfortable way to write for so long! I was wondering if folks had recommendations for cafes or businesses that are good for hanging out and studying in. I've debated skipping down to Green River but I'm not a student there. My college is a half hour drive away (it was the best place to get the program I wanted) so it's just been nightmare-ish trying to get there with gas prices and cringes I-5 traffic.

Video was taken on Oct 12nd, 2023, in UW campus. Maybe there will be another protest since three years anniversary is approaching.

I'd heard about this shop and wanted to check it out with my kids today. Huge success. In addition to a decent selection of official LEGO kits, the shop has tons of custom build kits that you can buy and build at the shop it at home. The pictures above are a huge, custom pirate diorama that the owner is working on. Apparently the shop is moving upstairs to a larger space in a couple weeks (next to Din Tai Fung). The shop keeper said they'd have more room for a build/freestyle area. I'm excited to check it out.

This is my second week in Washington State. I'm staying in Bellevue, and I am absolutely in love with WA! The people here are amazing, everything is so quiet at night (which is totally my vibe), and I really like how safe the transit is compared to LA. Yesterday, night I was using public transit to head to the Redmond suburbs. The app told me to take the B Line and transfer to the 250 bus. Shortly after boarding the 250, I suddenly realized I had left my phone on the B Line. I panicked, but I went up and talked to the driver, a polite young man. I explained what happened, and he immediately called the transit center. Just three minutes later, he told me they had reached the B Line driver and found my phone! He instructed me to head to the Downtown Redmond station, where a transit supervisor in a metro car would hand it back to me. Getting my phone back brought me back to life. Thank you to all the wonderful people in Washington, and a huge thank you to Metro Transit!

Hi everyone! I’m joining Amazon as an SDE in Bellevue and I’m looking for a room or roommate starting around November . If anyone is also joining Amazon around the same time and is looking for housing or wants to share an apartment, please feel free to DM me. I’m open to Bellevue or nearby areas and am flexible with apartment/room options. Thanks!

A private Bellevue club runs a junior tennis program that sells mislabeled classes, refills itself with beginners, and routes every complaint back to the staff it concerns. Coaches earn their income from adult member teams, so member grievances outrank children's welfare. The program trains 0–1% of the competitive juniors its top tier claims to serve. One case shows what the structure permits: adults carried a political dispute into the program and aimed it at a child, and no one inside the club stopped them. The Staff Stephanie Koetje: Junior Tennis Director. RSPA Elite Professional. Elected RSPA Pacific Northwest representative for Northwest Washington. Brian Nash: Tennis Director. RSPA Elite Professional. RSPA Pacific Northwest Division 2023 Professional of the Year. Supervises the tennis department. Scott Petersen: Teaching pro. Coaches adult USTA teams at the club. Zuzana Brogdon: Tennis office administrator. The Business Model Mislabeled classes. The Gold tier is marketed as intermediate to advanced and varsity caliber. Players in the Gold tier perform at an advanced beginner level. When parents question progress, Koetje gives warm and convincing talks and moves their kids up a tier. The instruction does not change. By the time a family moves up, the parents are already visiting other tennis centers. Labels as marketing. The club keeps the tier labels to market a holistic program. The labels signal progress where no progress exists. The program's club tennis team fields advanced beginner middle schoolers rather than juniors who compete for local high schools and in tournaments. Premium rates. The program charges premium rates to advanced beginners in classes labeled Gold and Silver. The program cannot give the Gold and Silver tiers away to the competitive juniors who actually meet the published class descriptions. Market Share: 0–1% of the Program's Own Target Market Over 100 tournament and varsity level juniors play across local high schools and USTA circuits. The program trains 0–1 of them, a 0–1% share of its own target market. Enrollment is open to non-members, so access is not the reason. 25 of those competitive juniors hold memberships at the same club. Some place at the state high school tournament. They train at other facilities and practice with each other in hitting groups on the club's own courts, bypassing the club's program entirely. The club's most advanced junior group left the club entirely in 2025. Beginner backfill. Program revenue does not depend on competitive players. Beginners ages 5 to 7 keep enrollment totals steady, and their parents cannot yet judge instruction. Informed families leave around ages 12 to 13 and never return. Enrollment totals look healthy because new beginners keep replacing the families able to see the gap between labels and coaching. Threatened departures outrank real ones. The coaches act on adult members who threaten to leave and never do. The same coaches cannot account for the junior families who leave the program every year and actually go. The Closed Loop Complaints about the junior program go to the same tennis office whose staff are the subject of the complaints. Nash confirmed that Koetje and the coaching staff would sit in any review of a complaint about their own conduct. No one outside the tennis office reviews how tennis staff treat children. Accounts about families leave the tennis office, circulate among members, and return to the office as "member concerns." The tennis office then treats its own echo as evidence. Supervision runs backward. Nash once promised a parent his child would be kept safe. Petersen overrode the promise in front of him, and Nash said nothing. One Rule for Coaches, Another for Parents Coaches talk freely about families to other parents. Parents who talk to one another about the junior program get reported. Koetje reported a parent to management for speaking in the lobby with a second parent. The second parent had already withdrawn her daughter and was the one describing the program's problems. Club management answered the written concerns it had requested by offering the reporting parent an exit. Management reviewed no staff. Credentials Without Oversight Two of the four staff hold the RSPA Elite credential, the association's highest designation. Koetje holds the division's elected seat. Nash holds the division's 2023 Professional of the Year award. The RSPA reviewed Koetje's conduct using information supplied by her own employer and stated no reasons. A professional body cannot regulate its own board members and award winners. Parents who read an Elite credential as an assurance are relying on a standard nobody enforces. What the Structure Allowed A club member who informally advised the coaches belonged to a political network that had lost a 2021 school board race and a King County Superior Court case. The member never disclosed that dispute to the coaches. He told them his family felt disrespected by "some Asian households." His wife's USTA team, coached by Petersen, threatened for two years to leave the club unless the coaches acted against an Asian family. None of them ever left. The coaches acted anyway, against the family's daughter. Petersen announced a staff wide refusal to coach a child he had never coached. Koetje kept the child off a program trip the family never signed up for and told other parents in her class. Koetje also told parents the child's mother was not really a piano teacher. Brogdon held no role in the trip and had no child in the program. Brogdon booked herself and her mother on the program trip at the group travel discount for a personal vacation, while working to exclude a child whose family never signed up. Koetje and Nash heard the "Asian households" statement and corrected nothing. No staff member ever cited anything the child did. Every mechanism above made the targeting possible: the closed loop kept it unreviewed, the double standard silenced the parent, and the credentials gave it cover. Why Parents Should Know Families who run into the junior program's mechanism leave quietly, so the next family enrolls with no warning. A junior program built on high churn, beginner backfill, closed loop complaint handling, inverted enforcement incentives that protects coaches rather than kids, aims the same tools at the next family.

I am just one of the 144,000 disabled vets with treatment resistant schizophrenia in the US asking on behalf of WA state veterans everywhere: Is this because they were purged by Musk and DOGE? Why wouldn’t the VA have folks trained in EMDR when they are well aware of how efficacious it is for trauma? Along with stellate ganglion block treatments? Meanwhile the VA Secretary continues to incessantly blow smoke up everyone’s ass with these circle jerky emails telling everyone how fast and quick and efficient the VA is now. Faster doesn’t mean better. Women in my MST group have told me there is medical gaslighting taking place within VA. After experiencing my own series of unfortunate events with the VA, i’ve decided there may be some truth there not just paranoid suspicion. My shows weren’t being logged, her no show wasn’t logged, she kept interrupting me whenever we did talk just constantly telling me to slow down i can’t i just can’t man i have a lifetime of bullshit man She broke trust I requested a new therapist She responded acting like she didn’t even know who i was and that i was a new patient So when you ask veterans why they harbor distrust for the government, especially the VA? Now you know why. Because of this, there is only one other option: go back to medicaid. No therapist available or accepting my medicaid. I now live in a more rural part of the state and now 2 hours+ from Seattle. I still drive to everett or mt vernon or even all the way to Seattle often bc there aren’t any psychs paneled with VA who are scoped for my condition in my area or they don’t have any openings. Thanks to my advocating for myself to state reps i barely barely avoided homelessness just before last christmas we were foood banking it about to lose our apt By my own advocacy and persistence i just refused to give up and allow my family to become homeless so i begged murray and cantwell and i begged They monitored my case they said that was all they could do but they followed up and their aides did check in with me ppl need to know we are still not receiving proper care please don’t just blindly believe some surveys or emails sent by Doug Collins. When you see us in the streets of seattle please leave us be we mean you no harm Do not let high profile media bs make you afraid Most of us milvets with sz just want to feel safe thats all anyone wants They always say go to the VA Go to the VA Everyone always says just go to the VA And now you know why we laugh at you The VA is not safe

I know there's been discussion of the Haunted Soiree/House of Spirits Halloween season event here in the past, so I figured I'd pass this on. The attraction has been reduced to a skeleton crew this year, both in its original location in Los Angeles and at the Rainier DAR Chapterhouse here in Seattle. They don't directly mention this in the ads or on the website (although they do note that the $80 "SilverMeister" tier only gets one complimentary drink instead of the multiple drinks of previous years), and they're still charging quite a bit for tickets to the two-hour event. I freely admit that I don't have a lot of specific information about the changes, so make your own decision about whether to get tickets. If you go for the purpose of roleplaying as your costumes with the costumed actors, as some guests do, it might still be worthwhile, but most of the burlesque/aerial/contortion/other specialty performers were not called back this year because of how "scaled back" the production is. To a certain extent I suppose this might be a blessing because in previous productions, they packed the old venue far beyond its fire safety capacity. Obligatory credentials: I worked with them in previous years and have received haphazard information from Casting and other former cast and crew this year. I don't really care to go into the details of my opinions on the matter, but I did think it was worth giving the community a heads up about the changes considering how unclear the ticket sale website is about it.

My best friend and I wanted to go out tonight, get dressed up, grab some drinks, maybe find somewhere fun with good music and a nice crowd… and why does it feel like our options are SO limited? For such a big city, I feel like Seattle gets so dead at night, especially when you just want a fun girls night without going to the exact same places every time. Where do people actually go out around here? I need recommendations because there’s no way this is all Seattle has to offer lol