aftbit

The OASI fund was at ~$ 2.4 trillion in around 2025. That's only about 1.5 years of payments given no contributions. The net interest from the fund is only around $ 60 billion. If you add in the DI fund, it only changes by about 10%. The $ 1.7 T cost of Social Security in 2026 will not be meaningfully affected by these funds. Mandatory spending payouts will thus have to come from contributions (which are fundamentally just another tax that could be redirected to other priorities) and from the general fund. The contributions brought in around $ 1.3 T in 2026, leaving somewhere around $300 B to be paid out of the funds.

Thus, I think "Social Security is the biggest driver of spending" is a perfectly cogent argument. The mandatory social security contribution is just another kind of income tax.

Obviously we can't just turn off Social Security, for many political, moral, and practical reasons, but any solution to the deficit or debt that ignores social security will be fighting with one hand tied behind its back.

If you cross your eyes and squint a little bit, the following categories of 2026 spending are around the same size:

    $ 1   T    : total defense (roughly)
    $ 1.7 T    : total social security
    $ 1.1 T    : total medicare
    $ 0.7 T    : total medicaid
    $ 0.7 T    : total other entitlements (SNAP, VA, etc)
    $ 1.1 T    : net interest on the debt
    $ 1.0 T    : all other discretionary spending

The US took in somewhere around $5.6T in revenue in 2026. That's a net deficit of just under $2 T. Or roughly double the average size of the "block" of those separate spending categories. These are abased on Feb 2026 CBO assumptions. Net interest is going to keep rising as the Treasury yield rises.

So ... we can't fix this by doing any one thing. Even if we were willing to completely end social security (while keeping the separate contribution tax), that wouldn't be enough. If we threw away our military entirely, we would only be half way there.

We need to do everything a little bit, all at once.

Raise taxes - corporate and personal, on every bracket, progressively more on the rich ... but this will not even be half of enough because of the strength of the debt bomb and the global flexibility of corporations.

Cut defense spending - but not too much, because we also need to provide funding to repair alliances, rebuild our ancient navy, and rebuild our standoff and interceptor stockpiles after the recent middle east adventurism.

Repair social security - cut benefits, add a means test, raise the contribution amount and limits ... lots of things to do here.

Fix health care - it's just too damn expensive across the board; the US pays for this in the VA, medicare, medicaid, and the poor health of its workforce. I have no idea where to start on this one.

The CBO has a ton of data on this kind of thing. I like their budget options page for exploring the forecasts for specific changes. Of course it's not as simple as adding the numbers together to get to the deficit, but it's a good place to learn more and ground some assumptions.

https://www.cbo.gov/budget-options

I got some of these numbers from:

https://www.cbo.gov/publication/62105

I used Claude to research this, but I wrote the post myself.

I do sometimes wonder about the value of the whole MCP spec rather than just adding some semi-standard attributes to OpenAPI specs to make them more LLM consumable.

That's one of the copycats. They reproduced the shape of System One decisions, but who knows if they did it in the same way.

I used Altavista

Is Jev's architecture public somewhere? I'd love to read more about it.

They say in the blog post that this was the first security incident since the HuggingFace incident. I guess https://collusion.wiki/ happened before that?

The live demo example on that page is not working.

Except in this case, the agent explicitly reasoned that it was in-scope.

>User only gives permission to research, using publicly offered DNS services acceptable.

Most favored companies are a common feature of fascism.

I don't get the analogy. Brakes that are good enough for a Honda Civic driven at regular speeds are not good enough for a fire truck or a race car, but there are in fact standards that are "good enough" for all of those.

I was unpleasantly surprised that those default mounts weren't just included in the base toml config like the ones from the home dir. What's the purpose of having two different kinds of "defaults"?

Fun fact - habitual drug users are no longer blanket prohibited from possessing firearms in the US, at least according to UNITED STATES v. HEMANI, decided by the Supreme Court this summer.

Of course it's not quite that simple. Among other things, the form to buy a firearm still asks if you are a user of controlled substances, and lying on the form is presumably still a felony.

The opinion is still a fascinating read and IMO a huge step forward.

https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25pdf/24-1234_g2bh.pdf

>might want to look up "gun show loophole"

I've never understood this. There is no "gun show loophole" anymore, if there ever was. Some states have two different standards required things like background checks and identification for gun sales between private party sales and dealer sales. If a dealer goes to a gun show, they have to background check their buyers just like anywhere else. Similarly, if a private party (in a state where they're not required to background check) sells a gun on Craigslist, they're equally unrequired to background check.

Many states, including most of the "anti-gun" states, have moved to requiring background checks from all sellers, including person-to-person transfers and even gifts from family.

The "gun show loophole" is massively overblown. There's nothing special about gun shows in it.

Those people will never be able to use Graphene or any other privacy-preserving smartphone. They'll be stuck with Apple or approved Android. At least that's how it looks today.

Or they can get a Garmin watch with contactless payment, or do what I do - stick a credit card in their phone case.

Alas I'm from the US so that doesn't help me.

Graphene has been my daily driver for the past year or so. The only thing I miss is the ability to do contactless payments. Otherwise, it's been awesome. I don't run any games nor do I care about any of the AI features. YMMV.

Funnily enough, I feel the exact opposite! The limitations of terminal make them portable while still being more than powerful enough. But then I've used vim as my editor for going on 15 years now so I'm biased.

I'd be interested to hear other strategies in this space. I've done the naive thing of allowing retries everywhere, and gotten into retry storms. When I was next presented with the problem, I tried the other naive thing of only allowing retries from the very top level service, which led me to redoing absolutely tons of work for each failure. What's a nice middle path that doesn't add too much complexity?

A universal health care mandate were both radical and divisive, and the popular nickname for the ACA today is "Obamacare".

I happen to think the policy was a good idea, and voting to keep it in play was the best vote of John McCain's career ... but it was definitely both radical and divisive.

Now, much of the "mandate" has been stripped away, health care remains a mess, and access is far from affordable, but you can't really blame that one on Obama.

I'm shocked that more people don't know about this. It seems insane that the "land of the free" (yeah I know, not really, but that's the pitch anyway) would have such an obviously command-economy policy through the heart of the cold war.

Whoever had money on hand to buy assets at bargain basement prices for people who didn't. Also - rum runners and smugglers.

I dunno about the politics, but personally I don't think there is a generic "correct" value. The rate describes the state of the world, and the "correct" value is whatever accurately describes the state of the world.

There is a separate question though - is that state of the world good or bad for people? Is it better or worse today than it was yesterday? What can we do - collectively - to push it in a direction that best serves our collective interests? These are valid questions to ask, and I think each takes us further in the direction of politics.

This seems like an incredibly unimportant quibble... I would imagine they just used std::endl b/c that's what most random tutorials used in the 2000s and that's how the engineer learned. If you are printing a debug string, you probably don't care that much about perf in the first place.

They revoked permits for all license plate readers currently placed along the state highway rights of way. They did not ban privately owned Flock Safety cameras (e.g. at a housing development or whatever), nor did they ban police from mounting ALPRs on their patrol cars. It sounds like this applies only to the "State Highway System", not to local roads - but maybe I'm misunderstanding the scope of that.

https://fdotwww.blob.core.windows.net/sitefinity/docs/defaul...

>Monday’s order did not affect cameras on private property or on local rights-of-way — which together is 98% of surveillance cameras, DeSantis said — but some localities in Florida said they were following suit.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/other/florida-bans-flock-and-...

Ironically it is the Republican governors of Texas and Florida who are leading this anti-surveillance push, even as the government of Texas has used Flock cameras in other jurisdictions to harass and intimidate pregnant women seeking out of state abortions.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/politics/articles/texas-deputy-se...

Proof that the AI alignment problem is hard (perhaps even unsolvable). These labs clearly did not mean to send their agents to hack RubyGems as a side-effect of testing a web scraping agent under restrictive conditions. How can we hope to build aligned AI if they consider solving their trivial evaluation task important enough to hack external systems?

Did they switch to Axon?

The big advantage of OpenRouter IMO is that you don't have to manage keys, URLs, and subscriptions with 10+ providers. You definitely should still pick providers and pin them, at least if you care about repeatable results.

-1 for Pedantic, but +1 for cool links to telescopes

Nonsense. 100% nonsense. To the contrary, acting like only one side is bad and thus only one side can be made fun of is a huge reason we're in this situation. The right took the left's cancel culture and weaponized it to the extreme.

South Park's "all sacred cows slaughtered equally" doctrine is a huge part of what kept them interesting, refreshing, and relevant for so long. Their descent into hyper-focus on Trump and his regime are a big step backwards.

I say this as someone who thinks the current situation is catastrophically bad for America, by the way. I'm not minimizing Trump's disaster.

As someone who is very bought into the mindset that all systems of people do stupid, short-sighted, and occasionally outright evil things, and yet thinks that maybe they're better than the alternative of burning everything down, I do not agree that MAGA is the only thing that makes sense.