It doesn’t even need to be secret or underhanded. The government can simply foster the media that drives their strategic goals. Same kind of idea as stochastic terror.
284 karma · joined December 28, 2025
In U.S. policy terminology, Social Security and Medicare are social insurance programs. Medicaid, SNAP, SSI, and housing assistance are means tested safety net programs.
Yes, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and defense make up a majority of federal spending. But your conclusion only works by relabeling Social Security and Medicare as welfare, dismissing the rest of government as noise, and then assigning an arbitrary share of decades of accumulated interest expense to those programs.
Your last move is especially egregious. Federal debt reflects the cumulative gap between all federal spending and all federal revenue over time. You can't figure out what caused it by looking at today's largest spending categories.
Social Security's current shortfall is primarily the result of a demographic imbalance Congress has known about for decades and repeatedly declined to fully address. That makes it particularly silly to retroactively assign some arbitrary share of the rest of the federal government's accumulated debt to Social Security.
The accurate way to talk about this is that Social Security and the major health programs are a very large share of federal spending. "The social safety net is most of the budget" is a conclusion manufactured by your definitions.
The actual means-tested safety net (Medicaid, food assistance, SSI, housing) is only around 15% to 20% of federal spending.
No, it’s not. The Protestant work ethic is what causes people to come into work when they’re sick, spreading illness to others.
Wrapping an interrogation in a polite "just to clarify" and demanding point estimates and error bounds on a generalization is weaponized pedantry designed to derail the thread into an impossible burden of proof.
The books we were disposing of were so totally inane that I couldn’t tell you what they were, but they weren’t taken out in like 30-40 years. Northeast US state R1 research university. Maybe we got rid of stuff that would come in handy!
Do you think there's no difference between the books curated at Oxford University and the crap that Amazon is buying?
I simply don't see why railing against the AI giants about this without also contributing significant effort into protecting these low-print-run books from getting jettisoned by university libraries makes any sense.
I have volunteered with a library, and probably threw hundreds of books over a couple week engagement from a university library into a shredder at the direction of a professional, academic librarian. Libraries are constantly culling books, the EXACT category books we're talking about here (old, never-read). This is happening at a much larger scale, so I would recommend railing against university librarians in addition to the AI juggernauts.
I doubt “klarna” will have even 1% of the customer service that Apple provided.