See I know something of what actually wanting to fix the government's waste fraud and abuse would look like. It would be beefing up the IRS (where every dollar more than pays for itself), it would be banning people in congress from buying individual stocks; it would be a lot of things that deeply nerdy policy wonks have been saying for years.
That's not what I'm seeing happen. I'm not seeing cost benefit analysis, I'm not seeing the use of existing experts.
What I am seeing... well perhaps we'd have different perspectives. To pick an example, look Musk saying that people who are over 200 years old are marked as alive.
If you assume the worst of Elon Musk, you might think he's an idiot who doesn't understand how COBOL represents dates in the SSA system, nor how large government databases deal with missing data.
I've worked, not for the SSA, but with public health data. Real people and historical records and old databases are messy as fuck.
The SSA neither throw out data, nor do they add data they haven't received, except when there is funding appropriated for it.
So these old people are simply actually people they never got death info on.
Could they just add a date? Well you have to consider the data integrity issues around date of death. If you pick a nonsensical date, can you assume that the SSA, department of commerce, and other orgs, not to mention the internal SSA progroms that rely on processing SSA data can handle it? Nope, an engineer can't assume that, there's an implicit API.
But the fact is, this has been looked at. Per this 2023 audit the SSA estimated it would cost 5.5 to 9.7 million to mark people as deceased in the database when they don't have death date information. They didn't do that, probably because no money was appropriated for it.
Does that mean there's massive SSA fraud of dead people? Nope. back in 2015 they decided to automatically stop giving benefits to anyone over 115. The oldest living American is, in fact, Naomi Whitehead, who is 114.
In other word, Musk is acting like saving the government 5.5 million minimum is a "HUGE problem".
Now, I don't think Elon Musk is an idiot who doesn't understand COBOL or how messy data can be from real people. I also don't think he thinks that 200 year old benefits fraud is really an issue.
Which begs the question, why bring this up at all?
My interpretation is perhaps less charitable than yours, but I'd be interested in hearing what you think.
What’s especially frustrating, if you care about governance being more serious than pro wrestling, is that we have a couple organizations in government that’d happily provide all kinds of ways to reduce the deficit: the GAO and the CBO.
But they tend to say reality-based things like “no, your tax cuts won’t pay for themselves, in fact they’ll cost $1.2T over ten years” or “no, this war won’t pay for itself, lol, what the fuck even” or “no, you can’t make meaningful progress on cutting the deficit by attacking benefits fraud, because there’s not very much of that.”
All things Republicans would rather pretend aren’t true, and certainly don’t want to act on. So what do you do when you need to show progress but are constrained by operating based on fiction? You tout tiny wins and hope the numbers seem big to people who don’t know much; you make things up; and you cause harm or even incur long-term costs or cause waste and call that savings by doing bad accounting.
> See I know something of what actually wanting to fix the government's waste fraud and abuse would look like. It would be beefing up the IRS (where every dollar more than pays for itself), it would be banning people in congress from buying individual stocks; it would be a lot of things that deeply nerdy policy wonks have been saying for years.
This is exactly what the dems need. Currently we have two options.
#1 status quo complacency which does things like congressional insider trading, identity politics, is completely ancient, and useless and ineffectual in identifying or implementing any actual changes that would improve people's lives.
#2 is a wing of the party ready to take a wrecking ball to things (bravo), but thinks taxes are the solution to everything.
We need more wrecking ball type options than just #2. We need a diversity of wrecking ball options that are energetic, smart, able to identify the places where the system (both private industry & governmental) isn't functioning properly and have the guts to actually push change through.
That's not exactly true, to pick some examples Bernie quitting the race in 2020 used his connections with biden and got a lot of things into a unity party platform, and I've seen it argued that AOC and the green new deal pushed the overton window for the infrastructure recovery act, and while it definitely wasn't everything they hoped for, it did include elements, including a massive investment in clean energy.
Pelosi is the top grifter. Instead of spending her last years with her kids she stays “employed” in order to keep her and her families crimes under wraps. She will die in office, there will be great fan fair of how amazing she was, followed by countless breaking stories of her and her families corruption of over half a century.
More eligible voters didn't vote for any candidate then for Trump or Harris.
Trump won a slim majority of the people who did choose to vote, but it's hardly an endorsement by a majority of Americans, much less the American people as a whole.
Choosing not to vote is a vote for the status quo. That still is a choice.
There are BS loopholes we need to correct, but people who can't do the bare basics to reserve a morning to fill out a ballot fundamentally have themselves to blame.
Nonsense. If you live in one of the ~40 states where the outcome is a foregone conclusion, who you vote for makes no more difference than it does in Russia. It’s reasonable to protest by refusing to participate in that unfair system, and doing so doesn’t mean you support one candidate or the other.
36% of eligible voters - 90 million people - likely had a similar attitude. The margin of victory was 2.3m votes. What's that phrase? Something about how no single raindrop thinking they're responsible for the flood.
while it's true that there's quite a few non-votes that far outweight the margin of victory, they're all spread out and not in states that held marginal votes. It may actually indeed be the case that their turnout would not affect the results.
However, turnout don't only affect the results, but future results.
Politicians look at votes to determine their future trajectory - those who don't turn out won't be seen at all, and would be treated as if they don't exist. After all, why hadn't the native indians got the vote until legislated, and why slaves too, until some compromise was reached?
So voting, regardless of your effect on outcome, is important. I only wish the vote was easier, as some people need to take time off work to vote, or have to trek far, or make arrangements which would be inconvenient. For example, making postal voting easier to get is a good starting point.
43% of eligible voters in Mississippi didn't vote. 42% in NY and 38% in CA. That's a significant amount of people who could have swung the election either way despite them being "safe" states. Any state can be in play if turnout ever increased significantly. And even if your state voted your way federally, did every local/state race go to what would've been your preferred candidate? I doubt it.
Pretty sure a bunch of statistics that might be used to argue against Republican talking points are going to disappear or not be updated. Maybe they won't even get to be collected. It's a lot easier to lie if you prevent scientists and health care professionals from undercutting you with inconvenient truths.
As someone who has worked in public health and epidemiology, this kind of open ended restriction is extremely concerning.
Also appears to undercut the whole free speech thing that President Trump supposedly supports, and that the constitution provides for in the first amendment.
> Also appears to undercut the whole free speech thing that President Trump supposedly supports
Saying he supports "free speech" and actually doing it are two different things. In reality he supports speech that supports his preferred narrative of reality and opposes speech that doesn't.
Free speech, states rights, government accountability, any serious sense of libertarianism and so on are all with the caveat of “if I like it” as far as the current Republican Party is concerned.
If you've worked as a scientist, why not gather evidence before jumping to conclusions? For example, you could inquire of the administration why they did this. They're actually putting in quite an effort at transparency.
My concerns about the future are based on what President Trump did in 2017 with the NIH budget (attempting to cut it 22%)¹ thus preventing important scientific research funding, as well as removal of covid-19 health statistics from the CDC in 2020² in the middle of a major pandemic.
Unfortunately, given that he is now holding the highest office in the US, it's a well known fact that Donald Trump lies constantly both when in office³ and when campaigning⁴, and I lack all faith in his administration's supposed transparency.
Because for some people, this is not a scientific peer-reviewed discussion, but rather typical conversation normal people have over dinner table with gut feelings and limited information. Just assume that "I believe", "in my opinion", "AFAIK" are implied for statements like above.
That's almost exactly the split they made actually, with things like feats and flight still species based, but statu bonuses and backgrounds (with maybe some small exceptions) not being species based.
They did some work to balance it, but really species have never been the biggest balance issue, it's always been class stuff, or magical vs. martial issues, or the fact that ranger is thematically cool if you like LOTR, but sucks mechanically compared to other classes.
These changes were a part of the 2024 edition of the Player's Handbook (PHB) and Dungeon Master's Guide (DMG), both now published, with more of it to come in other updated books. (Or "5.2E" if you prefer the simple decimal point of the 2024 updated Systems Reference Document [SRD] over "5E (2024)".)
The entire premise of insurance is that people get care for their medical issues. Mental health issues are medical issues; just because they manifest in terms of behavioral and thinking changes doesn't make them any less so.
Mental Health coverage does cover therapy, and therapy of various sorts is effective to treat or ameliorate a number of mental health issues, but it also covers psychiatric medication.
Also mental health coverage covers people's kids and dependents, not just them, your focus on the policy holder is a little narrow, I think.
> Also mental health coverage covers people's kids and dependents, not just them, your focus on the policy holder is a little narrow, I think.
Right, but as people are more and more likely to be single, more and more people are policy holders. This is not a situation where you always have a spouse with insurance or something.
> Mental Health coverage does cover therapy, and therapy of various sorts is effective to treat or ameliorate a number of mental health issues
As I said. mental illness is on the rise. We could treat all these issues and spend for it. Or we could try to trace root causes (I know people are working hard on this). The latter seems the more useful method.
It's pretty well established that greater lead exposure leads to increased risk of cognitive decline.
I'm not saying that's all of it, but it seems like it could be as much of a factor as anything.