I like them both a lot but the original is a classic I keep going back to. Maybe I’m just the right age for it.

I wanted to downvote your stupid ass but op asked for unpopular opinions. So fuck you here’s an upvote.

Don’t be silly. I’m sure the U.S. military has drawn up several contingency plans to massacre climate migrants.

My wife and I loved that.

I’m not trying to tell you “keep at it, it gets better”, because it doesn’t. It starts out awesome and stays that way, in my opinion.

But if you had watched more you’d see Mariner’s persona is a front. She might be the most Starfleet motherfucker in the show.

That’s a tautological statement. We define words like sentient and sapient in terms of what we are.

Saying “this lifeform that we can’t communicate with in any meaningful way (for these purposes) has emotional or cognitive experiences that we would recognize as meeting those definitions” isn’t falsifiable and therefore isn’t science.

If at some point someone invents a human to mollusk translator so we can discuss our experiences, this topic can be revisited.

Until then words like “may” and “possible” should be used.

I searched for it and didn’t see it but one of the top results is “Boycott - Israeli Products”

Have you not been paying attention to what the Fed has been doing? Pardon my language but shoving cash up my asshole earns more than 1% these days.

In 2022, before most of the rate hikes, the trust fund earned $66.4 billion. This year’s high, and hopefully very temporary, interest rates aside, it’ll usually be around 2.5-3%.

I’m not sure what you think loss leading means or why you’re using it here, but governments storing reserve money earmarked for a specific purpose in their own bonds isn’t unusual or a bad thing. Should they stuff it under a mattress earning 0%? Should they risk it in the markets? Unsecured domestic bonds? Foreign bonds?

I was trying to keep it short and simple by skipping a step but yes, the SSA follows a formula to raise the cap. But anything the executive does must be authorized by Congress, including the current formula which was set in a reauthorization bill back in the 80s (I think, maybe the 70s, apologies, but I’m not able to look it up right now). So far, every time a budget is passed and every few years when the SSA needs to be reauthorized, they’ve left them alone. Despite the occasional bill messing with the SSA getting introduced, they never get out of committee.

As far as the CBO goes I don’t recall ever reading about cap increases in their report summaries on the trust fund. Although I have read their reports on the effect of various proposed changes to the way the cap is calculated. I’ll have to do some more looking when I have the time, but I was definitely under the impression cap increases were in a category the CBO didn’t anticipate future changes to when evaluating the health of the trust fund. I thought normally the COLAs would also fall into this category but that is overridden by them being mandatory spending, as opposed to discretionary, so they have to be taken into account. I’m certainly no expert and wouldn’t be surprised to find out I missed something.

That exact comment would be at home in a letter to the editor in response to an article in any newspaper, in any year, for the past 80 years. And on any discussion board from the earliest days of the internet until now.

I’m not going to make any assumptions about your age or the length of time you’ve paid attention to these issues, but if it’s only been a decade or so, you should start seeing the pattern soon. It won’t even be at the last minute, it’ll just keep slowly moving out so it’s always 10-15 years away. Don’t let them scare you into helping them do what they’ve been trying for 88 years.

This program has kept a lot of elderly and disabled people out of poverty. Don’t let them take it.

They’ve been saying that my entire life, my dad’s entire life, and when my dad was my age, my grandfather would tell him he’s heard the same things his entire life going back to the 40s.

For a couple decades the disingenuous doom -and-gloomers told us no way could social security ever deal with the baby boomers. All through the 80s and 90s they told us we might as well privatize it or kill it all together. The only time wall street shut up about it was when they were too busy jerking off to the thought of getting their hands on that money. Well, the youngest of the boomers turn 60 in '24, they’re almost all in and the end times keep getting pushed back, from the 80s to the 90s to the 00s to the 10s to the 20s and now 2035. It’s like a doomsday cult that keeps pushing the date when the apocalypse doesn’t arrive at the appointed time.

You’ll have to excuse me for not getting worked up over the 40th new year I’ve heard for the sky falling.

And for what it’s worth, managing the COLAs, the cap, the percentages, and anything else the SSA has done throughout it’s existence isn’t “tomfoolery,” it’s accounting. And damn good accounting so far. The SSA being such a well run government institution probably makes republicans hate them almost as much as the tax itself.

Reposting from another thread:

Social security has been 10-15 years away from being insolvent for 80 years. It will always be 10-15 years away from being insolvent because of the way it’s calculated.

When the CBO or whoever scores it they can predict certain things like the number of recipients, the size of their payments, and inflation. They aren’t allowed to take into account things that Congress may (but definitely will) do in the future, like raising the cap on social security taxes roughly with inflation. It went up from $160200 in 2023 to $168600 in 2024. This is a rare bipartisan, uncontroversial thing. Congress almost always follows the SSA recommendation exactly.

It would be more accurate to say “if the social security cap stays at $168600 for 10 years, social security will be insolvent.”

The people pushing this bullshit know it’s bullshit. They do it to make people think they’ll never get social security so they can get enough voters on board with killing it, like they’ve been trying to do for 88 years.

Don’t fall for it.

Social security has been 10-15 years away from being insolvent for 80 years. It will always be 10-15 years away from being insolvent because of the way it’s calculated.

When the CBO or whoever scores it they can predict certain things like the number of recipients, the size of their payments, and inflation. They aren’t allowed to take into account things that Congress may (but definitely will) do in the future, like raising the cap on social security taxes roughly with inflation. It went up from $160200 in 2023 to $168600 in 2024. This is a rare bipartisan, uncontroversial thing. Congress almost always follows the SSA recommendation exactly.

It would be more accurate to say “if the social security cap stays at $168600 for 10 years, social security will be insolvent.”

The people pushing this bullshit know it’s bullshit. They do it to make people think they’ll never get social security so they can get enough voters on board with killing it, like they’ve been trying to do for 88 years.

Don’t fall for it.

Google says (I know) total wealth in the US is 135T.

2% of the total (almost half of millennial’s 4.6% share) would be 2.7T.

2% of millennial’s 4.6% would be 124.2B. (Google says he has 111.6B)

Unless you think the robot has 2.7T, it’s 2% of millennial’s wealth, not 2% of the total.

Still fucking insane of course.

Reference your questions about relative percentages of the population etc., I had a whole big ass post with references but I lost it. I’m not doing all that again so I’ll just give the main takeaways from memory and the history in my calculator so unfortunately my source is trust me bro.

Two caveats: I’m using median ages of the cohorts, average could charge things (edit: see correction at end). Percentages are of total population including children (who generally have no wealth), not working age plus retired population.

In 1990 the median boomer was 35, they represented 30.6% of the population and had 21.5% of the wealth.

In 2022 the median millennial was 33.5, they represented 21.7% of the population and had 5.6% of the wealth.

So boomers had 1.4x the share of the population but 3.8x the share of the wealth.

Boomers in 1990 did have 1.5 more years to earn, save, and grow their wealth than millennials in 2022(maybe more or less if you use average age), but I don’t see how that alone makes the difference. For whatever combination of reasons, boomers had a much larger share of the wealth, relative to their population share, in their mid thirties than millennials do.

Correction: 35 and 33.5 aren’t median ages, that’s just the age of the middle of the cohort. The point about using average (or even the real median) age for an apples-to-apples comparison stands, I just misused the word median.

Damn you for reminding me about him. I'm going to be mad for like an hour now.