US Social Security is fundamentally not an investment plan. Workers who have not yet retired pay a special tax and this is used to pay benefits to those who have retired. Roughly speaking (using handy numbers) workers pay the tax for 44 years (ages 21 to 65) and collect SS benefits for 11 years (ages 65 to 76) and then die, so in principle four active workers support one retired worker. SS benefits are very small, something like a third of what active workers make on average, so more like twelve active workers support each retired worker, so the tax is a very affordable amount.

Much of the confusion over this resulted in the 1980s, when Congress recognized that the changing demographics in the future (like, 50 years later) would mean fewer workers relative to retirees. They chose to prepare for this in advance by raising the SS taxes slightly above what was needed at the time to support retirees and investing the surplus in US Treasury bonds. This Social Security "trust fund" is now being tapped to provide benefits without raising the tax rate -- as well as being used by Republicans to fool people into believing that when the supplemental trust fund is empty, Social Security itself will be "bankrupt". Not true, because even then SS benefits will continue to be paid, either in slightly lower amounts if the tax rate is not increased, or at the same amounts if the tax rate is increased to cover it.

Incidentally, this SS trust fund is a huge part of what allowed President Reagan to rack up enormous debt without destroying (at least immediately) the US economy. Treasury bonds were paying about 2.5% at the time, so the SS trust fund was essentially a source of cheaply-borrowed money to cover the government's general budget.

Something something the Dow of Poo.

The Rocketeer (1991)

As much as I love good animation, nothing can possibly replace 1991 Jennifer Connely.

Also, masturbation becomes just work.

I used to work for Cisco as a programmer, and when I got laid off by them I found out that my mom thought I had been working for Sysco the whole time. She had never understood why I was working for a food services company, although I expect they employ a large number of programmers too.

Did working for Cisco suck? I can't say as I never did a lick of actual work for them. They acquired my original company and then we all sat around for a fucking year doing nothing until they laid most of us off. Weirdly, everybody who got laid off was childless -- the only people from my original company who were kept on had one or more children. I don't know what to make of that.

My only regret is not saying that my work macbook had been stolen. That's what all of my coworkers did and they all ended up with free macbooks.

As someone who has actually physically built houses (i.e. nailing walls together, putting up the siding, hanging and mudding sheetrock, installing doors and windows etc.) this mindset pisses me off more than anything. "Management" does stuff like buying already-built houses, trucking them to our site and placing them on foundations, discovering the houses were built in the 1960s with 2x3s instead of 2x4s and thus needed to be torn down to the floors because they're no longer up to code, necessitating us rebuilding the houses entirely from the floors up, and then discovering the houses were placed two feet too close to the property line so we have to literally chop two feet off of them and rebuild the walls.

True fucking story. And I forgot to mention that the floors were 3/4 rotten so we had to rebuild most of them, too.

My weed dealer a few years ago got all paranoid and made his buyers start contacting him with WhatsApp. "It's encrypted and completely secure!" Lol sure. It's weird that the only other person who has ever made me use it was my realtor.

A reasonable solution has always been the "medicare for all" concept: just lower the eligibility age by a couple of years every year. Going from 65 to 0 would have taken just over thirty years, and if this had been implemented in the '90s when it was first suggested we'd have universal healthcare by now. Hilary Clinton was lauded for pushing for universal healthcare when her husband was president, but apparently she wanted instant universal healthcare and fought the "medicare for all" contingent. I don't think she was as responsible for bad shit as is often made out, but it's pretty clear that she didn't help in this case.

Asking people if they're planning to have kids is like asking an unemployed person if they've found a job yet.

I love it when guests are this comfortable because it means I don't have to tend to them and interact with them 24 hours a day.

"Could you bring me an old sock, please?"

So AI is losing money hand over fist, and the solution is for AI to lose even more money? Thank god our economy is on a sound footing.