It’s common enough that my State’s toll provider has had a banner on their front page about it for months https://www.driveezmd.com/

If you want to file a complaint, the Internet crime control center is asking for information on these scams specifically https://www.ic3.gov/PSA/2024/PSA240412

The Social Security Trust Fund does not exist. It is an accounting fiction. When Social Security was passed, it came with a tax increase to offset the increased spending. For decades, the tax increase was greater than the spending increase, so the government spent the difference on other stuff; but made a note that Social Security had a surplus. However, since 2010, this flipped and the cost of Social Security has exceeded the income of its associated tax. The bean counters would the flip happened in 2021, but that is because they believe in the fiction of the Social Security Trust Fund, so that interest on the Trust Fund counts as income to Social Security, despite the fact that said interest is paid by the federal government.

So, why does this accounting fiction called the Social Security Trust Fund matter? Because it has the force of law. Under current US law, Social Security is exempt from the the typical budgetting rules. As long as the bean counters would say the Trust Fund has a positive balance, Social Security is authorized to increase it’s budget to meet it’s obligations. In contrast, most Federal programs get their budgets increased as part of the yearly budget (or a continuing resolution when Congress can’t pass a budget. Or they just close when Congress can’t pass a CR).

So, what happens when the trust fund runs out?

Option 1, Congress does not authorize continued spending at current levels. This is typically known as a spending cut. But because it is triggered by an existing law and Republicans have spent decades playing up the trust fund, they can act like this cut was a force of nature, and not them actively deciding to cut it in the congressional budget.

Option 2, Congress funds social security just like it funds everything else, through an appropriations bill. SS keeps operating, and becomes another political football in the annual budget fight

Option 3, Congress picks some way to tell the bean counters that the social security trust fund is still positive. Social security keeps operating at current lol levels, and remains exempt from the normal appropriations process.

So, what is all this talk about removing the cap on the Social Security payroll tax? If we ignore all the accounting trickery, that is about taking a regressive income tax payed by workers earning less that $168,600/year and turning it into a flat tax. Nothing whatsoever to do with social security, but I agree that a flat tax is better than a regressive tax. Still not as good as a progressive tax, which is the only thing that would have been politically viable but for the fiction that this tax is at all related to Social Security benefits (and their associated limit).

Social Security isn’t even the only federal program to have this issue. Our highway system is payed for by the Highway Trust Fund, which is funded by a tax on gasoline. This fund has been insolvent since 2008, so Congress just included highway funding in their appropriations bills and payed for the difference like they pay for most Federal programs.

The monthly payout of social security is based on how much you earned while you were working, which is roughly correlated with how much you payed in [0]. However, the monthly payment has a hard cap. No matter how much you earned while working, SS will not pay you more than someone who averaged $168,600/year. Even below that cap, there is a progressive structure, where those with a lower income see a larger marginal benefit.

[0] not exactly, as it only looks at you inflation adjusted best 35 years

CPI does weight items by based on spending patterns (although the details of how to determine this weight are complicated and the main reason there are multiple inflation indecises).

The 2022 CPI has a 0.178% contribution from the price of milk, and a 45.065% contribution from the price of Housing. Housing itself is subdived into several subcategories. Notably, neither the purchase price of a house nor the typical mortgage are included. Instead, homeowners cost of shelter is covered by “owner’s equivelent rent” which attempts to answer what the owner would be paying if they had to rent the house they are living in.

https://www.bls.gov/cpi/tables/relative-importance/2023.htm

There is a solution to this: homestead exemption. A lot of states already implement implement this with their normal property tax. If a property is your primary residence, then the tax you pay on it cannot increase by more than x% a year. Some states also give preferential tax treatment to senior’s primary residence. Their is no reason we couldn’t implement these same breaks on a LVT.

We’ll support you a bit less … after our elections are over and we can support you without any domestic consequence.

Remember the airdrops and logistics piers that the Biden admit spent months touting as the US’s solution to the humanitarian crises, and we just need to give them time to be implemented. Then, when they didn’t work (as anyone who was paying attention knew would happen, because they were fundamentally stupid ideas from the start), the admin quietly rolled them back without much fanfare.

This is at least slightly better in that it is in principle and actually good idea. But the Biden admin has no credibility for actually following through. The state department will release a public report saying that Israel is in compliance and military aid will continue uninterrupted; regardless of the facts on the ground.

By the time voters can see for sure that this was a lie, the election will have ended.

I bought in 2022 and can’t imagine having that much interaction with a mortgage broker. My interaction consisted of giving them my information. Getting pre approved for a stupidly large mortgage (about twice what I could afford). Then, when I found a place to buy, they punched in the address for the “virtual appraisal” and approved the loan.

The war in Europe puts us in conflict with a Country that could actually threaten us. When we go to war in the ME, the only victims are people in the ME.

Part of plausible deniability is that it has to be plausible. There has been no plausible argument presented that Israel did not do the pager and walkie talkie attack. For that matter, there hasn’t even been a denial about it.

Trump is an existential threat to Iran. Iran is in a regional cold[0] war with Israel. Israel’s ability to wage this war is largely dependent on US support; both in terms of raw military assistance, and in the US providing diplomatic and economic cover for Israel.

While the US had not applied nearly as much moderating pressure on Israel as I would have liked, it has still provided some. Israeli prime minister Netenyahu, in contrast, has been angling for a direct confrontation with Iran for decades now. Given the past 11 months, there are serious forces, both in Israeli politics, Iranian politics, and the inertia of war, pushing in that direction.

Trump is aligned with Netenyahu on this point, and would push him towards a direct confrontation with Iran. By all indications, Harris is not. This dynamic was made clear to Iran when the Democratic administration signed the Iran nuclear deal (against Israeli opposition), from which the US under Trump proceeded to unilaterally withdraw from.

[0] Cold might be a bit of an understatement after the last 11 months. However, apart from a brief tit-for-tat exchange, the fighting has stayed confined to Israel and Iranian proxies.

I have very course facial hair and switching to women’s razors pretty much solved my post-shave irritation problem. In order of quality for my face it goes: men’s disposable razor << safty razor < women’s disposable razor.

Because tensions between Hezbollah and Israel have been steadily rising since October 7th because of Hzebollah’s objection to how Israel is acting in Gaza. To be clear, prior to October 7th, tensions were already high enough that they would regularly lob bombs at each other. Today’s “escalated” tensions include northern Israel being evacuated due to threats from Hezbolla’s rocket attacks.

At this point, it is clear that the options available to Israel are to either withdraw from Gaza and hope Hezbolla stands down, or end up in a full war with Hezbolla. Historians will say that the war with Hezbolla started months ago, and this was just one attack among many.

But they didn’t because materials that explode like that simply aren’t used as batteries.

Further, software is not magic. In consumer electronics basic power management is done entirely by hardware. A hack cannot short out the battery, because the circuit to do that simply doesn’t exist. Maybe the hack could cause enough of a sustained power draw to overheat the battery and trigger a failure eventually, but that would still look quite different from what we saw.

To be clear, the target of the shooting was an unidentified individual, and a scoped rifle was found in the vicinity.

Maybe something else happened, but it looks like the secret service doing their job and stoppingva shooter before he was ready to take the shot.

Its not symbolism.

The reason people view Dax as a trans is that they were at times male and at times female. That is not symbolic of being trans, it is just being trans.

However, despite exploring what it means to be a trill passing through generations of hosts, the changing gender aspect of it never comes up. If Kurzon was a women, I doubt we would be talking about Dax as a trans stand-in, but I can’t think of a single plot point or character development that would meaningfully change.

Normally I’m a believer in death of the author, so I won’t be offended if anyone wants to completly ignore thus section, but in the DS9 documentary, they have a section on LGBT representation, and their big example for it was Jadzia. However, that was not for being trans, it was for being in a gay relationship.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ya8WTQc93yI&t=5467s

Don’t, Jadzia clearly appreciated it.

Trill’s relationships to their past hosts is complicated and never fully explored, but it is clearly established that the distance they create between their current host’s life and that of their past host is something that is enforced apon them by broader trill society.

Both Kurzon and Jadzia were, at least at times, clearly unhappy at the extent to which they had to distance themselves from their past life.

https://youtu.be/Qu-bP5367Yo?si=YNBFC_IUo7o7FpCd

The thing is, Trill are not trans. Dax didn’t go from being a man to a woman. Kurzon was always a man and Jadzia was always a women. And DS9 actually took this concept seriously on its own terms.

I can’t guarantee that none of those drivers were actually part of Hamas

We need to get passed the idea that the mere presence of a Hamas member justifies all military action. Assuming it is true, what were those Hamas members doing?

Throwing away the vaccines to use the marked car for transporting weapons and fighters? Valid military target (and a war crime)

Assisting in distributing polio vaccines? Not a valid target.

No good Sir, I’m on the level.

First, he wasn’t found “not guilty,” the charges were dismissed.

Doesn’t matter. Jeopardy attaches when the Jury is sworn in. And the jury has already been dismissed. At best, they can ask for a mistrial at this point. There are some cases where you can get a mistrial that allows for a new jury, but that is pretty much impossible if the mistrial was the prosecutor’s fault; even if, on review, a mistrial was not nessasary. Essentially, you do not want prosecutors to deliberately induce a mistrial in order to restart a trial that is not going well.

Further, there is simply no mechanism that allows the judge to even consider this motion, and the prosecutor in her brief did not provide a single theory for why it would be proper to consider the motion. This motion was written for the media, not the judge.

This us not out of character. In the hearing that led to the dismissal, there was a conversation with the judge during the lunch break. It subsequently came out that the judge was inclined to dismiss the case. Following that meating, the prosecutor’s co-council quit; and the prosecutor called herself as a witness. On its own, a prosecutor calling herself as a witness (subject to cross examination) is crazy enough. But the judge already told them he was dismissing the case. There was no legal reason for her to do so. The only justification for it was PR. In explaining her decision to call herself she said, on the record (but not under):

Court: It doesn’t matter to me weather you call yourself as a witness. It doesn’t matter to the defense weather you call yourself as a witness. So, if your calling yourself as a witness, there is no one here that is requiring you to be called as a witness.

Prosecutor: The information. Everything that happened in this regard, especially as it pertains to me, needs to come out in the public

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=03FPAS71YYs&t=24292

In the modern era, wars are rarely in the interest of either side. However, miscalculations happen, and the more you play at the edge of war, the more likely you are to fall over.

In April, Israel calculated that they could bomb an Iranian complex in Syria, targeting top Iranian officials without sparking a war. They were correct.

In response, Iran calculated that they could send 300 drones/missiles to Israel, and have enough be intercepted by air defense systems to avoid starting a war. They were correct.

Israel and Hezbollah have been exchanging fire; each side calculating that each strike would not start a war. Thus far they have been correct.

For years, Hamas and Israel have been exchaning small attacks. Both sides correctly calculating that they could avoid a full war. Then, on October 7th, the IDF fucked up. A Hamas attack was far more successful than it had any bussiness being, and now both sides are 10 months into a war that hurts both of them.

A war with Hezbollah might not be inevitable, but the current level of conflict is not sustainable. Every day that it is not resolved is one more opportunity for miscalculation; and one more notch ticked on the escalatory ratchet.