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 There is No Respectable  Argument Against It* I would hardly miss it! 1. Removing the FICA (Social Security) Cap: Income above $176,100 is currently exempt from Social Security tax Estimated additional revenue: $100-150 billion annually 2. Including Capital Gains: Capital gains are currently not subject to payroll taxes Annual capital gains realizations: ~$800 billion to $1.2 trillion Applying 15.3% total payroll tax to capital gains Estimated additional revenue: $120-180 billion annually Combined Rough Estimate: $220-330 billion in additional annual revenue for Social Security and Medicare combined. THE AMERICAN SYSTEM ALLOWS --  ENCOURAGES! -- WEALTH TO BE ACCRUED. NOTHING SAYS ONLY THE UN-WEALTHY  HAVE TO PAY A PERCENTAGE OF THEIR INCOME IN FICA TAXES.  FAIR IS FAIR, AND IT'S NECESSARY TO HELP FIX THE...  $23 trillion Social Security shortfall and   $46 trillion Medicare shortfall projected over 30 years * I'd be happy to debate it. *G...

 Pain on the level of watching your child starve While your whole community starves around you All amid the rubble and destruction of your once homes... Seems an unGodly thing to cause. Perhaps not, in the minds of some fundamentalists in Israel. "...devote to destruction all that they have." " A few well‑known Old Testament passages in which God commands total destruction of Israel's (and His) enemies : Deuteronomy 20:16‑17 “But in the cities of these peoples that the LORD your God is giving you for an inheritance, you shall save alive nothing that breathes, but you shall devote them to complete destruction—the Hittites and the Amorites, the Canaanites and the Perizzites, the Hivites and the Jebusites—as the LORD your God has commanded.” 1 Samuel 15:3 “Now go and strike Amalek and devote to destruction all that they have. Do not spare them, but kill both man and woman, child and infant, ox and sheep, camel and donkey.” Deuteronomy 7:2 “And when the...

 I Never Thought This Could Happen NPR and PBS are American jewels One reminder. Call / Mail / Text your Congresspersons, The Prez, and the FCC: FUND THE CPB. SAVE PUBLIC BROADCASTING! Thanks.

Are You Planning For It?   Is anybody (like the government)?  Pretend you work for Amazon.   Amazon CEO to Employees: "Yes, AI Will Probably Take Some of Your Jobs ." Spare change? Just to elaborate:  " Amazon has laid off  more  than 27,000 people  since 2022, and most recently cut jobs  across its devices and services group  and its  books division . Andy Jassy notes that Amazon has more than 1,000 AI services and apps that the company is working on or has already built, saying that it’s just a “small fraction” of what it’s planning to launch in the future." The Verge. More likely, you don't work for Amazon, but you are: ...A law clerk, a copywriter, an intern, a call center worker, a lab assistant...  you know, a white collar type. Don't kid yourself, the AIs are coming for your job. Especially an AI AGENT is coming.  It will do your job better than you can (soon, if not already), it costs your company much, much ...

It Is a Truthful Tract on Truth I Agree With Every Word of it.  I think its language is poetic.  It's ALLEGEDLY written by one of my heroes, Noam Chomsky. It's ALLEGEDLY read by the same guy.                        NOT              You Know I'm Noam You know I'm not. I am NOAM AI. And that's the truth. ANOTHER TRUTH: There are these channels on YouTube that are sort of fan fiction. Some are all AI -- images, text, design, everything  --  "prompted" by actual humans (presumably). I don't know how many of these productions there are, but a bunch. Judging by the comments below each of them, you have to wonder how many people know they are AI and how many have no idea.  There are this sort of fan fiction sites on all kinds of people, nice and courageous and nasty and cowardly. There are sites for Hitler and Erdagon, for instance. SO CHECK IT OUT . As I said, I agree wit...

In 2017 I concluded the mighty health insurance companies were successfully hiding their premiums income. I just couldn't get a good answer from the Google/Bing duopoly.  What the...? I wrote a blog post challenging readers to see if they could find it. Nope. So today I gave two of my fav chatbots, ChatGPT and Claude, the challenge. NO PROBLEMO!  And they pretty much agreed. Claude.ai: Key Premium Revenue Estimates: Total Market Size : The health insurance market size to surpass USD 1.78 trillion in 2024 Measuring total-premium inflation for health insurance in the Consumer Price Index : Monthly Labor Review: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics Private Health Coverage Spending : Spending on private health coverage is set to exceed $1.5 trillion this year, according to the nonpartisan US Government Accountability Office Best’s Market Segment Report: US Health Insurers Met Challenges in 2024 but Pressures Expected to Persist in 2025 The data suggests that premium revenue from al...

 Two Takes On How Fast  and How Big AI Changes  Are Upon Us Already millions of people are being fooled, made fools of and robbed blind by AI. Already millions are being convinced of "truths" that are really lies. If you say, "Not me!" you better be right. The stakes are high and getting higher fast. You can't believe what you see. You can't believe what you read. The new normal is to doubt everything.  That's the take away from these Truth Tellers, John Oliver and Geoffrey Hinton. John Oliver sent me! LINK My expression give you a hint? LINK It took me 25 minutes to put this post together. AI could do it in seconds. It could do ten variations in a few more seconds. If it couldn't find a picture of Geoffrey Hinton it liked, AI could create one. In seconds. Watch these two assessments of the situation. Ramp up your mental guard dogs. Don't believe your eyes.  You've been warned. P.S. I LOVE AI.  I'm beguiled by it. I use it all the time. ...

  Three Years Ago (summer, 2022) I posted: Blogging With Dall-E... Bizarre    ...and it was. Wrong number of fingers, strange eyes, inconsistent physics. But have things ever changed for the better! Multi-level prompts get amazing results. Body parts are under control for sure. You know how fast AI is moving.  All the chatbots are getting smarter, having fewer hallucinations and becoming specialists in hundreds of fields. Stills and video generation are becoming mind bogglingly good.  I thought I'd revisit Chat-GPT's graphics generator (not called Dall-E much any more) again to see if it's as good as I've read it is.  I fired off a moderately detailed prompt: PROMPT: Create an image of an old man (totally bald, with a short full beard that is all white) wearing a parachute type harness which holds an anti-gravity device on his back. he is cruising along at 20 feet above a wide, empty field of grasses and wildflowers. The perspective must be from slightly ab...

  I'm surounded by people very upset by what's going on in Washington. Most of them say "What can we do about it? What can I do?" A data wizard I know has built a complete set of handbooks to show you the way. It's very powerful, with specific targeting of each of the "hits" in the exploding chaos in D.C. Whichever huge challenge grabs you the most, there's a "handbook" of what you can do about it. (For instance: I'm grinding my teeth over the defunding of NPR and PBS,  I think the attack on science is tragic, and I am sick over the destruction of USAID.) You can pick your topic and there is a customized set of aids, suggestions, and gems of facts ready for you to use.  https://constitutionaldefenders.org/index.html The site is also motivating, which all of us need a bit. It clearly shows what you can do "right now," then it makes it easy to do. And it's all free.  I urge you to check it out, spend a few minutes clicking ...

 From August 2017 ...Spelled Out in the Most-Read Story Ever in.... Magazine Art with a terrible message* The article, in the June 9, 2017 issue of New York Magazine, was the most read in the magazine's history. It was titled, simply: The Uninhabitable Earth Pretty straight forward, no? Maybe a little hyperbolic; not every square mile of Earth will be uninhabitable, even in 50 years. Just a very great deal of our planet will be purely awful and most totally unliveable. Hundreds of millions  of climate refugees will head for what  livable  space is left. They will be desperate.  The situation, in a few powerful sentences scattered through the piece: 1.  It is, I promise, worse than you think. 2.  Even when we train our eyes on climate change, we are unable to comprehend its scope. 3.  But no matter how well-informed you are, you are surely not alarmed enough. 4.  We are currently adding carbon to the atmosphere at a considerably faster rate (t...

 Kawasaki! I'm a big fan  I had a hot rod of a motorcycle in '73. A Kawasaki 350 2-stroke.  HOT. (and smokey, alas, at full acceleration.) You can call me Hotty. Kawasaki engineers really made it right. But now... Holy cow, A robot horse! It's name is Corleo. I feel naked without a rider. But can it handle a Steeplechase? No problemo Check this out. Video -- including that jump. HERE. OK, it's almost all GCI (or AI video), but I believe Kawasaki can take this baby from vaporware to hardware, all based on what a great machine that 350 was . Here's hoping.