I think it should count as a surplus in this case when revenue exceeds expenses. After all, the government really has nowhere to put the extra $100 if it takes in $1000 in taxes and only pays out $900 in benefits. They buy treasury bills perhaps, but that's just another way of spending the extra $100, since money you loan the government is spent.

I think, by the way that both democrats and republicans miscount these issues in their own ways. Democrats always want to point to the Social Security trust fund, for example, but that is silly. That money was loaned to the government, and it will require a reduction in spending elsewhere or a raise in taxes elsewhere to pay the money back.

So, while I would count it as surplus when revenue exceed expense (for one year) I would also count it as deficit when expense exceeds income. According to the SSA, that started happening in 2010, "Social Security’s total expenditures have exceeded non-interest income of its combined trust funds since 2010, and the Trustees estimate that Social Security cost will exceed non-interest income throughout the 75-year projection period."

On Social Security statements, they tell you what your benefit will be at your retirement age. They also predict what percentage of benefits will be covered by receipts on that date, based on population dynamics. For my retirement age, that's about 70%. Social Security taxes will only be able to pay a bit more than 2/3 of the benefits promised when I retire.

That's the amount I use for retirement planning, by the way. I don't think Social Security will "go away" but it's inevitable that the amount awarded can't indefinitely exceed the receipts, and I don't think it is sensible to plan for the full amount.

I'm a die hard Linux user, but seriously, it sucks.

X breaks my shit every time I upgrade. I just spent 90 minutes tonight getting my Synaptics touchpad working again. I spent hours 2 years ago making it work. All the focus on compositing is leaving good 2D stuff in the lurch I feel. I do a lot of work remotely, and it is the devil trying to find a display manager that will work over VNC and let you choose your window manager without crashing. And then what do you use, Gnome, Unity, KDE? It's getting to where nothing works without a compositor and 3D.

Sound is a disaster. How many Linux sound systems are there? OSS, ALSA, Jack, ESound, PulseAudio, some I don't even remember. Alsa has been a disaster since it came out, from the perspective of documentation. I don't know how anyone ever wrote the first ALSA applications. They're supposed to be compatible, but they're not. If you play ALSA applications on my PulseAudio system, you get static and distortion. I went through all the fixes, and none of them work on my system. Fortunately the author of my application added PulseAudio as a natively supported output method (in addition to the OSS and ALSA that they already supported). I need to send them a thank you.

Notifications? Behavior I depended on two versions ago has been removed from the current version.

My system tray in XFCE4 is quirky. Some application icons won't appear unless I run the application as root (Hamster and redshift). Maybe that's a quirk of upgrading, but Google tells me I'm not the only one with these problems. And XFCE4 sucks less than other window managers, so it's a behavior I just live with.

That's just what I can think of off the top of my head.

And it sucks.

What I hate most are the meta-discussions; discussing what we're going to discuss. And the meta-meetings; meetings to decide when we're going to meet.

Ding ding ding! This is exactly why people who remember still hate Microsoft. Using their monopoly muscle to make vendors pay for their Windows product whether they use it on a machine or not was a despicable practice.

You mean "obvious to you and me." "I" is a subject and "me" is an object. It doesn't make you sound more educated to you "I" everywhere. Well, it does to some people, but it shouldn't. Just as you don't say, "Give that to I," you don't say, "That is obvious to I."

This reflects my anecdotal experience of late as well. My Dell server just turned 3 years old (and I had a 3 year service agreement on it). It came with three 1-terabyte drives. All failed before my service period ended and were replaced; the last of the three was replaced this past summer. 100% failure of the original drives in less than 3 years.

Yes, remote graphical desktop work of all kinds has been wrecked in the recent versions.

When I finally got the computer to boot with wdm (by editing the startup scripts) I quit looking for other solutions. But I admit I didn't try mdm. I went through the 8 or so display managers that are packaged with Ubuntu, and did not go outside to build something external like Mint.

For a decade, I've set up a server with listening VNC servers for remote access through our switched network. Yes, it is somewhat undesirable from a security point of view, and we require SSH tunneling or VPN for machines off the immediately local network.

I can tell that less emphasis is going into "remote" use of X11 and more going into the "desktop" experience, because this work pattern is almost entirely broken of late. I can't find a display manager to reliably work with XDMCP (and supply session switching, language choice, etc.) under the most current update.

Crazy stuff is broken. The menu option of KDM just doesn't work (i.e. the widget is just broken). Some incompatibility with the new X11 apparently. LightDM is so unstable as to not be usable. WDM has an upstart bug that prevents the computer from booting (though this is the manager I use--I edited the rules in the script to fix the boot). GDM has the annoying 'Super-D' bug so no one with a D in their username can login (yes, this can be fixed and the session startup scripts are still a problem on my platform).

It's absolutely insane that you can't find a display manager that actually works properly over VNC. It breaks a straightforward work pattern that I've used for a long long time.

These people think they can make a phone. In my experience with Ubuntu that viewpoint is absolutely self-delusion.

I ignored them for a long time. Now I press 1 every time, and start asking questions as if I'm interested but don't have a clue how this can work and who they are. One of of the reps said, "Gee what an idiot," before finally hanging up on me.

I'm not sure, but the pace of their calls seems to have slowed now that they know I'm just going to tie them up and cost them money.

I'll second this. It seems like no one does "useful" like XFCE.

The more obvious approach is to join and support the ARRL, the most successful amateur radio lobbying group. It's not unlike gun owners joining the NRA. Even if you don't like all their actions, they're working harder than anyone else to preserve your rights.

Instability is also my big beef with the recent Ubuntu. It seems to be due to three causes (so it's been forever for anyone to make progress on fixing anything): Intel wireless drivers suck (kernel issue), gnome-screen saver sucks, and the Unity interface sucks. Getting rid of gnome-screensaver and installing xscreensaver is probably the best improvement I've seen, after finally finding a kernel where the Intel wireless driver worked. But I've put my computers on XFCE (with the menu bar on the left like Unity) and they're finally usable again.

It's what I did too. Debian and XFCE4 on my daughter's laptop. I'll be doing the same thing on my own laptop the next time it gets a re-install or upgrade. I've got a few work machines that'll probably go over to Debian as well.

Since this morning's update on Ubuntu I can't pull up Gmail. It's pretty darned annoying and now I've gone back to Firefox to wait for the next update to fix whatever is really busted.