The final paycheck has to meet minimum wage. They start with hours worked and the basic wage, supplement it with reported tips (credit cards have been a big boost here), and then see if it meets the minimum. If not, they have to cover the gap.

No, it won't. Most users will glance at it, click OK or close the tab, and move on.

People claimed that Chrome use would plummet when they announced the move to Manifest 3. That's underway, and I don't think Chrome's market share has meaningfully moved.

It's about optics. They crow about saving $50 million here and $100 million there, but that's just today and doesn't look at where that money went and what the loss will mean. And it ultimately means very little because those just don't amount to much. Saving $50 million a day comes out to about $18 billion a year.

They can't cut enough from the budget without crashing not just the US economy but the global economy, and then even the wealthy will have nothing. Musk and others have straight up said they want to cut hundreds of billions in annual spending for each of Social Security and Medicare. That's economic suicide. Social Security largely replaced pensions, and not nearly enough people opened 401(k) or IRA accounts. Social Security spending in 2024 was $1.5 trillion, and the last number I saw was that they were going for $200 billion in cuts, or about 13%. That will utterly ruin millions of retirees, many of whom are just barely hanging on. They're going to say that it's the only way to save Social Security, when a much better way is just to remove the cap on Social Security wages. But tax reduction and caps have gone from a solution to a mantra to a religion among some people, so it doesn't get considered.

I lean conservative. I am something of a budget hawk, and I know there is pointless spending. My views started when I was at a public library around eighth grade and was looking through a printed copy of the US budget when I was supposed to be doing actual studying. I saw a budget item for $50,000 to make Eisenhower's birthday more well-known. But I've also come to understand that the waste levels that people think are there largely aren't. They don't understand how small NASA's budget is, or USAID's budget is. They don't understand that there is a corps of people who work to minimize waste, fraud, and abuse, and that these people bust their asses. They don't understand that there are long-term consequences for slashing spending.

You mention hospitals, but Texas has sued the federal government to overturn mandated spending on 504 programs that go to help integrate kids with disabilities and ensure they get a good education and not whatever they can scrounge together. I would like to think that the suit won't succeed (I think Roberts and Barrett, at least, would not nix them), but if Trump somehow eliminates the Department of Education, it all becomes moot anyway. It would affect one of my kids who has ASD and ADHD and the other who is temporarily in a wheelchair due to a degenerative bone disease (hopefully done in another year), but I also think about one of his schoolmates who has severe cerebral palsy, will never not be in a wheelchair, and "speaks" through a communication board. His parents saw ours in his wheelchair at a summer open house and asked nervously about our experiences. We were able to talk about how good the school had been, how they worked with us and got necessary changes made. That was a huge relief to them.

But much of what the school could do came from 504 funding, including the counselors and the training made available to the teachers who have disabled kids in their classrooms. If those kids can't make it through school, they're going to end up dropping out eventually, or in remedial schools that treat them like criminals. They're going to turn into future crime sprees, especially if cuts to Medicaid happen and the ACA is repealed, making it even harder to get them the treatment and medicine they need.

I have communicated to my various representatives my concerns about what is going on, but they're all Republicans, and so far, I don't see much pushback from them. Cornyn, at least, seems to be biding his time and not fully endorsing things, even taking some tepid stances against some things, but Cruz is as cowardly as ever and my local House member hasn't said anything in opposition. I don't think that the Department of Education is going away immediately, but I do expect that the programs authorized by Congress are going to have major problems next school year. I fear for what will happen to my own kids, and millions more students besides.

The content quality has dropped dramatically. I managed, without a lot of effort, to curate a decent feed. A few things slipped in here and there, but they weren't that hard to address. I still have an account only because Twitter is still useful for the moment to find information as it unfolds, though BlueSky is starting to catch up. On the rare occasion that I open it, I see a flood of trash content that would not have been permitted at the same volume pre-Musk.

When everyone around you is a jerk, sometimes it's not everyone else that are the jerks.

Enough people will be against these wherever they would be installed that it would get tied up in years of litigation. It doesn't even have to be a majority to have the litigation go on for many years, but I suspect that there would be a lot of places that, if placement were put to a vote, would block it by notable majorities because of a basic fear of nuclear anything, and any city council that votes to allow it would find themselves out of office after the next election, if recalls weren't mounted first.

Given that money can now be funneled to him via one or more cryptocurrencies with effectively no oversight, expect everything to be a grift.

It will mean more renewable in some states, delayed coal retirements in other states, and more natgas in almost every state. The time required to build a nuclear plant even on an accelerated schedule is too long to have any effect. Small modular reactors will be faster to build, but almost no one will want them anywhere close, so they'll get caught up in litigation and regulatory battles.

You're behind on the development status. Starship reached an altitude that would have allowed it to orbit several times but would also force it into reentry in case of a failure that would prevent it from initiating its own reentry. That was a safety measure, not a failure.

Flight 3 demonstrated propellant transfer between two the header tanks to its main fuel tanks, and Flight 6 (the last one) demonstrated a cold relight in space. Flights 9 and 10 are expected to demonstrate fuel transfer between two Starships in orbit.

Saturn went without blowing up rockets because it used an entirely different design philosophy. Had any of those exploded, it would have been a massive financial loss and a long time to catch back up. SpaceX has built something close to two dozen Starship prototypes and more than a dozen others were partially built before being scrapped because they were obsolete; S34 will be used in the upcoming Flight 7. More than a dozen boosters have been built, with Booster 15 to be used for Flight 7 and boosters B16 and B17 under construction. And don't forget the booster recovery on Flight 5. I still have trouble believing that worked.

The current stated payload capacity to LEO is over 100 tons. We haven't seen any real payload attempts, though that is apparently coming on the next flight, with mass simulators totaling around 20 tons to be ejected to test Starlink satellite deployment. That's supposed to be a fraction of its actual capability. Elon claims that coming upgrades will allow up to 300 tons in a fully expendable configuration, but I have my doubts. Regardless, 150 tons, or even a bit higher, doesn't seem unrealistic. Falcon Heavy doesn't fly that often because Falcon 9's upgrades got it to the point where it can carry double the original version, moving payloads originally planned for FH into the F9's range.

As for funding, some money comes from the government, yes, but much less per launch of the F9 than came from missions on Atlas or Delta variants, and less than Vulcan or New Glenn is projected to cost. F9 is profitable on its own, and SpaceX is also getting a ton of money from Starlink subscribers, with more than four million worldwide. That's somewhere between $300 million and $500 million per month, and while I'm sure a chunk of that goes to capital costs for the satellites and launches, it's also probably a lot left over for SpaceX to use on other projects. Observers have suggested the cost per complete Starship and Booster is somewhere around $200 million, so they may be able to build a new one just off of Starlink subscriptions every couple of months.

I get the pushback against Elon, but SpaceX is not just Elon. And while they're not hitting all the milestones on Elon's schedule, they're doing things that a decade ago were declared impossible by a lot of people. They put 1500 tons of payload into orbit over 134 missions in 2024 alone, launching more often than any other country. They longest they went between launches was something like five or six days, and they were frequently launching every other day, if not faster. We're a week into 2025 and they've already launched Falcon 9 twice with four more scheduled in the next week alone. (And if you're focusing on not hitting HLS milestones specifically, while I don't have clear info on that, SLS isn't hitting its milestones, either, and virtually no one believes that the Artemis III lunar landing will happen in 2027, even if Starship's lander is ready.)

Meanwhile, Blue Origin is over there doing it mostly the old way, and they're hoping to get their first orbital rocket launch tomorrow and hope to fly up to eight missions per year over the next few years, comparable to what ULA is hoping to do with Vulcan. The scale just isn't the same.

Starship isn't what's going to get the crew to lunar orbit. That's still Orion. Starship has a very long way to go before it gets crew rated for launches or landings. It may happen, and I hope it does, but it's not happening in time for a 2027 lunar landing.

Even if he publicly says that he will order the DOJ not to enforce the law, Apple and Google will both drop it from their app stores because they can't trust him not to flip on a dime the moment he doesn't like it. At that point, it's a $5000 fine per user installing or accessing app since the start of the ban. Trump can also just hold that over them as leverage, having someone quietly suggest that if they don't do this or that, then he'll order the ban enforced. For even a million users, that's $5 billion in fines. There are supposedly 170 million US users, for $850 billion in potential fines. Google and Apple combined cannot afford even a quarter of that.

Profit margins vary by insurance company. They're generally capped right now in the insurance sector in that at least 85% of all premiums collected must go toward healthcare. The rest isn't all profit, as administrative and other costs have to come out of it. Some companies do very well, and I've had two reimbursements from BCBS in the last seven or eight years because they didn't spend enough money on healthcare. Others do not do so well, and skate very close to the edge of profitability.

Where you see companies like United Healthcare posting huge profits is all the other stuff they do, like all the healthcare practices that they directly own, and the pharmacies that they directly own, and the pharmacy benefit manager that they directly own. There are no caps on profit for those.

I'm not saying that the new ones are better. I agree that they're too new to fully trust, and even if OpenSSL had them in a workable state, I wouldn't use them for production anytime soon. But the sooner we get something viable, the sooner people can look at the algorithms with large data sets and find issues, especially implementation problems and side-channel attacks. Australia's action, even if it's risky, may well accelerate that work.

If you took whatever you're paying for that insurance today, and what your employer is paying on their side and it was a tax instead, that'd easily cover your portion of the cost of universal healthcare and also the costs for those who are not covered today.

No, it wouldn't. In 2023, total healthcare premiums collected was about $1.2 trillion. Total healthcare spending in the US in 2023 was $4.9 trillion, or $14,750. Of that, $1.0 trillion was Medicare and about $900 million was Medicaid. That leaves $3 trillion in spending and $1.2 trillion in premiums, plus $400 billion in Medicare taxes collected, a difference of $1.4 trillion. That's a very far cry from covering everyone based on current spending levels. It would have to be a Medicare-style setup where people are taxed based on their wages, meaning higher wages pay more. It might work with the right reforms, like getting rid of PBMs and getting private equity out of healthcare, but at least some people would see changes in their paychecks. Without factoring in savings from reforms, take your Medicare contributions and multiply it by about seven (but also take out whatever you're paying for insurance).

I pay a few hundred dollars a month I think for health insurance.

You pay that much. Your employer probably pays even more. My family had to go on COBRA last year, and it cost $24,000 for 10 months of coverage (it was a very good PPO). We'd been paying $600 a month while employed, meaning the employer was around $1800 a month.

Is that all it would take in tax to pay for US Universal health care?

Where and from whom is all this extra money the US is paying currently in health care coming from?

No, but like Medicare (and unlike Social Security), there doesn't have to be a wage cap. Those making more would pay higher amounts, though the same percentage. Employers could be required to pay some portion of it (like they do with Medicare and Social Security) to limit the direct impact to the employee. Smaller companies and low-wage earners could be eligible for offsets.

How would this be done so as NOT to raise my already too high taxes? Remember, I'm already paying federal, state and then all the various sales taxes too.

Depending on how reforms are done (nixing PBMs, getting private equity out of healthcare, etc.), it could come in right around what you're already paying, perhaps somewhat less. Existing insurance companies could become case management companies, similar to how they already do it except they wouldn't collect premiums nor pay out, but instead would be paid by the government based on some metric of services. There are multiple models in other countries that could be reviewed, some of them entirely government-run (I think the UK's NIH is like this) and some where there's a mix of insurance companies and government backing (I believe Germany is like this).

I won't even get into not really wanting to place my health and health decisions in the hands of bureaucrats....I mean, I dread EVERY time I got to the DMV...the long inefficient lines, etc...I can't imagine having to deal with shit like that for my health?!?!

You already do place your health and health decisions in the hands of bureaucrats. The insurance companies are laced with them, and while some are better and some are worse, almost all of them make life harder for patients and providers alike. (And who goes to the DMV anymore? Almost everything can be done online in most states.)

I was an opponent of universal health care for a very long time. In the last four or five years, I've become more open to the idea because what we have in the US isn't working, and it's going to get worse.