The Social Security Fund can't and won't go "bankrupt." It may be depleted to the point where it has insufficient funds to cover current obligations, but that isn't the same as being bankrupt. The only reason its depletion might matter is that Congress required that benefits must be paid from the Fund rather than from general revenues. Thus, if benefits are reduced, it isn't because the Fund was depleted, it is because Congress is unwilling to pay the benefits. In any case, contributions would continue and, eventually, once the Boomers die off, the fund would once again have a positive balance.

We should be asking why we have a Social Security Fund in the first place... Back in the days of a gold-backed currency, a savings fund made some sense. But, today, given that we have fiat currency, saving money in one year to pay out in some future year just doesn't make a great deal of money. The reality is that Social Security contributions are just one of several sources of Federal revenue. The primary task of those controlling Federal spending is to ensure that inflation is controlled. Pulling money from a "savings fund" doesn't make the spending any less inflationary -- even though collecting the funds is, in fact, anti-inflationary because it reduces disposable income. The Fund is an anachronism. It may have made sense some many decades ago but no longer does.

If benefits are reduced, it won't be because the Fund ran out of money. It will be because Congress is unwilling to authorized continuation of the benefits with a reduction. It is law that requires benefit reductions, not anything which is inherent to the Fund itself or that comes from some economic imperative. Whether the spending is from the Fund or taken from general funds makes no difference to the inflationary or economic impact of the spending.

As far as I know, no law compels anyone to fetch or respect the contents of robots.txt. While respecting it is "The Right Thing To Do," doing so is a courtesy, not a legal requirement. Thus, I suggest that efforts to expand the expressiveness of robots.txt, or to create additional files that are similar, will have the effect of giving the false impression that something useful has occurred. It will attract a great deal of discussion and effort without actually changing the legal, and enforceable, obligations of those doing text and data mining. In time, just as it was once found necessary for the law to define the specific form for effective copyright reservations on various human-readable items, we will need to legally recognize some specific form of a digital Rights Expression Language.

There are already groups actively working on this issue. For instance, within the W3C, the Text and Data Mining Reservation Protocol Community Group has been developing what are essentially robots.txt extensions as well as syntax for embedding rights reservations embedded in content. This work leverages the W3C's work on Open Digital Rights Language (ODRL). The TDMRP community group's work is motivated by recent EU laws that, unlike US law, explicitly permit text and data mining of content -- even when that content is under copyright.

New York spends billions of dollars each year on maintaining local utility gas distribution systems. More than half the per-unit cost of gas pays the cost of the distribution "pipes," not the cost of actual gas molecules.Today, most gas powered appliances won't work without electricity. As a safety measure, most modern furnaces will shutoff when the electricity is off, and, in any case, furnaces usually rely on electrically powered blowers to distribute warm air. So, if most people can't use gas when there is no electricity, is it still reasonable to spend billions each year to serve the needs of the very few people who are somehow able to continue using gas during the rare, and usually brief, moments that the electric system is down? Why are we paying for two completely different energy distribution systems when one could serve all the existing needs? If we invested those billions in improving the electric system, is it likely that it would fail less frequently? I think so. It seems to me that we'd save money by eliminating investments in the redundant legacy gas system. bob wyman

Why would higher-energy be the only condition affording novel tests of the Standard Model?

We could continue using fossil fuels for fertilizers and pharmaceuticals long after we stop using fossil fuels for energy. Eliminating the use of fossil fuels in vehicles, furnaces, and boilers would accomplish most of the necessary reduction in pollution and GHG emissions while allowing an increased focus on finding alternative carbon and hydrogen feedstocks for fertilizers, pharmaceuticals, and chemicals.

When productivity was rising, wage growth didn't keep up. So, workers were taught that working harder or smarter doesn't ensure that you'll earn more. Having learned this lesson, we shouldn't be surprised that productivity is falling. If we want productivity to rise, we should ensure that wage growth matches productivity growth -- as it once did. You get what you pay for.

A windfall tax does not remove the profit incentive. Non-windfall profits are, and were, sufficient to motivate people to be in the fossil fuel business. The windfall generates a profit which is higher than what producers expected and sufficient to keep them in the business. Taxing excess profits (economic rent) is generally accepted by economists to be non-distortionary. The more general question is why we don't tax the excess profits of all companies... The ability of a market participant to generate a super-normal profit is a clear indication that the market is not competitive and that the profit-taker is exercising pricing power -- often as a means to gain monopoly or oligopoly rents. Antitrust law might be made immensely simpler if we switched from taxing profits to taxing primarily excess profits.

The headline is wrong. The report does not say that nuclear "Must Double By 2050," it only suggests that "Achieving net zero globally will be harder without nuclear."

The report states that nuclear was the source of only 10% of total generation in 2020. Thus, doubling nuclear by 2050 only addresses a relatively small part of the additional clean generation needed by then. Yes, it might be easier to achieve net zero with increased nuclear production, but it can't be rationally claimed that nuclear is necessary to achieve that goal.

On correlation v causation: Regularly walking 7k steps/day is likely to increase or maintain one's ability to walk 7k steps/day as well as provide a number of other health benefits. Thus, encouraging more walking by those who now walk less than 7k steps/day is likely to "cause" a reduction in premature mortality whether or not actually walking 7k steps/day causes a reduction in premature mortality.

What is paid for medical services, drugs, or devices depends much more on who is paying than it does on the actual cost of providing the service. What is paid depends almost entirely on the negotiating power of the payer. In general, the uninsured pay the most while the largest insurance companies pay the least. Smaller insurance companies pay more than larger companies and often end up subsidizing the costs of those larger insurers.

The law should be changed to require a single all-payer price for medical service. Differences in prices should be allowed only when their are significant differences in the cost of providing service. The ChargeMaster price should be the universal price and insurers should be free to exclude excessively expensive providers from coverage. Medical pricing should be Fair, Reasonable, and Non-Discriminatory (FRAND).

• Fair means that the billed charge should be rationally related to the actual cost of the service provided.
• Reasonable means that the costs should be less than the value of the service provided.
• Non-Discriminatory means that equal service should result in equal costs.

Those who argue for single-payer insurance, and similar schemes, should recognize that a significant benefit of single-payer is that it would result in a single all-payer price, if only because there would be only one payer. Given that it appears difficult to get single-payer adopted, it would make sense to work for FRAND, single-price regulations that achieve much of the same benefit while still allowing a diversity of insurance providers.

The vocabulary for expressing opinions concerning online content should not be limited to emotional expressions. In many cases, the appropriate response is not to "Like" or "Dislike" content, but rather to "Agree" or "Disagree" with the content's message. To create a less emotionally harrowing online experience, replace "Like/Dislike" with "Agree/Disagree."

Agreement/Disagreement provides useful information about one's response to content without eliciting an emotional response. If only "emotional" signals are made available to those who comment on content, we shouldn't be surprised that emotions are aroused or impacted by these signals. So, if the concern is bullying or other psychological impacts on content providers, the most logical thing to do is to replace emotional signals with signals that are free of emotion.

bob wyman

Should be:

The proper function of government includes establishing the laws and regulations which necessary to prevent accumulations of excessive market power. The problem isn't that "capitalism leads to monopoly" but rather that governments, legislators, etc. fail to perform their role as wise regulators of the economic system.

We could easily make it harder to gerrymander simply by increasing the size of the House and thus making smaller districts. When districts are smaller, it is harder to dilute votes and it is less useful to create "sacrificial districts" since you'll need to make more of them.

Even though the House grew in every apportionment, except one, before 1913, it has remained at 435 members ever since then. In 1913, the average district contained 210,583 people, yet we expect that in 2023, the average district will contain 761,169. Since a 1913 district is only 28% of a 2023 district, you could "dilute" an entire 1913 district in a 2023 district and thus essentially cancel those voters... This is ridiculous.

The size of the House is determined by Congress and can be changed with normal legislation. No Constitutional Amendment is required to implement this most obvious means to reduce the ease and effectiveness of gerrymandering. In the process, the quality of representation would be improved and the Electoral College vote would tend to diverge much less from the popular vote. There can be great debate about how large the House should be, but I think it is clear that it should be larger than it is.

H.R.996, the “Congress Commission Act,” calls for establishing a commission to make recommendations on the appropriate size of membership of the House of Representatives and the method by which Members are elected. Those who wish to make it harder to gerrymander should actively support passage of H.R.996.

I was born in the 1950's, learned BASIC at high school during 1969, and have been writing code ever since. I was also the first, or one of the first, to implement much of the software that today's kids take for granted and rely on every day. Kids today only have what they have because their parents, grand-parents, and even great-grand parents spent many years building it for them!

While dominance may be fleeting, the question that Justice Thomas asks is: "Should we regulate dominant platforms while they have dominance?" Whether that dominance is fleeting or long-lasting is irrelevant. As Thomas says: "It changes nothing that these platforms are not the sole means for distributing speech or information." His concern is that "concentration gives some digital platforms enormous control over speech." I suspect that he would have also said that it changes nothing that these platforms may not remain dominant.

Personally, I think it unlikely that our nation's founders were much concerned that a commercial enterprise might one day accumulate so much power over the realm of public discourse that it rivaled the power that the government would have had if not constrained by the Constitution. Thus, it may be that we need to expand our understanding of the intent of the Constitutional guarantees of Freedom of Speech and Assembly. Were the founders exclusively concerned with restricting the government's control over discourse or were they more generally concerned to ensure that the realm of public discourse was unconstrained? I suspect that had they been faced with the power of Facebook or Twitter that they would have been more expansive in drafting our First Amendment rights.