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Silicon Valley 'Divided Society and Made Everyone Raging Mad', Argues Newsweek (newsweek.com)
"Anyone who is pissed off can now automatically find other people that are similarly pissed off," argues author Jamie Bartlett, in a new essay shared by Slashdot reader schwit1 which calls the internet "a bottomless well of available grievance." Here's an excerpt from Newsweek:
Silicon Valley's utopians genuinely but mistakenly believe that more information and connection makes us more analytical and informed. But when faced with quinzigabytes of data, the human tendency is to simplify things. Information overload forces us to rely on simple algorithms to make sense of the overwhelming noise. This is why, just like the advertising industry that increasingly drives it, the internet is fundamentally an emotional medium that plays to our base instinct to reduce problems and take sides, whether like or don't like, my guy/not my guy, or simply good versus evil. It is no longer enough to disagree with someone, they must also be evil or stupid...
Nothing holds a tribe together like a dangerous enemy. That is the essence of identity politics gone bad: a universe of unbridgeable opinion between opposing tribes, whose differences are always highlighted, exaggerated, retweeted and shared. In the end, this leads us to ever more distinct and fragmented identities, all of us armed with solid data, righteous anger, a gutful of anger and a digital network of likeminded people. This is not total connectivity; it is total division.
Nothing holds a tribe together like a dangerous enemy. That is the essence of identity politics gone bad: a universe of unbridgeable opinion between opposing tribes, whose differences are always highlighted, exaggerated, retweeted and shared. In the end, this leads us to ever more distinct and fragmented identities, all of us armed with solid data, righteous anger, a gutful of anger and a digital network of likeminded people. This is not total connectivity; it is total division.
Hitler was to the left. Ghandi, Kennedy, and Mandela were also nationalists. Using the term nationalist does not make someone similar to Hitler.
10 years ago you were calling Bush a racist white supremacist, Hitler, warmonger, Islamophobe, and the end of the world.
You assholes have literally done this before. It's the same tired appeal to emotion, devoid of fact. The same smears. The same smug condescension that ignores legitimate concerns to favor bumper sticker insults.
I'm a liberal on almost every issue. I was a straight ticket Democrat voter my entire life. Never again. Consider me Woke. I'd rather vote beside Bible thumping racists than stand beside you ever again.
That's a massive amount of wrong condensed into a single paragraph.
1. Social Security and Medicare are paid out of two different funding sources.
2. Medicare has no expected shortage despite the Baby Boomers retiring. The taxes paid by GenX and Millennials will cover it, just like GenX and Boomer taxes paid for Silent/WWII-generation's Medicare.
3. The Social Security Trust Fund is supposed to go bankrupt.
It was created in 1983 in anticipation of the Boomers retiring. In the original design, Social Security benefits are paid out of the taxes collected today. That works as long as each generation is larger than the previous. When GenX turned out much smaller than the Boomers, there was a problem. Enter the trust fund. Boomers, GenX and now Millennials have been paying higher taxes over the last 34 years to build up a trust fund to cover the Boomers. And only the Boomers.
After the Boomers, we go back to each generation being larger than the last. So we can go back to the ~2 younger generations funding the one older generation. (Technically, this will depend on how many kids the Millennials end up having. So far, so good on that front.). Under current projections, the Trust Fund will last until virtually all the Boomers have died of old age.
4. There will not come a day where we suddenly have to pay the Social Security Trust Fund back, because we've already been paying the Trust Fund back. The Social Security Trust fund can only invest in US Bonds. Those bonds have a maturity date where the money has to be paid back. And that maturity date has already passed for some of the bonds. (The principal and interest were used to buy more bonds initially, at the moment some of the interest is being paid as benefits. Just as planned)
So no, there will not be a sudden need for more money. There has been and will continue to be a gradual reduction in how many bonds the trust fund can buy. That could theoretically increase the deficit, but if you give a damn about that then fix it via the general fund instead of a Rube Goldberg design involving Social Security.
6. If you really want the trust fund to continue to exist, the fix is incredibly easy - raise the cap on FICA taxes. Back when Social Security started, about 95% of income was subject to FICA taxes. Thanks to the growth of income inequality, only 70-someodd percent of income is subject to FICA taxes. The difference is caused by the wealthy making more money.
In 2017, the cap is $127,200. $127,201 and up are not subject to Social Security taxes. So raise that cap to ~$200-250k and the trust fund lasts forever...not that it would actually be needed.
7. Remember point 1 about Medicare and Social Security having different funding streams? Medicare taxes don't have the cap mentioned in 6. That's why it doesn't have a near-term funding problem.
8. Attempting to balance the budget 30 years from now is an incredibly stupid exercise. We can't predict the economy 10 years from now with reasonable accuracy. You think we can nail 30 years?
In summary, any pundit or politician giving dire warnings about insolvency and sudden repayment are lying to you in an attempt to convince you to support cuts.
The taxpayers paid into Social Security. The money paid was treated like general revenue and spent.
False
In its place there is an IOU from the treasury called a US Bond.
False
How does the treasury repay these bonds in the future?
Same way we've been repaying the bonds for the last 30 years. Again, there will not be some sort of sudden payment coming due.
The scheme keeps working until China stops buying treasuries.
False.
First, China stopped buying significant amounts of US bonds in 2006. They were trying to use these transfers to keep the Yuan low versus the Dollar, but you can only make a river flow upstream for so long. They currently use other, more direct methods. So if China not buying bonds was supposed to be a disaster, we'd have started that disaster a long time ago.
Second, countries are not the only entities that can buy government bonds. In fact, about 80% of US federal debt is owned by Americans and American corporations. And considering inflation-protected bonds are selling at close to 0% interest, we're not in danger of that drying up overnight.