This search is for "intelligent life" given the way they are searching. This means that some kind of life that has enough dexterity and intelligence to produce some high powered radio transmitters... Just an observation, but that requirement and given what we know about intelligent life here, that's a pretty unique (and thus rare) evolution path....
Even the guy giving the money rates the chances at 1% for them finding anything credible.. I think he's off by a few orders of magnitude, but in general, even HE agrees that their chances are pretty slim, and it's HIS money being spent here.
Hawking's position is most likely more about getting big money for a research project than it is about the chances of getting the headline results. I'm guessing he is well aware that the headline making goal is virtually impossible but he goes along with this to get the money so he can use the data for other research which IS likely to advance the understanding of astrophysics, which seems more likely what Hawking really cares about.
Remember that this is why "they won't find proof".
Then we agree, this specific search will not find proof of alien life, for theirs is a radio signal search. The rest of what you've been reading is me justifying the reasons why I'm claiming they have zero chance. The locating a habitable, life bearing planet that happened to give rise to intelligent life with suitable technology to emit radio signals in our direction that happen to arrive in the next 10 years is pretty slim odds for a number of reasons.
I'm saying they won't find proof, that the $100 million will not produce proof over the next 10 years.
And I'd like to point out that I'm not making the argument that alien life doesn't exist, only that it's statistically rare and that fact multiplies the difficulty of finding proof, which is also very difficult in it's own right. All the difficulties taken together and I'm confident their task will fail, as sure as a rock dropped off a building will hit the ground.
Air drops are done low and slow where the work load is high. Bad things happen quickly under these conditions and you can be dead almost before you realize there is a problem.
To use a shot gun you are going to need to be REALLY close to the thing you are shooting. If you get over 20 yards or so, you can forget about doing any kind of reliable damage.
Why do people not realize that I'm not arguing their design was wrong... It's the PROCESS that's the problem here. If they *could* perform a nondestructive test of a flight critical component, what kind of dolts don't test it? This is supposed to be a HUMAN RATED vehicle after all.
They had a hardware assembly FAIL in flight, a structural component failure that caused the loss of the vehicle. The problem wasn't design, the problem was quality control of the structural components and the process that allowed for a bad strut to make it into flight hardware. Aerospace engineers know all too well how to do structure design and verify their design. But there is NO excuse for flying an assembly that has a flight critical structural component which fails, especially in a soon to be human rated system.
No, the problem is the process... Where it MIGHT be limited to just this strut problem, somehow I don't think it is. They have a systemic problem with their process, or they didn't follow the process. Both are SERIOUS issues and tells me that Space X is likely cutting corners a bit too much. Best case is the process is the problem, so I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt here.
Yes, Sister Mary Ellen....Pardon my incorrect usage, here are my wrists for your ruler. Shall I stand at the board and write the sentence correctly 100 times now so I won't ever forget and flaunt my ignorance of the word flout for all the world to see?
Oh I'm fully understanding that there is a progression of probability here...
First comes "Habitable" which means that it is capable of supporting *existing* life. Mars is possibly habitable, meaning it's environment is capable of supporting life, at least for short periods of time. As you point out Venus is another possibility at the other end of the habitable zone. Being habitable, does NOT imply life exists, only that it could. A very small percentage of known planets are Habitable.
For a planet to support "life" means it is within the habitable zone and has at least *some* capacity to sustain something that's living. There is a subset of habitable planets which actually sustain life. In our solar system, 1 in 3 habitable planets are known to have life, who knows if this ratio is universally true or not, but we can assume planets with life are going to be a subset of planets which are habitable.
Intelligent life is a whole new kettle of fish. There is an exceedingly narrow window that a habitable life sustaining planet must be within or intelligent life will not evolve. It nearly didn't here on earth, I think it is very safe to assume that finding intelligent life is even more rare than finding a habitable, life sustaining planet.
Then there is the whole time frame thing... If you look at history here on earth, it is very clear that intelligent life, capable of the technology required to transmit radio energy that can make the hundreds to thousands of light year trip and be detected by this listening effort being supported by Hawking is going to be very time limited. (For us it's only a few hundred years out of a couple of billion years).
All this adds up to a very very slim chance of this effort being successful, which is my point. They are not going to find alien life this way or any other way. Not in 10 years, not in 100. The odds are just so not in their favor...
You can do what you want, but if you break the law and it is enforced, don't come crying to me about how unfair it is. Of course, one could use this "getting caught" tactic as a PR move as well, but in that case you WANT to be caught and are breaking the law with a purpose. I'm OK with that, but you had better be willing to pay the full price of breaking the law when you enguage in this civil disobedience thing.
Uber doesn't act ethically. They encourage others to break the law, then hide behind this "we are not a taxi service" dodge to defend their business. What they SHOULD be doing is getting the local laws changed, not trying to fly under the radar. They should be advising their drivers NOT to accept fares to the airport if that is illegal in the area, going so far as to refuse to arrange rides to places where their drivers shouldn't go. Uber doesn't care about acting ethically. In fact, a pretty good ReCo case could be developed in their case because they conspire with drivers to break local laws across state lines...
Sure the local authorities CAN go after local small businesses if they choose. They can very easily find and prosecute drivers who flaunt the local law.
The question is will they choose to do this? I'm guessing that's a political question.
I remember when file sharing was all the rage about 10 years ago. MP3 sharing was literally everywhere. People said the same kinds of things.. Ah, nobody is coming after ME for this, I'm just a small fry. Fast forward a decade and tell me where we are now? File sharing is not ubiquitous, but the exception, and has gone largely underground. Why? Well the record industry made examples out of some common people and drove most of us to understand there could be serious costs involved if we continued to just share files.
Local authorities could do the same. Just catch a few, prosecute them in the public eye, and watch the illegal activity fall off. That's what the Vice Squad does when they go out and catch a couple of John's or set up online pedophile stings. You simply make it appear that the risks are high and the undesired behavior gets suppressed.
Yet, Uber drivers *should* be required to follow the local laws, no exceptions.
Where I don't necessarily think that all laws are good things, you don't get to choose which ones you agree with and will follow. If you break the law, you risk paying the prescribed price when that law is enforced.
Now if Uber wants to lobby for changing the law, or organize their drivers to lead grass root efforts to get the laws they don't like changed, power too them. However, until you change the law, you live by the law... Uber wants to be above the law, or at the very least, encourage their drivers to break the law. This is not an ethical way to do business.
I can order a taxi online already. Why would a particular implementation of ordering transport online suddenly make it something completely different?
If you take away the cars, Uber no longer has anything to sell. If you take away the online app, they could switch to some other channel and continue.
Uber is just a clearing house for dispatching and processing payments for taxi rides. They are neither a tech company, nor a taxi service.
However, this is NOT to say Uber drivers shouldn't be required to follow the existing laws for Taxi services. Uber drivers should be required to meet all the same legal requirements as the local taxi services, commercial licenses, commercial insurance, etc Where Uber is not bound by these rules, they should make it clear that their drivers ARE bound by the laws in their local area. In addition, Uber should be REQUIRED to report trips to local authorities who request it that start, end or transit though areas they enforce the laws in.
Yes, this would likely end Uber and it's business model of today. However, the law is the law and Uber and it's drivers should be bound by it.
Not an issue, just patch it... It doesn't take that long, nor is it that hard...
On July 16, owners of vehicles with the Uconnect feature were notified of the patch in a post on Chrysler’s website that didn’t offer any details or acknowledge Miller and Valasek’s research. “[Fiat Chrysler Automobiles] has a program in place to continuously test vehicles systems to identify vulnerabilities and develop solutions,” reads a statement a Chrysler spokesperson sent to WIRED. “FCA is committed to providing customers with the latest software updates to secure vehicles against any potential vulnerability.”
You can be sure any new vehicles will have the fix too.... Nothing to see here, move along...
Yes, you can test to design specifications before you assemble if you specify a part strength at failure which is well above the design...
However, my point here is that the *real* problem isn't the design, but the QA process that allowed an assembly to be certified for flight with a strut that didn't even meet the minimum design load, when that strut was a critical component for flight.
This was a process failure, first and foremost. The structural failure and loss of the vehicle was just the end result of the process failure.
Yes, I'm really confident that finding habitable planets, capable of supporting intelligent life at a high enough level of technology that this project can hope to find something is vanishingly rare. So confident that I can easily say "They won't find proof".
The jury, if it looked at the evidence we now have, would have to say that while it sure seems possible for life to have evolved elsewhere, we have exactly zero proof of such an assertion. All indications are that in the observable area of our solar system, only earth has been shown to carry life and all the places which have been proposed as possible sources of life have proven to be barren, even Mars. The hard evidence we have says that only earth has ever contained life.
We do have some interesting theories and thought experiments, but these do not imply hard evidence. Where I can invent a whole range of "possibilities" in my head, you cannot make such ideas into fact without some observations... In this case, observations are few, and the opportunity for making observations extremely limited due to the great distances involved. We will never be able to go there and see first hand, and our ability to directly observe a planet which is tens to hundreds of light years away is nearly nonexistent and that is unlikely to change.
In order to find alien life using this project, it's going to have to be intelligent life with advanced technology which is similar to ours. They are trying to use radio telescopes to listen to inadvertent radio signals coming our way. So I think the "habitable" zone which leads to this project producing "proof of alien life" got very narrow indeed.
Cars and rocket science... Hmmm, you seriously think a car safety record has anything to compare to something in the aerospace world? His cars may be the safest on the road, but that doesn't mean he builds safe rockets, or that the QA processes for automobile manufacturing applies to aerospace vehicles...
I suppose that's somewhat true, a design problem would be a bigger deal and point to an even bigger issue in their process, but one *could* argue that having a single point of failure in a flight critical part of the structure really IS a design issue. I'm choosing to give them the benefit of the doubt on this, but this only means that the QA process is an open question still. How do you go fly with a system that will suffer a structural failure? How does a mission critical safety of flight structural component become the primary cause of a failure?
"You cannot prove a negative" but I can argue that it's so nearly impossible that I'm confident that they won't prove me wrong... Not in my life time, not even a microbe or radio peep will be found that proves alien life. Our search ability is too limited and the area to be searched too vast.... But go ahead, fund the research, it may yield valuable science and keep a bunch of folks employed, it just won't find anything it's looking for.
TESTING requires destruction of this kind of thing as I read the article. They will NOT be doing 100% testing to failure of their stock of struts, except to prove to themselves how bad their supplier really was.
Apparently their testing process was insufficient to be sure, which is my point. You DON'T put a flight critical structural component into an assembly unless you are SURE it's going to work at least to the design limits required. Structural failure is a serious problem in the aerospace world and betrays a serious process problem at Space X. Structural failure should not ever be an issue that leads to the loss of a vehicle, especially one that is intended to be human rated in the future.
So I'm not saying they need margin beyond what they have, but that if you don't have structural redundancy in your design, you have critical parts that MUST be validated structurally sound by your quality assurance processes and statistical sampling is not sufficient for this part. If their process says that statistical sampling WAS good enough in this case, their process failed them. If the process failed, then the problem is much bigger than just this strut, this launch, this failure or even this supplier, it becomes systemic with Space X. And that leads one to question the whole program. Questions that I believe are legitimate ones to ask.
Thanks, I didn't recall/know the details of this, but I understood that this "toilet seat" thing has always been a bluster about something that actually made sense overall and wasn't a waste of government resources, but was putting an older aircraft back into shape so we could use them longer....
That's not to say the government doesn't have huge amounts of waste.... I heard a story where the FSN of an "anchor chain" used to hold a dust cover on a piece of test gear differed from an "anchor chain" used to moor a ship at sea differed by ONE digit. The hapless electronics tech ordered the wrong one of course, which arrived on a number of flatcars after what seemed to be an extremely long wait... DMRO had fun with that one....
The problem with the F35 is that it's being designed with too many requirements, making it too complex and unreliable. It's going to be all things to all the services who are involved in the procurement, plus a few foreign governments.. Being a "jack of all trades" makes you a "Master of none" especially in the fighter jet world. It will be a mediocre fighter, struggle to drop bombs in the close air support role, and it won't be all that stealthy.... Of course they plan to make it up in volume, having common spare parts, training and maintenance facilities.... I for one am not buying it...
Ah, come on... Remember that Clinton took all that Social Security and Medicare spending OFF BUDGET....
We don't put budget money into those programs anymore... They are separately funded though that Social Security Trust fund "lock box" which only has a pile of IOU's in it.. Wait you say, what happened to all my social security taxes I paid in? Um, we SPENT that money and left you with I pile of US Government bonds, T-Bills, for which somebody will have to be taxed or money printed to repay.
We may not go down the same road as Greece.... But it will be similarly painful if we don't stop spending on social programs like we are...
Slashdot Mirror
This search is for "intelligent life" given the way they are searching. This means that some kind of life that has enough dexterity and intelligence to produce some high powered radio transmitters... Just an observation, but that requirement and given what we know about intelligent life here, that's a pretty unique (and thus rare) evolution path....
Even the guy giving the money rates the chances at 1% for them finding anything credible.. I think he's off by a few orders of magnitude, but in general, even HE agrees that their chances are pretty slim, and it's HIS money being spent here.
Hawking's position is most likely more about getting big money for a research project than it is about the chances of getting the headline results. I'm guessing he is well aware that the headline making goal is virtually impossible but he goes along with this to get the money so he can use the data for other research which IS likely to advance the understanding of astrophysics, which seems more likely what Hawking really cares about.
To quote my *original* post in this thread...
Remember that this is why "they won't find proof".
Then we agree, this specific search will not find proof of alien life, for theirs is a radio signal search. The rest of what you've been reading is me justifying the reasons why I'm claiming they have zero chance. The locating a habitable, life bearing planet that happened to give rise to intelligent life with suitable technology to emit radio signals in our direction that happen to arrive in the next 10 years is pretty slim odds for a number of reasons.
I'm saying they won't find proof, that the $100 million will not produce proof over the next 10 years.
And I'd like to point out that I'm not making the argument that alien life doesn't exist, only that it's statistically rare and that fact multiplies the difficulty of finding proof, which is also very difficult in it's own right. All the difficulties taken together and I'm confident their task will fail, as sure as a rock dropped off a building will hit the ground.
Exactly this..
Air drops are done low and slow where the work load is high. Bad things happen quickly under these conditions and you can be dead almost before you realize there is a problem.
To use a shot gun you are going to need to be REALLY close to the thing you are shooting. If you get over 20 yards or so, you can forget about doing any kind of reliable damage.
Printed on a 3D printer none the less..... Totally untraceable...
Why do people not realize that I'm not arguing their design was wrong... It's the PROCESS that's the problem here. If they *could* perform a nondestructive test of a flight critical component, what kind of dolts don't test it? This is supposed to be a HUMAN RATED vehicle after all.
They had a hardware assembly FAIL in flight, a structural component failure that caused the loss of the vehicle. The problem wasn't design, the problem was quality control of the structural components and the process that allowed for a bad strut to make it into flight hardware. Aerospace engineers know all too well how to do structure design and verify their design. But there is NO excuse for flying an assembly that has a flight critical structural component which fails, especially in a soon to be human rated system.
No, the problem is the process... Where it MIGHT be limited to just this strut problem, somehow I don't think it is. They have a systemic problem with their process, or they didn't follow the process. Both are SERIOUS issues and tells me that Space X is likely cutting corners a bit too much. Best case is the process is the problem, so I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt here.
Yes, Sister Mary Ellen....Pardon my incorrect usage, here are my wrists for your ruler. Shall I stand at the board and write the sentence correctly 100 times now so I won't ever forget and flaunt my ignorance of the word flout for all the world to see?
First comes "Habitable" which means that it is capable of supporting *existing* life. Mars is possibly habitable, meaning it's environment is capable of supporting life, at least for short periods of time. As you point out Venus is another possibility at the other end of the habitable zone. Being habitable, does NOT imply life exists, only that it could. A very small percentage of known planets are Habitable.
For a planet to support "life" means it is within the habitable zone and has at least *some* capacity to sustain something that's living. There is a subset of habitable planets which actually sustain life. In our solar system, 1 in 3 habitable planets are known to have life, who knows if this ratio is universally true or not, but we can assume planets with life are going to be a subset of planets which are habitable.
Intelligent life is a whole new kettle of fish. There is an exceedingly narrow window that a habitable life sustaining planet must be within or intelligent life will not evolve. It nearly didn't here on earth, I think it is very safe to assume that finding intelligent life is even more rare than finding a habitable, life sustaining planet.
Then there is the whole time frame thing... If you look at history here on earth, it is very clear that intelligent life, capable of the technology required to transmit radio energy that can make the hundreds to thousands of light year trip and be detected by this listening effort being supported by Hawking is going to be very time limited. (For us it's only a few hundred years out of a couple of billion years).
All this adds up to a very very slim chance of this effort being successful, which is my point. They are not going to find alien life this way or any other way. Not in 10 years, not in 100. The odds are just so not in their favor...
You can do what you want, but if you break the law and it is enforced, don't come crying to me about how unfair it is. Of course, one could use this "getting caught" tactic as a PR move as well, but in that case you WANT to be caught and are breaking the law with a purpose. I'm OK with that, but you had better be willing to pay the full price of breaking the law when you enguage in this civil disobedience thing.
Uber doesn't act ethically. They encourage others to break the law, then hide behind this "we are not a taxi service" dodge to defend their business. What they SHOULD be doing is getting the local laws changed, not trying to fly under the radar. They should be advising their drivers NOT to accept fares to the airport if that is illegal in the area, going so far as to refuse to arrange rides to places where their drivers shouldn't go. Uber doesn't care about acting ethically. In fact, a pretty good ReCo case could be developed in their case because they conspire with drivers to break local laws across state lines...
Sure the local authorities CAN go after local small businesses if they choose. They can very easily find and prosecute drivers who flaunt the local law.
The question is will they choose to do this? I'm guessing that's a political question.
I remember when file sharing was all the rage about 10 years ago. MP3 sharing was literally everywhere. People said the same kinds of things.. Ah, nobody is coming after ME for this, I'm just a small fry. Fast forward a decade and tell me where we are now? File sharing is not ubiquitous, but the exception, and has gone largely underground. Why? Well the record industry made examples out of some common people and drove most of us to understand there could be serious costs involved if we continued to just share files.
Local authorities could do the same. Just catch a few, prosecute them in the public eye, and watch the illegal activity fall off. That's what the Vice Squad does when they go out and catch a couple of John's or set up online pedophile stings. You simply make it appear that the risks are high and the undesired behavior gets suppressed.
Yet, Uber drivers *should* be required to follow the local laws, no exceptions.
Where I don't necessarily think that all laws are good things, you don't get to choose which ones you agree with and will follow. If you break the law, you risk paying the prescribed price when that law is enforced.
Now if Uber wants to lobby for changing the law, or organize their drivers to lead grass root efforts to get the laws they don't like changed, power too them. However, until you change the law, you live by the law... Uber wants to be above the law, or at the very least, encourage their drivers to break the law. This is not an ethical way to do business.
It's a taxi company
I can order a taxi online already. Why would a particular implementation of ordering transport online suddenly make it something completely different?
If you take away the cars, Uber no longer has anything to sell. If you take away the online app, they could switch to some other channel and continue.
Uber is just a clearing house for dispatching and processing payments for taxi rides. They are neither a tech company, nor a taxi service.
However, this is NOT to say Uber drivers shouldn't be required to follow the existing laws for Taxi services. Uber drivers should be required to meet all the same legal requirements as the local taxi services, commercial licenses, commercial insurance, etc Where Uber is not bound by these rules, they should make it clear that their drivers ARE bound by the laws in their local area. In addition, Uber should be REQUIRED to report trips to local authorities who request it that start, end or transit though areas they enforce the laws in.
Yes, this would likely end Uber and it's business model of today. However, the law is the law and Uber and it's drivers should be bound by it.
Not an issue, just patch it... It doesn't take that long, nor is it that hard...
On July 16, owners of vehicles with the Uconnect feature were notified of the patch in a post on Chrysler’s website that didn’t offer any details or acknowledge Miller and Valasek’s research. “[Fiat Chrysler Automobiles] has a program in place to continuously test vehicles systems to identify vulnerabilities and develop solutions,” reads a statement a Chrysler spokesperson sent to WIRED. “FCA is committed to providing customers with the latest software updates to secure vehicles against any potential vulnerability.”
You can be sure any new vehicles will have the fix too.... Nothing to see here, move along...
Yes, you can test to design specifications before you assemble if you specify a part strength at failure which is well above the design...
However, my point here is that the *real* problem isn't the design, but the QA process that allowed an assembly to be certified for flight with a strut that didn't even meet the minimum design load, when that strut was a critical component for flight.
This was a process failure, first and foremost. The structural failure and loss of the vehicle was just the end result of the process failure.
Yes, I'm really confident that finding habitable planets, capable of supporting intelligent life at a high enough level of technology that this project can hope to find something is vanishingly rare. So confident that I can easily say "They won't find proof".
The jury, if it looked at the evidence we now have, would have to say that while it sure seems possible for life to have evolved elsewhere, we have exactly zero proof of such an assertion. All indications are that in the observable area of our solar system, only earth has been shown to carry life and all the places which have been proposed as possible sources of life have proven to be barren, even Mars. The hard evidence we have says that only earth has ever contained life.
We do have some interesting theories and thought experiments, but these do not imply hard evidence. Where I can invent a whole range of "possibilities" in my head, you cannot make such ideas into fact without some observations... In this case, observations are few, and the opportunity for making observations extremely limited due to the great distances involved. We will never be able to go there and see first hand, and our ability to directly observe a planet which is tens to hundreds of light years away is nearly nonexistent and that is unlikely to change.
How old are you?
Old enough to know better, young enough to not care....
Assume I have another 100 years to live...
In order to find alien life using this project, it's going to have to be intelligent life with advanced technology which is similar to ours. They are trying to use radio telescopes to listen to inadvertent radio signals coming our way. So I think the "habitable" zone which leads to this project producing "proof of alien life" got very narrow indeed.
Cars and rocket science... Hmmm, you seriously think a car safety record has anything to compare to something in the aerospace world? His cars may be the safest on the road, but that doesn't mean he builds safe rockets, or that the QA processes for automobile manufacturing applies to aerospace vehicles...
I suppose that's somewhat true, a design problem would be a bigger deal and point to an even bigger issue in their process, but one *could* argue that having a single point of failure in a flight critical part of the structure really IS a design issue. I'm choosing to give them the benefit of the doubt on this, but this only means that the QA process is an open question still. How do you go fly with a system that will suffer a structural failure? How does a mission critical safety of flight structural component become the primary cause of a failure?
"You cannot prove a negative" but I can argue that it's so nearly impossible that I'm confident that they won't prove me wrong... Not in my life time, not even a microbe or radio peep will be found that proves alien life. Our search ability is too limited and the area to be searched too vast.... But go ahead, fund the research, it may yield valuable science and keep a bunch of folks employed, it just won't find anything it's looking for.
TESTING requires destruction of this kind of thing as I read the article. They will NOT be doing 100% testing to failure of their stock of struts, except to prove to themselves how bad their supplier really was.
Apparently their testing process was insufficient to be sure, which is my point. You DON'T put a flight critical structural component into an assembly unless you are SURE it's going to work at least to the design limits required. Structural failure is a serious problem in the aerospace world and betrays a serious process problem at Space X. Structural failure should not ever be an issue that leads to the loss of a vehicle, especially one that is intended to be human rated in the future.
So I'm not saying they need margin beyond what they have, but that if you don't have structural redundancy in your design, you have critical parts that MUST be validated structurally sound by your quality assurance processes and statistical sampling is not sufficient for this part. If their process says that statistical sampling WAS good enough in this case, their process failed them. If the process failed, then the problem is much bigger than just this strut, this launch, this failure or even this supplier, it becomes systemic with Space X. And that leads one to question the whole program. Questions that I believe are legitimate ones to ask.
Thanks, I didn't recall/know the details of this, but I understood that this "toilet seat" thing has always been a bluster about something that actually made sense overall and wasn't a waste of government resources, but was putting an older aircraft back into shape so we could use them longer....
That's not to say the government doesn't have huge amounts of waste.... I heard a story where the FSN of an "anchor chain" used to hold a dust cover on a piece of test gear differed from an "anchor chain" used to moor a ship at sea differed by ONE digit. The hapless electronics tech ordered the wrong one of course, which arrived on a number of flatcars after what seemed to be an extremely long wait... DMRO had fun with that one....
The problem with the F35 is that it's being designed with too many requirements, making it too complex and unreliable. It's going to be all things to all the services who are involved in the procurement, plus a few foreign governments.. Being a "jack of all trades" makes you a "Master of none" especially in the fighter jet world. It will be a mediocre fighter, struggle to drop bombs in the close air support role, and it won't be all that stealthy.... Of course they plan to make it up in volume, having common spare parts, training and maintenance facilities.... I for one am not buying it...
Ah, come on... Remember that Clinton took all that Social Security and Medicare spending OFF BUDGET....
We don't put budget money into those programs anymore... They are separately funded though that Social Security Trust fund "lock box" which only has a pile of IOU's in it.. Wait you say, what happened to all my social security taxes I paid in? Um, we SPENT that money and left you with I pile of US Government bonds, T-Bills, for which somebody will have to be taxed or money printed to repay.
We may not go down the same road as Greece.... But it will be similarly painful if we don't stop spending on social programs like we are...