It may be that it's JUST him. No other contributors get that kind of preferred place, not even people who participate in the community. It's kind of galling to see his name pop up every couple of weeks, and everybody instantly knows that the comments are going to be primarily about just how bad the contribution is, simultaneously wordy and wrong.
Perhaps if Slashdot spread it around a bit more, it might aggravate less. Instead, it's one of a mere two dozen or so stories posted per day. Few of them will be really engaging, but here's one that we know for a fact will be "thought provoking" only in the sense that people will have to explain why his "novel" idea is novel because it's bad. Nobody else's novelties get that kind of pride of place, on a web site that used to be known for driving so much traffic it could crash a small server.
Exactly. The NSA was never supposed to be doing that. They took advantage of technological changes and played semantic games that justified all kinds of shenanigans that was at best barely within the letter of the law, and at worst completely subverted the oversight.
So, a new law was called for. Ideally, it would update the NSA's mission to the age of Internets and cell phones, and put in oversight to at least put an end to the previous excesses (though they'll surely find new ones).
Whether this law actually does that... hell, when was the last time we passed any kind of law about anything? If Harry Reid is for it, I'm sure the Republicans will filibuster it, and if somehow Harry Reid and Republicans are on the same side it would only be because the bill doesn't actually say anything at all.
Well... while there sure as hell is a problem of China's state-operated hacking, it's not going away any time soon. We're not going to war over it (either physically or economically) and any treaty we signed to deal with it wouldn't be worth the paper it's written on. While I'd love to see the Chinese at least commit to removing the line item in their budget that says, "30 gazillion yuan for breaking into American computers", they'd surely just rename it and the actual hackers would do no more than change the project number on their time cards.
So yeah, you have to harden your web sites, and start thinking about our protocols in ways designed to make it easy to recognize and divert hackers, because the hackers aren't going away. We can blame them all we like, and be right, but that and $2.99 will get you a tall latte.
Ha. Thanks. There was so much bad news from SCOTUS this year that I missed the bit with the EPA.
It still seems like a dicey thing for China to gamble on having the US fulfill its commitments. Unlike them, we're going to swap out our executive branch in two years, and there's a nearly 50-50 chance it'll be a member of the party of Ted Cruz and James Inhofe. Anything Obama does by executive action can be undone by executive action. That President would still have a hard time passing legislation, since 2016 will be voting out some of the Republican wave of 2010 just as 2014 voted out some of the Democratic wave of 2008, and even if they don't, the filibuster busts both ways.
Still, I don't know if China has any good reason to trust us on this.
I would have thought you could do it for less, since you don't have to haul the batteries around like you do in a car. Weight and volume are much smaller considerations. Any idea what it would cost for, say, a lead-acid battery?
And even at that, US$25,000 isn't all that much compared to the price of a house. The median home price in the US is $313k as of September (and that's down from $350k the previous month). It's not negligible, but it's small, and can be folded into the mortgage. It adds $70 a month to the mortgage payment (not counting the interest costs), and that's offsetting part of an electric bill that averages over $300/month.
(Speaking of which... sheesh. I pay less than $100 most months. I must be doing something right.)
This is very much a stopped-clock kind of "right". It's Congress doing nothing, by default, as per usual. Even if the bill were a good idea, there's no chance of it getting serious consideration. It's always in somebody's best interest to make sure something doesn't happen, and it's just not hard to find people to support you on that.
The only way to pass legislation now requires half the House PLUS 60% of the Senate PLUS the President, and then it has to find 56% of the Supreme Court to keep it from being overturned. Getting all of those at once is very rare.
So this isn't a sign of anybody getting anything right. It's just another instance of them failing to do anything at all. We just happen to be lucky that this one time, "do nothing" is the right answer.
Speaking of deals... how are we supposed to deliver on this? Even before last Tuesday, there was no chance of getting this through as a treaty past the Republican filibuster. Now there's less-than-no-chance, and even the most extreme overreach of executive powers can't impose that much reduction.
So how are we supposed to deliver on this deal? There's simply no concession that Obama could possibly make to Boehner and McConnell that would get the to sign off on this. What am I missing?
So... we underwent whatever expenses that cost, and we managed to get no concessions out of other countries for doing so. I suppose I should be glad that we're managing to do things out of the goodness of our hearts, but it might have been nice to use our signature to also get China and India to put in some effort to reducing their carbon consumption over the past decade.
Part of their excuse for not signing was because we didn't, and unlike us, they weren't going to be reducing their emissions out of the goodness of their hearts. They're both undergoing an industrial expansion, prompted in part by our outsourcing, which also effectively meant outsourcing our pollution. They weren't going to reduce their pollution unless we committed to as well. Otherwise, it would put them at a competitive disadvantage, and they're still trying to catch up to us.
I'm glad to hear that Tommy is finally reunited with is 1965 AMC Ambassador, which Ray so cruelly sent to the crusher (just because it had fungus growing out of the seats and it hadn't moved for years).
If ever there were a time for Slashdot to allow image links, this would have been it. Meantime, this link is for you.
Without meaning to sound like a jerk, the show wasn't quite as "natural" as they made it sound. The show was heavily edited by some extraordinarily talented crew, which is how the callers always sounded so articulate and they never had to cut people off for time. They selected the most effective calls; I believe that part of what they're doing now includes old calls that didn't get aired. They worked very hard to create an illusion of naturalness, kind of like the un-made-up look that requires so much makeup work.
That's not to detract from Tom and Ray, who were incredibly gifted both as radio personalities and as mechanics. I've never heard anybody with anywhere near their level of talent. They brought warmth and humanity that resonated with callers and brought out the best in them. The crew helped make it look as easy with a bit of slight-of-hand, but they couldn't have done it without their utterly amazing source material.
Yep. Effectively, it's a four-variable problem: x, y, z, and t. If you had a synchronized atomic clock with you, you might be able to do it with just three satellites, but that would be pretty bulky and delicate.
Larger than Columbus thought. The consensus among the experts, going back to Eratosthenes, was pretty much right on the money. Columbus was the only one who thought it was smaller (much smaller, by 2/3), which is why he was rejected by the Portuguese king. I don't know how he managed to convince the Spanish monarchs to fund his expedition, but if he hadn't gotten very lucky, he would indeed have killed his crew.
In this case, it might be the opposite: Blacksburg is the home of Virginia Tech, and between the students and the professors it's considerably more liberal than the deep red you'd see on a coarser-grained map of the area. It does give them access to a large pool of both liberals and conservatives, if they're seeking volunteers from off campus.
At the very least they'd be able to statistically adjust it against national demographics, though the study isn't very large. I'd think of it as an interesting bit of preliminary work, but it would have to be replicated very broadly before taking it seriously.
Because that's your actual actuarial risk including the middlemen's 50% cut.
One of the specific provisions of the ACA is to limit that cut to 20%. Companies have had to actually send rebates when they took in more than that.
Whether the middleman's value is worth even that much is a different question. It's not completely valueless: they negotiate the price with the hospital, and they're on your side in wanting to pay less. It would much much harder for you to do that yourself, since you're not an expert in the cost of care or on what anybody else paid. That's a benefit to some, and a cost to those more savvy negotiators. I can tell you that I'm not in the latter category.
I've always found it kind of odd that Republicans wanted to eliminate the latter, without eliminating the former, which is obviously more popular. It seems to me that Democrats at some point should have said, "Sure! Hey, everybody, you can stop paying for insurance."
I know that it wouldn't actually get that far, but it seems to me that they could at least have gotten the insurance companies mad at the Republicans for making "paying for insurance" the problem. It's the only unpopular provision in the law, but necessary.
Thanks. No mod points today, but I appreciate somebody attempting to extract information from this rather than just apply quantum juju. #ifuckinghatesciencewriters
It depends on how you count the return. The US GDP is still going up. Perhaps it would be going up faster if we weren't jumping at our own shadows, but it doesn't appear to be bankrupting us.
We do a much better job at it ourselves. A graph of GDP shows only one visible hitch, the 2007 crisis. That had nothing to do with terrorism, unless you want to call the widespread fraud by the major investment banks "terrorism" (and I bet you could find some people to agree with you if you wanted to). It certainly wasn't Al Qaeda's fault; any hitch in the graph around September 2001 is lost in the noise.
Here's the problem; I *have* heard all of their arguments before. There's not going to be anything novel here. This is pretty well-trodden ground.
That's not a formal proof. It's an allocation of my time and resources. They can generate new conferences faster than you can refute them. "You can't dismiss me until you've heard MY version of this old argument, and you can't know that it's the same thing until you've heard it" gives them an infinite lease on my time.
So I'm not going to "hear them out". Somebody, I imagine, will, because an odd number of people seem to enjoy re-fighting this. And if they manage to derive an argument with a shred of merit, I suspect it will get back to me. If it takes a long time to do that, well, that's how it is with all ideas. Valid ideas stand the test of time; truth lends them durability because it can be independently re-discovered.
That means that I don't have to give them any time to consider their ideas. And for them to insist I do is dishonest. Any argument they might have to make has to begin with "OK, I understand why you consider the rest of my ideas idiotic, and your reasoning was sound," because it is. Until then it's just more deranged babble.
If I'm following the discussion (and thanks so much for this; I was hoping somebody would explain the concept), the value of goodwill depreciates over 15 years, yes? And you can deduct that as you would the depreciation of a physical asset.
Is that reasonable? On the one hand I could see it. If Coca Cola were to stop doing whatever it's doing to build up goodwill, the value of the brand would decrease over time. The number is arbitrary but that's just the consequence of trying to codify a tax system; buildings and machines don't break down on a fixed schedule either. It does "depreciate".
But on the other hand, it feels like it's an incentive to invest in intangibles rather than tangibles, which doesn't seem like it's as productive for the economy. I know that intangibles produce jobs; that basketball team is selling entertainment, and keeping people employed from the players to the peanut vendors. But entertainment dollars are fungible; how much of Coca-Cola's goodwill produces additional jobs via additional soda sales and how much of it is just devoted to putting dollars in their pockets rather than Pepsi's owners?
In the case of a general social networking tool, there kinda can be only one. People won't check every site every day, and the one they check most often will be the one with most of their friends. If you have "Ello friends" and "Facebook friends", odds are you'll visit one site much less, and your friends there will drift further away.
There's room for various niche sites, but they need a differentiator. I can imagine Ello wanting to be the social networking site for those who want privacy, but strikes me as being kind of counter to the point of social networking. People go to Facebook *because* it violates their privacy. It does so a bit more than most realize, perhaps, but really they only seem to notice the monetization of their lack of privacy, rather than the lack of privacy itself.
Yes, but they're not improving it, and the new Maps doesn't seem to be replacing the features of Classic Maps that I really liked. Any interface needs improvement, and while I like the older interface, its failures become more grating over time.
Other factors have kept inflation low for quite some time. The Treasury and Fed have been pumping money in at a rather alarming rate, and the inflation rate remains in the target range. Occasional spikes in oil prices notwithstanding, it's been under 2% for most of the last few years. (The September figure was 1.7%; the average for 2013 was 1.5%.)
I don't understand how we're currently having falling unemployment, low inflation, a record GDP, and a booming stock market. Some of that, of course, is dubious statistical measures, but they're the same measures we've always used (more or less). All that fiat currency should be producing huge amounts of consumption and inflation, and it isn't.
I've got a sneaking suspicion that we're looking at another crunch over the next few years as the Baby Boomers start to collect Social Security in earnest, though the first wave of it is already 67 years old. That has already caused us to to briefly deplete the Trust Fund a few years ago, and its growth has leveled off. That's gonna be bumpy.
He was the one who kicked off European colonization and exploitation of the place. Other Europeans who came made only a tenuous foothold. Columbus was the one who said, "There's a place over there, and it's worth living in and taking stuff." He's the reason Europeans in general came to know about it.
It's not entirely out of keeping with other uses of "discover". The OED's first definition is "To disclose, reveal, etc., to others". The fact that it's first is historical, rather than a matter of present usage; the present use "to find out" is also very old. But it also includes notions of "finding out for oneself", i.e. not necessarily being the very first.
All told the OED gives over a dozen different shades of meaning for "discover", and I don't think this one is entirely wrong. It can be misleading, since as you say there were already people there and other Europeans had lived there, but he was an important "first" whatever word one applies.
Still, the Trust Fund seems like a rather odd concept. It's a government promise to pay for... something it had already promised to pay, namely Social Security benefits. If the Trust Fund runs out, it's still on the hook to pay those benefits.
The program was intended to be pay-as-you-go. The SSTF was supposed to be a way to save against the Baby Bust being unable to pay for its parents, but where can you really save that kind of money? No bank can handle it; it would badly skew any stock market you tried to invest with. Effectively, they just dumped it into the general Treasury coffers, where it was all spent. The Boomers are starting to demand it back, and the burden falls right in the place the SSTF was supposed to avoid, their children.
The net effect was just to establish a highly regressive tax (since Social Security money is capped) that Reagan used to pay for a massive expansion of the US Government, doubling spending during his time in office. I used to think the SSTF was just a bad idea, but I'm increasingly coming to the conclusion that it was a deliberate attempt to screw over the poor and the Gen Xers.
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It may be that it's JUST him. No other contributors get that kind of preferred place, not even people who participate in the community. It's kind of galling to see his name pop up every couple of weeks, and everybody instantly knows that the comments are going to be primarily about just how bad the contribution is, simultaneously wordy and wrong.
Perhaps if Slashdot spread it around a bit more, it might aggravate less. Instead, it's one of a mere two dozen or so stories posted per day. Few of them will be really engaging, but here's one that we know for a fact will be "thought provoking" only in the sense that people will have to explain why his "novel" idea is novel because it's bad. Nobody else's novelties get that kind of pride of place, on a web site that used to be known for driving so much traffic it could crash a small server.
Exactly. The NSA was never supposed to be doing that. They took advantage of technological changes and played semantic games that justified all kinds of shenanigans that was at best barely within the letter of the law, and at worst completely subverted the oversight.
So, a new law was called for. Ideally, it would update the NSA's mission to the age of Internets and cell phones, and put in oversight to at least put an end to the previous excesses (though they'll surely find new ones).
Whether this law actually does that... hell, when was the last time we passed any kind of law about anything? If Harry Reid is for it, I'm sure the Republicans will filibuster it, and if somehow Harry Reid and Republicans are on the same side it would only be because the bill doesn't actually say anything at all.
Well... while there sure as hell is a problem of China's state-operated hacking, it's not going away any time soon. We're not going to war over it (either physically or economically) and any treaty we signed to deal with it wouldn't be worth the paper it's written on. While I'd love to see the Chinese at least commit to removing the line item in their budget that says, "30 gazillion yuan for breaking into American computers", they'd surely just rename it and the actual hackers would do no more than change the project number on their time cards.
So yeah, you have to harden your web sites, and start thinking about our protocols in ways designed to make it easy to recognize and divert hackers, because the hackers aren't going away. We can blame them all we like, and be right, but that and $2.99 will get you a tall latte.
Ha. Thanks. There was so much bad news from SCOTUS this year that I missed the bit with the EPA.
It still seems like a dicey thing for China to gamble on having the US fulfill its commitments. Unlike them, we're going to swap out our executive branch in two years, and there's a nearly 50-50 chance it'll be a member of the party of Ted Cruz and James Inhofe. Anything Obama does by executive action can be undone by executive action. That President would still have a hard time passing legislation, since 2016 will be voting out some of the Republican wave of 2010 just as 2014 voted out some of the Democratic wave of 2008, and even if they don't, the filibuster busts both ways.
Still, I don't know if China has any good reason to trust us on this.
I would have thought you could do it for less, since you don't have to haul the batteries around like you do in a car. Weight and volume are much smaller considerations. Any idea what it would cost for, say, a lead-acid battery?
And even at that, US$25,000 isn't all that much compared to the price of a house. The median home price in the US is $313k as of September (and that's down from $350k the previous month). It's not negligible, but it's small, and can be folded into the mortgage. It adds $70 a month to the mortgage payment (not counting the interest costs), and that's offsetting part of an electric bill that averages over $300/month.
(Speaking of which... sheesh. I pay less than $100 most months. I must be doing something right.)
This is very much a stopped-clock kind of "right". It's Congress doing nothing, by default, as per usual. Even if the bill were a good idea, there's no chance of it getting serious consideration. It's always in somebody's best interest to make sure something doesn't happen, and it's just not hard to find people to support you on that.
The only way to pass legislation now requires half the House PLUS 60% of the Senate PLUS the President, and then it has to find 56% of the Supreme Court to keep it from being overturned. Getting all of those at once is very rare.
So this isn't a sign of anybody getting anything right. It's just another instance of them failing to do anything at all. We just happen to be lucky that this one time, "do nothing" is the right answer.
Speaking of deals... how are we supposed to deliver on this? Even before last Tuesday, there was no chance of getting this through as a treaty past the Republican filibuster. Now there's less-than-no-chance, and even the most extreme overreach of executive powers can't impose that much reduction.
So how are we supposed to deliver on this deal? There's simply no concession that Obama could possibly make to Boehner and McConnell that would get the to sign off on this. What am I missing?
So... we underwent whatever expenses that cost, and we managed to get no concessions out of other countries for doing so. I suppose I should be glad that we're managing to do things out of the goodness of our hearts, but it might have been nice to use our signature to also get China and India to put in some effort to reducing their carbon consumption over the past decade.
Part of their excuse for not signing was because we didn't, and unlike us, they weren't going to be reducing their emissions out of the goodness of their hearts. They're both undergoing an industrial expansion, prompted in part by our outsourcing, which also effectively meant outsourcing our pollution. They weren't going to reduce their pollution unless we committed to as well. Otherwise, it would put them at a competitive disadvantage, and they're still trying to catch up to us.
I'm glad to hear that Tommy is finally reunited with is 1965 AMC Ambassador, which Ray so cruelly sent to the crusher (just because it had fungus growing out of the seats and it hadn't moved for years).
If ever there were a time for Slashdot to allow image links, this would have been it. Meantime, this link is for you.
Without meaning to sound like a jerk, the show wasn't quite as "natural" as they made it sound. The show was heavily edited by some extraordinarily talented crew, which is how the callers always sounded so articulate and they never had to cut people off for time. They selected the most effective calls; I believe that part of what they're doing now includes old calls that didn't get aired. They worked very hard to create an illusion of naturalness, kind of like the un-made-up look that requires so much makeup work.
That's not to detract from Tom and Ray, who were incredibly gifted both as radio personalities and as mechanics. I've never heard anybody with anywhere near their level of talent. They brought warmth and humanity that resonated with callers and brought out the best in them. The crew helped make it look as easy with a bit of slight-of-hand, but they couldn't have done it without their utterly amazing source material.
Yep. Effectively, it's a four-variable problem: x, y, z, and t. If you had a synchronized atomic clock with you, you might be able to do it with just three satellites, but that would be pretty bulky and delicate.
Larger than Columbus thought. The consensus among the experts, going back to Eratosthenes, was pretty much right on the money. Columbus was the only one who thought it was smaller (much smaller, by 2/3), which is why he was rejected by the Portuguese king. I don't know how he managed to convince the Spanish monarchs to fund his expedition, but if he hadn't gotten very lucky, he would indeed have killed his crew.
In this case, it might be the opposite: Blacksburg is the home of Virginia Tech, and between the students and the professors it's considerably more liberal than the deep red you'd see on a coarser-grained map of the area. It does give them access to a large pool of both liberals and conservatives, if they're seeking volunteers from off campus.
At the very least they'd be able to statistically adjust it against national demographics, though the study isn't very large. I'd think of it as an interesting bit of preliminary work, but it would have to be replicated very broadly before taking it seriously.
Because that's your actual actuarial risk including the middlemen's 50% cut.
One of the specific provisions of the ACA is to limit that cut to 20%. Companies have had to actually send rebates when they took in more than that.
Whether the middleman's value is worth even that much is a different question. It's not completely valueless: they negotiate the price with the hospital, and they're on your side in wanting to pay less. It would much much harder for you to do that yourself, since you're not an expert in the cost of care or on what anybody else paid. That's a benefit to some, and a cost to those more savvy negotiators. I can tell you that I'm not in the latter category.
I've always found it kind of odd that Republicans wanted to eliminate the latter, without eliminating the former, which is obviously more popular. It seems to me that Democrats at some point should have said, "Sure! Hey, everybody, you can stop paying for insurance."
I know that it wouldn't actually get that far, but it seems to me that they could at least have gotten the insurance companies mad at the Republicans for making "paying for insurance" the problem. It's the only unpopular provision in the law, but necessary.
What a difference 17 years make. Now there are a great many individual 12.9 gigabyte PowerPoint slide decks running around.
Thanks. No mod points today, but I appreciate somebody attempting to extract information from this rather than just apply quantum juju. #ifuckinghatesciencewriters
It depends on how you count the return. The US GDP is still going up. Perhaps it would be going up faster if we weren't jumping at our own shadows, but it doesn't appear to be bankrupting us.
We do a much better job at it ourselves. A graph of GDP shows only one visible hitch, the 2007 crisis. That had nothing to do with terrorism, unless you want to call the widespread fraud by the major investment banks "terrorism" (and I bet you could find some people to agree with you if you wanted to). It certainly wasn't Al Qaeda's fault; any hitch in the graph around September 2001 is lost in the noise.
Here's the problem; I *have* heard all of their arguments before. There's not going to be anything novel here. This is pretty well-trodden ground.
That's not a formal proof. It's an allocation of my time and resources. They can generate new conferences faster than you can refute them. "You can't dismiss me until you've heard MY version of this old argument, and you can't know that it's the same thing until you've heard it" gives them an infinite lease on my time.
So I'm not going to "hear them out". Somebody, I imagine, will, because an odd number of people seem to enjoy re-fighting this. And if they manage to derive an argument with a shred of merit, I suspect it will get back to me. If it takes a long time to do that, well, that's how it is with all ideas. Valid ideas stand the test of time; truth lends them durability because it can be independently re-discovered.
That means that I don't have to give them any time to consider their ideas. And for them to insist I do is dishonest. Any argument they might have to make has to begin with "OK, I understand why you consider the rest of my ideas idiotic, and your reasoning was sound," because it is. Until then it's just more deranged babble.
If I'm following the discussion (and thanks so much for this; I was hoping somebody would explain the concept), the value of goodwill depreciates over 15 years, yes? And you can deduct that as you would the depreciation of a physical asset.
Is that reasonable? On the one hand I could see it. If Coca Cola were to stop doing whatever it's doing to build up goodwill, the value of the brand would decrease over time. The number is arbitrary but that's just the consequence of trying to codify a tax system; buildings and machines don't break down on a fixed schedule either. It does "depreciate".
But on the other hand, it feels like it's an incentive to invest in intangibles rather than tangibles, which doesn't seem like it's as productive for the economy. I know that intangibles produce jobs; that basketball team is selling entertainment, and keeping people employed from the players to the peanut vendors. But entertainment dollars are fungible; how much of Coca-Cola's goodwill produces additional jobs via additional soda sales and how much of it is just devoted to putting dollars in their pockets rather than Pepsi's owners?
In the case of a general social networking tool, there kinda can be only one. People won't check every site every day, and the one they check most often will be the one with most of their friends. If you have "Ello friends" and "Facebook friends", odds are you'll visit one site much less, and your friends there will drift further away.
There's room for various niche sites, but they need a differentiator. I can imagine Ello wanting to be the social networking site for those who want privacy, but strikes me as being kind of counter to the point of social networking. People go to Facebook *because* it violates their privacy. It does so a bit more than most realize, perhaps, but really they only seem to notice the monetization of their lack of privacy, rather than the lack of privacy itself.
Yes, but they're not improving it, and the new Maps doesn't seem to be replacing the features of Classic Maps that I really liked. Any interface needs improvement, and while I like the older interface, its failures become more grating over time.
Other factors have kept inflation low for quite some time. The Treasury and Fed have been pumping money in at a rather alarming rate, and the inflation rate remains in the target range. Occasional spikes in oil prices notwithstanding, it's been under 2% for most of the last few years. (The September figure was 1.7%; the average for 2013 was 1.5%.)
I don't understand how we're currently having falling unemployment, low inflation, a record GDP, and a booming stock market. Some of that, of course, is dubious statistical measures, but they're the same measures we've always used (more or less). All that fiat currency should be producing huge amounts of consumption and inflation, and it isn't.
I've got a sneaking suspicion that we're looking at another crunch over the next few years as the Baby Boomers start to collect Social Security in earnest, though the first wave of it is already 67 years old. That has already caused us to to briefly deplete the Trust Fund a few years ago, and its growth has leveled off. That's gonna be bumpy.
He was the one who kicked off European colonization and exploitation of the place. Other Europeans who came made only a tenuous foothold. Columbus was the one who said, "There's a place over there, and it's worth living in and taking stuff." He's the reason Europeans in general came to know about it.
It's not entirely out of keeping with other uses of "discover". The OED's first definition is "To disclose, reveal, etc., to others". The fact that it's first is historical, rather than a matter of present usage; the present use "to find out" is also very old. But it also includes notions of "finding out for oneself", i.e. not necessarily being the very first.
All told the OED gives over a dozen different shades of meaning for "discover", and I don't think this one is entirely wrong. It can be misleading, since as you say there were already people there and other Europeans had lived there, but he was an important "first" whatever word one applies.
Still, the Trust Fund seems like a rather odd concept. It's a government promise to pay for... something it had already promised to pay, namely Social Security benefits. If the Trust Fund runs out, it's still on the hook to pay those benefits.
The program was intended to be pay-as-you-go. The SSTF was supposed to be a way to save against the Baby Bust being unable to pay for its parents, but where can you really save that kind of money? No bank can handle it; it would badly skew any stock market you tried to invest with. Effectively, they just dumped it into the general Treasury coffers, where it was all spent. The Boomers are starting to demand it back, and the burden falls right in the place the SSTF was supposed to avoid, their children.
The net effect was just to establish a highly regressive tax (since Social Security money is capped) that Reagan used to pay for a massive expansion of the US Government, doubling spending during his time in office. I used to think the SSTF was just a bad idea, but I'm increasingly coming to the conclusion that it was a deliberate attempt to screw over the poor and the Gen Xers.