It's fine to let the "basic" users do whatever they want in one click. But me, as a "power" user, I want the ability to go beyond that.
A common belief among geeks is that superior intelligence creates an entitlement... In fact, "power" users wouldn't have a problem with Apple's products, because if they were power users they'd create their own products. What complainers really want is the thing they often accuse Jobs of: they want to be able to take an existing product, an iPhone for instance, perform a few little tweaks around the edges and pass it off as their creation and ingenuity, when really all they did was put shiny rims on a great truck built by someone else.
Jamies-Mac:~ jamie$ telnet tempuri.org 80 Trying 207.46.197.32... Connected to tempuri.org. Escape character is '^]'. GET / HTTP/1.0
HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently Cache-Control: private Content-Length: 23 Content-Type: text/html Location: http://www.microsoft.com/ Server: Microsoft-IIS/7.0 Set-Cookie: ASPSESSIONIDSCRTQCBT=OOMFGMHCDGHHDMPJLACINBJP; path=/ P3P: CP='ALL IND DSP COR ADM CONo CUR CUSo IVAo IVDo PSA PSD TAI TELo OUR SAMo CNT COM INT NAV ONL PHY PRE PUR UNI' X-Powered-By: ASP.NET X-UA-Compatible: IE=EmulateIE7 Date: Sun, 30 Jan 2011 21:10:50 GMT Connection: close
<!--TOOLBAR_EXEMPT--> Connection closed by foreign host.
This particular placeholder seems highly vendor-dependent to me.
I suspect, given the source, the real target are people that don't go out to vote at all, but are of the cranky libertarian-pox-on-both-your-houses crowd, who if given the opportunity to vote for two people, would be happy to vote for their favorite libertarian/natural law type and a major-party type just in case their factional vote loses -- the thinking of the proposers is probably that most of the disaffected voters who don't show up at the poll right now are likely Republican second-choicers, and would probably never approve of a Democrat. Thus the system becomes, "Hey come one out, we'll be happy to let you vote for whoever you like! But just in case your man turns out to be a dud, let us know if you'd be okay with our guy too!"
Notice that this solution doesn't actually change the first-past-the-post dynamic, there's still only one winner after one trial. I suspect the people supporting this would take a much dimmer view of IRV, since there's a much wider set of 3rd party candidates to split rightist voters than leftist voters, and a Democrat is much likelier to be the number 1 or 2 choice on a crank leftists ballot, whereas on a crank rightists ballot he could have 3 or 4 crackpots ranked above the Republican.
Most Communists and Socialists nowadays are localists. Their attitude is that the real central authority in Washington is the one that allows the wealthy to avail themselves of state violence in order to protect property, and that private property cannot exist without constant and pervasive shows of police power -- which is true, and how you feel about communism and anarcho-syndicalism generally depends on how you feel about this.
The United States doesn't have a Liberal party, and most liberal parties in the world are libertarian and pro-business a the expense of Conservative parties, which generally support government welfare systems to benefit churches and cultural institutions, to benefit the moral and cultural character, and traditions, of the state, and Labor parties, which generally support government welfare as a government entitlement, to benefit Labor-with-a-big-L and drive up overall wages and living standards. Liberalism is the belief that both of these approaches are wrong-headed, and that the state should dedicate itself to securing individual liberty as a means of obtaining both higher living standards and higher moral culture. Both US political parties are "Liberal," they only disagree about which individual rights are more important.
I suspect what the GP is trying to say is that, compared to just about every other first world nation on Earth, the sort of policies advocated by US Democrats are basically the sort of thing you'd see from the CDU party in Germany, or the UMP in France, or the Conservative party in Britain. If you wanted to be called a libertarian-capitalist-Randian crackpot in any other country in the first world, all you'd have to do is advocate a privately-owned health insurance system with a purchase mandate, or for individual political subdivisions of your country to decide wether or not to honor particular kinds of marriages, or to decide if the possession of drugs was either a felony or not a crime at all. When it comes to the whole capitalism and decentralization issue, the US is simply far more radical and ideological than most other nation-states on the planet; that's just a fact.
Really? I mean, on a Mac you use Cocoa, all vendors use Cocoa -- they don't have to, some people rope STL into the fray, but that's because of language issues with legacy code. Why would you write a new one of these libraries, when half a dozen people have already written the same add-functions-to-C-to-bring-it-up-to-parity-with-Python libraries?
Just thumbing through these, this framework looks a lot like GObject... Why are there literally 5 or 6 different frameworks in Linux, each with their own container classes, marshaling, runloop, event handling, and string libraries again? It'd make sense if they were all for different languages, used vastly different semantics, etc. and then only barely, but these all have bindings for dozens of languages and all gab with the client in essentially the same way. It's weird.
Schwarzenegger did, it doesn't happen very often. The hazard with paying politicians a $1 is that if they aren't billionaires who could care less, or their income from outside government becomes disturbed, they can become highly receptive to bribery.
Admittedly I don't think we know enough about his case to say. I know that when I make 1099 income from rentals and royalties, and when I receive income for contract work, at the end of the year I have to pay self-employement tax on the income, which covers the SSI and Medicare that wasn't withheld, and both sides of it too. This cat probably structured the bulk of his income, the bit over $20k, in such a way that it wasn't liable to SEP like it's supposed to be -- instead of paying it to himself as 1099 or W2 income (or benefits like a jet), he probably structured his income distributions as dividends, which are liable to normal income tax when they pass to the individual but not FICA.
The whole point is that the profit distributions weren't profit, in the sense that they were revenues minus expenses, because he was using the fact that his time is his number one corporate expense to game his corporate profits up. If he had to pay an accountant an actual non-phony salary to do the work he did the excess profits he skimmed wouldn't exist.
The MPAA ratings board is a group of old "married" white women (supposedly parents with children living under roof, though most of them have no children in the house, and why is that the standard anyway?), so of of course tits are going to rate far higher than blood. I'm not being hyperbolic there either. It really is a bunch of old white women.
The MPAA rating isn't designed to protect children from content, it's designed to protect studios and theater owners from lawsuits and boycotts, and secondarily from state and federal regulation (btw, the first one has more historical precedent than the second and would be much more serious from a commercial standpoint -- it used to be in the 30s that studios might have to produce at least two cuts of a film for the United States, the one that the studio releases everywhere, and the one that releases in Jim Crow south.)
Children do not file lawsuits, lead boycotts or write letters to congress. Old busybody white women do (arguendo I accept your stereotype), thus they set the standard. Kids sneak into whatever film they want, studios game the edge, etc.
Recently this brushed up against Tom Hooper and his The King's Speech, which he was shocked got an R rating, when in every other film market on Earth (even and remarkably the government-rated ones) it was a family film with a G or PG equivalent. All for one seen where people swear, in a completely non-sexual context and for humorous effect.
You need a standard to define what's a valid and invalid file. Having only the source code would allow people (including Google) to create WebM encoders which are nominally compatible with the open source decoder but "extend" the format by inserting new data in a nonstandard way, which might then be available to only to the (perhaps paying) users of their platform. Thus fragmentation of WebM, perhaps eventually leading to a situation where only one company's reader and writer are useable in most practical circumstance.
In fee simple at common law, you can hold title to the property and thus benefit from its activity (by collecting rent or market appreciation), but the state reserves the right to collect taxes on the property, the right to appropriate it through eminent domain, the right to escheat it if it becomes ownerless, and the right to enter it to execute police functions. It's been this way for hundreds of years.
It should be sort of obvious, but "ownership" is an institution that only holds practical meaning in the presence of government to define what is ownable, the limits if ownability, and to protect the rights of owners with police force.
Well that's not fair, Socialism and Communism both entrain government authority and require the state to create and protect certain kinds of economic rights while denying others, just as Capitalism does. Their have been communes and colonies and other voluntary communist and socialist communities throughout modern history, but they generally always required the participants to grant the community's government plenary authority over their ability to form capital, ability to contract, and ability to resolve disputes over property.
While the Republicans have certain ideological commitments to "free market" (i.e. free for the incumbents) content creation and distribution, the Democrats just get too much in campaign contributions to let this sort of thing fall apart. You'd be better off pushing for public financing of elections, or organizing your friends into a cadre of nutty "patriots" who show up at town hall meetings with rifles and threaten "second amendment remedies" to the problems of media consolidation.
Of course, as long as the only people who care about media consolidation are the Clearasil posse, and pissy libertarians who refuse to vote for the major parties, expect no change on this front.
Something TFA doesn't talk about is how the engineers are organized -- surely there's a team that does memcache, a team that does database work (like those Cassandra guys), a team that does i18n, a team that does rendering, a team that specializes in Flash doodads, etc. It's hard to see how the engineers check each other without knowing where demarcations lie.
My issue wouldn't be with the quality of the code, it's how they decide what code to write in the first place. All of the Kaizen processes work great on an assembly line, but a feature request and a coworker evaluation aren't fender panels. They require someone in authority to tell you what you're trying to accomplish in the first place. The description of the way people decide what to add (basically shutting out the marketing people if they speak out too much) and how they discipline each other (too many blames in the SVN log and too many "public shamings" result in termination) speaks to a culture where new ideas and customer focus are almost stigmatized, and where the engineers don't try to evaluate each others ideas as much as they worry about getting voted off the island.
the culture of the company seems to be set so that *everyone* feels responsibility for the product
It's astonishing that they can keep such a process rolling with 500 engineers, let alone 200
product managers have a lot of independence and freedom. The key to being influential is to have really good relationships with engineering managers. Need to be technical enough not to suggest stupid ideas.
So basically, Facebook is run by an aggressive engineering culture based not on consensus or managerial decision making but by cliques and lobbying, where the worst thing someone can possibly do is suggest an idea that an engineer claims is "stupid" and doesn't give them opportunity for nerd glory. How much you want to bet that Zuckerberg sets the tone and decides that any modifications to the way the privacy settings are run is "stupid" and "boring."
If you put a back button on the phone, the developers are going to use it. iPhones don't have back buttons, thus you never notice one is missing because the devs accomplish the effect through different ways.
There's no reason that Google couldn't include rules like "No DRM" or "Upgrades must be allowed."
Except that it would make the platform really unattractive to networks and manufacturers, or at least as unattractive as the iOS platform. It's called the Open Handset Alliance, not the Open Handset User Alliance.
As much as you would think this would be the last word on the issue, this is not the end. Just after this news came out a friend of mine was was posting on Facebook that just because Wwakefield is discredited it doesn't mean that vaccinations are safe. -- he then put up a bunch of links to studies alleging things about Thimerosal etc and asked rhetorically "why don't you think you've ever heard of these studies?". The belief in the conspiracy has become self-confirming, and these people have since started websites, support groups, and they have elaborate FAQa and monographs to explain the "problem" to a new generation of parents.
My friend has four children, all with some form of autism -- even the girls. Many of the "leaders"of this movement are desperate, angry people who have suffered much at the hands of a little understood mental disease, and grasp at any shred of evidence to link autism to something in the environment, something the can control. I don't think well hear the last of anti-vaccination until autism's cured or becomes genetically screenable.
Entitlements are created by government. If you feel you're entitled to a benefit and you know you're going to live past 2040 (that's the trick!) call your congressman and tell them you want a commission to save Social Security, and not kill it or sell it to Wall Street.
You might want to leave the libertarian stuff at the door though. Demanding money from the trust fund, and demanding it's solvency past 2040, while demanding people should be able to exempt themselves is a bad negotiating position.
This is imbecilic. Do you have a contract with the SSA guaranteeing you money? What if you die before you vest? Most of the time that money doesn't go to someone else. What if you go blind at 20? you're going to receive gobs of SSA benefits you didn't pay for. You don't own "shares" in the trust funds; I'm sorry that you applied the sort of flaky logic most Americans apply to their credit card statement when trying to understand the Social Security benefit, but that looks like what you're doing.
The way it works now is the trust fund buys securities from the federal government. The federal government then spends the money made on the sale of the security. It owes the social security fund that money back, plus interest. Guess where that money is going to come from? Taxpayers. So they take your retirement money from you, invest it in themselves, then charge you later for getting your own money back through increased taxes to cover the cost of the interest they are charging on themselves.
Notice that the SSA buys its bonds on the open market at market rates. People around the world are willing to pay a premium for US debt because the market predicts that our economy will grow. US debt has rarely ever been cheaper, even with massive QE pumping into the banking system.
Besides, all of the SSA's actions happen in the open. You can go on the SSA's website and see all of the information on these transactions, the health of the fund and how long the fund has. There's no fraud here. If the SSA ever becomes insolvent and unable to pay full benefits, something that tsn't projected to happen until around 2038, it will be a completely public, foreseeable, and preventable. Unless of course people decide they don't want a trust fund anymore, and would rather hand all their money over to Goldman and their buddies to invest...
An "Annuity" is a form of insurance, subject to the various risks of insurance and cancellation if conditions aren't met.
Do you really think he wouldn't have been hung from a lamppost if he had tried to sell a 15% tax to go towards a risky investment with no ownership stake or entitlement to money back in the middle of the great depression?
That's what the law says. People were happy to pay it because it was a much better deal that anyone in the private market was offering, and the actuarial condition guaranteed the first generation a good return.
I'd feel a lot better about spending the half-a-fucking-billion dollars if I wasn't completely certain that the whole SSI system was going to be scrapped by some concern-trolling "deficit hawk"-types before I ever saw a check.
A Ponzi scheme is a form of fraud -- people are promised their money goes into X and makes a return but it really doesn't. Is this happening?
I agree with the brother poster that the crank theory that the SS Trust Fund is a "Ponzi scheme" come from people's misconception of it as a savings vehicle. It's not, it's much more like an insurance risk pool. People who pay into SSI have zero equity or ownership stake in the fund and are entitled to no money back. Who gets money out of the fund, and how much, is completely a regime decision and can be changed by law.
Slashdot Mirror
It's fine to let the "basic" users do whatever they want in one click. But me, as a "power" user, I want the ability to go beyond that.
A common belief among geeks is that superior intelligence creates an entitlement... In fact, "power" users wouldn't have a problem with Apple's products, because if they were power users they'd create their own products. What complainers really want is the thing they often accuse Jobs of: they want to be able to take an existing product, an iPhone for instance, perform a few little tweaks around the edges and pass it off as their creation and ingenuity, when really all they did was put shiny rims on a great truck built by someone else.
pthread_set/getspecific(3)? Isn't that just what __thread does under the hood?
This particular placeholder seems highly vendor-dependent to me.
I suspect, given the source, the real target are people that don't go out to vote at all, but are of the cranky libertarian-pox-on-both-your-houses crowd, who if given the opportunity to vote for two people, would be happy to vote for their favorite libertarian/natural law type and a major-party type just in case their factional vote loses -- the thinking of the proposers is probably that most of the disaffected voters who don't show up at the poll right now are likely Republican second-choicers, and would probably never approve of a Democrat. Thus the system becomes, "Hey come one out, we'll be happy to let you vote for whoever you like! But just in case your man turns out to be a dud, let us know if you'd be okay with our guy too!"
Notice that this solution doesn't actually change the first-past-the-post dynamic, there's still only one winner after one trial. I suspect the people supporting this would take a much dimmer view of IRV, since there's a much wider set of 3rd party candidates to split rightist voters than leftist voters, and a Democrat is much likelier to be the number 1 or 2 choice on a crank leftists ballot, whereas on a crank rightists ballot he could have 3 or 4 crackpots ranked above the Republican.
Most Communists and Socialists nowadays are localists. Their attitude is that the real central authority in Washington is the one that allows the wealthy to avail themselves of state violence in order to protect property, and that private property cannot exist without constant and pervasive shows of police power -- which is true, and how you feel about communism and anarcho-syndicalism generally depends on how you feel about this.
The United States doesn't have a Liberal party, and most liberal parties in the world are libertarian and pro-business a the expense of Conservative parties, which generally support government welfare systems to benefit churches and cultural institutions, to benefit the moral and cultural character, and traditions, of the state, and Labor parties, which generally support government welfare as a government entitlement, to benefit Labor-with-a-big-L and drive up overall wages and living standards. Liberalism is the belief that both of these approaches are wrong-headed, and that the state should dedicate itself to securing individual liberty as a means of obtaining both higher living standards and higher moral culture. Both US political parties are "Liberal," they only disagree about which individual rights are more important.
I suspect what the GP is trying to say is that, compared to just about every other first world nation on Earth, the sort of policies advocated by US Democrats are basically the sort of thing you'd see from the CDU party in Germany, or the UMP in France, or the Conservative party in Britain. If you wanted to be called a libertarian-capitalist-Randian crackpot in any other country in the first world, all you'd have to do is advocate a privately-owned health insurance system with a purchase mandate, or for individual political subdivisions of your country to decide wether or not to honor particular kinds of marriages, or to decide if the possession of drugs was either a felony or not a crime at all. When it comes to the whole capitalism and decentralization issue, the US is simply far more radical and ideological than most other nation-states on the planet; that's just a fact.
Really? I mean, on a Mac you use Cocoa, all vendors use Cocoa -- they don't have to, some people rope STL into the fray, but that's because of language issues with legacy code. Why would you write a new one of these libraries, when half a dozen people have already written the same add-functions-to-C-to-bring-it-up-to-parity-with-Python libraries?
Just thumbing through these, this framework looks a lot like GObject... Why are there literally 5 or 6 different frameworks in Linux, each with their own container classes, marshaling, runloop, event handling, and string libraries again? It'd make sense if they were all for different languages, used vastly different semantics, etc. and then only barely, but these all have bindings for dozens of languages and all gab with the client in essentially the same way. It's weird.
Schwarzenegger did, it doesn't happen very often. The hazard with paying politicians a $1 is that if they aren't billionaires who could care less, or their income from outside government becomes disturbed, they can become highly receptive to bribery.
Admittedly I don't think we know enough about his case to say. I know that when I make 1099 income from rentals and royalties, and when I receive income for contract work, at the end of the year I have to pay self-employement tax on the income, which covers the SSI and Medicare that wasn't withheld, and both sides of it too. This cat probably structured the bulk of his income, the bit over $20k, in such a way that it wasn't liable to SEP like it's supposed to be -- instead of paying it to himself as 1099 or W2 income (or benefits like a jet), he probably structured his income distributions as dividends, which are liable to normal income tax when they pass to the individual but not FICA.
The whole point is that the profit distributions weren't profit, in the sense that they were revenues minus expenses, because he was using the fact that his time is his number one corporate expense to game his corporate profits up. If he had to pay an accountant an actual non-phony salary to do the work he did the excess profits he skimmed wouldn't exist.
The MPAA rating isn't designed to protect children from content, it's designed to protect studios and theater owners from lawsuits and boycotts, and secondarily from state and federal regulation (btw, the first one has more historical precedent than the second and would be much more serious from a commercial standpoint -- it used to be in the 30s that studios might have to produce at least two cuts of a film for the United States, the one that the studio releases everywhere, and the one that releases in Jim Crow south.)
Children do not file lawsuits, lead boycotts or write letters to congress. Old busybody white women do (arguendo I accept your stereotype), thus they set the standard. Kids sneak into whatever film they want, studios game the edge, etc.
Recently this brushed up against Tom Hooper and his The King's Speech, which he was shocked got an R rating, when in every other film market on Earth (even and remarkably the government-rated ones) it was a family film with a G or PG equivalent. All for one seen where people swear, in a completely non-sexual context and for humorous effect.
You need a standard to define what's a valid and invalid file. Having only the source code would allow people (including Google) to create WebM encoders which are nominally compatible with the open source decoder but "extend" the format by inserting new data in a nonstandard way, which might then be available to only to the (perhaps paying) users of their platform. Thus fragmentation of WebM, perhaps eventually leading to a situation where only one company's reader and writer are useable in most practical circumstance.
It should be sort of obvious, but "ownership" is an institution that only holds practical meaning in the presence of government to define what is ownable, the limits if ownability, and to protect the rights of owners with police force.
"John" is the most common name in the US, thus the population not named John is negligible. :)
Well that's not fair, Socialism and Communism both entrain government authority and require the state to create and protect certain kinds of economic rights while denying others, just as Capitalism does. Their have been communes and colonies and other voluntary communist and socialist communities throughout modern history, but they generally always required the participants to grant the community's government plenary authority over their ability to form capital, ability to contract, and ability to resolve disputes over property.
While the Republicans have certain ideological commitments to "free market" (i.e. free for the incumbents) content creation and distribution, the Democrats just get too much in campaign contributions to let this sort of thing fall apart. You'd be better off pushing for public financing of elections, or organizing your friends into a cadre of nutty "patriots" who show up at town hall meetings with rifles and threaten "second amendment remedies" to the problems of media consolidation.
Of course, as long as the only people who care about media consolidation are the Clearasil posse, and pissy libertarians who refuse to vote for the major parties, expect no change on this front.
Something TFA doesn't talk about is how the engineers are organized -- surely there's a team that does memcache, a team that does database work (like those Cassandra guys), a team that does i18n, a team that does rendering, a team that specializes in Flash doodads, etc. It's hard to see how the engineers check each other without knowing where demarcations lie.
My issue wouldn't be with the quality of the code, it's how they decide what code to write in the first place. All of the Kaizen processes work great on an assembly line, but a feature request and a coworker evaluation aren't fender panels. They require someone in authority to tell you what you're trying to accomplish in the first place. The description of the way people decide what to add (basically shutting out the marketing people if they speak out too much) and how they discipline each other (too many blames in the SVN log and too many "public shamings" result in termination) speaks to a culture where new ideas and customer focus are almost stigmatized, and where the engineers don't try to evaluate each others ideas as much as they worry about getting voted off the island.
It's astonishing that they can keep such a process rolling with 500 engineers, let alone 200
So basically, Facebook is run by an aggressive engineering culture based not on consensus or managerial decision making but by cliques and lobbying, where the worst thing someone can possibly do is suggest an idea that an engineer claims is "stupid" and doesn't give them opportunity for nerd glory. How much you want to bet that Zuckerberg sets the tone and decides that any modifications to the way the privacy settings are run is "stupid" and "boring."
If you put a back button on the phone, the developers are going to use it. iPhones don't have back buttons, thus you never notice one is missing because the devs accomplish the effect through different ways.
Except that it would make the platform really unattractive to networks and manufacturers, or at least as unattractive as the iOS platform. It's called the Open Handset Alliance, not the Open Handset User Alliance.
As much as you would think this would be the last word on the issue, this is not the end. Just after this news came out a friend of mine was was posting on Facebook that just because Wwakefield is discredited it doesn't mean that vaccinations are safe. -- he then put up a bunch of links to studies alleging things about Thimerosal etc and asked rhetorically "why don't you think you've ever heard of these studies?". The belief in the conspiracy has become self-confirming, and these people have since started websites, support groups, and they have elaborate FAQa and monographs to explain the "problem" to a new generation of parents.
My friend has four children, all with some form of autism -- even the girls. Many of the "leaders"of this movement are desperate, angry people who have suffered much at the hands of a little understood mental disease, and grasp at any shred of evidence to link autism to something in the environment, something the can control. I don't think well hear the last of anti-vaccination until autism's cured or becomes genetically screenable.
Entitlements are created by government. If you feel you're entitled to a benefit and you know you're going to live past 2040 (that's the trick!) call your congressman and tell them you want a commission to save Social Security, and not kill it or sell it to Wall Street.
You might want to leave the libertarian stuff at the door though. Demanding money from the trust fund, and demanding it's solvency past 2040, while demanding people should be able to exempt themselves is a bad negotiating position.
This is imbecilic. Do you have a contract with the SSA guaranteeing you money? What if you die before you vest? Most of the time that money doesn't go to someone else. What if you go blind at 20? you're going to receive gobs of SSA benefits you didn't pay for. You don't own "shares" in the trust funds; I'm sorry that you applied the sort of flaky logic most Americans apply to their credit card statement when trying to understand the Social Security benefit, but that looks like what you're doing.
Notice that the SSA buys its bonds on the open market at market rates. People around the world are willing to pay a premium for US debt because the market predicts that our economy will grow. US debt has rarely ever been cheaper, even with massive QE pumping into the banking system.
Besides, all of the SSA's actions happen in the open. You can go on the SSA's website and see all of the information on these transactions, the health of the fund and how long the fund has. There's no fraud here. If the SSA ever becomes insolvent and unable to pay full benefits, something that tsn't projected to happen until around 2038, it will be a completely public, foreseeable, and preventable. Unless of course people decide they don't want a trust fund anymore, and would rather hand all their money over to Goldman and their buddies to invest...
An "Annuity" is a form of insurance, subject to the various risks of insurance and cancellation if conditions aren't met.
That's what the law says. People were happy to pay it because it was a much better deal that anyone in the private market was offering, and the actuarial condition guaranteed the first generation a good return.
I'd feel a lot better about spending the half-a-fucking-billion dollars if I wasn't completely certain that the whole SSI system was going to be scrapped by some concern-trolling "deficit hawk"-types before I ever saw a check.
A Ponzi scheme is a form of fraud -- people are promised their money goes into X and makes a return but it really doesn't. Is this happening?
I agree with the brother poster that the crank theory that the SS Trust Fund is a "Ponzi scheme" come from people's misconception of it as a savings vehicle. It's not, it's much more like an insurance risk pool. People who pay into SSI have zero equity or ownership stake in the fund and are entitled to no money back. Who gets money out of the fund, and how much, is completely a regime decision and can be changed by law.