Economists often say that the national debt isn't analogous to consumer debt, because the US has a number of means to address it that the average consumer does not have, including the ability to print money.
And while that's true ... perhaps we as citizens and taxpayers would be better off ignoring that technicality and treating this debt as more like consumer debt.
Eventually, it's going to come back to bite us or our children, and we need to be willing to make some hard choices now to avoid having to make even harder choices later.
I used to think that way, but now I don't believe that the debt ever needs to be repaid by anyone's children. The public sector debt is basically just a record of net private sector liquid assets, and repaying it would amount to the private sector losing all of its liquidity, or having to replace it with private debt instead. That's basically what happened throughout the roaring '20s preceding the Great Depression, and I don't think it really ends up being a good move.
Yes, it's independent of the absolute level of debt. A 500 trillion dollar debt means the private sector is proportionately awash in 500 trillion of liquid assets. This will be reflected in a proportionately high (dollar-denominated) GDP, tax revenue, and consumer price level (absent any big changes in population or productivity).
Of course, to get from 40 trillion to 500 trillion would mean that prices are basically 12x higher, which would mean a lot of inflation will have happened in the meantime. So it would be very bad if the government debt increased by that much in the timespan of one year, because it would basically mean hyperinflation over that span of time. But if that same growth in the debt happened over 400 years, it would be no big deal.
So the relative rate of growth of the government debt certainly matters, because that influences inflation, which is the thing that actually causes problems. Not the size of the debt itself. That is, if G is outstanding government debt, then the figure that matters for inflation is approximately (1/G) dG/dt. But not the absolute level of the government debt G itself.
This also means that compounding interest doesn't really affect the calculation. As the debt grows larger, and the interest payments grow larger, directly in proportion to the size of the debt, and therefore the economy as a whole -- they don't outgrow it. Assuming a steady and reasonable interest rate, at least. If the interest rate were super high or growing without bound, then yes, that would be a problem for the government debt. But that would be a pretty weird thing to happen and wouldn't happen just because the debt figure itself hit some large value, but probably instead because of a currency crisis (eg. the country owes debts to other countries in currencies it does not control).
I'm trying to think of a good way to put this. A person can run out of water and die of thirst, but when you zoom out to bigger and bigger scales, the Earth itself doesn't run out of water; it just goes around in a cycle. Economists have a saying that "one man's expenses are another man's income". For a single household, that doesn't really feel true; the rest of the economy is so big that expenses bascially just disappear from your bank account, and you don't notice any of the money that leaves your pocket when you hire a plumber come back to you, even though some tiny amount actually does when that plumber buys food from your restaurant. So we individuals also can have the experience of debts growing big enough to bankrupt us as the interest payments exceed our income. But governments live on the same scale of economies as a whole, and for them, the recirculation of the money they spend really can't be removed from the analysis.
It comes directly from the math of double entry bookkeeping.
In my analogy, individual people do need to take care to ensure they don't run out of water. But you don't need to worry that if it rains a lot this year, there won't be any rain left for your children.
I don't see such a clear benefit to eliminating the debt, actually I see a lot of downsides that would likely be worse for our children. The way I understand it, the primary concern is whether the debt is growing faster than the economy can support and whether we're using it for productive purposes or not. A government isn't like a household: treasury debt also functions as a safe asset, a tool of monetary policy, and a store of value for pensions, banks, and investors around the world, a majority of the debt is also a domestic asset. Trying to eliminate the debt would likely mean austerity and major tax increases, which can be more damaging the debt itself.
I don't think people realize that a large share of the government's debt is also a domestic asset. It is still something to be wary of and manage carefully but it is not something that I think is wise to eliminate either. The main concern should be making sure it is being used productively and is not exceeding what the growth of the economy can support (which happens when its used unproductively).
not just eventually. Its coming back to bite you now and for the last 10 years and the next 10 years. if you sell a house (and you're past the 500K exemption), or any kind of equities or gold, you're going to be a world of pain. Most of the "capital gains" aren't gains at all, it's just devaluation of the dollar. Let's say dollar devaluation is roughly 7% per year, that means you're paying 2% to 2.5% of your houses value every year in "capital gains" tax. sure, you don't pay it until you sell, but rest assured, it's accumulating. so 2M house means 40K to 50K per year! and if you think i'm overstating the 7%, just look at the case shiller housing index for the last 10 to 15 years!
and if you're holding cash or bonds, you're even worse off. even if the dollar is devaluing at just 7% per year, that's a 50% loss in just 10 years and that compounds to 75% loss after 20 years.
This would not be a good idea. Government "debt" expands the money supply, and if government spending gets us infrastructure and social services.
The only big issue here is the interest, which we force ourselves to pay by requiring the issuing of bonds in the first place, and is a big transfer of tax payer money to the large bond-holders.
At some point it becomes better option just to take the money you get paid back and instead of loaning it out again buy something... Anything else really... And then it gets worse.
It's something that the US could uniquely do without going into hyperinflation due to it's status as a reserve currency.
That all, of course, changes if other countries decide they've had enough of our shit and switch over to different reserve currencies like BRICS. And, of course, printing currency to get out of debt is something that would make countries consider dumping the dollar as a reserve currency.
> You type in what you are looking for, "linen shirt under $80" or "running shoes for wet trails", and it searches across every UCP-connected merchant in real time.
I expect scaling problems to crop up very quickly.
It will be a scaling problem for the search engine: How do you query every merchant in real time when the number of merchants increases by 10X?
And for the merchants: How do you handle the increased load when the number of queries increases by 10X or 100X?
At some point, the merchant is going to look at their logs and wonder why 99% of the search queries they're receiving are for products that aren't even in their retail category.
> Think of it as what RSS did for blogs, but for buying things.
RSS was a nice standard for subscribing to feeds, but it and this UCP standard have fundamentally different access patterns.
With RSS, you basically accessed your feeds like you accessed your webpages.
But with UCP, the pitch is real-time search across an unlimited number of sites, with no indexing. If that approach were scalable, Google would have already done it.
UPDATE: After reading through https://ucp.dev it looks like Google and Shopify have co-developed the protocol. So I suspect that either there's some Google magic happening under the hood, or the "searches across every UCP-connected merchant in real time" claim in the blog post is not accurately describing the underlying architecture.
Wait, the main takeaway from this article is that cybersecurity sales teams now have great leads?
Facepalm.
The real takeaway should be that at every level -- government, corporate, healthcare entities, personal -- we need to rethink how we're acting in the face of these disasters.
Government should recognize that its current regulations are insufficient and look for ways to refine them.
Corporations and health-care entities should be asking themselves, "Do I really need to store this data? If so, how do I store it securely, make my systems less vulnerable to attack, make my personnel more informed about phishing, store it for the minimum amount of time, etc."
And we as individuals should be asking ourselves whether so many health-care entities need to store so much data about us.
This wouldn’t have solved the largest one, Change Healthcare. They are an insurance claims exchange. They have to have all of this data.
The breach was social engineering of a customer support rep.
Having worked with them, they’re absolutely necessary for healthcare (in its current form; don’t get me started) to function. The alternative is integrating with hundreds of payers (won’t happen) or doing it by fax/mail (disaster).
I would say that if it is possible to exfiltrate 193 M sensitive records through a social engineering attack on one customer support rep, then there are multiple failure points that they and other businesses need to address:
- better security training for employees
- don't store 193 M sensitive records in such a way that one social-engineering attack gives you access to all of them
- don't store 193 M sensitive records without appropriate encryption, and make it hard to steal both the records and the decryption mechanism.
Let's not forget that cybersecurity companies may also be directly involved into hacking government institutions. Case in point - the Bulgarian TAD Group cybersec firm that allegedly hacked the National Revenue Agency in 2019.
> It is still unclear what prompted the hack. The prosecution claims that TAD Group tried to blackmail several companies to hire its services, inducing them with hacked information from their websites. However, no company has publicly complained yet. [0]
> Government should recognize that its current regulations are insufficient and look for ways to refine them.
The shear hostility by many people on here to data protection law (hello GDPR) suggests you are going to have a hard time getting such laws passed in the USA.
John Bryant, aka The Civil Rights Lawyer, recently did a piece about a similar case of mistaken identity. The consequences weren't as severe, but the willingness to trust the AI over any other evidence was the same:
In the video, it shows a police officer blindly trusting a casino's AI software, even when a cursory investigation should have given any reasonable person enough of a reason to question whether the man he arrested was the same man accused of a crime. (And then even after it was confirmed he was not, the prosecutor continued to charge him for trespassing!)
First time around, luck mostly. Happened to get hired by a company that switched to this schedule. I eventually left for higher pay (but gave up my Fridays). Eventually got laid off, and a friend who was still there managed to get me a spot back on her team. By that time, they'd embraced remote work during Covid and decided to keep it permanently.
Granted, I could probably be making way more if I were to leave - I took a pay cut when I went back the second time. But at this point in my career, I value the 4/10 and lower stress job (no on-call rotation) more.
I think it's partly tongue in cheek, because when "big data" was over hyped, everyone claimed they were working with big data, or tried to sell expensive solutions for working with big data, and some reasonable minds spoke up and pointed out that a standard laptop could process more "big data" than people thought.
The default TTS voice (Piper) is a lightweight model optimized for speed over quality. It's fast but yeah, it doesn't sound great.
If you install Kokoro TTS (rcli models > TTS section), the voice quality is dramatically better, it's a neural TTS model with 28 different voices. MetalRT synthesizes Kokoro at 178ms for short responses, so you don't pay a speed penalty for the upgrade.
We should probably make Kokoro the default or atleast make the upgrade path more obvious in the first-run experience. Fair feedback.
The consequence is that any company that does business with the U.S. military, and potentially any company that does business with the government in general, must stop using Anthropic's products for that work.
Anthropic has vowed to fight this designation in court.
Without weighing in on the constitutionality or legality of the move, I think it's obvious that this kind of retaliation power is unmatched by any private business that has a contractual dispute.
If a private business doesn't like Anthropic's terms, it can walk away from the deal, but it can't conduct coordinated retaliation with other companies before ending up in antitrust territory or potentially violating the Sherman Act.
Now for my editorializing: The fact that Pete Hegseth is willing to apply this type of designation against a U.S. company simply because he doesn't like its terms is pretty chilling. It's all the more scary once you consider which terms he objects to.
FedRAMP and FedRAMP adjacent revenue is non-negotiable for vast swathes of businesses. The designation of "supply chain risk" is viral in nature because no GRC team will dare take such a risk within their supply chain because most customers add BOM requirements in contracts so this will end up falling under those already.
There's a lot of backchanneling going on between Emil and Dario because everyone's in the same circles but it's all for naught.
The DoD has been rather consistent that they will decide what to do with a product sold to them, not some random vendor. There is nothing extra to "price in".
The "extra" is that the government is now attempting to unilaterally renegotiate contracts, and if the contractor disagrees, not only do they terminate the agreement but they restrict how other companies can work with you.
The issue is the onus is on the contractor to prove that Anthropic technology has not tainted US government contracted projects - this is a herculean task verging on impossible. Additionally, most contracts will mandate SLAs around removing BOM risks.
If you were a contractor to DoD (no way I'm calling them DoW) would you take the risk of doing business with a company that has been labeled a supply chain risk by your main customer?
I’d like a lawyer to give some input. If you have a company that deals with the military does this chain down to not being allowed to use Claude or not?
IANAL and this is my understanding of the situation (I can be completely wrong) but yes, any company that deals with military cant use Claude (anthropic)
In fact adding onto it, IIRC this is the reason why google and amazon have to divest essentially from Anthropic if they want Govt. contracts
Hope this helps though a lawyer's input will definitely be more credible. So its good for them to respond as well.
I can be wrong but I looked up online and there are sources which say the same, so I am curious to know more about it.
> Former Trump Al advisor Dean Ball has warned that the White House's decision to designate Anthropic a "supply chain risk" could blow back on some of the biggest names in tech-including Google, Amazon, and Microsoft-all of whom have billions of dollars riding on the Al startup. Ball, reacting to Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth's order barring any military contractor or supplier from doing business with Anthropic, said the move amounts to "attempted corporate murder."
> He added that if Hegseth gets his way, Google, Amazon, and Nvidia would effectively have to divest from Anthropic-a company they've collectively poured billions into.[0]
> Amazon alone has committed up to $8 billion in Anthropic. Google has invested around $2 billion. And Microsoft, while not a direct investor, relies on Anthropic's models through its Azure cloud platform. A forced divestiture or business cutoff from any of these companies would send shockwaves through the AI investment landscape at a time when hundreds of billions are flowing into the sector.
Honestly, I don't see it. Are you gonna stay at home with yubikey plugged in? On your couch, in your bed, etc.? It's a matter of months, if not weeks, before you break it? And also need to remember to remove, because otherwise what's the point?
Used to own Yubikey before fingerprint scanners were a thing. I don't see the appeal now, to be honest. I considered it now that I use Asahi on my M1 with no support for TouchID, but still just type in the password because I couldn't be bothered with Yubikey.
You're missing that the Yubikey Nano exists. You just leave it in the port. You don't need to remove it - you have to physically touch it to activate it in the same way that you'd have to touch the Touch ID sensor.
Same way? That thing isn't biometric, how is this protecting me in the same way? That's just ridiculous. Yubikey Nano is a "thing you have", TouchID is a "thing you are".
Well, okay, you can select two specific words to fuel your apparent outrage if you'd like, but if you actually read the entire sentence, you'll see that there is some critical context that you're missing: "you have to physically touch it to activate it in the same way that you'd have to touch the Touch ID sensor."
I did not claim that it was the same security scheme or that it's biometric or anything like that. I did claim that you have to physically touch it to activate it.
Edit to add:
re 'Yubikey Nano is a "thing you have", TouchID is a "thing you are".', I would argue that your finger is in fact a thing you have. The loss of a finger might change a little of who you are depending on the circumstances that led to you losing said finger, but these both fall into "thing you have" territory for me. I don't think it's wise to consider Touch ID much more than that, personally.
What the other person is trying to explain to you is that your Yubikey solution fails the following scenario: you leave your laptop at school.
With TouchID, nobody can unlock it. With a Yubikey in the USB-C port, anyone could unlock it.
That's why macOS Yubikey login integration requires you to type in a PIN on the lock screen. At which point it's no different from typing in a password.
Dude, "thing you have" and "thing you are" are things that are already defined in context of authorization and MFA. You can't "argue" that just because it fits your narrative.
I'm a big fan of an economic philosophy known as distributism, popularized by G.K. Chesterton and Hillaire Belloc more than a century ago.
It basically says that the economy works best when ownership of productive property is as diffuse as possible -- when a high percentage of the population has some ownership, and it's not concentrated in the hands of a relatively few wealthy shareholders (in the case of capitalism) or the government (in the case of communism/socialism).
Under distributist principles, I would say that we should pursue economic policies that allow the ownership of productive AI to be widespread, whether that's in the form of cooperatives, employee ownership, or other means of giving the average person access to that ownership. (I acknowledge that it's currently possible to invest in publicly traded AI companies, but would prefer to see other ownership opportunities as well.)
Are you not familiar with the many ways in which distributism is already practiced and has been practiced during the past two centuries?
Every federal credit union in the U.S., every worker's cooperative or consumer cooperative -- including biggies like Mondragon in Spain and The Cooperative in U.K. -- is organized in the way that distributism advocates.
There is nothing stopping us from electing lawmakers who recognize that society becomes healthier when the ownership of productive property is not concentrated, and who advocate for economic policies that promote more diffuse ownership.
At a surface level, an important difference between "distributism" and the supposed examples you provide is that those examples are each (correct me if I'm wrong) consensual, but it's not clear whether this "distributism" would be consensual. It smells like force would be required to keep people in line.
Capitalism enables the boundless concentration of wealth and power in individuals. I reject the premise that seeking to become a billionaire is a natural behavior, instrinsic to the human experience.
I won't pretend to know what should replace capitalism, but I am sure we can do better.
And while that's true ... perhaps we as citizens and taxpayers would be better off ignoring that technicality and treating this debt as more like consumer debt.
Eventually, it's going to come back to bite us or our children, and we need to be willing to make some hard choices now to avoid having to make even harder choices later.
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