I like them both a lot but the original is a classic I keep going back to. Maybe I'm just the right age for it.

I wanted to downvote your stupid ass but op asked for unpopular opinions. So fuck you here's an upvote.

My wife and I loved that.

I'm not trying to tell you "keep at it, it gets better", because it doesn't. It starts out awesome and stays that way, in my opinion.

But if you had watched more you'd see Mariner's persona is a front. She might be the most Starfleet motherfucker in the show.

That's because your instance defederated from hexbear and lemmygrad.

That's a tautological statement. We define words like sentient and sapient in terms of what we are.

Saying "this lifeform that we can't communicate with in any meaningful way (for these purposes) has emotional or cognitive experiences that we would recognize as meeting those definitions" isn't falsifiable and therefore isn't science.

If at some point someone invents a human to mollusk translator so we can discuss our experiences, this topic can be revisited.

Until then words like "may" and "possible" should be used.

I was trying to keep it short and simple by skipping a step but yes, the SSA follows a formula to raise the cap. But anything the executive does must be authorized by Congress, including the current formula which was set in a reauthorization bill back in the 80s (I think, maybe the 70s, apologies, but I'm not able to look it up right now). So far, every time a budget is passed and every few years when the SSA needs to be reauthorized, they've left them alone. Despite the occasional bill messing with the SSA getting introduced, they never get out of committee.

As far as the CBO goes I don't recall ever reading about cap increases in their report summaries on the trust fund. Although I have read their reports on the effect of various proposed changes to the way the cap is calculated. I'll have to do some more looking when I have the time, but I was definitely under the impression cap increases were in a category the CBO didn't anticipate future changes to when evaluating the health of the trust fund. I thought normally the COLAs would also fall into this category but that is overridden by them being mandatory spending, as opposed to discretionary, so they have to be taken into account. I'm certainly no expert and wouldn't be surprised to find out I missed something.

Reposting from another thread:

Social security has been 10-15 years away from being insolvent for 80 years. It will always be 10-15 years away from being insolvent because of the way it's calculated.

When the CBO or whoever scores it they can predict certain things like the number of recipients, the size of their payments, and inflation. They aren't allowed to take into account things that Congress may (but definitely will) do in the future, like raising the cap on social security taxes roughly with inflation. It went up from $160200 in 2023 to $168600 in 2024. This is a rare bipartisan, uncontroversial thing. Congress almost always follows the SSA recommendation exactly.

It would be more accurate to say "if the social security cap stays at $168600 for 10 years, social security will be insolvent."

The people pushing this bullshit know it's bullshit. They do it to make people think they'll never get social security so they can get enough voters on board with killing it, like they've been trying to do for 88 years.

Don't fall for it.

Google says (I know) total wealth in the US is 135T.

2% of the total (almost half of millennial's 4.6% share) would be 2.7T.

2% of millennial's 4.6% would be 124.2B. (Google says he has 111.6B)

Unless you think the robot has 2.7T, it's 2% of millennial's wealth, not 2% of the total.

Still fucking insane of course.

Reference your questions about relative percentages of the population etc., I had a whole big ass post with references but I lost it. I'm not doing all that again so I'll just give the main takeaways from memory and the history in my calculator so unfortunately my source is trust me bro.

Two caveats: I'm using median ages of the cohorts, average could charge things (edit: see correction at end). Percentages are of total population including children (who generally have no wealth), not working age plus retired population.

In 1990 the median boomer was 35, they represented 30.6% of the population and had 21.5% of the wealth.

In 2022 the median millennial was 33.5, they represented 21.7% of the population and had 5.6% of the wealth.

So boomers had 1.4x the share of the population but 3.8x the share of the wealth.

Boomers in 1990 did have 1.5 more years to earn, save, and grow their wealth than millennials in 2022(maybe more or less if you use average age), but I don't see how that alone makes the difference. For whatever combination of reasons, boomers had a much larger share of the wealth, relative to their population share, in their mid thirties than millennials do.

Correction: 35 and 33.5 aren't median ages, that's just the age of the middle of the cohort. The point about using average (or even the real median) age for an apples-to-apples comparison stands, I just misused the word median.

Damn you for reminding me about him. I'm going to be mad for like an hour now.