That's not exactly true, to pick some examples Bernie quitting the race in 2020 used his connections with biden and got a lot of things into a unity party platform, and I've seen it argued that AOC and the green new deal pushed the overton window for the infrastructure recovery act, and while it definitely wasn't everything they hoped for, it did include elements, including a massive investment in clean energy.
See I know something of what actually wanting to fix the government's waste fraud and abuse would look like. It would be beefing up the IRS (where every dollar more than pays for itself), it would be banning people in congress from buying individual stocks; it would be a lot of things that deeply nerdy policy wonks have been saying for years.
That's not what I'm seeing happen. I'm not seeing cost benefit analysis, I'm not seeing the use of existing experts.
What I am seeing... well perhaps we'd have different perspectives. To pick an example, look Musk saying that people who are over 200 years old are marked as alive.
If you assume the worst of Elon Musk, you might think he's an idiot who doesn't understand how COBOL represents dates in the SSA system, nor how large government databases deal with missing data.
I've worked, not for the SSA, but with public health data. Real people and historical records and old databases are messy as fuck.
The SSA neither throw out data, nor do they add data they haven't received, except when there is funding appropriated for it.
So these old people are simply actually people they never got death info on.
Could they just add a date? Well you have to consider the data integrity issues around date of death. If you pick a nonsensical date, can you assume that the SSA, department of commerce, and other orgs, not to mention the internal SSA progroms that rely on processing SSA data can handle it? Nope, an engineer can't assume that, there's an implicit API.
But the fact is, this has been looked at. Per this 2023 audit the SSA estimated it would cost 5.5 to 9.7 million to mark people as deceased in the database when they don't have death date information. They didn't do that, probably because no money was appropriated for it.
Does that mean there's massive SSA fraud of dead people? Nope. back in 2015 they decided to automatically stop giving benefits to anyone over 115. The oldest living American is, in fact, Naomi Whitehead, who is 114.
In other word, Musk is acting like saving the government 5.5 million minimum is a "HUGE problem".
Now, I don't think Elon Musk is an idiot who doesn't understand COBOL or how messy data can be from real people. I also don't think he thinks that 200 year old benefits fraud is really an issue.
Which begs the question, why bring this up at all?
My interpretation is perhaps less charitable than yours, but I'd be interested in hearing what you think.
More eligible voters didn't vote for any candidate then for Trump or Harris.
Trump won a slim majority of the people who did choose to vote, but it's hardly an endorsement by a majority of Americans, much less the American people as a whole.
My concerns about the future are based on what President Trump did in 2017 with the NIH budget (attempting to cut it 22%)¹ thus preventing important scientific research funding, as well as removal of covid-19 health statistics from the CDC in 2020² in the middle of a major pandemic.
Unfortunately, given that he is now holding the highest office in the US, it's a well known fact that Donald Trump lies constantly both when in office³ and when campaigning⁴, and I lack all faith in his administration's supposed transparency.
Pretty sure a bunch of statistics that might be used to argue against Republican talking points are going to disappear or not be updated. Maybe they won't even get to be collected. It's a lot easier to lie if you prevent scientists and health care professionals from undercutting you with inconvenient truths.
As someone who has worked in public health and epidemiology, this kind of open ended restriction is extremely concerning.
Also appears to undercut the whole free speech thing that President Trump supposedly supports, and that the constitution provides for in the first amendment.
That's almost exactly the split they made actually, with things like feats and flight still species based, but statu bonuses and backgrounds (with maybe some small exceptions) not being species based.
They did some work to balance it, but really species have never been the biggest balance issue, it's always been class stuff, or magical vs. martial issues, or the fact that ranger is thematically cool if you like LOTR, but sucks mechanically compared to other classes.
The entire premise of insurance is that people get care for their medical issues. Mental health issues are medical issues; just because they manifest in terms of behavioral and thinking changes doesn't make them any less so.
Mental Health coverage does cover therapy, and therapy of various sorts is effective to treat or ameliorate a number of mental health issues, but it also covers psychiatric medication.
Also mental health coverage covers people's kids and dependents, not just them, your focus on the policy holder is a little narrow, I think.
Buying Positive or Negative Reviews: The final rule prohibits businesses from providing compensation or other incentives conditioned on the writing of consumer reviews expressing a particular sentiment, either positive or negative. It clarifies that the conditional nature of the offer of compensation or incentive may be expressly or implicitly conveyed.
private equity does seem to be kinda crap at running stuff, even screwing up with successful brands. It's not a surprise that hospitals and smaller businesses also get screwed up.
Like Toys'R'Us, Sears, Gymboree, Payless, Claire's, Radioshack, Sports Authority, Brookstone, all of them filed for bankruptcy, some closed for good. Now maybe they would have anyway, but it's hard to say.
But I guess they get money out of them. If you pile on debt and pay yourself, and then the company goes bankrupt, well you got paid, that's what matters to PE investors, right?
Hey, just going to say what I've been telling folks IRL, if you are reading this, and your parents and family members aren't tech savvy, you need to set them up with two factor authentication now.
Because you know how to do that, and it's so much easier than helping them when they get hacked.
Probably because of the high number of civilian deaths in a much shorter period.
Adults are harder to split out into civilians vs combatants, so sticking with just kids, by the beginning of March, four months into the Israel Hamas conflict, there were about 12.5k children dead in Gaza and Israel (a few dozen Israeli children on October 7th, the rest are Palestinian casualties of war).
In Ukraine 15 months into the war only 1.5k children had been killed, (all Ukrainian).
Add to that that the US government is continuing to directly arm and support the Israeli government, whose attacks are killing those Palestinian kids.
It's pretty well established that greater lead exposure leads to increased risk of cognitive decline.
I'm not saying that's all of it, but it seems like it could be as much of a factor as anything.