There doesn't really seem to be anything of substance in the actual executive order.
Section 1 doesn't say anything
Section 2 seems to boil down to: "improve cyber security and maybe use AI if we can find funding for it"
Section 3 proposes building a benchmark for evaluating cyber security performance of models that developers can choose to benchmark against. This seems like a good idea, I know Jack Clark has been a huge advocate for government's getting in with benchmarking.
Section 4 says to prioritize prosecuting cyber crimes. Not sure why they wouldn't already be prosecuted.
> Section 4 says to prioritize prosecuting cyber crimes. Not sure why they wouldn't already be prosecuted.
Not a whole lot of federal prosecutors. They're very selective about what gets pursued or not.
If they can't reliably build cases with a >90% success rate, it doesn't get prioritized. There's like <500 (federal) convictions per year on this whole area.
We hear about a few big famous ones in the news here, but most of it goes completely unenforced.
Not to mention quitting in droves because very many don't want to take these cases or otherwise to stand in court and explain why current admin is not bound by existing laws, court orders, the US constitution in general, or internationally recognized human rights etc.
If a federal prosecutor doesn't want to prosecute federal crimes, it's probably best for both themselves and their country if they find themselves a new job.
Out of curiosity, did you willfully choose to not understand the circumstances that prosecutors are being forced to carry hundreds of cases, too many to even read before they are in court, and then they are forced to stand in front of judges and face contempt while they are asked to explain why the government, who the prosecutor has no real control over, is violating yet another judicial order?
It isn’t just a matter of prosecutors picking and choosing…it’s underfunding, DOGE, and then those that are left are treated as adversarial the moment they complain about conditions or case loads. (Just like your comment does.)
It is only when judgement is rendered that it becomes a federal crime. Until then it is only alleged. And guess what: this administration is alleging a lot of things that fail.
Ah hahah yea. Not too much need about hackers being prosecuted going around. Lot more news about hackers breaching companies though. Closure rate of law enforcement & prosecutors vs hackers has gotta be way under 1% lol.
I’ve read lots of executive orders and it’s pretty standard. They don’t have much power. They are mostly just mandates and guidance for federal agencies, most of which is non binding, like a glorified mission statement. They just get sold as something bigger in the press.
Most voters don’t understand how the US government works, so EOs seem to be a way to pretend that the executive can pass laws. A way to make good on the campaign promises that require laws to be passed, which is usually all of them.
There is no actual regulation in EO 14319. It only covers federal government purchasing and vendor management. No one is required to change the "ideology" of an LLM, although they might not be able to sell it to the government.
That's not accurate. The EO explicitly lays out the implementation
> Sec. 4. Implementation. (a) Within 120 days of the date of this order, the Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), in consultation with the Administrator for Federal Procurement Policy, the Administrator of General Services, and the Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, shall issue guidance to agencies to implement section 3 of this order.
A major LLM that did not submit to this would be labeled a "supply chain risk". It's unquestionable that every major LLM would go through this process
It even then goes on to say that existing contracts will be reviewed to ensure they are in compliance (reviewed by OMB)
> (b) Each agency head shall, to the maximum extent consistent with applicable law:
> (i) include in each Federal contract for an LLM entered into following the date of the OMB guidance issued under subsection (a) of this section terms requiring that the procured LLM comply with the Unbiased AI Principles and providing that decommissioning costs shall be charged to the vendor in the event of termination by the agency for the vendor’s noncompliance with the contract following a reasonable period to cure;
> (ii) to the extent practicable and consistent with contract terms, revise existing contracts for LLMs to include the terms specified in subsection (b)(i) of this section; and
> (iii) within 90 days of the OMB guidance issued under subsection (a) of this section, adopt procedures to ensure that LLMs procured by the agency comply with the Unbiased AI Principles.
You seem to be trying to win a technical argument while ignoring the practical implications of the order. But even technically I think you are wrong. Just because it's not passed by Congress doesn't mean it's not "regulation". OMB Memorandum M-26-04[0] is absolutely regulation and was created exactly because of this order.
Other agencies like the NIST (lookup NIST AI Risk Management Framework), the NAIAC (which was created in 2020) are the ones like in charge of:
> Agencies’ development of metrics, methods, and standards to test and measure AI, where such metrics, methods, and standards are for use by the general public or the Government as a whole, rather than to test AI for a particular agency application
Not technically but practically. The decrees are effectively considered law by the executive. Yes, you'll likely win in court later on, but you'll lose your job, get sent to prison, have your bank accounts and vehicle seized, etc., in the meantime.
Legality isn't really of much practical concern anymore. It's about what gets/can be enforced immediately.
What a weird comment. How many private business managers have ever been sent to prison for violating an EO? This particular EO doesn't even mention any criminal penalties.
Does the First Amendment actually let the US government dictate the types of speech you're allowed to put in your LLM? I mean, a US government that's bound by the Constitution, obviously.
While that issue hasn't been specifically tested in court yet, the current interpretation of the First Amendment probably wouldn't allow the US government to dictate the types of speech you're allowed to put in your LLM. But federal government purchasing decisions aren't generally bound by the First Amendment. In other words, government officials can generally refuse to purchase your LLM services if they don't like the speech it outputs. So there's no real constitutional concern with this EO.
I'm not claiming that this EO is sensible or enforceable, just that it's not prima facie unconstitutional.
Might be fair to say it’s setting the tone, though, that if you use “woke” (subjectively defined) ideology in any of your company’s marketing, documentation, or other communications you won’t be considered for government contracts. That’s a major blow for any company given the naked corruption and grift coming from the current admin.
It's not "setting the tone" it says that explicitly and even goes into detail into the implementation of how that is going to be enforced
> Implementation. (a) Within 120 days of the date of this order, the Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), in consultation with the Administrator for Federal Procurement Policy, the Administrator of General Services, and the Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, shall issue guidance to agencies to implement section 3 of this order.
They even say they will review existing contracts
> (ii) to the extent practicable and consistent with contract terms, revise existing contracts for LLMs to include the terms specified in subsection (b)(i) of this section; and
> (iii) within 90 days of the OMB guidance issued under subsection (a) of this section, adopt procedures to ensure that LLMs procured by the agency comply with the Unbiased AI Principles.
The specific text reads like a favor to Elon Musk's xAI, since "Truth-seeking" is the buzzword Elon Musk frequently used to talk about Grok:
Sec. 3
Unbiased AI Principles.
It is the policy of the United States to promote the innovation and use of trustworthy AI. To advance that policy, agency heads shall, consistent with applicable law and in consideration
of guidance issued pursuant to section 4 of this order, procure only those LLMs developed in accordance with the following two principles (Unbiased AI Principles):
(a) Truth-seeking. LLMs shall be truthful in responding to user prompts seeking factual information or analysis. LLMs shall prioritize historical accuracy, scientific inquiry, and objectivity, and shall acknowledge uncertainty where reliable information is incomplete or contradictory.
(b) Ideological Neutrality. LLMs shall be neutral, nonpartisan tools that do not manipulate responses in favor of ideological dogmas such as DEI. Developers shall not intentionally encode partisan or ideological judgments into an LLM's outputs unless those judgments are prompted by or otherwise readily accessible to the end user.
> No one is required to change the "ideology" of an LLM, although they might not be able to sell it to the government.
It takes hundreds of millions of dollars to train a model. If a large customers, the government, says they won't buy it if it doesn't adhere to a set of standards, no one is "required" to change, but it's a pretty heavy hand on the lever. It's like having a job. No one is "required" to have a job, but having one gets you money, and having money is pretty important to modern life.
So what? No business has a legal right to sell their products to the government. The LLM vendors should probably find cheaper, more efficient ways to train their models rather than depending on government contracts. If your business lives or dies based on a single large customer then you don't have a viable business in the first place.
Are we looking at the same data? On that site I see that opus 4.7's and gpt 5.5's g scores are within each others confidence intervals, and both significantly ahead of the number 3 model.
Your comment makes it sound like they are miles apart, which the benchmark doesn't seem to support.
Edit:
I looked at the data more and the two models are only basically equal when looking at the mean of all the tests. Gpt 5.5 significantly outperforms opus 4.7 in coding, while opus 4.7 significantly outperforms in "decision making." I'm not seeing details on what decision making explicitly means.
Decision making refers to the environments where the LLM is called on every tick (like games with social communication), examples here: https://gertlabs.com/spectate.
Because GPT 5.5 just launched and those games take longer to accumulate data for, it just doesn't have enough samples yet. It will end up with a wider lead on Opus, I am sure. Coding evals always have large sample sizes on day 1. Good find, we should probably better adjust the weighting here for decision games with low match counts.
Right, I'm including my own observations in what the leaderboard is showing. Could be confirmation bias, but I use both Opus and GPT extensively and since GPT 5.4 I have noticed that Opus doesn't even begin to touch GPT's level of technical depth. I was hoping Opus 4.7 would close that gap, but unfortunately it doesn't even compare to GPT 5.4 in that sense.
I'm not being a hater, I love Opus for different reasons, but I can't rely on it for its technical ability.
If you take a chart of population density, and overlay the chart of suicide rate, you'll see an exceedingly strong correlation. It does not follow weather patterns. Utah has 3x the problem relative to California, for example.
Yeah if you go to CDC WISQARS you can do fatal injury reports filtered by intent (suicide) and aggregated by urban/non urban geography. These differences are not small, they vary by factors or orders of magnitude in every state. It's not the weather.
I had a similar experience recently, where I logged in to Facebook after not using it for years and was shocked by how much garbage was there. My spouse does use Facebook somewhat regularly so I looked at her feed and it was much more reasonable.
I wonder if for those of us that haven't used Facebook in years the recommendation algorithm is essentially default. Which much like the default youtube algorithm, is completely garbage. But if we did use it (which I have no intention of doing), it would start being more reasonable.
I would assume inactive accounts get "sold" to the algorithm's lowest bidders. If you're not generating new information, there's nothing to scrape or sell. You must be pretty locked down outside of Facebook as well (you've actually toggled privacy settings, ever).
I logged in to instagram after like 5 years and my whole feed is literally just thots and AI generated content, even though I follow a crapload of accounts.
I did "not interested" & "This post makes me uncomfortable" for a solid month and now have a reliable feed of comedians, tacos, golden retrievers, classic jazz drummers, etc. The algorithm thought I turned Mexican and gave me exclusively Spanish content for a month but I just kind of went along with it.
I found that "not interested" didn't work for me, that I had to explicitly state what I was interested in and only then did my suggestions become relevant. It will at times revert to slop and then I have to go through the process all over again.
Not just thots but thots with inevitable links to their OnlyFans pages. It seems that FB and Instagram's primary purpose has become funneling people into OnlyFans. I wonder if Zucc has caught on to this and is at least getting some revenue share from OF.
He has testified to congress that IG/meta does not promote sexual content, which is nuts, because anyone who’s spent 5 mins on the platform knows this absolutely not the case
In my experience it’s mostly sexual adjacent content with just enough plausible deniability that you could say it’s a comedic sketch or something. They’re not funny, and the punchline is usually tits, but it has the cosmetic structure of a joke.
Agreed.
I'm over 50, so I'm 'allowed' to use FB ;-),
for those few posts of the last remaining family and friends there.
Using FBP, I only see new posts of friends in chronological order.
But FB still f*cks you, because it does not show all updates of everyone.
When the algo decides you've had enough, you simply reach the 'end' of your feed.
Well when FB, sessions keep getting shorter and shorter...
There are some EU laws in the making that might change things, though.
Not sure why people are downvoting this, it's absolutely true. I watch a lot of youtube on my TV and I can tell in milliseconds if it's logged me out and I'm seeing the default feed. It's fully insane and inane.
It only takes me a few seconds of scrolling in a private window to hit an AI-generated cat head on pregnant human woman barfing rainbows on the floor: 63M views. Really makes you believe in the dead internet theory, just that they're all in their own little slop algorithm world. Or maybe it's ipad babies after all.
Now and then it gets things right, but I find a lot of YT recs to be pretty dubious, and find it is trying to bias me in this direction or that direction. It's pretty pathetic.
The search function is also useless. About the only Scottish history content I ever get rec'd is Scotland History Tours. While I like his channel, it is not the only show in town and it doesn't go very deep.
When I got my last YT account I could see it was trying to access which news I should see. It was trying to link me to one American party or the other. I just clicked "not interested" into most of the partisan bait content. Not my circus, not my clowns.
Interesting. I have a very different experience with YouTube, to the point I consider it my favorite social network thingy. My search history and subscriptions are carefully curated, and I mostly get "more of the same", with pretty good recommendations for stuff that usually interests me. Also, zero "thirsty" stuff.
Logged out, YouTube suggests me endless videos about MMA fighting or trash for children. I only use the YouTube app for commenting. I use Brave to avoid constant adverts.
I do notice though that YouTube is always trying to bias me in one direction or another. I have a friend whose feed is full of Trumpbait and stuff about how Putin is about to die and the Ukraine war is about to end. (Sounds fine except these videos have been saying that for four or five years.) Whatever one things about these things, the videos he gets are very propagandistic and have ridiculous AI thumbnails and titles. Usually of Putin or Trump scowling at something. He also gets suggested a lot of food videos (okay, I suppose) and often ones about Nazis and WW2 (a bit fetishistic, but to be fair he did history at university).
My non-political YouTube suggestions tend to be about popular music from decades ago. I emphasise "about". I notice the algo more rarely suggests actual music itself. I suspect this is because YT has to pay out money for music but not videos about it. I get some local history stuff (which is interesting but usually not about areas I know well). I very rarely get suggested much in the way of Scottish, Irish or Welsh content, in spite of viewing a lot of it. Never anything about what's happening with Scottish politics (always from a London perspective) or the parliament here.
I still log in fairly regularly and get a bunch of reasonably targeted content, but also a ton of ragebait ai shit like protestors attacking cops. So it’s a bit of both, they’re just flooded with bad ai posts. It’s changed drastically in the past year, from a bunch of posts you could argue make sense, to mostly posts of rage. But the number of actual friends posts is basically zero
Every social media algorithm is like this now. Accidentally viewing certain types of videos are like dropping a nuclear bomb in your carefully nursed algorithm.
> But if we did use it (which I have no intention of doing), it would start being more reasonable.
It would start being more "relevant" but not necessarily more reasonable.
I hadn't used Facebook regularly in many years but recently posted a story about the passing of my 18 year old cat. I did this as a way of informing friends and family I don't communicate with on a constant basis that I was going through a bad time (I was very fond of my cat).
My Facebook algorithm is now just almost entirely a solid wall of people I don't know announcing the death of their cat. A non-stop parade of personal tragedies.
I can see the connection of how one thing led to the other but it also highlights how clumsy and soulless these algorithmic systems are.
I think it just throws the most engaging content at you hoping you get lured into using it more then the algo will update once it sees how you behave.
For me, it's almost all thirst traps for several years. More recently it learned that I like 90s/00s rock, which is a fad again, so it started showing me some of that. Also, I am a sucker for stand up comedy clips and it feeds me that now. So that was a hint that it does start to become more reasonable. But, if I start to scroll it only goes 3-5 posts deep before thirst gets put back in the rotation no matter what I do.
I've been using it more than ever in the last ~2 years, just because my old friends started sending me videos to the music related stuff so I click it and it opens in FB. We chat on messenger and I guess that little DM airplane logo is how they found a way to get me into it on occasion. Granted, my friends send me like 5-10 videos a day and I only watch them about once a month to get caught up, I can tell it's trying really hard to make a DAU out of me.
Yeah, this makes sense. It does sort of imply that new users would just see a bunch of garbage, which you'd think isn't ideal. On the other hand, how many new users could possibly still be signing up for Facebook? So maybe it's not a problem as they just manage the decline.
It's nonsensical rage/click baiting garbage. You are the product, not the user.
Anybody who hasn't used FB in a long time almost certainly has 100s if not 1000s of posts from friends and family that they missed. Instead of this garbage it should be "Hey, we haven't seen you in awhile! Here's all the fun and important stuff you missed out on."
That might actually get me to engage with the platform because that would be putting my needs first and foremost. But that's not what FB does and not what FB ever did. Zuck never had our best interests in mind, so why would it put our interests first?
It does make me wonder if that system is a net positive or a net negative. For me, I go, see suggested stuff which is all trash, and never want to engage with FB ever again. I stay only because of friends but only check once a week or so. Where as, if they got rid of all suggested stuff and instead it was 100% friends and family and every 5 posts, an ad. I'd engage with it far more often.
My facebook page, which is where I have friended everyone I met between like 2004 and 2017 is absolute garbage.
But I have a secondary account where I follow a few specific niche groups on a specific topic that are only on facebook. This page is actually fine, and is pretty good at suggesting related pages.
Not sure what the takeaway is for facebook though.
Same here, I use it once every year or so. I get AI slop when I log in that is mostly like this blog post.
My wife, who uses it maybe once or twice a month, does not AI slop, she showed me her feed. Nor does my friend who uses it daily. It's definitely based on usage or lack of usage.
From seeing the feeds of a few categories of people near me (some using it semi-professionally, some just personally, some like me that avoid it unless strictly necessary)... it really does seem to be all of them. Absolute garbage is a majority, and they all complain about missing things they actually care about (though to be fair this has been true ever since it left colleges).
Facebook is truly awful to everyone. I can't believe people don't try harder to leave.
I wonder this too about X: when I sundowned my Twitter account when I started seeing 80% "no question literal nazi-posting" by bluechecks on my feed, I unfollowed everyone and kept the account just to prevent someone posting on what was my username for over a decade.
So now that I follow no one, when I click a link from Reddit or HN to X, my "For You" page is:
- Asian pornography; AI generated "vibes" videos of machines doing "oddly satisfying" things; Elon Musk; American right-wing politicians and pundits screaming about "woke" or jerking off ICE videos; AI or real public sex outdoors at festivals?
Of course, I don't use X, and don't seek this stuff out, and only see it there.
Will it not get all bunched up near the poles though? and maybe have seam where the ends of the tiles meet?
edit: Perlin noise and similar noise functions can be sampled in 3d which sorta fixes the issues i mention , and higher dimensions but i am not sure how that would be used.
Yes, you can use a 3d Perlin noise field and sample it on the surface of the sphere, to get seamless texture without any anomalies at the poles or projection distortion. That applies to any 3d shape, not just spheres -- it's like carving a solid block of marble. And use 4d Perlin noise to animate it!
It's easy to add any number of dimensions to Perlin noise to control any other parameters (like generating rocks or plants, or modulating biomes and properties like moisture across the surface of the planet, etc).
Each dimension has its own scale, rotation, and intensity (a transform into texture space), and for any dimension you typically combine multiple harmonics and amplitudes of Perlin noise to generate textures with different scales of detail.
The art is picking and tuning those scales and intensities -- you'd want grass density to vary faster than moisture, but larger moist regions to have more grass, dry regions are grassless, etc.
I've thought about this before, and I think there is some way you could find to do it. For example, you could generate on the mercator projection of the world, and then un-project. But the mercator distorts horizontal length approaching the poles. I think it would be complex to implement, but you could use larger windows closer to the poles to negate this.
You're still going to run into problems with mercator because under mercator the poles project to infinity, so you'd need an infinitely large texture or you special-case the poles. Many renderers do this so it is viable!
There isn't a zero tradeoff 2D solution, it's all just variations on the "squaring the circle" problem. An octahedral projection would be a lot better as there are no singularities and no infinities, but you still have non linear distortion. Real-time rendering with such a height map would still be a challenge as an octahedral projection relies on texture sampler wrapping modes, however for any real world dataset you can't make a hardware texture big enough (even virtual) to sample from. You'd have to do software texture sampling.
I worked on something very similar for my master's degree.
The problem I could never solve was the speed, and from reading the paper it doesn't seem like they managed to solve that either.
In the end, for my work, and I expect for this work, it is only usable for pre generated terrains and in that case you are up against very mature ecosystems with a lot of tooling to manipulate and control terrain generation.
It'll be interesting to see of the authors follow up this paper with research into even stronger ability to condition and control terrain outputs.
I came here to say this. My masters was on procedural generation. Perlin, fBm, etc. The things these noise functions have that an LLM doesn’t is speed. 1-D perlin is just a dozen or so multiplications with a couple random coefficients. The GPU can do 4-D Perlin all day long every frame taking up a 4096x4096x32 texture volume.
While I do like the erosion effects and all, having a few height texture brushes that have those features that you can multiply on the GPU is trivial. I still welcome these new approaches but like you said, it’s best for pre generation.
My masters was also on procedural generation. Now I wonder how many of us are out there.
At any rate, given that this paper divides the terrain in regions and apparently seeds each region deterministically, it looks like one could implement a look-ahead that spawns the generation on async compute in Vulkan and lets it cook as the camera flies about.
I think it's catnip for programmers, myself included. (See also: boids, path traced renderers, fluid simulations, old fashioned "generative"/plotter art, etc. - stuff with cool visual output)
Boids, Game of Life, Genetic Algorithms, Pixel Shaders...
All so satisfying to play with.
One of my favorites was when I was sure I was right about the Monty Hall problem, so I decided to write a simulator, and my fingers typed the code... and then my brain had to read it, and realize I was wrong. It was hilarious. I knew how to code the solution better than I could reason about it. I didn't even need to run the program.
Which is what a sane terrain system would do. Just beyond the far plane you would load/gen the tile/chunk and as you got closer, increase the resolution/tessalation/etc. (or you start with high and each level away you skip vertices with a wider index march for a lower lod).
In any case, like I said, I welcome any new advances in this area. Overhang being the biggest issue with procedural gen quad terrain. Voxel doesn’t have that issue but then suffers from lack of fine detail.
There are still some features that a miss from Google photos. There isn't any way (that I know of) to auto add pictures to an album based on the face. I used to have dedicated albums for family members, and it was nice to have the auto updated.
Face recognition in general just isn't as good as Google Photos.
It's still an amazing piece of software and I'd never go back, but it isn't perfect yet.
Are we using the same Google Photos? I've found Immich face recognition and context/object search to be miles better than Google Photos. In particular, Google Photos is exceptionally bad at distinguishing non-European looking faces (though it's not great in general), and it completely gave up on updating / scanning new photos in 2024 after I imported party photos with a lot of different people.
Almost all my Google Photos "people" are mix-and-matched similar looking faces, so it's borderline useless. Immich isn't perfect, but it gives me the control to rerun face recognition and reassign faces when I want, even on my ancient GTX 1060.
My google photos doesn't even seem to support facial recognition, maybe I turned it off somehow at some point, but it doesn't seem like google photos supports manually selecting a face (a face that isn't detected), which is something I use a ton with Immich, it is very convenient, even if a bit tedious if going through a backlog.
Annoyingly you can't create a person that way yet with immich, but that's where digikam helps.
Immich manages to detect my kids faces much better than expected. I only have two years, but it is spot on with kid #1 from newborn to 2yo, and it manages to not mix up the new baby photos of #2 with the baby photos of #1.
In my 44k photos there are zero statues face detected, the only flukes are a few photos from a restaurant with a celebrity picture wall.
Diffusion LMs do seem to be able to get more out of the same data. In a world where we are already training transformer based LLMs on all text available, diffusion LMs ability to continue learning on a fixed set of data may be able to outperform transformers
Also, not all of the admin overhead would disappear if we got rid of means testing. I don't have the expertise to come up with a specific number, but I'd wager that getting half the admin costs back would be the absolute best case. I still support simplifying means testing for benefits programs, but not because it's going to magically free up a consequential amount of money.
> Also, not all of the admin overhead would disappear if we got rid of means testing.
Exactly. The same conversation happens with discussion about eliminating private health insurance: Other countries with nationalized health care still have their own overhead. It's less than the overhead of a private healthcare system, but not by as much as everyone assumes. You could completely eliminate the overhead of private health insurance in the United States and it would only change the situation by a couple percent, though most people assume it would be much, much more.
Precisely, people on the left wildly overestimate the admin overhead while people on the right wildly overestimate the fraud.
In the end, we have a gradually increasing idea of what the "basics" are which we should provide the poor / the elderly / everyone, and a decreasing working-to-retired ratio.
That is - the spend side is increasing faster than the income side. Europe is about 10 years ahead of us on this problem, but we are catching up fast.
I think the other problem with UBI, besides the fact that we can't afford it .. is that its probably actually bad for society.
Many problems come from an increasing lack of purpose in society. Getting paid to do nothing will not solve that for probably 99% of the population. Lots of idle time for lots of bored people is like pouring gasoline on a fire.
UBI isn’t “getting paid to do nothing”, it is “removing rapid clawback from means-tested welfare so that there isn’t a significant range in the working poor to middle income range where additional outside income as reduced impact because it is offset by welfare clawbacks.”
Mechanically the other problem would seem to be, if you listen to someone like Gary Stevenson, that it only works if you ratchet up taxes on the top end.
Otherwise broad flat cash distribution from the government generally causes inflation and all the money ends up workings its way up to the wealthier. So if you do not tax it back, it actually ends up being regressive.
The mechanism is something like - the poorer you are, the higher % of your income, by necessity goes to spending on basic needs. You have a zero or negative savings rate. The richer you are, the opposite. You have savings you put into income producing assets (stocks which are fractional ownership in companies, real estate, etc).
So if everyone gets $25k/year, the bottom end will spend it all on goods & services (food, clothing, rent) that are owned/produced by the wealthy. And it compounds as the wealthier then are able to buy more and more income producing assets from the middle class.
> Mechanically the other problem would seem to be, if you listen to someone like Gary Stevenson, that it only works if you ratchet up taxes on the top end.
That’s not what I'd call a problem (its part of most concrete UBI proposals), but, yes, whether you look at it through a classic fiscal lens or a macroeconomic impact lens, you have to raise taxes concurrently if the UBI is significantly greater in aggregate payments than the means tested welfare it replaced (which it must be to maintain the same base benefit level, and many proposals would increase the base benefit level), and any sensible implementation will do it progressively starting somewhwere above the middle of the income distribution.
Its actually simpler on both an initial and, even moreso, ongoing basis to eliminate multiple means tested programs and replace them with a single UBI with clawback through progressive taxes than to adjust the numbers in all of them in a way which has the same effect and then administer that on an ongoing basis througn the separate bureaucracy attached to each program. (Especially since the UBI itself, as well as the clawback, can be built into the tax system simply by “adjusting the numbers” in that system. Which is why “negative income tax” is a name under which a policy identical to UBI+tax financing has been proposed.
Negative income tax is probably a more straightforward to implement this.
Explaining to middle class people that they are going to get $20K UBI but their taxes are going up $18K isn't going to go well.
Remember whenever you setup a "good" government program thats dependent on 1-2 other "bad" government programs in unison (UBI + progressive tax increases) then the risk is future admins remove the medicine but keep the candy. Then the whole thing becomes unaffordable and the good program gets wound down.
Or you end up with crazy stuff like the UK triple lock pensions.
Two mitigations would be gradual adjustments, and a willingness to delay reductions a bit.
People shouldn't be sweating bullets about help being pulled prematurely as a direct result of trying to get past the need for it. Or have the marginal impact of increasing their earned income actually reduce total help+income.
I know somebody in an extremely bad health situation, and dealing with both of those perverse issues. Attempting employment would carry a lot risk. And with kids to be cared for, playing roulette in an already challenging situation is a real barrier. (In this case, it isn't government help, but a situation with similar logic.)
A large number for sure, and completely agree likely too much.
However that's against a projected total spend of $6 trillion in 2027, so 13% accounting for all profit for every level in the medical system (insurers, providers, pharma, medical equipment, etc) .
If you were to wipe that to 0, maybe medical costs go down 13% in US. I don't think US is seen as obscenely expensive and bad value (outcomes per spend) because of a 13% difference.
For example per capita medical spending is 2.3x higher in US than UK, so wiping out all profit will bring us to.. about 2x UK costs.
It's a deeper structural problem of utilization (lifestyles, behavioral), high labor costs (AMA cartel), incentives (pay for treatment not outcomes), etc.
Section 1 doesn't say anything
Section 2 seems to boil down to: "improve cyber security and maybe use AI if we can find funding for it"
Section 3 proposes building a benchmark for evaluating cyber security performance of models that developers can choose to benchmark against. This seems like a good idea, I know Jack Clark has been a huge advocate for government's getting in with benchmarking.
Section 4 says to prioritize prosecuting cyber crimes. Not sure why they wouldn't already be prosecuted.
Section 5 doesn't say anything
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