It strikes me that Large Language Models (LLMs) are a great interface between people and necessary complexity. This past summer I spent a week at the Chautauqua Institute. It’s a 149 year old summer long festival that features lectures, sports, and religious practices, and I only learned of its existence because my wife was invited to give one of the morning keynote lectures this year.
I gotta take issue with the premise here, that means-testing the poor is a necessary evil. In fact it's an inevitable dumpster fire in at least half a dozen different ways, _by design._
It's far more efficient and effective to simply deliver universal benefits and tax them back very progessively from top income recipients. Because _we already means-test the rich._ It all gets sorted out on your tax return every year.
The straightforward approach of Social Security, ACA health-insurance premiums, etc. are a direct result of that simple universality. And most recently the Child Tax Credit. (Infuriating that the Dems didn't pick up/adopt Romney's version which was hands-down the best one out there...)
The idea that we should fix effed-up programs by throwing cool (and insanely abstruse) tech at them, rather than...fixing the goddam programs, seems pretty starry-eyed to me.
Means-test the rich, not the poor. (Oh! We already do!)
I gotta take issue with the premise here, that means-testing the poor is a necessary evil. In fact it's an inevitable dumpster fire in at least half a dozen different ways, _by design._
An AI "solution" whose inner workings are incomprehensible to even the most tech-savvy of humans is not a well-recommended fix. (Think: Air France flight 447: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/business/2014/10/air-france-flight-447-crash)
It's far more efficient and effective to simply deliver universal benefits and tax them back very progessively from top income recipients. Because _we already means-test the rich._ It all gets sorted out on your tax return every year.
The straightforward approach of Social Security, ACA health-insurance premiums, etc. are a direct result of that simple universality. And most recently the Child Tax Credit. (Infuriating that the Dems didn't pick up/adopt Romney's version which was hands-down the best one out there...)
The idea that we should fix effed-up programs by throwing cool (and insanely abstruse) tech at them, rather than...fixing the goddam programs, seems pretty starry-eyed to me.
Means-test the rich, not the poor. (Oh! We already do!)
What an uplifting framework! From your public thinking to a generation of policymakers, please.