It implies the money is destroyed by taxation. In reality that money would go towards relieving the governments need to collect other tax revenues. So for example you could increase the standard deduction. Now everyone pays less tax and can either contribute more to their 401k (boosting stock values) or buying more things (boosting stock values). If you want to say the government is incompetent and will waste the money, that doesn't apply here because it applies to every tax, not specifically this one.

The IRS doesn't have the authority to mandate the creation of a secure national ID system and enforce it's use by the financial system. Only congress has the ability to really do that. The IRS collects revenue.

Even if it did have that authority, it doesn't have the budget to accomplish that goal.

We could effectively geoengineer one by pumping things into the upper atmosphere ourselves, but there's a lot of questions about that and we have no idea if this would help more than it hurt.

I'm not saying ML is useless, far from it, but this is reminding me a lot of Eric Yuan (the CEO of Zoom) talking about AI clones in meetings: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dKmAg4S2KeE

It's weird. In the late 2010s it seems like people were wising up to the idea that you can't implicitly trust big tech companies, even if they have nap pods in the office and have their first day employees wear funny hats. Then ChatGPT lands and everyone is back to fully trusting these companies when they say they are mere months from turning the world upside down with their AI, which they say every month for the last 12-24 months.

Citation Needed.

It is probably the first time a country has democratically chosen to trade sanction itself for no benefit.

Getting better at identifying and shutting down these chop shops is a good idea obviously, but that's also hard. On the other hand, forcing companies who didn't give a shit about security for years to pay for retrofitting the shitty cars they put out is actually a lot easier.

Even though I'd firmly disagree with it, I'd much rather read an article that says "yeah, he was a war criminal, but war crimes are okay when America does them because America good." Instead you get this washed out nothingness where we as a society can't reflect on anything.

It Reminds me of the scene in the Big Short where they're trying to convince the reporter to run the story on the obvious pump And dump, and the guys like "hey I've got a family to feed."

It's 100% about this. I know several people who were forced back to work after being able to do their entire job at full productivity remotely for years, and they were happier and saving money. They were just as able to "brainstorm" with people. It's all about control and justifying office space cost.