The law could be whatever we wanted it to be.

Your example scenarios are hardly compelling reasons that we should just accept the status quo.

We don't need to allow companies to have no liability in accepting automated electronic claims of anything from anyone in the interest of making more ad revenue faster.

It's been much more reliable to just have Codex rewrite all the prose at the end of a Claude task than to keep futzing with my prompts/memory/agents.md (On certain issues I can't get Codex to be as thorough on the actual implementation, c'est la vie.)

That presentation does support their claim that both parties need to get back to basics on that matter.

Though now that I'm a bit more invested, looking at deficit delta by year for each of those tells a bit more.

Bush's went up then started to fall until 2008. Obama inherited that mess and he+his Congress spent to get out of it then made it shrink continually until a bump back up in 2016. Trump increased the deficit every single year (and enormously so in 2020, another disaster response incident). It shrank back under Biden in 2021 and 2022 then ticked back up, Trumps' now got it trending back up again after a tiny decrease in 2025.

The thing that changes with that view is that Trump appears to be the big outlier here, who's never really managed to bring it down at all or even try. And there's a fun macro-trend of both of those Democrats only getting elected into shits-on-fire circumstances. Clinton didn't have the problem, maybe that's why he did better.

"I think we even agree that one party will outspend the other."

I'd rephrase it to out-deficit the other because you could spend more AND bring in more revenue and improve the situation. If we do that, then yes, that's certainly my hunch, but I didn't pull any numbers. Maybe the covid-era timing of Trump-vs-Biden plays out wildly different, maybe some of the Obama-era stuff cost more than I'm recalling. Seems necessary to know to know if it's one party is MUCH better than the other or just one party is a bit better than the other.

>You're ignoring my entire point that running a deficit is the problem and both parties are guilty of doing it and both parties continue to push for even more spending on policies they happen to agree with.

My reason for asking for the data is that the best action to take depends on the magnitudes. If one party is dramatically better than the other then the most practical way of fixing your problem is likely to be do everything you can to get that party more power AND work to shift it into the positive vs try to burn both parties down.

But it's also disingenuous to claim that none of today's approaches would show up as high income. A lot of old money would be protected still, a lot of new-money would be hit.

Isn't it telling that there was so much massive development of American industry in the post-WWII era and yet there weren't any Musks or Bezos or Gates? A country that had minted tycoons like Getty and Rockefeller and Carnegie stopped for a while. A guy like Howard Hughes was involved in several areas of development but didn't touch the guys who came before him or after him overall...

So if one guy figures out some rhetorical tricks to convince an entire generation that ACTUALLY tax cuts will INCREASE revenue and HELP the deficit... while meanwhile massively increasing it under his administration... that guy still has responsibility for it decades later. (Throw in the hollywood greed-is-good-everyone-screw-over-your-neighbor-and-do-cocaine enthusiastic adoption of the era for good measure.)

But how can you conclude that if you don't have those numbers to give me?

Switching gears to externalities seems like a bit of a dodge unless you are super confident that those externalities are more significant than the bad things you predict happening in the future due to the debt.

Don't you need to look at the numbers to justify that claim? Maybe one party has added 30T and another has added 5T to the debt since Carter. Maybe one has added 20T and the other added 18T. Those numbers would demand VERY different responses.

But saying "it's not one party" seems to assume a particular set of numbers. What are they?

Health access, for instance, improved as a result of one set of votes. Lifetime maxes are gone. There is improved access to non-employee plans.

It didn't stop inflation of health plan costs or medical treatment in general. One might think that means its worth voting for people pledging to make further large-scale changes to address those things.

And meanwhile, the assholes have been campaigning on the opposite for more than a decade: try to make the access worse again by trying rhetorical tricks to say that the one caused vs failed to fix the other. That'll let some rich people get even richer.

That's a real difference for many millions of people.

Neither party is perfect. Welcome to adulthood. Shitty compromises are generally all you get.

By all means, work on structural things to encourage more parties to exist and flourish.

Just also pay attention to the active battles.

But Clinton was a bit of a correction—not perfect by any means—to Reagan, who lit a bunch of gasoline on the "don't tax and DO spend" fire. Too bad even Reagan would look like some sort of TDS cuck RINO to the current conservatives...

If you can't be honest that some folks out there are, in fact, pushing much worse agendas than others... then how do you hope to convince anyone to evaluate if anyone else is gonna actually do better than either? You can't easily have those critical thinking skills without noticing the differences in the two current parties...

having seen both (a) mission-critical human-built systems become nightmares for maintainability and extensibility and (b) bleeding-edge ai coding agents confidently and quickly fix a wrong problem in the face of an issue (or fix it in a slightly wrong way), I remain skeptical that this great de-skilling will all be perfectly fine.

of course, if you aren't looking at the code you won't fucking know until someone yells...

The 40-year-deep-history Mac answer to workflows like that with a small working set with frequent cross-app-one-to-other-switching IMO is mouse-based navigation + spatial partially-overlapping windows, but this seems to be an extremely foreign concept to Windows/*nix users that grew up on full-screen-maximize or tiling. So I don't think is particularly likely to be adopted by anyone who doesn't already have it burned into their brains at this point. :) There's a lot of these old Mac bones still baked into the OS (e.g. if you have a folder on your desktop, and double click it, and move it, then close it, it'll open to the location you moved it to next time. And that memory is separate from that for another folder on your desktop. Though some of the follow-on behaviors have changed (opening folders in already-open windows used to behave similarly, opening new windows by default).

The 20-year-history version is my own personal lord and savior: Exposé hot corners.

Spaces and no-mouse navigation are still in many ways comparative afterthoughts to mouse-based/spatial workflows. Though as someone with 30+ year of Mac muscle memories in my head, the switching-windows-vs-switching-app concept and awareness of "where" I am relative to it is pretty embedded.

How many of these "we sandboxed it and said not to do Y, but then it went and did it!" stories would you consider necessary to disprove that?

It may be good at following rules 99.99% of the time but if someone launches a million times more parallel agents than they would hire humans, it might still be much worse in practice...

"We've been told we must find an effective drug candidate here, and to follow this process for evaluating the quality of the candidate, but actually we could subtly change the analysis like this to make this candidate look favorable enough..."

(And then compare that to deterministic algorithms...)

You can automate the setup and mechanical process. You could increase the physical capacity for parallel tests. You could increase the rate of acquiring raw materials.

But how much you cut down the time depends on how much of the trial-and-error feedback loop depends on feedback and iteration vs cast a wider initial net.

(One of the interesting things to me about the dominant software development agent pattern across all of Claude, Codex, and Cursor is that the approach is still extremely local and iterative, human-mimicking, rather than big-brain-one-shotting a novel or perfectly-fit-for-purpose software design. The performance of the agents on the initial "jump to conclusions" step does not appear superhuman in the same way that the speed-of-iteration is clearly superhuman.)

Expose + Cmd-tab/Cmd-backtick being separated == a gap that Linux/Windows have somehow never managed to close in 20+ years now.

I think there's some nuance here though between "fully anti-AI" and "be careful with that power saw."

That example I mentioned didn't make it to production. It got noticed and fixed more properly by the person who submitted the first prompt before it even went to PR.

But a lot of times things in that same vein can be solved sufficiently with a "dumb" prompt like that, so a one-line prompt to get a PR drafted in the background for the dumb stuff can be a pretty good time saver.

The art is not skimping on your attention to the bigger or more important stuff so much that all the time you save on first getting code written is lost by cleaning up stuff like that...

That happened at least 20 years ago. How many recent "this product did so great because of the care of software engineering, and now the creator is comfortable for the rest of their life without risk of it being copied" success stories are there compared to "this product chased some trends VCs were nuts about with a slapdash MVP and the founders took out 8 figures from their later fundraising rounds, but then the business sputtered out"?

I think there's an angle with AI tools where business-minded people will have a better chance of doing interesting things now than in the recent past, because you could potentially tailor much more deeply to individual customers with reasonable economics than in the past. There are fields where there's room for a garden of solutions from different small-team vendors appropriate for different use cases instead of a one-size-fits-all SaaS winner-take-all type market in the past. We could kill the old line about SAP around needing to change your business to accommodate SAP instead of customize SAP to accommodate your existing workflow.

But if you aren't business-minded at all there are likely less places that will need to hire as many careful maintainers or novel-software-writers, which obviously is a huge kick in the teeth to a lot of people.