Yeah, that's how they sell it. Problem is, studies have shown the fraud in these programs isn't much of an expense, in the broader context. And, Trump has granted clemency to Lawrence Duran, who stole $205M from Medicare, which tells you they don't really care about that. These programs are actually pretty efficient, and spending funds to investigate small-time fraud would often cost more than just letting it happen. It's not like tons of people wish to be on our shitty social programs that don't even supply enough help for the people that absolutely need it.
Kinda depressing that all of big-tech seems to have given up "innovating" (finding applications for publicly-funded research), and have become rent-seeking dinosaurs.
From the people I know, who do depend on these programs and like Trump, they don't believe they will have their benefits reduced. The think the other people, "taking advantage" of the system will be kicked off. It's being sold as reducing fraud and abuse. The right-wing has been pushing this framing for decades, and many people have bought into it.
I agree that AI is overhyped and these billionaires are dumb out-of-touch psychopaths. All these people are in a kind of fascist/accelerationist cult (e/acc, Dark Enlightenment, etc). They're also trying to focus on automating the well-paying white-collar jobs away now. It was possible to automate fork-lift drivers away decades ago (I've worked in a factory that did just that), it's just usually cheaper to pay someone a low wage to do it.
A lot of the immigrant labor has been at least slave-like for decades too. Under constant threat of deportation on their "employer's" whim. Fairly common for "employers" to take documented worker's documentation to hold them hostage. Reports of some farmers housing and working workers fenced-in, having them working under gunpoint. Some farmers have been caught buying and selling immigrants amongst each-other. I remember a report of a meatpacking plant calling ICE on its own employees to have them deported after they started asking for better treatment, then just hiring more immigrants to replace them. Hell, I even remember near where I grew up, you could see the shed-like shacks from the road on one farm where they kept the migrant workers; no electricity, didn't look like they had any running water either.
I've always found needing to manually add a class instance parameter (i.e. self) to every object method really weird. And the constructors being named __init__. Not having multiple dispatch is kinda annoying too. Needing to use decorators for class methods, static methods, and abstract classes is also annoying. Now that I think about it, Python kinda sucks (even though it's the language I use the most, lol).
Haven't used it yet, but venice.ai looks interesting; they have a good privacy policy. Right now, I just use ChatGPT with the "improve models" setting turned off, and use "temporary chat" mode. I don't really trust OpenAI to be doing the right thing though. I've used 14B models locally, but they aren't as good as 72B+ models.
In my limited experience of just living in bad neighborhoods, most gangs I've encountered are just small groups of kids that sell drugs, rob, burglarize, fight, and occasionally kill kids in other small groups. From talking to older people that were in gangs (well, they still consider themselves to be in a gang, but the gang doesn't functionally exist or do anything), things were much different in the 80s and 90s. Guessing it differs depending on the city though (there aren't really "territories" in my city; drugs are sold through apps/text).
I've heard it claimed social stratification didn't really start happening until agriculture; that's when you see many small residential structures and a few large ones. On the other hand, it allowed for specialization and the pursuit of arts and sciences (at least for the elite).
They seem to be trying to emulate Russia, Hungary, or even Nazi Germany. So probably similar things. The US tech oligarchs seem to want something like Dark Enlightenment, while the other politically powerful sect seems to want christo-fascism; all seem to be white nationalist to varying degrees.
I think some people in the admin actually want that. A lot of them are heavily into crypto and other assets such as real-estate, and they won't be able to balance trade as long as the USD is the world's reserve currency.
And immigrants here legally as well. And because they're ignoring due process and habeas corpus, I have no doubt, citizens who committed no crime soon (they've already kidnapped citizens and looted citizens homes, but haven't exiled citizens yet, AFAIK).
Edit: Forgot. Yes, they have already started kidnapping and exiling citizens who are minors.
Privacy policy changes are worrying. They also implemented Privacy Preserving Attribution, which sends anonymized data to advertisers, and enable it by default. I personally like LibreWolf.
Yeah, that's how they sell it. Problem is, studies have shown the fraud in these programs isn't much of an expense, in the broader context. And, Trump has granted clemency to Lawrence Duran, who stole $205M from Medicare, which tells you they don't really care about that. These programs are actually pretty efficient, and spending funds to investigate small-time fraud would often cost more than just letting it happen. It's not like tons of people wish to be on our shitty social programs that don't even supply enough help for the people that absolutely need it.