Not only is it too low, but it is the discontinuity in support. This leads to perverse incentives where for the wage you could make, you’d barely clear the threshold to lose benefits and make barely more money than on government support.
This isn’t an argument to remove support—it’s an argument to remove binary thresholds with smooth ramps to incentivize people to work.
I would have said it needs to taper off, not just stop, but reading it described in black and white made me think "actually, why _not_ just stop at a threshhold?".
If you can get 2k a month (all numbers pulled from my butt) in disability support, and at some point get a job offer which will give you the same, why _shouldn't_ you work? Non-monetary forms of support should probably continue, or even be increased, depending on what you're going to need to be able to work.
Things may get more expensive, but if more Americans can live a middle class life even accounting for the inflation of consumer goods I think that is a good tradeoff.
There is a joke in applied mathematics that we’re like Taco Bell. We all use the same six ingredients, mixing them in different ways.
For myself, I’ve found several techniques I use over and over again. Some of this is a “when you’re a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” But fundamentally there are only a handful of ideas. One professor of mine once said the only groundbreaking result in the past few decades was compressive sensing.
When I was working with NREL back in 2017, they were thinking about coordinating water heater electricity use with a “smart grid.” Each device attached to the smart grid would measure the electricity spot price and would “store” energy to minimize cost. At the time the goal was to reduce peak load on the grid, but the same ingredients to maximize power use from intermittent power sources.
"Deep defense cuts. Since the 1980s, the Pentagon budget has fallen from 6% to 3% of GDP—not far above Europe’s target of 2%. Cutting U.S. defense spending to the levels pledged by European members of NATO would save 1% of GDP, or less than one-fifth of the Social Security and Medicare noninterest shortfall by the 2040s and 2050s."
Read the budget. Learn something. None of the partisan mantras solve the problem. The only solution is to trim ss, trim medicare, and raise taxes across the board.
I concur. As a postdoc for many years adjacent to this work, I was similarly unimpressed.
The best part about PINNs is that since there are so many parameters to tune, you can get several papers out of the same problem. Then these researchers get more publications, hence better job prospects, and go on to promote PINNs even more. Eventually they’ll move on, but not before having sucked the air out of more promising research directions.
I taught numerical linear algebra in grad school and was really frustrated that even the applied math department took so long to build up to solving linear systems and eigen-decompsotions. The ordering of the material in the textbook is great, focusing on algorithms and decompositions.
This isn’t an argument to remove support—it’s an argument to remove binary thresholds with smooth ramps to incentivize people to work.