Li: Privacy Paradox In Digital Service Taxation
Delmotte: Beyond The Wealth Tax
Data reveals Musk has delivered 0.25% of promised federal spending cuts
Musk Watch: “With Musk now preparing to scale back his work for the White House, he joined a farewell Cabinet meeting last Wednesday, during which he took credit for saving the federal government $160 billion. However, the real number appears to be much lower, particularly when considering how much DOGE could save taxpayers in future federal budgets. For fiscal year 2026, Musk Watch’s DOGE Tracker could verify just $5.02 billion in savings produced by DOGE. Of the $165 billion in savings DOGE now claims — another $5 billion was added to DOGE’s website following Musk’s comments last week — it has only itemized $69.3 billion.
But in many line items, DOGE claims savings but provides no information about the contract or grant. This makes these claimed savings impossible to verify. In other cases, DOGE includes theoretical savings, counting unexercised government options to inflate the value of the contract. To correct for this, Musk Watch calculated savings by subtracting the amount already obligated from the total current value of the contract. Tallying DOGE’s savings that way, and excluding unidentified grants and contracts, we found that DOGE identified about $16 billion in verifiable cuts from grants and contracts. But that figure still doesn’t tell the full story.
Musk promised to cut $2 trillion from the annual federal budget. But the $16 billion in verifiable cuts from grants and contracts will be realized over several years, since many of the contracts and grants that were cut spanned many years. DOGE made it difficult to calculate the annual savings because, in many cases, once it canceled the contract or grant, DOGE changed the termination date of the contract to the date of the cancellation. To estimate the annual savings in 2026, Musk Watch analyzed about 5,000 grants and contracts terminated by DOGE where the cancellation date had not been changed. The lifespan of those commitments averaged 1233 days, or about 3 years and 3 months.
So, to determine how much DOGE’s cuts could save in Trump’s first full fiscal year, Musk Watch calculated one year of prorated savings. We found that DOGE’s verifiable cuts to contracts and grants would produce about $4.73 billion in fiscal year 2026. Adding in DOGE’s full claimed cancellations of $291 million in real estate leases (even though many of those cuts are dubious) brings the total verified cuts to $5.02 billion…”
Predictive Policing AI Is on the Rise − Making It Accountable to the Public Could Curb Its Harmful Effects
Predictive policing experiments continue, despite poor results to date. Can this approach be made non-abusive?
Trump Nominates Donald Korb To Serve A Second Stint As IRS Chief Counsel
Why write?
Having taken much of last weekend off, I do not need another bank holiday today, so the day is going to be spent working on a plan for my proposed book.
Two thoughts were sent to me on this issue. One is by the great black activist and writer, James Baldwin, who said:
You write in order to change the world, knowing perfectly well that you probably can't, but also knowing that literature is indispensable to the world... The world changes according to the way people see it, and if you alter, even but a millimeter the way people look at reality, then you can change it.
There is much to agree with in that.
The other is this piece from the late Ursula Le Guin, when receiving an award late in her life:
Again, much to agree with.
Both managed what is hard: to produce writing that changes understanding. To pretend that achieving that is anything else is to deny the effort required to do so, and the demands it makes. I am hoping my efforts will be worthwhile. What I do know is that without a very good plan, I will not start.
US-Ukraine “Resources Deal”, Negotiations Tanked, Will Trump Return to Biden Policies on Ukraine Conflict? Russia Preparing for War with NATO.The Real Politick with Mark Sleboda
Vladimir Putin the Blessed News Forensics
F-16s Pulled From U.S. Boneyard Are Being Delivered To Ukraine For Spare Parts The War Zone
Exploding Cargo. Hacked GPS Devices. Spoofed Coordinates. Inside New Security Threats in the Skies. Vanity Fair. Wild stuff. Implies that Russia is to blame for January 29 collision of American Airlines jet with Army Black Hawk helicopter over
Tomato ripening regulated by the same cellular process that slows aging in animals and humansPhys.org
