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As someone who paid off student debts as quickly as possible 10+ years ago...am I supposed to feel a great sense of unfairness? Because I don't 🤷

Yes, the taxation is regressive, but the benefits are progressive. E.g.,

According to the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office, for people in the bottom fifth of the earnings distribution, the ratio of benefits to taxes is almost three times as high as it is for those in the top fifth.

( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Security_(United_States) )

It's certainly not a perfect system, but personally I think it has some merit. And it's by far not the worst aspect of USA tax structure (in my opinion).

Something something Drake meme Discord/IRC...

Not sure I get why social security being flat with a cap benefits one class over the other.

Sure, once I meet the max contribution then my withholding goes down and my take home increases. But anything in excess of the max contribution doesn't affect social security payouts after retirement

if you put in more, you get out more, and if you're capped in your contributions then you're also capped in your withdrawals.

Is it a paternalistic program? Sure, it's essentially a forced retirement plan. Its implementation isn't perfect, but I'm not sure I'd call it class warfare.

I think an argument is that because many people live paycheck to paycheck, investing simply isn't an option. Many costs in life are somewhat fixed

I buy similar groceries compared to someone who makes half what I make, and compared to someone who makes twice what I make; as a fraction of income it's a huge spread.

What this means is that making twice as much money doesn't mean you get to invest twice as much

you can invest way more, because the difference in income is largely disposable.

I don't follow why the mortgage interest is better for the wealthy than the total mortgage amount?

In the USA afaik it is only the interest which is tax deductible.

Sonic is offered around the bay area and silicon valley. It's fantastic. I sadly don't have it in my current place, but previously had their gigabit fiber

symmetric, uncapped, reliable, and north of 900Mbps on iperf (fast.com would claim 1.0Gbps).

I think so. A huge amount of energy is now trying to get to ground. Power will now be dissipated across the ground (so, from the lightning rod to the earth). This is bad ("ground" is no longer at ground potential everywhere), but probably not as bad as the alternative.

I think one way to think about it is that, ideally, ground is a single point in a circuit that is defined to be at zero potential, always. Anything that appreciably violates this assumption causes bad things to happen, though often the bad things are subtle/not that bad (e.g., your guitar amp starts buzzing more than you want).

The potential at the ground isn't (or shouldn't) be changing

which is the same thing as saying the power isn't being dissipated in the ground. So the power isn't being "dumped to ground," it's being dumped through the wire.

So basically, two options: 1) you dissipate power in the load, which is what should happen, and everyone is happy. 2) you dissipate power across your ground, which means ground is no longer really ground, and all sorts of nasty and dangerous things can happen.

Pandemic lockdown maybe? Everyone got bored a few months into 2020. By 2021 they finally figured out their wifi drivers 🤷

(I'm joking, I haven't seriously struggled with wifi for a long time. I use Debian btw.)

In an ideal picture, ground isn't where energy gets dissipated

there's no such thing as "dumping energy to ground" (or if you prefer, everything is "dumping energy to ground").

If ground dissipates significant energy, this has all sorts of Very Bad implications. For starters, the ground can no longer be at uniform potential if it dissipates

so now we have a ground that isn't actually at ground! (This just follows from Ohm's law.)

Another way of stating this is to imagine what sort of circuit you need to "dump energy to ground." This is probably just a wire connecting hot to ground

but what happens if you do this in your home, i.e., plug a wire from hot to ground (please do not do this!)? It gets really, really hot, and will probably either throw the breaker, melt, or start a fire. The reason it gets hot is because it's the wire that dissipated the energy.

Ok. So the reason the wire gets hot is because it has finite resistance. So what if we choose an imaginary superconductor instead? Well, now we're trying to draw infinite power, which is bad! In practice of course it won't be infinite, and will be determined by the resistance of the power lines feeding it. But remember that wire that got really hot? Now we're treating the power lines that way. So this is really not good, and besides, we wanted to use a controlled amount of power, which this clearly isn't.

So, we can be smarter here and add some resistance to our load

instead of a wire from hot to ground, we now have maybe a coil of low-but-finite resistance wire. This works great, and it's just a resistive heater.

The problem isn't dumping energy at a human scale (e.g., an individual space heater)

the problem is when you have excess power on an industrial scale.