So-cited the Daily Beast (which demands I let it run crazy-scam ads to view, so no linkey will be provided.)

The reference is to the debt at the federal level; Trump has been led to believe and has bought into the idea that "growth" can fix the problem.

He's not only wrong those telling him this are lying.  You need only look at the last fiscal year -- he got his "growth" but federal debt expanded at 6.2% of the economy, far beyond any rational target for GDP and also roughly double the actual realized GDP expansion.

Two exponentially-growing (that is, "x% per year" growth) things, where one exponent is larger than the other, will always blow up with the larger running away in a hockey-stick fashion.  This is trivially provable if you don't believe it in seconds using Excel or Google's Sheets.

It always happens -- exactly how quickly depends on the parameters, but that you will never get away with this is mathematical fact.

Sadly there is another fact in play, which is that the markets never let you actually hit the wall.  1929 was not the actual wall.  Neither was 2007.  Nor was 2000.  All three of these events occurred long before the actual mathematical wall was reached.  They happened because the market sussed out that all the game-playing was not going to be voluntarily curtailed, ever, and that the frauds embedded in that game-playing would continue forevermore.

In other words the inevitability of the outcome became apparent to the markets and it was that determination which, I remind you, is a purely psychological matter, that resulted in the crash.

If you remember the CEO of Citibank infamously said that while he knew the music would stop while it's playing you have to get up and dance.  The firm was nearly destroyed by doing this and many other banks were destroyed including Bear Stearns, Lehman, IndyMac, Washington Mutual, Wachovia and more.  General Motors only survived as a result of a massive, unfunded bailout by the US Government.  The market didn't go down "a bit" it lost roughly 2/3rds of it's value, a plunge only arrested when Congress literally threatened to legislate fraud and force it upon FASB, convincing them to allow fraud in accounting (specifically, asset "values") on a forward, permanent basis.

Absolutely nothing got actually fixed.  Nobody went to prison for said frauds.  The people who got reamed were the shareholders and, in some cases, bondholders.  They lost everything as a direct consequence of said frauds and there was no compensation for them.

There is a known, hard date out there of 2024.  I remind you from my previous article that by 2024 Medicare, which currently spends about $1,100 billion a year yet only takes in about $250 billion, will run out of Treasuries it can redeem with the US Treasury (and by doing so force the Treasury to issue same into the public market, since the US Treasury has no money and operates on a perpetual deficit.)  That this is going to happen, and when it does that Medicare will be short some 75% of what it is asked to pay, is a known fact.  That said event will occur approximately six years from now is also a known fact.  While the actual end date might move a year either direction or two that doesn't matter because once again the market never lets you actually hit the wall.

This specific problem is especially severe because unlike the housing market which was a few percent of the economy (and houses were not being sold at four times their value), and unlike the tech crash which was powered by a few dozen crazy stock market plays that had no real profit prospects this sector is 20% of the economy and the people over 65 really are spending the Medicare funds in hospitals, doctor offices and pharmacies.

It's not "loosey goosey" numbers on a screen as was the case in 1929 and 2000, and it's several times the size of the real economic impact from the housing mess.

There is no escaping this outcome -- a complete detonation of the federal budget and asset markets -- other than a dramatic and immediate reduction in the cost of health services and products.  Not "bending the curve", not tiny incremental changes worth a billion over 10 years or so (e.g. $100 million a year) but rather an across-the-board, immediate reduction in cost for everyone whether government or not in the health care space by about 80%!

In other words health care must be reset to be approximately 4% of the economy instead of the nearly-20% it is now and you cannot wait until the actual collapse in funding comes or you are going to kill at least ten million Americans when the checks bounce.

There are answers.  This sort of reduction in cost is not impossible and it doesn't mean throwing Granny down the stairs -- or in the hole.  However, it cannot happen if the collusive, monopolist practices now rampant are allowed to continue and are not met with proper sanction that has always existed under 100+ year old anti-trust law but that governments at the federal, state and local levels all refuse to enforce.

President Trump will not be "gone" before this all comes apart and destroys the economy and asset markets if he wins a second term.  He might manage to escape before it all goes to Hell should he be defeated in 2020 but even that is uncertain.  The problem with exponential explosions of this general sort is that very small changes in economic outcomes can accelerate the timeline dramatically because these timelines are always predicated on things continuing as they are -- that is, no recessions, no serious disruptions in the global economic environment and, quite-importantly, no wars that cut off resources or otherwise constrain commodities (like oil.)  For instance were we to have a recession in 2020 the odds of that causing an immediate acceleration such that Medicare blows up one or two years hence instead of four would be extremely high.  In turn the odds of the market deciding to not wait the two years to react would go to near-100% and what would otherwise be an ordinary market downturn and recession would likely turn into economic and market destruction worse than the 1930s.

No, Mr. President, you won't "not be here" when this happens.....

Someone -- or more like a few someones -- have screwed the pooch.

IPv6, which is the "new" generation of Internet protocol, is an undeniable good thing.  Among other things it almost-certainly resolves any issues about address exhaustion, since it's a 128 bit space, with 64 bits being "local" and the other 64 bits (by convention, but not necessity) being "global."

This literally collapses the routing table for the Internet to "one entry per internet provider" in terms of address space, which is an undeniable good thing.

However, this presumes it all works as designed. And it's not.

About a month ago there began an intermittent issue where connections over IPv6, but not IPv4, to the same place would often wind up extremely slow or time out entirely.  My first-blush belief was that I had uncovered a bug somewhere in the routing stack of my gateway or local gear, and I spent quite a bit of time chasing that premise.  I got nowhere.

The issue was persistent with both Windows 10 and Unix clients -- and indeed, also with Android phones.  That's three operating systems of varying vintages and patch levels.  Hmmmm.....

Having more or less eliminated that I thought perhaps my ISP at home was responsible -- Cox.

But then, just today, I ran into the exact same connection lockup on ToS's "Trader TV" streaming video while on XFinity in Michigan.  Different provider, different brand cable modem, different brand and model of WiFi gateway.

Uhhhhhh.....

Now I'm starting to think there's something else afoot -- maybe some intentional pollution in the ICMP space, along with inadequate (or no!) filtering in the provider space and inter-provider space to control malicious nonsense.

See, IPv6 requires a whole host of ICMP messages that flow between points in the normal course of operation.  Filter them all out at your gateway and bad things happen --- like terrible performance, or worse, no addressing at all.  But one has to wonder whether the ISP folks have appropriately filtered their networks at the edges to prevent malicious injection of these frames from hackers.

If not you could quite-easily "target" exchange points and routers inside an ISP infrastructure and severely constrict the pipes on an intermittent and damn hard to isolate basis.  

Which, incidentally, matches exactly the behavior I've been seeing.

I can't prove this is what's going on because I have no means to see "inside" a provider's network and the frames in question don't appear to be getting all the way to my end on either end.  But the lockups that it produces, specifically on ToS' "Trader TV", are nasty -- you not only lose the video but if you try to close and re-open the stream you lose the entire application streaming data feed too and are forced to go to the OS, kill the process and restart it.

The latter behavior may be a Windows 10 thing, as when I run into this on my Unix machines it tends to produce an aborted connection eventually, and my software retries that and recovers.  Slowly.

In any event on IPv4 it never happens, but then again IPv4 doesn't use ICMP for the sort of control functionality that IPv6 does.  One therefore has to wonder..... is there a little global game going on here and there that amounts to moderately low-level harassment in the ISP infrastructure -- but which has as its root a lack of appropriate edge-level -- and interchange level -- filtering to prevent it?

Years ago ports 138 and 139 were abused mightily to hack into people's Windows machines, since SMB and Netbios run on them and the original protocol -- which, incidentally, even modern Windows machines will answer to unless turned off -- were notoriously insecure.  Microsoft, for its part, dumped a deuce in the upper tank on this in that turning off V1 will also turn off the "network browse" functionality, which they never reimplemented "cleanly" on V2 and V3 (which are both more-secure.)  Thus many home users and more than a few business ones have it on because it's nice to be able to "see" resources like file storage in a "browser" format.

But in turn nearly all consumer ISPs block those ports from end users because if they're open it can be trivially easy to break into user's computers.

One has to wonder -- is something similar in the IPv6 space going on now, but instead of stealing things the outcome is basically harassment and severe degradation of performance?

Hmmmm....

Folks, this is why it matters and someone should snap up the entire codebase and app (in source of course) for HomeDaemon-MCP and put it on the market.

Yes, I know, I can.  I have the capital to roll it out.  I have good personal reasons to not want to though, especially given where I live now and what I think is going to happen to the political environment there.  Further, any business that deals in any sort of physical product (even coffee mugs) is ridiculously burdened in Florida.  I knew this when I moved to the State and never intended to start another business that might sell same in the future.  Anyway, that's the short side of the story and there is of course more, but for this coming year it is what it is.

On to the reasons: You now are seeing the media pick up on the business model question -- and especially recommend eschewing cloud anything.  And not just any media -- the GRAY LADY herself.  You want to know why you should do it now?  Because opportunity is best when its hot, and it's hot right now.

Then there's this, which made me spit my coffee:

Hackers ‘can detect your butt plug from outside your house – and turn it on’

They call the new technique screwdriving which seems entirely appropriate... but added massively to the coffee explosion out my nose.  Now I need a new keyboard, which is somewhat of a bummer but definitely worth it.

Look to the right and email me folks -- because I've decided that I just don't want to do it here in Florida, and I'm unsettled on where I'd rather live (in no small part due to the political shifts around the nation) the opportunity is now to buy this out at a quite-polite price all things considered.

As usual the lie factory continues here -- and this is from someone who knows better.

Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid benefit millions of Americans, but are major drivers of our national debt, which has skyrocketed to more than $21 trillion. If every U.S. taxpayer was billed for an equal share of that debt, we would each be charged about $400,000.

The cause of our out-of-control national debt is rooted in current and long-term obligations of these three big entitlement programs, due in large part to rapidly rising costs and an aging population.

Again, let me reference this Ticker, just one of dozens I've written over the years, that points out the truth: There is no crisis in Social Security.  There is a problem which can be addressed, but the problem was caused directly by tampering with interest rates within The Fed and Congress along with allowing millions of able-bodied people to claim "disability" -- and some of them have been documented to have run marathons while allegedly "disabled."

Nonetheless Social Security is fixable without a large amount of pain.  Why?  Because it is a progressive tax-based system (you get more back in benefit for the first dollar you pay in via taxes than later ones), it holds a relatively large body of bonds which by design were constructed to allow "pig-in-python" style bursts of baby creation (ala The Boomers) as the designers anticipated that happening (along with "busts" at other times) and the tax rate is, in relative terms, high.  (12.4% of all wages earned up to the cap -- you only  "see" half of it as a payroll deduction -- unless you're self-employed!)  Further the boomer pig in the python will start to recede in ten years -- 2028 -- as boomers start dying and so will their outsized proportion of the "draw" on said system.

In other words the conflation of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid is an intentional lie that is repeated for political purposes and any politician or other policy "wonk" who does so deserves to be destroyed as his or her intent is to wreck this nation on a permanent fiscal basis by generating enough screaming among seniors to guarantee the actual problem is not addressed.

The entire problem with our budget lies in Medicare and Medicaid.  The reason is multi-fold but is focused in the following places:

• The Medicare tax rate is 2.9%, (1.45% each for employer and employee), or less than one quarter of that for Social Security.  Yet last fiscal year Social Security spent $1.03 trillion while Medicare and Medicaid spent $1.46 trillion with approximately $1.15 trillion being Medicare.  In other words Medicare assesses taxes at less than 1/4 the rate of Social Security yet pays out more money.
  
  
• Medical spending as a percentage of the national economy has increased by a factor of five since Medicare was put into place. Medical spending was approximately 4% of GDP in the 1960s; at 4% of GDP Medicare was sustainable indefinitely as its tax receipt projections were approximately correct in covering expected expenditures.  Medical spending is almost 20% of GDP today, or five times as high in percentage terms.  Yet the Medicare tax rate has not advanced at all.  It would have to be five times what it is today, and advance at the rate of medical spending generally indefinitely into the future, to be solvent.
  
  
• If is not possible to "catch up" now even if you immediately made the Medicare tax 15%, which would be higher than Social Security, because those who are retired now didn't pay the higher rate and the bonds were not bought with their funds.  As such it is flatly impossible to fix this on a prospective basis through higher taxes.  IT CANNOT BE DONE BECAUSE TOO MUCH TIME HAS PASSED WITHOUT DOING IT OVER THE LAST 30 YEARS.
  
  
• Medicaid is even worse because there no tax assessed to cover it.  That is, Medicaid is a "pure" entitlement and last year spent approximately $400 billion.  You get it because you're low-income, not because you paid into it while working and now need it.  For this reason you cannot fix Medicaid with any sort of targeted, employment-based tax because there isn't one and the regressive nature of such taxes means people will leave the workforce to avoid paying same and then collect it.  In fact that has happened now and continues to this day.

By 2040, Medicare, which funds health care for people 65 and older, will cover 88 million enrollees and the cost per enrollee by then is estimated to more than triple. Medicare’s hospital insurance program, known as Part A, can only pay full benefits through 2024, according to the program’s trustees.

Why will it triple on a per-person basis?

Simple -- we have an out-of-control medical racketeering set of enterprises in the United States, all of which are illegal under more than 100 year old law.  Years ago I wrote an article on Lilies explaining how exponents invariably screw anyone who relies on them for a long-term "growth" plan.  It's mathematics, not politics and mathematics cannot be evaded.  But far worse when you only think you see the tiniest bit of the problem coming you're nearly dead -- every time -- because of how exponential math works.  As such the la-la-la-la-la nonsense out of politicians on this and all related subjects has only one rational, society-preserving response: REVOLT.

Let's make this clear right up front: Neither the left's "Medicare for all" or the right's "Repeal and replace" mantras will do a damn thing about this, and 2024 is not far away.  I will also remind you that markets never let you actually hit the wall just as they did not in 2000 and 2007.

Once they suss out that the politicians will not fix it because the people are sticking their fingers in their ears and chanting for people like Trump and Occasional Cortex the market will dive.  Not a little, a lot.  This will force the naked swimmers in the pool above water level for their ugliness to be seen by all.

Again -- there is no tax change that can fix this.  The only means to fix it is to dramatically cut medical spending in the economy as a whole -- not cost-shift it, not make someone else pay, stop paying entirely right now, not in the future, not via some claimed "cost curve" bend in the future that never comes.

Medical spending as a percentage of the economy must collapse back to about 4% of the economy, or approximately one fifth of what it is now, and it must do so today.

This is not impossible, contrary to those who say it is.  As just one example we can take as much as $400 billion out of federal health spending per year right now, today, forevermore by simply addressing one self-inflicted, very damaging and expensive set of disease treatments: Diabetes.  

To those who claim that sort of action would be "cruel" I reply that it is the very opposite of cruel because not only does it take a huge whack out of the federal budget (and state pension expenses) it also will dramatically improve the life of those who suffer from this condition, including in many cases reversing it entirely!

Please explain how that is "cruel".  I'm waiting......

When it comes to surgeries (Hospital Part "A" stuff) may I point to The Surgery Center of Oklahoma which routinely, even when it has to buy supplies and drugs at monopolist prices which are 100-500% or more of a market price, manages to undercut the local hospital in your town by that very same 80% I cited as necessary?  Were they able to buy supplies and drugs at market prices it would likely be 90%.  Oh, and you're one twentieth as likely to acquire an infection in said surgery center as your local hospital because they can't bill you for the cost of fixing their own mistakes and as a result they're far more-careful than your local hospital is.

Incidentally those "mistakes" (negligence, mostly) kill 200,000 Americans a year and maim millions which does even more economic damage since a dead (or maimed) person either produces nothing or far less than they otherwise could.

In 2011, in my book Leverage, I laid out a means to fix this.  Through the years since I've fleshed it out a bit more, but the basic premise remains: 

• Enforce the damned law against all the medical providers, require them to post prices and charge everyone the same price for the same thing, thereby allowing competition into the game.
  
  
• Make illegal any sort of cost-hiding (such as the current practice of not being quoted a charge and then having your insurance company play the "explanation of benefits" game.)  This is illegal everywhere else in the economy with damn good reason -- it is, in every case, a criminal conspiracy as it intentionally screws some people who have no opportunity to shop or say no.  In other words you must get a bill and submit it to the insurance company yourself so you see the entire bill, and you must agree in advance to the charges.  When that's physically impossible (e.g. you're on your back having a heart attack) you cannot be charged more than someone who is conscious and able to give consent for the same procedure.
  
  
• Medicaid can be rendered unnecessary in its entirety by these changes (no, this doesn't mean poor people get no medical care -- see the text of the bill.  They in fact get superior care to what they get now.)
  
  
• Forbid drug companies from differentially-pricing across national boundaries -- either directly by law or by dropping the law that currently forbids me from getting on a plane, filling my suitcase with drug "X" in said nation and flying back to resell it in the United States.
  
  
• Forbid government (or care invoiced to the government on behalf of a citizen) from paying anything for medical care where a lifestyle change will provide substantially equivalent or superior outcomes.
  
  
• Force alleged "insurance" to actually be insurance.  What we now call "health insurance" is not insurance; it is a scam, a fraud under the law and a felony criminal offense in every single instance.  Actual insurance by the definition of the word is a group of people who pay a small amount of money into a pool in anticipation of a possible but not certain loss, and from which losses are then paid to those who suffer them.  By definition with insurance once you have a loss you no longer pay anything; the company pays you, and it is criminal fraud to buy an alleged "insurance" policy against either a certain or already existing loss.

Congress would have to act to put into place much of this.  But not all.  The President is the head of the Executive, which is in charge of law enforcement.  Myriad existing parts of the health system are breaking existing, in many cases 100+ year old, laws -- specifically related to anti-trust.  In the specific case of anti-trust these violations are not civil offenses they are criminal felonies.  As a result right here and now, today, the President could direct the US Attorney General to bring said charges tomorrow as could any State Attorney General, since every state legal code I'm examined has similar statutes to 15 USC Chapter 1.

The people of this nation have the ability to put a stop to what is otherwise going to be a certain collapse -- not just in asset markets but of the government itself.  This is not going to happen in 2024 when Medicare cannot pay it will happen before that date because in the history of the world markets have never allowed an actual end date to be reached before they throw up all over the impending disaster.  To expect otherwise is to claim that literally everyone in the world is stupid beyond words.

May I point out that when Medicare's funds are exhausted that $1.1 trillion dollar expenditure (and rising) from last year will be immediately reduced by 75%?  That's right -- they took in just $260 billion last fiscal year in Medicare taxes but spent four times that amount.  If you think the government can immediately add $800 billion to the deficit without interest rates spiking to 10% or more overnight -- which instantly crashes the markets and government both -- you have rocks in your head.

Exactly when the markets will blow up is not determinable in advance but that it will happen is an absolute certainty.  Once it happens there will be no orderly path available to the government or anyone else to stop or mitigate the damage since the entire problem with the market throwing up on such an event is that confidence in the ability and desire of government to address the issue will have been irretrievably lost.

I will remind you that in 2008 the housing sector and frauds in a small part of it, centered in a few "hot" markets such as Florida and California, caused the Stock Market to lose well over half of its value.  This was due to scams in perhaps 3% of the US Economy.

This blowup will be not in 3% of the economy but rather nearly 20% of it and thus will be six times as bad.

The market will not lose 50% of its value, it will lose 90% or more of its value.

GDP will not decline a few percent, it will decline 20% or more.

We will not lose a few million jobs, we will lose 20% or more of the jobs in our economy.

There will not be a couple of investment banks that fail; all of the money-center banks will fail as will all businesses that have any sort of material debt exposure.  That's every large bank, the majority of regional banks and more than half of the publicly traded firms in the United States.

There will not be a few people who lose everything -- homes, jobs, savings and retirement -- up to a third of Americans, or perhaps as much as 100 million people, will lose everything.

The odds that some sizable percentage of that 100 million people will turn to extreme and uncoordinated violence is very high.  A third of the nation may well end up hungry and homeless.  If you think the government will be able to control or put that down think again; the number of angry, willing-to-do-it individuals will be several times the size of the military and police forces combined while federal, state and local government ability to pay said forces will have collapsed.  How many cops will show up for work when their paychecks bounce and they know going to work means their family is defenseless?  How many members of the military will suddenly decide that the Constitution means something and orders be damned?  There's no way to know the answers to those questions in advance, but I assure you -- you're not going to like the answers.

You think this can't happen here?  Oh yes it can.  It has in many other nations, some with ridiculous amounts of very valuable natural resource -- such as oil.  Venezuela anyone?

If you think this is not serious enough to get off your ass now and demand resolving the problem with something as immediate and forceful as this law, backing up that demand with whatever is necessary to make it happen, and yes, I do mean whatever is necessary, then you are through your inaction giving consent to an all-on collapse of our society and government within the next six years.

The market's determination that you're un-serious and don't give a crap, at which point the option to address this problem peacefully and politically will expire, could come at any time including today -- and it is certain on the present path that the hard end-point will arrive before the end of Trump's second term when Medicare runs out of money.

This is no longer an abstract issue that is at some point "far off" in the future.

It must be addressed now.

So about those locks.....

One of the challenges I've had with allowing the manipulation of lock state (other than lock/unlock, or setting the keypad on or off) is the risk of someone picking off a code from your phone -- and then being able to break into your house.  For obvious reasons that would be bad.

I've decided to leverage the notification system built into the software for this purpose.  This has several advantages, chief among them being that neither the phone or the base software has to store a code from a lock in any case.

If you select "Get Code in Slot" and enter the slot number when you click Execute HomeDaemon-MCP retrieves the code in real time over the AES-encrypted channel from the lock and sends it back to your device via the encrypted notification system.  It never touches anything else (like the cloud) and is not stored anywhere other than in RAM on the device when displayed in the notification pane, which can be dismissed.  In addition there is no storage off-site, anywhere, of the event itself either so Mr. Subpoena (or "Mr. NSL") can pound sand since nobody can produce what they don't have.

If you set a code it is transmitted to the lock.  Ditto for deleting a code.

Codes on most common locks (they're all using the same basic board) can be 4 to 8 numeric digits.  8 is quite secure; 4, not so much, although after a few (wrong) attempts the lock will raise an alarm exception.  In all cases when the change "takes" an exception is raised back to the phone, so you know it went through, exactly as is the case for an asynchronous event (e.g. someone uses the code to open the lock.)

Disabling the keypad locks out all the codes, instantly (very useful if you're not at home, don't expect to be home, and don't want anyone to be able to open the door.)  The state of the lock in the background is currently set this way ("Prohibited" .vs. "Accessible.")  Oh, and the manual operation of the lock (e.g. with a key or the inside knob) is also instantly reported.

Again -- no cloud, no BeeEss, no stealing.

HomeDaemon-MCP is available to the firm, large or small, that wants to disrupt the model of "smart home" systems.  All rights, source and all, to both the base code running on a $35 piece of hardware and the Android app are included.  Look to the right and email me today!