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When President Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR) signed the Social Security Act into law 90 years ago this week, he vowed it would provide economic stability to older people while giving the U.S. “an economic structure of vastly greater soundness.”Today, the program provides benefits to almost 69 million Americans monthly. It’s a major source of income for people over 65 and is popular across the country and political lines.It also looks more threatened than ever.Just as it has for decades, Social Security faces a looming shortfall in money to pay full benefits. Since President Donald Trump took office the program has faced more tumult. Agency staffing has been slashed. Unions and advocacy groups concerned about sharing sensitive information have sued. Trump administration officials, including the president, for months falsely claimed millions of dead people were receiving Social Security benefits. Former top adviser Elon Musk called the program a potential “Ponzi scheme.”Trump and other Republicans have said they will not cut Social Security benefits. Yet the program remains far from the sound economic system that FDR envisioned 90 years ago, due to changes madeand not madeunder both Democratic and Republican presidents.Here’s a look at past and current challenges to Social Security, the proposed solutions, and what it could take to shore up the program. The go-broke date has been moved up The so-called go-broke dateor the date at which Social Security will no longer have enough funds to pay full benefitshas been moved up to 2034, instead of last year’s estimate of 2035. After that point, Social Security would only be able to pay 81% of benefits, according to an annual report released in June. The earlier date came as new legislation affecting Social Security benefits have contributed to earlier projected depletion dates, the report concluded.The Social Security Fairness Act, signed into law by former President Joe Biden and enacted in January, had an impact. It repealed the Windfall Elimination and Government Pension Offset provisions, increasing Social Security benefit levels for former public workers.Republicans’ new tax legislation signed into law in July will accelerate the insolvency of Social Security, said Brendan Duke at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.“They haven’t laid out an idea to fix it yet,” he said. The privatization conversation has been revived The notion of privatizing Social Security surfaced most recently when Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent this month said new tax-deferred investment accounts dubbed “Trump accounts” may serve as a “backdoor to privatization,” though Treasury has walked back those comments.The public has been widely against the idea of privatizing Social Security since former President George W. Bush embarked on a campaign to pitch privatization of the program in 2005, through voluntary personal retirement accounts. The plan was not well-received by the public.Glenn Hubbard, a Columbia University professor and top economist in Bush’s White House, told the Associated Press that Social Security needs to be reduced in size in order to maintain benefits for generations to come. He supports limiting benefits for wealthy retirees.“We will have to make a choice,” Hubbard said. “If you want Social Security benefits to look like they are today, we’re going to have to raise everyone’s taxes a lot. And if that’s what people want, that’s a menu, and you pay the high price and you move on.”Another option would be to increase minimum benefits and slow down benefit growth for everyone else, which Hubbard said would right the ship without requiring big tax increases, if it’s done over time.“It’s really a political choice,” he said, adding, “Neither one of those is pain free.”Nancy Altman, president of Social Security Works, an advocacy group for the preservation of Social Security benefits, is more worried that the administration of benefits could be privatized under Trump, rather than a move toward privatized accounts. The agency cut more than 7,000 from its workforce this year as part of the Department of Government Efficiency’s effort to reduce the size of the government.Martin O’Malley, who was Social Security agency commissioner under Biden, said he thinks the problems go deeper.“There is no openness and there is no transparency” at the agency, he said. “And we hear about field offices teetering on the brink of collapse.”A Social Security Administration representative didn’t respond to a request for comment. Concerns persist An Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll conducted in April found that an increasing share of older Americansparticularly Democratssupport the program but aren’t confident the benefit will be available to them when they retire.“So much of what we hear is that its running out of money,” said Becky Boober, 70, from Rockport, Maine, who recently retired after decades in public service. She relies on Social Security to keep her finances afloat, is grateful for the program, and thinks it should be expanded.“In my mind there are several easy fixes that are not a political stretch,” she said. They include raising the income tax cap on high-income earners and possibly raising the retirement age, which is currently 67 for people born after 1960, though she is less inclined to support that change. Some call for shrinking the program Rachel Greszler is a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, the group behind the Project 2025 blueprint for Trump’s second term. It called for an increase in the retirement age.Greszler says Social Security no longer serves its intended purpose of being a social safety net for low-income seniors and is far too large. She supports pursuing privatization, which includes allowing retirees to put their Social Security taxes into a personal investment account.She also argues for shrinking the program to a point where every retiree would receive the same Social Security benefit so long as they worked the same number of years, which she argues would increase benefits for the bottom one-third of earners. How this would impact middle-class earners is unclear.“When talking about needing to reform the system, we need to reform it so that we don’t have indiscriminate 23% across the board cuts for everybody,” Greszler said. “We need to reform the system in a more thoughtful way, so that we are protecting those who are most vulnerable and reliant on Social Security.” Fatima Hussein, Associated Press
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Fly by Jing, the beloved CPG brand thats helped make high-quality chili crisp a staple in many American households, announced today that its fusing its iconic sauce with an unexpected condiment: ketchup. The new product, called Chili Crisp Ketchup, launches today in a limited run online, retailing for $15 a bottle. It was made in collaboration with Frankie Gaw, a creator and author known for remixing Asian cuisine with classic American products. According to a press release, Chili Crisp Ketchup combines Fly by Jings bestselling Original Sichuan Chili Crisp with a ketchup base to create a spicy, savory, and smooth blend thats at once novel and nostalgic. For Fly by Jing founder Jing Gao, the brands move to fuse its core product with a classically American condiment is an evolution of its overarching goal to help Western consumers experiment more wildly with traditionally Chinese flavors and integrate them into their existing routine. But the Chili Crisp Ketchup also serves a secondary purpose: helping Fly by Jing diversify its supply chain in the wake of President Trumps sweeping tariffs on Chinese imports. [Photo: Fly By Jing] Fly by Jing spices up ketchup Gaos concept for Fly by Jing first took shape in 2018, when she noticed that the market for chili crisp was rapidly expanding in Western markets. She saw an opportunity to introduce a broader customer base to the iconic flavors of her hometown, Chengdu, China, and to create her own chili crisp with higher quality ingredients than other competitors on the market. The first step was spending several years just courting Sichuan suppliers and merchants to source the chili crisps 18 premium ingredients. Since its launch in 2019, Fly by Jing has transformed from a crowd-funded direct-to-consumer (DTC) project to a staple on grocery store shelves, now offering its products in 11,000 stores nationwide including major retailers like Target, Safeway, and Walmart. The company has also debuted additional products like a spicy vinaigrette, a line of instant noodles, and an ultra-hot oil thats appeared on the YouTube show Hot Ones. [Photo: Fly By Jing] The concept for a ketchup-slash-chili-crisp actually came from a TikTok video made by Gaw, who used chili crisp to create his own custom ketchup blend. Gaw and Gao connected over the concept, which Gao saw as a natural evolution of her brands central thesis. From day one, we’ve really tried to decrease the barriers for people to understand Sichuan flavors, Gao says. She specifically recalls launching the brands original flavor through collaborations with ice cream shops to show how unexpectedly delicious the pairing could be. Showing these flavors truly are good on everything, I think it was really helpful for Western audiences who hadn’t experienced this before, she adds. [Photo: Fly By Jing] A satisfying squeeze bottle Fly by Jings Chili Crisp Ketchup comes in the brands first-ever squeeze bottle, which Gaos team has actually been conceptualizing for several years. The main challenge with the proposition was making the squeeze format work with the chunky, gritty textures of a good chili crisp. In this case, Gao says, they were able to solve that problem by sifting out some of the larger components and relying more on the deep flavors of the oil itself, which is then balanced with the sweet tanginess of the ketchup. For his part of the collaboration, Gaw assisted in the tasting process and also designed the squeeze bottles label. The package is a major visual departure from Fly by Jings other branding, swapping its dopamine design neon colors for a retro Americana look (and a swaggy image of Gaws own grandma, clad in a flaming cowboy hat). As of right now, Chili Crip Ketchup is a limited edition product. Gao plans to test consumer interest through an initial DTC launch, which will help determine whether the product is a good candidate to roll out in retail. [Photo: Fly By Jing] Weathering Trumps tariff headwinds In the meantime, Fly by Jing is also testing several other squeeze bottle sauces with production components based in the U.S. and other countries as part of a broader supply chain diversification effort. That’s because some of the important ingredients across its portfolio of product offeringsthe premium spices and aromatics that are specially sourced from Sichuan, Chinaare subject to the Trump administrations tariffs on China. Currently, those tariffs equal a 55% tax on imported ingredients, though they could jump up to rates as high as 145% if the Trump administration doesnt relent on its plan to boost them in the next three months. So far, Gao says, Fly by Jing has been able to absorb that cost without passing additional fees onto the customerthough the unpredictable tariff environment has made maintaining profitability more challenging. The new Chili Crisp Ketchup is one way that Fly by Jing is testing out this diversified supply chain. While Gao says that the brand wont compromise on sourcing its key chili crisp ingredients from Sichuan to maintain its unique flavor, add-ins like a classic ketchup component are perfectly suited for domestic manufacturing. Obviously, we brought in our chili crisp for that signature Sichuan flavorbut the blending, the mixing, all the other ingredients, we did domestically in the U.S.,” she says.
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E-Commerce
AI development is moving at a rapid pace, but it risks running headlong into a wall. As websites increasingly place barriers on scraping (some of which are allegedly ignored), and as the remaining content is voraciously collected by scrapers to train AI models, concerns are growing that we may run out of usable training data. The industrys answer? Synthetic data. Recently in the industry, synthetic data has been talked about a lot, said Sebastien Bubeck, a member of technical staff at OpenAI, in the companys livestreamed release of GPT-5 last week. Bubeck stressed its importance for the future of AI modelsan idea echoed by his boss, Sam Altman, who live-tweeted the event, saying he was excited for much more to come. The prospect of relying heavily on synthetic data hasnt gone unnoticed by the creative industries. I believe the main reason companies like OpenAI are having to rely more on synthetic data now is that they’ve run out of high-quality human created data to mine from the public facing internet, says Reid Southern, a film concept artist and illustrator. Southern believes theres another motive. It further distances them from any copyrighted materials they’ve trained on that could land them in hot water. For this reason, he has publicly called the practice data laundering. He argues that AI companies could train their models on copyrighted works, generate AI variations, then remove the originals from their datasets. They could then claim their training set is ‘ethical’ because it didn’t technically train on the original image by their logic, says Southern. That’s why we call it data laundering, because in a sense, they’re attempting to clean the data and strip it of its copyright. We create synthetic data to advance AI, in line with relevant copyright laws,” an OpenAI spokesperson told Fast Company in a statement. “Generating high-quality synthetic data means we can build more intelligent and capable products like ChatGPT that help millions work more efficiently, discover new ways to learn and create, and enable countries to innovate and compete globally. The issue is more nuanced, according to Felix Simon, an AI researcher at the University of Oxford. In one sense, it doesnt really remediate the original harm over which creators and AI firms squabble, he says. After all, synthetic data isnt plucked from the ether but presumably created with models that have reportedly been trained with data from creators and copyright holdersoften without their permission and without compensation. From the perspective of societal justice, rights, and duties, these rights holders still are owed something even with the use of synthetic databe that compensation, acknowledgements, or both. Ed Newton-Rex, founder of Fairly Traineda non-profit certifying AI companies that respect creators intellectual property rightsshares Southerns concerns. I think synthetic data is a legitimately helpful way to augment your dataset, he says. If youre training an AI model, its a way of increasing the coverage of your training data. And at a time when were butting up against the limits of legitimately accessible training data, its seen as a way to extend the usable life of that data. Still, Newton-Rex acknowledges its darker side. At the same time, I think unfortunately its effect is, at least in part, one of copyright laundering, he says. I think both are true. He warns against taking AI firms promises at face value. Synthetic data is not a panacea from the incredibly important copyright questions, he says. I think there tends to be so much of a feeling that synthetic data helps you, as an AI developer, get around copyright concerns. That belief, he says, is wrong. The framing of synthetic dataand the way AI companies talk about model trainingalso helps them distance themselves from the individuals whose work they may be using. The average listener, if they hear this model was trained on synthetic data, theyre bound to think, Oh, right, okay. Well, this probably isnt Ed Sheerans latest album, right? It further moves us away from an easy understanding of how these models are actually made, which is ultimately by exploiting peoples lifes work. He compares it to plastic recycling, where a recycled container might once have been a toy, a car bumper, or something else entirely. The fact these AI models mash all this stuff up and generate, quote-unquote, new output, does nothing to reduce their reliance on the original work. For Newton-Rex, this is the critical takeaway: Really the absolutely critical element here, and it’s just got to be remembered, is that even in a world of synthetic data, whats happening is peoples work is being exploited in order to compete with them.
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