Sven Slootweg (soft-deprecated) @joepie91@pixie.town

First of all, it doesn't actually matter when public services also benefit the wealthy, because a) they're a small group of people so it doesn't make much difference for funding, and b) them being wealthy means their benefit from it is *already* much less than that of poor people.

Basically: $10 can be the difference between life or death for a poor person, but for a wealthy person it's coffee money and not worth the effort.

Secondly, it's *actively harmful*. Means testing always means bureaucracy, and being poor is *already* extremely mentally taxing. You're expecting the most vulnerable people to take on the biggest burden; and wealthy well-connected people can still easily cheat the process anyway.

Even if your means testing is perfectly accurate, the hurdle to getting support is big enough that many people who need it just won't. And your means testing *isn't* perfectly accurate, and is gonna overlook corner cases. Guaranteed.

And to top if all off: means testing is a dial for a regressive government to turn without oversight. There are a million ways in which a government can make the requirements stricter or harder to meet, and indirectly deny support to the people it is supposed to help - all without any of the usual legislative process.

Means testing is not a legitimate solution. It's a way to sabotage government support, that only superficially *looks* like a solution. That's why it's so popular among conservative and neoliberal politicians, and why it suspiciously always comes without supporting evidence.

(Remember, neoliberalism is just capitalism as a political ideology, and capitalism cannot work without a class of poor people)

Means testing was never about fairness or fraud prevention. It was always just about denying vulnerable people the support they need, just packaged in a more socially acceptable form.

And to be clear, this is not to say that dependency security efforts are not important.

But it's important to understand that this is like car vs. plane safety; planes (dependencies) *look* really scary, but the actual thing that's likely to kill you is a car (rolling your own).

That doesn't mean that improving plane (dependency) safety doesn't matter, but it's a background process by people whose job this is, not some acute crisis that you need to deal with yourself.

Regarding "supply chain security" with dependencies: as a professional dependency auditor I can tell you that malicious dependencies are extremely rare... and what's far more common is security issues in utilities that large dependencies insisted on reimplementing despite safe off-the-shelf options being available.

If your takeaway from dependency security stuff is "avoid dependencies", then that is absolutely the wrong takeaway.