I grew up in Texas and was taught the American Civil War was over slavery, and my husband grew up in Iowa and was taught that war was over state’s rights. This was thirty years ago, but at least then the narrative split didn’t have any neat north/south distribution.

Increased unemployment can lead to decreased wages, depending on other factors. I had read your post above as claiming a multipart chain of higher minimum wage -> increased unemployment -> decreased wages, and my post was intended to address the first link (higher minimum wage -> increased unemployment), not the second.

Lots of people get degrees in lower-earning fields because they value working on things that are interesting or meaningful to them more than they value the income tradeoff. Growing as a person is its own reward.

A few percent of job seekers as structural unemployment supports a healthy economy where people change jobs and careers to match changes in labor needs.

That doesn’t mean an increase in minimum wage increases unemployment. There are hundreds of academic studies investigating that question, and it seems the increased economic activity of low-income people having more money generates enough new jobs to at least balance whatever job cuts happen due to the higher labor costs (low-income people tend to spend all their money, so they are more effective agents of short term economic stimulus than higher-income households that tend to save some of it).

Having more than your neighbors is a huge drive to human happiness. House size has no impact on happiness. Having the biggest house on the block is a huge happiness boost. Above the level needed for minimum sustainable food and shelter, wages have no impact on happiness. Making more money than your friends is a huge happiness boost.

It’s something about how we are wired as humans. Many of us have other drivers that are stronger than the drive to have more than others in our community, but to get social support any strategy for raising the living standard floor needs to acknowledge the issue of this hard-wired drive.

The pandemic made things worse, but something bigger is going on.

The new data provides the first national comparison of school districts through 2025, and… underscores that many districts have experienced a long-term slump in student achievement, not just a blip during the pandemic.

From 2017 to 2019, students lost as much ground in reading as they did during the pandemic, and reading scores continued to fall at a similar rate through 2024.

Students’ test scores had been increasing since 1990 — then abruptly stopped in the mid-2010s. That coincided with two events: an easing of federal school accountability under No Child Left Behind, which was replaced in 2015, and the rise of smartphones, social media and personalized school laptops.

From the article:

The new report found that science of reading reforms were necessary, but not sufficient, to improve scores. Only states that had embraced science of reading reforms showed improvement from 2022 to 2025 — yet not all of those that did saw gains.

I braved the risky click, and was rewarded with a fun article chronicling the history of a small village.

My medical records are riddled with artisinal fully human-generated hallucinations and missing information. The AI note takers, even with the rate of issues noted in the article, seem to have crossed the threshold to be an improvement on the current system. The records still suck at a similar level, but as you noted it frees up clinicians to add a few more minutes of engagement per patient visit.

I read the anecdote as identifying location of any horseplay-related sound, not just voices.

You mention trying different masks, and none working. Have you asked about reducing the pressure? Or maybe switching to a BiPAP that reduces pressure for exhale? Nothing is guaranteed to help, but if you haven’t explored those options, might be worth asking.

It wasn’t my husband’s snoring that made me nag him for years (I would have just gotten earplugs like other comments suggest), it was the lack of breathing. Waking up to a snore, and then hearing… nothing… nothing… nothing… nothing… GASP!!! is quite distressing. If WandowsVista’s partner is giving him feedback on noise, I am sure he’d be getting feedback on any lack of breathing.

Also, CPAP isn’t a clear win for a lot of people with apnea. My husband really struggles - even years after starting it - to fall asleep with a hunk of plastic strapped to his face, and middle of the night large air leaks that make the thing stop being effective are a recurring issue as wear parts get changed out and the straps have to be tweaked and tweaked to get the system stable again. For him, the reduced headaches (and lack of nagging from me) make the CPAP worthwhile, but I have known quite a few people who got the sleep study, got the CPAP, tried to make it work, and gave up.

Our comforter is tied to the bed footrest on my husband’s side, because otherwise I steal it in my sleep. It keeps marital harmony!

It might reduce dryness-related pain, or wash out any dust or eyelashes that were causing irritation. Unless you are sensitive to the preservatives, saline solution would do the same and be more convenient. They have single-use saline packets for people with preservative sensitivity, but those are kind of pricey, so I can see the case for boiled water.

People get weird ideas and can be stubborn about them. My father spent more than a week using Clear Eyes in an attempt to moisturize. (Clear Eyes is a product to reduce red appearance, is not meant to improve eye comfort, and causes rebound irritation as the blood vessel constrictor wears off.) It took multiple talks after his eye irritation was only getting worse to convince him to switch to the actually moisturizing drops the eye doctor had given him.

Public support fractures if the questions are broken down into more detail. People have unfounded fears of new “death panels”, and founded fears of the government screwing up implementation (Canada has crazy wait times for many medical services - it’s an outlier among developed countries, but demonstrates the screw-up opportunity). People support new services if they are funded magically, but aren’t willing to support tax raises, even though the tax increases would be less than the savings from not paying for private health insurance.

The complexity - and partisan politicians being more than willing to weaponize confusion over details to divide us against each other - is the barrier.

In the short-lived news app Artifact, that was one of my favorite features. It was done on demand, and if a high portion of early viewers asked for a rewritten title, the rewrite would become the default for future viewserves.

In the Artifact implementation, the LLM was specifically prompted by the app to summarize the article with an honest, non-clickbaity title. In Google’s case, they claim they are prompting the LLM to title the link to better tempt the searcher to click on it based on what they were searching for. Kind of the opposite. Yes, LLMs could do what you say, but that doesn’t seem to be how Google is setting it up.

I wasn’t intending my comment as a correction - microbe is a more general term than bacteria, and most fungi are indeed microbes - but just saw an opportunity to add on what I think is a cool fact. Thanks for bringing up the carboniferous period!

That it took 400 million years for one fungus to evolve wood eating is wild to me. And no other microbe has ever evolved that ability: my understanding is all wood decay fungal species today evolved from one shared ancester.

This really veers out of the espionage lane and towards the act of war lane. Acknowledged as a war action when done successfully against Ukraine. Possibly “only” a message if the failure in Poland was deliberate on the hacker’s part, but still awful.

the unsupported, internal format - that allows for pretty much everything - is in some way exploitable

It prevents AI summaries of the video from including all the video content. Obvious solution: remove the information missing from the summary from the video itself. Now they match! /s