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.

Clicking through to the 404 Media article, I found this gem of a quote:

In a March blog post called “Boosting Your Support and Safety on Meta’s Apps With AI” announcing its AI support feature, Meta said that the system can “Prevent an account takeover by noticing it was suddenly accessed from a new location, the password was changed, and edits were made to the profile—changes that, in isolation, look harmless to a person reviewing the account, but AI was able to recognize as a threat.”

The very thing they boasted about the AI protecting against, not only did it not work, but it enabled that kind of attack. And they didn’t detect the exploit internally: this has been trending on Telegram since March, and only when the social media activity got large enough did they realize. Epic fail on Meta’s part.

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 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.

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.

Global population growth is happening. Slowing down, but looks inevitable for at least several more decades. Given that baseline, it is optimal for all countries involved to allow immigration from countries with population growth (reduces strain on government services, adds to the economy with remittances) to countries with lower birth rates (tax revenues support social service budgets, increased entrepreneur rate of immigrants increases job growth, etc.)

Economies can transition to population decline while maintaining standards of living for sure, if handled in a planned way. Some short-term pain during the transition, then fine later. But why go through a combination of short-term pain right now, at the same time as incredible cruelty is required to keep out migrants?

A path to degrowth will be needed globally in the medium-term future (finite planet), but trying to implement that now at just the US locally isn’t going to help the planet at all.

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.

My (cis female) birth certificate erroneously was filled out with “male”. Same error happened on the birth certificate of my mother (who is also cis female). It’s never caused either of us any problems. Schools enrolled us as female, driver’s licenses say female, etc.

When I was in college in the early 2000s, my dad’s mother helped me get a copy of my birth certificate, and was horrified her beautiful granddaughter was listed as male. She called up the county clerk and raised Cain, and then informed me it had been corrected. I’ve never needed to get a fresh copy since then, so I don’t know for sure, but it sounded like the word of an angry old lady was enough to get an update filed.