Everyone online knows that. The vast majority of the population doesn't - it's not general knowledge outside of people that spend a lot of time online. That where you get this 'the famed hacker 4Chan' or 'CEO of Bitcoin' nonsense in reports, it's simply not their world and they don't swim in these waters.

I mean, I've been online since about 1989 and even I don't know that much about actual 4chan, to me it was always the Lion King's "You must never go there" scene (and then came 8chan - my god).

It doesn't surprise me that those who aren't immersed in this environment daily don't actually know that much about it.

Free: look to ADP, Indeed, LinkedIn and similar sources. Wall Street gets data out of the largest employers regularly because they have special relationships.

This one in fact, saying that survey response rates for official UK data had collapsed from 35% to 5%.

Survey fatigue is one, but I think people are also more wary about having their opinions attached to data these days. At least for formal, official data anyway, obviously social media is still going strong. I think a factor is that people aren't sure how it's going to be used and if it could come back to them in some way.

Everyone who makes actual economic decisions based on this kind of data have long-ago abandoned confidence in government reporting. It's politicized and it's been systematically sweetened to preserve the illusion of low inflation and higher employment for decades. The fact that people don't want to answer questions may have as much to do with distrust of government as anything else. Why waste your time?

Consider the counterfactual. If it was the Swedish government from the 1990s asking you to answer questions, you'd probably take it seriously because it would credibly inform responsive policy.

BLS stats are mostly just headline generators for the propaganda machine.

Lean on your keyboard for long enough and you'll have a valid Perl program. You won't know what it does of course, but then how does that differ from any other Perl program?

Because for music, we're in a post-scarcity future. The world is not short of new music, and the tools for producing it get better and better and better. There's no shortage of people wanting to write, you can reasonably easily self-publish (and on a completely unrelated note...check out my two albums and my singles...)...there's no scarcity here.

The problem isn't availability. The problem is gaining an audience.

That's been their whole business plan since day 1.

is that facebook, google, etc.... all the monopoly players keep buying their potential competition before they get too big.

Consolidation has played a large part in this since it's a guaranteed payout rather than having to gamble with trying to defeat the dominate powers.

A lot of the recent AI purchases are this pattern. In the early 2000s or in dotcom days they might have IPOed.

I do very much understand what you're saying and it certainly adds to the complexity. One cannot put sociological or psychological factors on a box.

That aspect of the problem is indeed going to be much harder to deal with than, say, salt, trans fats, or known carcinogenic compounds.

Honestly, I'm not sure what you can do about those aspects - financial incentives help a little, but honestly I don't believe they make a huge difference - which is why I've concentrated on unsafe levels of ingredients, because although we don't know exactly what those should be, we've at least got a rough idea for some of them. It's going to be a delicate one, though -- you don't want to overly restrict sources of sugar because diabetics can suffer from crashes due to excessively low sugar just as badly as excessively high levels, and some items get unfairly maligned (chocolate, per se, isn't bad for you, it's the additives, and indeed particularly high percentage chocolate can be helpful for the heart).

But, yes, I absolutely agree with your overarching point that the problems are primarily psychological and sociological. I just don't have the faintest idea of how these can be tackled. Jamie Oliver tried (albeit not very well, but he did at least try) and the pushback was borderline nuclear, and that was where there was clear and compelling evidence of significant difference in health and functionality. If you can barely escape with your life for saying eating better reduces sickness and improve concentration, and pushing for changes where these two factors essentially dictate whether a person is functional in life, then I don't hold out hope for change where it's more ambiguous or the economics are much tougher.

There are papers arguing that smoothies aren't as good as eating real fruit because it seems that there's actually a benefit to having to break down cell walls, even at the expense of not getting 100% of the nutrients from it. However, cooking food breaks down cell walls, although obviously not to the same degree. It's not clear that breaking down cell walls is harmful, even if it's not beneficial.

A lot of ultra-processed foods have been accused of having unhealthy levels of certain ingredients (usually sugars or salt) and certain styles of cooking can add harmful compounds.

It would seem reasonable to say that there's a band at which a given ingredient is beneficial (analogous to a therapeutic threshold), with levels above that being increasingly harmful, eventually reaching a recognised toxic threshold. In terms of the harmful compounds from cooking, it seems reasonable to suggest that, below a certain level, the body's mechanisms can handle them without any issue, that it's only above that that there's any kind of problem.

So it would seem that we've got three factors - processing that can decrease benefits, ingredients that follow a curve that reaches a maximum before plunging, and processing that can increase harm.

Nobody wants to be given a complicated code that they need to look up, but it would seem reasonable that you can give a food a score out of three, where it would get 3 if you get maximum benefit and no harm, where you then subtract for reduced benefit and increased harm. That shouldn't be too hard for consumers, most people can count to 3.

Yeah, understood, food is going to vary, since it's all uncontrolled ingredients and processing itself is very uncontrolled. So take two or three examples as a fair "representative sample". Further, most manufacturers can't afford to do the kind of testing needed, and our understanding of harm varies with time. No problem. Give a guidebook, updated maybe once every couple of years, on how to estimate a value, which can be used, but require them to use a measured value if measured, where the value is marked E or M depending on whether it's estimated or measured.

It's not perfect, it's arguably not terribly precise (since there's no way to indicate how much a food item is going to vary), and it's certainly not an indication of any "absolute truth" (as we don't know how beneficial or harmful quite a few things are, food science is horribly inexact), but it has to be better than the current system because - quite honestly - it would be hard to be worse than the current system.

But it's simple enough to be understandable and should be much less prone to really bizarre outcomes.

50 years later and 26mph slower than Italy's high speed rail,30 years later and 40mph slower than France, 15 years later and 20mph slower than Spain, in a country with an awful lot more money, greater access to modern technology, a larger engineering pool, and a lot of relatively flat land.

Still, one shouldn't complain. America is, at least, moving in a sensible direction on train travel, which is an improvement over how things were in 2000 when the Federal government weren't able to get a number of States to build train lines even if the Feds paid for everything.

Debit cards are available to under 18s - you can have one from the age of 12. Credit cards aren't - that's why they're picking credit cards.

This is the UK - debit cards are the norm, credit cards are not universal. Most people have one of course, but most - certainly not all particularly at the 18-24 type age range.

The cult of Carbon has spoken. You are unworthy. If you own an Apple watch, you must plant a Bonesai tree in your ass to atone for your greenhouse sins.