Off topic here, but that seems like a stupid metric. I would be more interested in comparing risks of dementia, fatal or not. Using death as the outcome measure confounds with other causes of mortality -- as noted. Death from Alzheimer's disease (or other causes of dementia) also typically occurs well after retirement from active employment.

The linked article claims that "Between 2012 and 2021, nothing killed more people in the UK than dementia. According to Alzheimer’s Research UK, in 2023 alone, 75,000 Brits succumbed to it."

"Alzheimer's research UK" has an obvious fund-raising incentive, but it's still surprising. I didn't know that. According to the chart, "Dementia and Alzheimer's disease" killed more people in the UK than coronary heart disease, respiratory disease, or cerebrovascular disease (strokes). That's different to the US.

Technically, "dementia" is a symptom with a number of causes, not a disease, so it isn't clear what they actually mean by "death from dementia". They mention Alzheimer's disease, which is the primary cause of progressive dementia in the US, and they also refer to "vascular" dementia.

There are some systemic, statistical problems with "reducing the death rate" for a given disease. I thought it was laughably stupid when the Biden Administration proposed the Cancer Moon Shot with the goal "to cut the cancer death rate in half over the next 25 years". Since the death rate for any individual is always 100%, reducing the death rate from cancer will necessarily increase the death rate for one or more other causes. Deaths from cancer could be almost completely eliminated using the Logan's Run strategy: just kill everybody before they get cancer. Big win! Four more years!

I prefer the saying attributed to Ashley Montagu: The goal of medicine is to die young as late as possible.

Anyway, some interesting points there.

Becoming a licensed (or "licenced") taxi driver in London requires passing a test which is reportedly unusually difficult and rigorous but possibly less demanding than actually being a taxi driver in London. One study found that "The posterior hippocampi of taxi drivers were significantly larger relative to those of control subjects." There are several types of memory: the two hippocampi are specifically associated with declarative memory (conscious facts and events) and spatial memory (navigating routes and environments), in contrast to emotional memory and procedural (muscle) memory. Some nomenclatures also distinguish between semantic memory (facts) and episodic memory (events experienced personally).

I learned four languages at the age of 12, and my brain disappeared entirely for a year. So now I know.

That $27.5 million net profit was for the first three months of 2026, not a year, so the debt could be paid off in 40 years, if all the profit went to paying it off. And "a market value of $25.2 billion"? What are people thinking? Is this more-fool investing? Or a return to the days when the only thing that mattered was growth in the number of subscribers?

Yes, one study found that semaglutide reduced motivation to exercise in mice. [Preprint] "... the long-acting GLP-1R agonist semaglutide (SG) suppresses voluntary wheel running in both lean and diet-induced obese mice. Importantly, this suppression of activity was not caused by hypophagia and was accompanied by decreased motivation, with SG-treated mice displaying reduced effort for wheel access in a progressive ratio task. Real-time measurements of dopamine via fiber photometry revealed specific dopamine changes in the nucleus accumbens ...."

"Mice are natural runners, often covering up to 10 kilometers a day when given access to a running wheel. However, a study led by Yale University neuroscientist Ralph DiLeone found that mice treated with semaglutide ran 38% less than their typical distance over seven days. Interestingly, when the drug was discontinued, their running habits returned to normal. ... Additionally, semaglutide’s ability to suppress compulsive behaviors like overeating and addictions has been noted, which may explain the mice’s diminished drive to run."

Note that mice are not actually humans, and mouse reactions to drugs don't necessarily translate to humans.

That's true, and historically in the US, laws against vagrancy were passed after the Civil War and were enforced much more against Black folks than white. Some references include Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II , by Douglas A. Blackmon and The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America, by Khalil Gibran Muhammad.

Michelle Alexander, in The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness also examines mass incarceration and prison labor, mostly from the standpoint of drug policy.

"It is the duty of the poor to support and sustain the rich in their power and idleness. In doing so, they have to work before the laws' majestic equality, which forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets and steal loaves of bread."
--- Anatole France: Le Lys Rouge [The Red Lily] (1894), chapter 7

Frank Luntz isn't just a pollster: he is (or has been) a propagandist, inventing terms like "death tax" and "death panels". Wikipedia notes: "His work has included developing talking points and other messaging for Republican causes, assistance with messaging for Newt Gingrich's Contract with America, and public relations support for The Israel Project. He is a former climate denier[3] and has advocated use of vocabulary crafted to produce a desired effect, including use of the term death tax instead of estate tax, and climate change instead of global warming."

And $20,000 invested in the NASDAQ in 2000 could turn into less than half that a couple of years later. Not to mention that the problems ClassicASP describes didn't start recently: they've happened intermittently and repeatedly in the past. You seem to have grabbed onto survivorship bias here.

Anonymous boasting also seems a bit odd.

Interesting. Thanks for that.

The Official Story from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics: "Some people think that to get these figures on unemployment, the government uses the number of people collecting unemployment insurance (UI) benefits under state or federal government programs. But some people are still jobless when their benefits run out, and many more are not eligible at all or delay or never apply for benefits. So, quite clearly, UI information cannot be used as a source for complete information on the number of unemployed."

Statistical sampling: "... the government conducts a monthly survey called the Current Population Survey (CPS) to measure the extent of unemployment in the country. The CPS has been conducted in the United States every month since 1940 .... There are about 60,000 eligible households in the sample for this survey. This translates into approximately 110,000 individuals each month ...."

"... the chances are 90 out of 100 that the monthly estimate of unemployment from the sample is within about 300,000 of the figure obtainable from a total census. Relative to total unemployment -- which ranged between about 7 and 15 million over the past decade -- the possible error resulting from sampling is not large enough to distort the total unemployment picture."

There are more details on the Web site.

Also worth noting, I think: the BLS definition of "employed" is "People are considered employed if they did any work at all for pay or profit during the survey reference week."

I don't know whether begging is officially considered "work".

Ars Technica speculated that "The space agency is effectively on a wartime footing as it seeks to accelerate plans to land humans on the Moon’s south pole before China and to explore the most interesting terrain there first." Isaacman hisself said, "“We’ve got the hardware, and this is exactly what we should be trying to do to put wins on the board, getting a capability like Promise to the surface of the Moon", so he seems to be thinking in terms of competition.

Did you mean "insolation", as in sunlight? As you say, it wouldn't be temperature in the same sense as on Earth, since the temperatures we talk about on Earth are air temperatures, and there's no air on the moon.

"Insulation" also does apply: it's hard to get rid of heat in a vacuum.

The sun is killer, but at least it's a dry heat -- there's no humidity.

No, it doesn't have an RTG installed, but I couldn't find any definite statements to that effect, only vague allusions like this "NASA has an MMRTG available".

Also interesting, from Space Daily: "A fully built, fully tested lunar rover named VIPER faced dismantlement for parts after its 2024 cancellation, and NASA is now considering sending a Mars engineering testbed that has spent its working life in a JPL rock yard to the Moon instead .... VIPER, the Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover NASA built specifically to search for water ice at the lunar south pole. VIPER was, by NASA’s own account, fully assembled and had worked through acoustic, vibration, and thermal vacuum testing by mid-2024. It was not a concept or a prototype. It was a finished spacecraft waiting for a launch date. NASA cancelled VIPER on July 17, 2024, citing cost growth and the risk of further delay." VIPER was/is also solar-powered, which is a limitation on the moon.

Google AI guesses that "The word 'legacy' was specifically chosen to emphasize the long-term, foundational value of the project." Wikipedia tells a different story: "The telescope was originally named the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope .... In June 2019, the observatory was renamed the Vera C. Rubin Observatory as proposed by United States Representative Eddie Bernice Johnson and Resident Commissioner of Puerto Rico Jenniffer Gonzalez-Colon. ... The telescope itself is named the Simonyi Survey Telescope, in recognition of private donors Charles and Lisa Simonyi. ... The LSST acronym was repurposed to refer to the survey that the observatory will perform as the 'Legacy Survey of Space and Time'". Technically not an acronym, but there you go.

According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, "legacy" can be used as a noun or adjective. Adjective definition 2 is similar to your understanding.

Now let's have an argument about why it's called the "Simonyi Survey Telescope", rather than the "Charles and Lisa Simonyi Survey Telescope" (or the "LISA and Charles Simonyi Survey Telescope"). Then we can have a rousing debate about why the Nobel Prize in Economics isn't really a "Nobel Prize" but instead "The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel". No doubt because the Swedish bank is woke.