The 300,000 seemed awfully high to me. For context, there are about 800,000 stokes in the US every year. Is the author seriously suggesting over a third of them will be prevented by eliminating DST? That's got to be too high by at least an order of magnitude.

It would be interesting, though, to see a chart of strokes over time. If there's a huge spike after both time shifts, that would support the prediction. The article was paywalled so I couldn't check.

Thing is, Daylight/Standard time does better align our behavior with natural light. The problem is back in the day, people got up at daybreak, regardless of what the clock in town said. It's only when we started obeying clocks rather than the Sun that things got out of whack.

You might want to read up on how economists talk about supply/demand graphs. They have to offer me enough to make taking the job be better than my next best alternative (which might be sitting on my duff flaming on the Interwebs). If I have no skills and few opportunities, yes, that's going to be starvation wages. But the vast majority of people do have options so any employer has to out-bid the next best choice.

To put it another way, I've never ever had an employer ask me how much I need to live on. The only thing they are interested in is how much some other employer has or might offer me because that's what they have to beat.

I do not believe that is the case. Standards of living consistently rose in England throughout the industrial revolution. I just read a book by Don Boudreaux and Phil Gramm which has an entire chapter documenting this.

Did you live through the '70s? I did. Life is immeasurably better now for everyone but the homeless guy on the corner. The wage stagnation myth is just that created by twisting statistics (e.g. ignoring transfer payments).

Tell me about it. I got laid off from my cushy high-tech job and spent 13 months trying to land a new gig. I lost count of how many applications and interviews I went through. High tech and software job markets are in a world of hurt right now.

I have no doubt working in a Nigerian nickel mine sucks ass. But just like other sweatshops going back to the aforementioned dark satanic mills, you have to ask, why are people working there? Because it beats the alternative. The long term answer is to make Nigeria and Haiti (to pick two examples) more productive so they generate wealth, not make hiring people so expensive the employers all leave. And that's my point: yes some regulation can help some people in the short run. If it makes hiring people too expensive relative to their output, the jobs will leave and everyone left behind will be worse off.

The history I look to is 250 years of productivity improvements leading to economic growth and rising standards of living. I also look at the history of not having hordes of unemployed weavers, farmers, longshoremen, and office clerks roaming the streets when their jobs were automated away.

Which historical trends are you looking at?

Well, it's a good argument of separating employment from health insurance. It's a good argument for separating employment from retirement planning (that is to say, company provided pensions) too. I'm glad we find points of agreement.

We can argue to what extent those separated benefits should be provided by the government or private organizations but that's a different question.

That is not literally true, not in labor markets and not in virtually every other market. If employers could offer anything they wanted, they'd pay me $1/year. They do not, they offer much more than the minimum wage for something like 97% of hourly jobs. Salaried jobs have no minimum wage and yet we don't get poverty wages. Clearly the same supply/demand curves which control other markets are at play here.

That's been the story of industrialization since the 1750s. Every productivity enhancement has been decried by people claiming it will lead to waves of unemployment and dark satanic mills. And yet the numbers do not support this fear. Standards of living and wages have been more or less monotonically increasing for two centuries and for the most part, anyone who wants a job has one. It's almost as if improving productivity leads to rising wages and economic growth.

Gee, my current employer is hiring fast and furious, as are many others. My previous employer is shedding people at an equally ferocious rate (me included, thank goodness in retrospect). It's almost as if employers want to hire as many people as they have productive work for and no more and that hiring and firing isn't personal, it's just business.

This has been argued back and forth for at least a century. We're not going to come to an agreement here. All I'll conclude with is that some regulation may have value and there's also a reasonable chance regulation is harmful. It comes down to who do you trust more: individuals to chart their own fate, or distant bureaucrats or legislators to make decisions without any knowledge of the specifics of any situation. Given my framing, I'm sure you see which one I trust more.

Or we could just let workers and employers sort it out. Why would I get involved in your negotiating a four-day week and four-day wage with your boss? Why would you expect you and I to have the same preferences?

That said, there are reasons employers might want one full-time person over two half-timers. First there's communication overhead. Pretty much every job involves communication and that's overhead. Second, every employee creates overhead (payroll, reporting, scheduling, mandated benefits, and the like). All things being equal, I expect employers generally prefer having fewer employees working longer hours than vice versa.

There might be some legislative or regulatory action which could make it more attractive for employers to have more employees. If we reduce the per-employee overhead, that would make employers (on the margin) more willing to have shorter hour employees. So perhaps relax requirements for mandatory benefits and reduce reporting overhead. I don't know how much of a difference that will make but it would be a move in the correct direction. OTOH, you could do things like mandate overtime pay for any hours over 32 per week. Bear in mind that gives employers incentive to automate jobs out of existence and/or offshore them so be careful what you wish for.

(Anecdotal evidence: California, where I live, raised the minimum wage for many hourly workers. I went to a movie theater for the first time in years and discovered they basically don't sell tickets at the theater any more. You buy them online ahead of time. That's all well and good and advantageous in many ways. I'm also sure it was cheered by the theater owners because they didn't need to staff a ticket sales desk.)

I was kind of wondering that too. Where do you land that behemoth and how do the blades get from the landing strip to the wind farm? I mean, sure, you made the problem 99% smaller but you've still got a big problem.

I have an answer. Since the biggest wind farms are off-shore, this needs to be a flying boat! Howard Hughes would be smiling.

And you know what a heavy lift helicopter needs? Some really big blades. Just sayin'.

Alternatively, use Bluetooth. I think wired headsets, keyboards, and mice went away long before USB-A ports started disappearing. I'm pretty sure I only use USB-A when I need to recharge a device which uses micro-USB. Seriously, other than power and video, I think wired devices of all classes are becoming legacy.

Here's the thing though: I'm sure the hardware vendors and Microsoft have telemetry about how many USB ports are in use and for what. If they're reducing the number of USB-A ports, I'm pretty confident it's because 99% of them are rarely if ever used.

We have an organization which sets standards for accounting. the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB). They set the Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP).

I'm sure they're not perfect but I trust them way more than I trust Trump (a felon convicted of accounting fraud, lest we forget).

I slogged through the paper (it's surprisingly readable) to section 4.3. That's the money section, where they talk about not what they can detect but whether the measured levels exceed health recommendations. There aren't recommendations for beer so they use the levels for water, which seems pretty reasonable to me.

Of the 23 beers they tested, three exceeded the recommended level. And bear in mind, they picked beers which are brewed in areas known to have high PFASs in the local water so this was a worst-case measurement. This all seems much less scary than the headline.

The next question I would ask is how do the health consequences of the PFASs compare to the consequences of ethanol? I'm pretty sure nothing good comes from the actual alcohol and expect that's the bigger threat.

Yeah, my thought exactly: why is the article and summary highlighting the oil companies? Yes, they produce oil but they wouldn't if we didn't buy it from them. And technically, Shell wasn't the one who burned the gasoline and produced the CO2, that was you and me.

I quickly read parts of the paper. Being a science paper, it's a bit dense. If I'm reading it right, they have a database of 200+ heat waves since 2000 (which they admit is an incomplete list). Of these, they conclude that in all cases for which they had good data, the heat wave was made worse by temperatures rising over the last 150 years. This is unsurprising, it's almost by definition. No doubt I'm vastly oversimplifying.

I didn't get far enough in the paper to see whether they actually link this to CO2 emissions or just take that as settled science.

Around 2012 or a bit later there were a large number of really great audio drama productions. The Truth was probably my favorite. Hello From the Magic Tavern and Welcome to Night Vale are also great. Think the latter two are still running.

I stopped listening a while back because I found other things I liked better, mostly non-fiction news and economics. I don't think they are big businesses but they're enough to keep a small crew employed.

Even in the before days, who paid ATM fees? Sheesh, if I needed cash, I would just buy a candy bar at Safeway and get $60 back. I don't think I'd go to an ATM as often as once a year.

The pandemic changed everything. Now I got to Safeway for cash about twice a year.

OK, I understand your point. I don't agree with it but I understand it.

Let's try this: if it's profitable to rent my property for four weeks out of the year, why wouldn't it be even more profitable to rent it eight? It's costing me the same amount to own and maintain, more or less, regardless of what I choose.

Ignore for now that if everyone keeps their properties off the market, the price can be made artificially high. That's collusion, it's illegal, and it's very, very hard to pull off. Each landlord has an incentive to agree and cheat. What matters is what the landlord can control, his own rental decisions. There are very few examples (De Beers being one classic one) of anyone limiting supply to drive up profits. OPEC tries to do this with limited success.

I'm curious: what is it about state boundaries which makes them special? Shouldn't I be able to stay in my county? Town? Region? Country? Why states?

But that's the thing. Why do you suppose we have empty houses and people looking for places to live? Sure, some people buy vacation homes. That's extravagant IMHO but it happens. I can see why they might choose to not rent it out, being a landlord is a bunch of work and who wants strangers messing around with your stuff?

Rent controlled units are another common example. I may not need it but if I can afford the artificially cheap rent, I may pay the price to keep my options open.

There may be other cases where rental rules make a property not worth renting. I was looking at rental properties in Berkeley, CA (I thought I could buy a place and rent it to my daughter so the rent money would stay in the family). Rental rules in Berkeley are so onerous for landlords we decided we wanted nothing to do with the city. If I had a property there, I might see leaving it idle while I waited for the right time to sell it. Or, if I owned it outright, just pay the property tax and let the price appreciate, even if it's not generating income. Notice how building more houses solves that problem: houses will appreciate in value slower so I have less incentive to hold on to it.

Where else do you think there are large quantities of vacant houses? Why do you suppose the owners don't rent or sell them? Think about it from your perspective: if you owned a property, what would incentives would you need to hold on to the property but not rent it out? Home owners aren't crazy. If they're not using their property, there must be some good reason for it.

I do not believe that is the case. Sadly, I do not have data handy but recall reading about studies showing that's exactly what happens.

Because that's how every other market works? Because of the chain of reasoning I put in my post (if you build more luxury houses, rich people move to them and that reduces demand for the houses they used to live in, which reduces the price for those houses)?

Absolutely. It's an indirect solution. And yes, of course there is a lag. It takes time to build houses, for people to move, and for prices to adjust. You might even have to build a lot of houses before you see measurable results. We've constrained construction for over 50 years so there's a lot of pent-up demand.

Absolutely. There's a flip side: as developers rush to hoover up the now-available properties, that bids up the prices for them. Guess who benefits? Oh, that's right, the lower income people currently residing there. They sell their knock-and-go shack for an unreasonably high price and run giggling.

Yes, there's a cost: moves are disruptive and unsettling for the individuals and the community. Traffic patterns and neighborhood character change. I don't see a way around that. The only thing that is constant is change. We used to be a much more mobile society than we are now and we may need to revert to older behavior.

I don't follow your logic. Virtually everyone wants a place to live, either renting or buying. As there are more of them relative to supply, prices go up. As prices go up, people compromise on what sort of house they'll accept. Maybe it's smaller, less well built, or has roomates. Kind of a bummer but again, that's how markets work. At the same time, there are people who want to invest in real estate. As the demand to invest grows relative to supply, that will also bid up prices but as prices go up, the amount of demanded investment will tend down. At some point, it's no longer a good investment to buy a rental house, you don't make enough on the rents to pay the mortgage.

You notice what is the same there? Raise the quantity of houses and both prices go down. More houses? Sellers have to accept lower prices to clear the market. More houses? Investors aren't willing to pay as much to buy a rental. It's all about supply and demand, just like every other market in the world.