Insomnia isn't anything you should lose sleep about
Journalist Jennifer Senior writes at The Atlantic about her own and the nation’s struggles with insomnia: Why Can’t Americans Sleep?.
Like Senior, I have struggled with fierce insomnia, sometimes getting only two hours per night of sleep for several nights a week. It started in 2020 or so. And like Senior, medication has corrected the problem for me. She takes Klonopin; for me, it’s 50 mg of Trazodone, an antidepressant. I take it at bedtime, and I sleep soundly most nights. It hasn’t fixed my insomnia, but it’s reduced to two or three nights a month.
Not only is restored sleep great for my physical and mental health, but I get the added benefit that I can drink as much coffee as I want, whenever I want. It’s coming up on 4 pm right now and I’m thinking of fixing myself a cup now!
I’ve recently become conscious of how often I say, “Cool.” It’s an all-purpose word for me, meaning “OK,” “thank you,” “good-bye,” “that’s good,” etc.
It seems lazy to me to keep hitting that word. I need alternatives.
Candidates:
- Ave atque vale.
- Keep the shiny side up and the greasy side down.
- Get your hands off me you damn dirty apes.
- You’re damn skippy.
Other ideas?
Warning: NY & Minnesota’s Social Media Warning Label Laws Are Unconstitutional. And based on zero scientific evidence too. By Mike Masnick at Techdirt.
In Defense of the Tourist Trap: Why Following the Crowd Might Be the Smartest Way To Travel. “The tourist traps were made for tourists. They know what they’re doing. If you’re a tourist, there’s no shame in enjoying them.” By Christian Britschgi at Reason.
This is the way.
“Thoughts and prayers” does sound a lot nicer than “I didn’t do anything before to prevent this foreseeable disaster and I’m not going to do anything now.”
This was, of course, a very worthwhile use of my time
I wanted to get out to walk the dog early Friday morning because I had an important 11 am meeting — not a video meeting. Real life. So I got up early enough and shaved. I put in a new blade and noticed how much nicer it was. I go months between changing razor blades, and by the end of that time, it’s like dragging a broken beer bottle across my face.
I thought to myself that I need to change the blade more often. So, after I let the dog in from the backyard to the kitchen, I got out my phone, leaned against the kitchen counter, and I checked on ChatGPT to see how often I should change a Gillette Mach 3 blade, which is the brand I use. ChatGPT said every 5 to 10 shaves. So I set a reminder in Omnifocus, which is the reminders app that I use, to change the blade in two weeks, based on my shaving every other day, which is what I do.
I wanted to set a notification for that reminder because I usually don’t check OmniFocus until midmorning, and a notification would pop up on my phone screen first thing in the morning. That’s how I remind myself of things I need to do first thing in the morning — I set notifications to pop up on my phone home screen, because, like many people, I check my phone as soon as I get up. This may be a bad habit, but I’m not going to worry about that now.
I did not want to set a due date for the OmniFocus task, because you should only set a due date on tasks where there is a real penalty for failure to complete them. I learned that from the GTD productivity system.
I could not figure out how to set a notification for a task in Omnifocus without first setting the due date, and after much tapping around on the Omnifocus iPhone interface, I asked ChatGPT. ChatGPT give me a bullshit answer so I searched the web and that didn’t work so I hunted around on the Omnifocus website for the Omnifocus manual. I was not able to find a way to do what I wanted to do, so I just gave up and used the Due app to set the reminder.
Then I decided to double-check whether ChatGPT had misled me on the number of shaves recommended between blade changes, and sure enough, the Gillette website said that I should change every 15 shaves. It also said that there is a colored strip on that blade itself that fades when it is time to change the blade. I have been using Gillette Mach 3’s for 30+ years and was completely unaware of that. So I stood up from where I was leaning on the kitchen counter tapping my phone, and I went into the bathroom and fished the used razor blade out of the trash, and compared it to the new blade, and confirmed that there was a colored strip on the new blade and that was not present on the old blade. So it turned out I did not need to set a reminder at all.
Then I went out and walked the dog, which is what I had initially set out to do.
Small web, big idea
A Small Web July — The author of the Small Cypress blog is “spending less time on the corporate web for the month of July,” minimizing Meta products, Reddit, and maybe Bluesky, and spending more time on small websites, RSS and the real world.
I did a social media fast in June 2022, inspired by Cal Newport’s writing on “social media detox” and “digital minimalism.' I would not say it had any effect on my life. I would also say I did not follow Newport’s prescription – he says you should make a point to add healthy activities you love to your life, to fill the social media gap.
Every few years I get a craving for nitro coffee, and I have some and remember I don’t like it. This weekend should do me for nitro coffee through 2028.
When state legislatures consider whether to bail out rural hospitals, remember that the tax money you send to the feds didn’t decrease, it just got stolen from hospitals and sent to billionaires and ICE agents. If your state then bails out the hospitals, your state tax money is now going to something your federal tax money was supposed to cover, so basically your state taxes are bailing out the Republican hand out to billionaires.
The next time a politician claims we can’t house the homeless, feed the starving or give medical care to the poor…. remember that they were able to build a concentration camp in 8 days.
We could provide for everyone if we wanted to, but instead we’re spending the money on fascist facilities and cutting taxes for the wealthy.
Trump’s Big Beautiful Gulag: The concentration camp reminagined as a hype house. By Ryan Broderick at Garbage Day.
When George W. Bush left office in 2009, the United States was mired in two wars and the global economy was in free fall. When Donald Trump left office after his first term, the United States was mired in a deadly pandemic and its economy was recovering from a free fall. (And this is to say nothing of Trump’s attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election in a desperate bid to stay in office.)
That’s two Republican presidencies over 20 years that ended in disaster. There is no reason to think that Trump’s second term will be the exception that breaks the rule.
Face It. Trump Is a Normie Republican.
Jamelle Bouie at The New York TImes:
If signed into law, the Senate version of Trump’s policy bill would slash $1.1 trillion from Medicaid and $186 billion from anti-poverty food assistance to help pay for trillions in tax breaks, including more than $564 billion in business tax cuts. By one estimate, these changes would result in at least 17 million people losing their health insurance over the next decade, as well as millions losing SNAP benefits, with some states possibly even ending their programs. All this so that the top 1 percent of households can receive an estimated average of a few tens of thousands of dollars each year.
But as irresponsible as this bill is, there is a dog-bites-man element to its existence. If we understand that Trump is, in most respects, an ordinary Republican president, then it is not news to learn that a Republican president wants to cut social services for the poor to sustain a large tax cut for the rich.
…
This reality extends, at least somewhat, to foreign policy.
What, so far, has been the signature foreign policy action of the Trump administration? A strike on Iran’s nuclear program. With one decision, Trump fulfilled the dreams of a generation of Republican hawks who have been clamoring for war with — and regime change in — Iran since President Bush proclaimed that it was a member of the “axis of evil” in 2002.
…
Across both the first Trump administration and this one, what you see are the longstanding goals of the Republican Party being fulfilled by a Republican president. What’s striking isn’t that this is happening, but that Trump, in his 10 years on the American political scene, has successfully obscured his rigidly partisan agenda with claims of populism and ideological heterodoxy. His occasional gestures toward support for existing social programs or greater taxes on the rich — and his willingness to say anything to amass power — are enough to persuade many voters (and some professional political observers) that Trump will somehow moderate the Republican Party or turn it away from its traditional agenda. If anything, it’s been the opposite: Trump’s willingness to do everything favored by his partisan fellow travelers has only accelerated the Republican Party’s dash toward ideological and policy extremism.
…
To look at the Trump administration and see something distinct from the past 44 years of Republican governance is to inhabit a fantasy in which past Republican presidents weren’t similarly contemptuous of legal and constitutional limits on their authority.
…
When George W. Bush left office in 2009, the United States was mired in two wars and the global economy was in free fall. When Donald Trump left office after his first term, the United States was mired in a deadly pandemic and its economy was recovering from a free fall. (And this is to say nothing of Trump’s attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election in a desperate bid to stay in office.)
That’s two Republican presidencies over 20 years that ended in disaster. There is no reason to think that Trump’s second term will be the exception that breaks the rule.
I am a regular user of an LLM chatbot (ChatGPT). It’s becoming essential to my work and life. And I also hate vendors' efforts to stuff AI into everything.
If I do a Web search, I want search results, not an AI summary. Likewise, Gmail email summaries are an abomination.
LLM chatbots like ChatGPT are good for answering questions. Search engines are good for finding websites. Two different jobs. And I know how to read email — I don’t need AI help with that.
Prices of Both Housing And Rent Are Decreasing In China. “In 2016, Xi said that houses were for living in, not for speculating. The Chinese government took steps to reduce prices, those steps took time to bear fruit.” By Ian Welsh.
When an Internet service is not responding the best thing you can do is click the button over and over again, dozens of times if necessary, getting more angry and frustrated. Follow me for more helpful tech tips.