As I understand the data in this article, midlife mortality rates for those who hold college degrees has declined from 1992 to 2019, whereas the rate has remained largely stable for non-college degree holders.

I wonder if this trend is due, in part, to college degree holders becoming disproportionately female over time, and women having lower midlife mortality rates? https://www.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/degrees-1.png

It's exactly these kind of issues with statistics that cause us all kinds of problems. I'm glad you pointed this one out.

It reminds me of a YT video I was watching with similar issues about cancer mortality rates. We've been doing all these treatments, and cancer survival rates have been going up. So everybody cheers about how good the treatments are. But when you control for the fact that earlier detection puts more people into the 'cancer' category earlier, causing 'cancer' people to live statistically longer from diagnosis, then the benefits of the treatments mostly go away (for many but not all types of cancer).

And these kinds of misleading issues are all throughout statistics. See Simpson's paradox, etc.

This seems like an extremely broad brush. There are cancers that were literally untreatable and guaranteed death within years, that with treatment now can see patients living 5+ years. Lung cancer specifically, but others as well.

You're not rebutting his point.

Let's assume fate has decreed that patient X will die of lung cancer at 70. Detect it at 68, dies in 2 years. Detect it at 64, dies in 6 years. Your early detection "increased" survival by 200%.

And I think there's a lot to his point. Fundamentally, cancer can be divided into three groups:

1) Slow growth. Leave it alone and it probably never harms the patient. Many prostate cancers fall into this category.

2) Fast growth. These are the ones where the oncologists hitting it hard can make a real difference.

3) Fast growth/fast spread. The oncologists don't have a chance. Some tumors can be slowed.

Unfortunately, our ability to figure these out (other than in hindsight) is limited. Both of my parents died of stuff that spread rapidly, in both cases treatment was a negative. (Although there was some palliative stuff for my father.)

Given that Americans with and without college degrees are split pretty much 50/50, then we’d expect there to be an equal increase in non-college degrees holder mortality rates if this was caused by changing who got degrees.

I suppose it’s possible that the gender ratio change is the cause of half of the mortality decrease, and the other half is a broad decrease in mortality rates. That would cause it to cancel out in non-college degrees holder mortality holders and double in college degree holders.

Women have had higher life expectancy and lower mortality rate in a number of age brackets, including the one studied in the paper, for much of recorded history, at least in the US. So if more women graduate from college you would expect to see some decrease in average mortality rates (and eventually increase in average life expectancy) among college graduates simply because of that.

Kinda like Bill Gates walking into a bar causes bar patron's average net worth jump up a few million. Funny thing, statistics.

Not just more female, but also a broader proportion of the population in total. You'd need to control for these effects to draw any conclusions at all.

> During the same period, mortality inequality across counties rose 30 percent, accompanied by an increasing rural health penalty

Surely women aren't a 30% greater percentage of rural county dwellers than urban county dwellers, though?

Then why don’t you go bet against these people? You could be rich.

Betting against a dumb bet isn't automatically smart.

This is good advice. You can buy “wart-off” freezing spray over the counter at a pharmacy to do this.

Oh darn, I thought they'd gotten Arch running on an M1 but they actually switched to a ThinkBook.

I somewhat regret my expensive switch from Linux to MacOS. MacOS is just so weird, it doesn't make any sense to me. For the first time in my life I feel like some tech-illiterate grandpa trying to figure out how to make his blasted computer do stuff.

Same, I have a Mac at work and can suffer the horrible window management by just having more physical monitors (3 + the built in screen).

I bought one for home use because I liked the hardware and the idea of running local llms. Long story short I'm still using my 6 year old Thinkpad running arch.

I think it is just us getting old. I used Linux since high school in the 90's, through all the way to the late 00's. I switched to OS X (long before it was macOS) because that's where all the and coming developer tools were, and I got tired of being sysadmin to my own Linux install as things break.

Now I'm the opposite of you. I WANT to run Linux, and I have both a recent Framework and Lenovo laptop at home that I bought for this purpose. But I have some issue with Nvidia drivers, or just stuck down a rabbit hole trying to configure a GUI the way I want, or whatever, and I give up and go back to macOS where everything is familiar and works out of the box. I'm too old and/or busy to deal with that shit, but it probably reflects my age more than it does macOS vs Linux.

> I think it is just us getting old.

I don't think it's that. I've used Linux since high school as well and use Mac occasionally and I get the same feeling that Mac is weird and nonsensical.

The reason I'm pretty sure it's something intrinsical to Mac and not age, is that is that I also use Windows now and then and while I don't like it and I have lots of complaints about it, I find Windows in general does make more sense to me then Mac. It's just crappy and clunky and closed, but it's generally pretty straightforward.

And I've had people tell me that since Mac is unix compliant it's very similar to Linux but I've never found that to be the case. Mac in general is obtuse, poorly documented, rarely configurable, and I always get the impression they like to do everything based on some weird sense of aesthetic that they've cultivated over the years that seems to work for people fully invested in the Apple ecosystem but just makes no sense to anybody else.

Genuine curiosity. Why would you buy a laptop with nvidia for the purpose of running Linux when it is known to be problematic?

I use Linux since ~ 28 years, and having seen all the trouble with Nvidia drivers, I just avoid it. I just pick an Intel graphics Thinkpad, likely the previous generation to the last one, check compatibility in the Arch wiki and then buy it.

I just had PTSD from reading your comment. Laptop + Nvidia drivers + Linux just do NOT work together.

Nvidia drivers almost bricked my laptop once, and I'm glad a random guy in a Discord server could help me out because I couldn't even get to the boot screen.

The biggest issue with Nvidia drivers, the mux chip issue, doesn't seem to be very prominent anymore these days. With modern laptops, you'll probably boot to desktop, though your experience will be terrible and pretty much unaccelerated.

Nvidia remains a problem on Linux, though they're making steps in the right direction. By putting all of their code in the secret and signed firmware, they can actually open source their drivers now, which is a lot better than how things used to be.

Still, I wouldn't buy Nvidia anything with a computer I want to run Linux on, it's not worth the hassle. Sucks that all developments related to AI are using Nvidia APIs though.

Yes but multi monitor in a Windows Centric office can also be troublesome because Apple continues to fail to support display port multi stream technology (MST) which means most docks will just give you one external display even if they have several. I've never understood why they're so bone-headed about this. It's not even a hard standard to support. It's just not invented here.

Only thunderbolt docks work properly but they cost a lot more so an office with 95% windows will not bother buying them.

I used to work on Mac management but the constant middle finger to enterprise needs got me to look for something else. For example, can you finally have apple federated IDs without having your email and UPN the same in the directory? This has been broken for years since they introduced federated IDs and I wouldn't be surprised if it's still broken.

For mac try moom: easily best keyboard-based windows management.

As for spaces: just create a few (important), then go to system settings and map alt 1-5 to switch between those

Failing that Rectangle.app

It's the first thing I install on any Mac.

As someone who grew up on DOS, Windows, OS/2 and Linux, macOS definitely took some getting used to (and I still have many gripes with it, especially the window management). Rectangle makes it better: https://github.com/rxhanson/Rectangle

That said, though, Macbooks are far and away the best laptop hardware you can get right now, and the combination of a POSIX/unix-like CLI environment and the ability to run common general-user desktop apps (Adobe/Microsoft/entertainment/etc) is very nice. On Linux you'd have to emulate some of the desktop apps, and on Windows you'd have to use WSL or Docker or such to gain a good *nix shell. And you'd have to put up with all the Windows ad spam and copilot spam.

But I do wish Apple would allow other operating systems on their laptops, and properly support them. I'd love to be able to properly BootCamp into Asahi or Windows for Arm with all the required drivers, etc.

It took me two weeks of farting about with Rectangle, alttab, hammerspoon and karabiner to make MacOS not give me face cancer every time I had to use it.

I still kinda hate it because I can't get keyboard shortcuts to just fucking work. On the work MacBook I use the mouse more than I'd like because I can't reliably do stuff that I have done fluidly on windows and Linux for decades, mostly around keyboard cursor control, selection, jumping in blocks of words and paragraphs, sane use of home / end, page up/down etc. Just when I think I have it cracked, I try to select the next two words, or from cursor to end of line, and it's like "no sir, in this fucking app it does something completely different, good luck finding out why it how to fix it"

I agree about the hardware though. Since the early 2010s MacBook Pro has been the best hardware. Before the M series I had a MBP13 2015, and in fact, it's still the "kitchen laptop", running OpenSUSE Tumbleweed.

Yeah, the keyboard shortcuts in particular are terrible :( The macOS GUI is just not made for power users, and I often miss the speed of being able to jump around Windows and Linux with shortcuts.

I thought a lot of stuff still doesn't work (graphics, etc.?)

I never have MacOS a chance, I have only used it for some quick safari debugging sessions, but in the last decade+ whenever I see a UI trend that really bothers me, makes things worse and harder to use invariably after some time I discover that they were copying Apple's UI/UX.

So I suspect I would not like using apple devices

Same experience here. I wanted to like it, after all it appears to be exactly what I want. An professional, stable Unix system with enterprise support.

I was and am still surprised that I found nothing of that and even Ubuntu or fedora community look more "enterprise ready" to me these days.

macOS is actively trying to hide everything unix these days and almost all the good features require building an app to access them (or buying one).

Isn't that totally normal?

When I have to touch Android or Windows, I feel absolutely awful because I am used to MacOS and iOS.

Likewise, Android and Windows users will feel awful when having to use MacOS and iOS.

It's simply a matter of habit and experience.

Having used Windows and Android for 10+ years before switching to the Apple ecosystem, I can say with confidence though that MacOS is not weird at all. It makes far more sense than the insanity that is Windows/Android.

> regret my expensive switch from Linux to MacOS. MacOS is just so weird, it doesn't make any sense to me.

When picking up macOS, two things really help:

1. Having some macOS techies in your circle (co-workers or friends) to whom you can fearlessly ask random newbie questions, since there's a good chance there's a way that works well, which you are not discovering, and one or more people in your Mac User Friends group will have a good suggestion. (Maybe an LLM or Reddit can solve this, but real people are good, too.)

2. Leaning into whatever the macOS way to do the thing is. Don't try to do it the Windows or Linux way. Fall into the Apple paradigm. Don't fight it.

The main problem I had was that apple is a really closed system. I'm not a one OS guy, i always need my stuff to work on windows, Linux, android etc. I don't even use iOS anymore because it's too limited.

Most of the things Apple offers in terms of cloud sync don't work on everything so it's a pretty but useless walled garden to me.

It's a shame because I was a long standing mac user. Because it was a good and fairly open Unix with a good UI. But since iOS became popular macOS has moved into a direction that didn't work for me anymore. They care more about locking users into their ecosystem now than anything else.

It was not super difficult to get Gentoo running on an m1 MacBook with the (unsupported) instructions some of the Asahi folks left around. I guess Arch might be a bit more difficult in some ways, given the weird status of arm64 being a different project from core Arch?

Asahi was originally arch based. Not sure how it is faring now, though

Arch on aarch64 still exists but it is poorly maintained. I switched to Fedora and I've been happy with that choice, although I do miss the AUR at times.

Or, alternatively, non-illiterates have different needs.

macOS is quite popular among tech literate people too, it's almost the default OS for most techies.

That's not my experience at all. Some tech companies are macOS shops and their employees will use macOS, but Windows still dominates the market.

Depends on the work I guess, for anything MS Office related Windows in way better.

Not really, it's just that macOS is more suitable for a different level of abstraction than linux.

Sell it and buy a PC.

You can actually do that, there is asahi-alarm

Curious, what is it that doesn’t make sense?

I can't figure out how to set a shortcut that moves the current window to my other monitor. Always have to go into the toolbar to do it.

Edit: And oh! Why do I constantly have to (painfully manually) maximize windows. Preview is constantly choosing a different size, for example. Why is this not remembered.

I can't recall the last time an application in linux forgot its size after restarting.

Agreed that apps forget where they were, or end up on the main screen instead of the attached one.

Rectangle deals with a lot of that with key shortcuts.

I don't love MacOS, but I don't hate it. I have a bunch of extra utilities like Rectangle, BarTender, MonitorControl, Karabiner-Elements, that make things better.

I use MacPorts so when I open a terminal, I get a Unix/Linux environment.

Things I miss from Linux/X-11, primarily middle button copy/paste, and being able to run an X-11 app remotely over LAN/WAN. But a lot of that is configurable with terminals like iTerm2.

You might like https://github.com/rxhanson/Rectangle

This app solves all window problems for me as well.

Give https://github.com/rxhanson/Rectangle a try... or Magnet, if you prefer a paid app: https://github.com/rxhanson/Rectangle

Not at my Mac right now, but I've defined cmd-F[12] to move windows from one monitor to the other.

The trick is to capture the exact words you see in the Window menu, with the exact monitor name, and use those exact words when defining the keyboard shortcut.

A clunky PITA, but once setup, works like a charm.

Can you not assign a shortcut to that item?

The difficulty in navigating to arbitrary locations in file open/save dialogs.

I wanted to attach a build log to a Teams post (maybe we shouldn't be using Teams on Mac, but it's a corporate decision that's out of my hands), and I could not for the life of me figure how to get the file-selection dialog to look at the relevant folder (which was somewhere under /private/). In the end, I had to use iTerm to copy the file to somewhere the dialog could find.

It should be more easily discoverable, but command-shift-g lets you type in the path directly, and even has tab completion. If you want to navigate visually, navigate up to the computer or drive where you want to start, then press command-shift-period in order to see all of the directories that are usually hidden.

Both of these approaches work in the open and save dialogs, and not just the Finder.

Thank you for the cmd-shift-g tip. That will save me a lot of grief.

Re your second tip: how do you navigate up? I couldn’t see an obvious way to do that, either.

The title of the current location next to "Where:" is a pop up button which will show you the parent directories. There is also a sidebar that appears if you toggle the small button that is an upside down caret.

This is outside the context the "Open File" dialog from your original question, but here's another tip about "navigating up":

In many application windows you can navigate the hierarchical directory structure that contains the currently open file by right-clicking on the document name/icon in the window's title bar.

E.g. in Preview, Pages, Finder, ..., hover over the file or directory name in the window's title bar. If you right click on it, a pop-out will appear with a vertical hierarchical list of that file's parent folders. Selecting one of the parent folders will open a new Finder window at that location, allowing you to quickly navigate to a file's containing folder.

And some additions to the tips in other comments:

- Dragging a file or directory from finder to the terminal will paste its path onto your shell

- iTerm has Finder integrations. Right click on a folder in Finder, Services -> New iTerm2 Window Here

And you might enjoy some of these Finder tweaks from my "dotfiles" (just run them on the shell):

  # Set Documents as the default location for new Finder windows
  # For other paths, use `PfLo` and `file:///full/path/here/`
  defaults write com.apple.finder NewWindowTarget -string "PfDo"
  defaults write com.apple.finder NewWindowTargetPath -string "file://${HOME}/Documents/"
    
  # Finder: show hidden files by default
  defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles -bool true
  
  # Finder: show all filename extensions
  defaults write NSGlobalDomain AppleShowAllExtensions -bool true
  
  # Finder: show status bar
  defaults write com.apple.finder ShowStatusBar -bool true
  
  # Finder: show path bar
  defaults write com.apple.finder ShowPathbar -bool true
  
  # Keep folders on top when sorting by name
  defaults write com.apple.finder _FXSortFoldersFirst -bool true
  
  # Enable spring loading for directories
  defaults write NSGlobalDomain com.apple.springing.enabled -bool true
  
  # Use list view in all Finder windows by default
  # Four-letter codes for the other view modes: `icnv`, `clmv`, `glyv`
  defaults write com.apple.finder FXPreferredViewStyle -string "Nlsv"
  
  # Show the ~/Library folder
  chflags nohidden ~/Library && xattr -p com.apple.FinderInfo ~/Library 2>/dev/null && xattr -d com.apple.FinderInfo ~/Library
  
  # Show the /Volumes folder
  sudo chflags nohidden /Volumes
  
  # Expand the following File Info panes:
  # “General”, “Open with”, and “Sharing & Permissions”
  defaults write com.apple.finder FXInfoPanesExpanded -dict \
    General -bool true \
    OpenWith -bool true \
    Privileges -bool true

Command+Up

I would also like a proper address bar in file selection dialogs.

The closest alternative I know of is dragging the target folder from an open Finder window into the dialog. Unlike pretty much any other OS, that doesn’t move the folder, but makes the dialog navigate to it. If you don’t have the folder open in Finder, you can do it with `open .` from a terminal.

What’s so hard about it?

I missed that bit. What did it say?

The first three questions I got were:

- Wishing a colleague a Eid Mubarak, at which the colleague mentions that she's no longer of the faith.

- It's Odd Socks day for Alzheimer awareness. Will you take off a sock? (No -> Linda disapproves.)

- Bring your dog to work day, will you bring treats to work? (No -> it got canceled anyway because of complaints.)

This just sounds like an exhausting attitude to go through life.

It is satire about working in a large corporation in the UK.

Oh no, I got that. It's just satire of the whiny kind instead of actually funny or interesting.

I don't Agree. I got a few giggles out of it. Especially the emails from "Linda", as I literally get those types of emails.

I think generally it was reasonably well done as a novelty joke website that is obviously trying to make a political point. That in itself makes it reasonably interesting IMO.

Exactly. Most HNers here are having a difficult time in telling what is satire these days.

Some of events I swear are straight of Yes Minister or The Office.

Yeah, office life is exhausting

Overblown dog whistles about "celebrate hijab day" or some such made-up nonsense I only hear about in conservative self victimisation fantasies.

There is an option to that question where it has a relatively positive outcome and you have lunch with her and presumable are on better terms afterwards. Which tells me that the author isn't dog whistling at all and it is more a lampooning the weird cringe stuff that you are expected to take part in one of these large corps.

In fact something like this sounds like it comes straight out of office space.

1. I don't believe your framing

2. What's wrong with celebrating Diwali?

3. Why should anyone care? Did anyone stop you from celebrating Christmas with your friends and family?

P.s. according to your post history you have based anti capitalist positioning on the pointlessness of most white collar labor, what happened to make you participate on the wrong side in a meaningless culture war that's just a distraction from the reduction in material conditions of the working class?

Well of course you don’t believe me, it goes against your narrative. But I’m sure someone living in Taiwan knows better than someone British currently in the UK.

Also that is quite an overreach on basic observations that are generally agreed upon and weren't anti-capitalist.

I don't believe you because I live in the UK and the idea that people don't celebrate Christmas is beyond moronic. The shops start doing Christmas stuff the day after Halloween. It's unending Christmas songs for two months.

Tell me you seriously didn't notice this.

Shops != schools. Go to a school, they are brainwashing children.

Shops will do whatever makes them profit, they are not strictly run by the government.

Schools are not strictly run by the government either. Learn how schools work before commenting.

A fair number of my family are teachers so check your facts before trying your lazy assertions.

2. What's wrong with celebrating Diwali?

3. Why should anyone care?

Most neoliberals (your entire political class) would vehemently disagree with the idea that the labor market is as high as 30% inefficiency, least of all in white collar jobs. That's not how they believe capitalism works. In their fantasy, pointless jobs can't exist, or at least not at such a high volume, since the invisible hand of the market would eliminate them.

You are of course right and they are wrong but my point is not many would agree with us.

Pretty sure that's what I have too (and am diagnosed ADHD). I used to complain to my Mum that I couldn't hear what people were saying on the bus back home from school. She took me to get a hearing test and it turns out I have bat-like hearing. I'm just not able to seperate out speech from background noise - noisy restaurants and bars are a nightmare.

> The US gets a stronger position with China such that china attacking Taiwan would be like bombing Apple or Google. The USA will go to war over that.

If TSMC has effectively transferred their technology to Intel, doesn't this remove a reason for the US to defend Taiwan?

having the tech doesn't build the actual fabs, and a two or three year halt in production or a transfer of that production from Taiwan to China while the US builds up its own production would be devastating for the US.

You are so naive to think that US actually cares about democracy. Do you ever wonder why they invaded Iraq two times, but never really bothered to invade Cuba, which is in their backyard? Because Cuba has nothing of value, no natural resources, no valuable technologies. So the US tolerates communist regime in Cuba, because there's no money in invading it.

I will disregard "Bay of Pigs Invasion", since that wasn't really US military operation, but some small scale, CIA orchestrated coup.

"Actually caring about democracy" isn't the same as liberal hegemony, where countries go to war to spread democracy.

The US has a good reason to invade Cuba: it's tightly linked to the US's largest enemy. Which is the same reason it doesn't invade (overtly).

Just spitballing - maybe if TSMC had a 49% stake in Intel they'd be incentivised to transfer their chip-making technologies and techniques to Intel, to maximise the value of their (forced) investment?

For me it's more a recognition after the fact thing: "Oh that was a good comment who said that? Oh that guy, yeah not surprised."

I see you’re being downvoted but I think you’re right.

The US reserve currency system allows the US to tax the world, whenever they print more dollars, via oil price inflation. Anyone without sufficient military power who tries to stop denominating their oil exports in US dollars ends up with freedom and democracy being brought to their country. Saddam Hussein switched to denominating Iraqi oil exports in Euros. Gaddafi tried to establish a pan-African gold-back dinar to denominate African oil exports in. And look how it turned out for them.

It’s a stealth tribute system. If you stop paying your tribute, the empire responds accordingly.