I don't really disagree that human cognition is essentially a predictive task though, as I understand it, predictive coding and related theories based on the Bayesian brain hypothesis are fairly popular these days (though maybe not clearly dominant over alterative models? IDK I'm not a neuroscientist). I imagine most people would draft a few tokens before refining them like MTP or diffusion though, if we do decide to use LMs as an analogy to human cognition.

Not that the other house isn't also tilted that way, but it seems to be that they, and the appointments approved by them, are functioning exactly as was intended (as shown by the supreme court suddenly caring about executive overreach when it came to money). Who knows whether they would care about the social issues affecting the poors nowadays, but they certainly didn't care to let the people be in charge without a veto from that opulent minority.

Given the number of goods and services there are in any given economy, you can probably find at least one good of each of the following categories:

A) that was very inaccessible in the 70s, and accessible now,

B) that was very accessible in the 70s and still very accessible now,

C) that was very inaccessible in the 70s and still very inaccessible, and

D) that was very accessible in the 70s and very inaccessible now (in addition to the one that you already picked)

None of those four tell us anything about whether "things people usually purchase" or "things the economy generally produces" have gotten more or less accessible, because different goods have gotten more or less expensive at different rates. You can easily point towards increasing inequality, which shows that the median American is getting a smaller share of income, and the divergence between CPI and GDPIPD, which serves to show that what people purchase on average (CPI) are getting more expensive faster than what the economy produces on average (IPD). (by about 30% on average according to FRED)

Insisting on intentionally using less useful evidence to support your claims is like making a strawman of your own argument, when clearly a stronger argument exists.

[FRED]: https://fredblog.stlouisfed.org/2023/03/the-differences-amon...

There is a divergence between the prices of goods the US produces and those that consumers purchase, as measured by the GDP IPD and CPI respectively, but that is not something that is appropriate to measure using one highly idiosyncratic good, nor even a basket of goods like "things I personally want to purchase", if one is wishing to produce numbers that others agree are reflective of the average experience of many.

[citation needed]

By measures such as own-wage elasticity [DUBE & ZIPPERER] increases to the minimum wage evidently increase wages more than they decrease employment.

[DUBE & ZIPPERER]: https://www.nber.org/papers/w32925