From that point of view they seemed to have created a system that stopped the elites from starting wars with each other by imprisoning their families. And although they levered high taxes they did force many elites to accept a small amount of resources per elite to the point that some in elite status were effectively poor. Instead of money they got status and a title.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elite_overproduction

With a perspective that goes farther back in time and a wider geography the sleep patterns promoted here as universal simply stated are not.

However, humans have always been flexible in their sleep patterns, and a lot of modern sleep pattern promotion is overly inflexible.

There are studies of hunter gatherers that lived close to the equator. Most of them did not nap most of the time, but in the summer they might nap during the day 20% of the time. They usually slept 6-7 hours in one stretch. [1]

But sleep was very flexible. In some cultures people would go to sleep at different times so there was always someone around the campfire. Mothers would nurse babies. Some cultures might for example once a month during a full moon stay up and party at night and then nap a lot the next day. And the sleep patterns mentioned in the submitted article show further flexibility.

Your sleep quality is likely a lot lower than a hunter gather due to modern light pollution, ability to use devices and have entertainment at night, and a lot of other factors. Unless you are monitoring your sleep with tracking devices there is a good chance you are probably getting a lot less (like an hour) than you might think. So committing to a 9 hour sleep window is still a good idea even if it might be natural in ideal settings to sleep for just 7 hours. Ultimately though you want to feel well rested with energy for your day rather than satisfying a belief system about sleep.

My approach with young children is to go to bed early so that if I get woken up I can deal with that and have time to go back to sleep. I might end up in the biphasic pattern of northern Europe sometimes with that. There was a time where I more intentionally tried to take a short nap during the day. But now I just take a nap if I feel tired.

References

  * [1] Hunter Gather Sleep study: https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(15)01157-4
  * Why We Nap
  * The Old Way
  * Keep the River on Your Right

This title of the article is misleading. Spain is one of the cheapest power generation markets, but In the article it states "Spanish households pay above the EU average". Then the reason is stated "Other system costs are rising. The flip side of getting energy cheap is paying more elsewhere to keep the system stable.".

Spain of course also had a blackout and the article states "every country in Europe needs to modernise how it handles voltage stability". I believe that's code for "its harder to manager power transmission grids with renewables". I have been told by a power engineer that read the report on the blackout that the authors are going out of their way not to explicitly blame renewables, but these things that caused the blackout are bigger issues now due to the switch to renewables.

But it makes sense for Spain to continue down this path and not pollute with coal or rely on other countries for gas imports.

Take a look Graph of energy consumption of China which is about double the US: https://ourworldindata.org/profile/energy/china

The energy consumption of the United States has flat lined: https://ourworldindata.org/profile/energy/united-states

One can argue that the US and Europe have maintained a low energy consumption by de-indusrializing and having China produce all the energy (largely with coal!) to manufacture their goods instead of manufacturing it themselves.

1) Is a lot more complicated as well. A simple ICE vs EV comparison ignores electric grid generation efficiency and transmission losses as well as the massive energy cost of manufacturing the battery.

This graph shows all energy usage over time: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-primary-energy

New energy sources have always been additive. We have never gotten rid of an energy source unless we exhausted the resource or it got prohibitively expensive (whale blubber having a population collapse). Coal is far more polluting then any other fuel source and globally we aren't reducing its usage. This graph is not updated for 2026, but I doubt the message will change much.

As we now undergo a worldwide population decline things might change. But at the same time we are also introducing energy intensive technologies: AI and robots, so there is no clear end in sight to increased energy consumption yet.

> Some have called it the “Mississippi miracle” ...

> A clear policy story is behind these improvements: imposing high standards while also giving schools the resources they needed to meet them. In 2013, Mississippi enacted a law requiring that third graders pass a literacy exam to be promoted to the next grade. It didn’t just issue a mandate, though; it began screening kids for reading deficiencies, training instructors in how to teach reading better (by, among other things, emphasizing phonics), and hiring literacy coaches to work in the lowest-performing schools. Louisiana’s improvements came about after a similar policy cocktail was administered, starting in 2021.

I would be interested to know more about the approach with literacy coaches. I donate to a charity that does 1 on 1 reading tutoring: https://readingpowerinc.org/

If we cannot as a society teach our children how to read, something is very wrong and we need to invest heavily in fixing it.

As renewable generation increases past a certain level grid stability does require additional effort and that’s a lot more difficult to price in. In Texas their grid is isolated from the rest of the US. This may create a lower ceiling on renewables since they can’t send excess generation anywhere other than their own batteries .

https://www.liftosaur.com/

The approach I ended up taking is to use slog attributes. It allows for reuse of existing logging attributes.

This is explained here (skip to the “adding metadata” portion). https://blog.gregweber.info/blog/go-errors-library/

Go package: https://pkg.go.dev/github.com/gregwebs/errors/slogerr