Probably not, but contemporaneous notes have their own value legally.

Honestly, the killer smartwatch feature for me is being able to quickly click a button to find my iPhone. Everything else I use it for feels like I'm just trying to justify spending hundreds of dollars on it. I record all my workouts and my sleep patterns etc., but I never use that data for anything. I wish I could buy a $10 digital watch that also had a "find my iPhone" button.

Casio WSB1000 is probably the cheapest with phone pinging ability, but it's about $40.

I used to work at a local paper that also ran a quarterly trade magazine on the chicken processing industry.

I feel like that sounds less weird when you really start to think about it. There is lot of chicken being processed. And the margins must not be great and competition between suppliers must be at least somewhat fierce...

So there are good use cases for capital if you are in that market.

My wife works in autism services. Insurance companies are the bane of her existence. Every six months (sometimes less), she has to write a huge report justifying services. These reports are frequently over 100 pages and she is only slotted so much time to do it, so she ends up doing a ton of unpaid work. The entire business model is to drown the practitioner in paperwork then use “peer reviewers” who are nurses that don’t know anything about the treatment to deny claims then waste the practitioner’s time on appeals in the hopes that people will give up. AI has obviously made this process easier and the insurance companies absolutely hate it.

People have no idea how inefficient the U.S.’s healthcare system is. And it isn’t just the private companies. A ton of states purposefully overburden and underfund their Medicaid systems for ideological reasons. Then the private insurance companies adopt the same practices later.

I've always enjoyed the question, "how many layers of profit are between you and your doctor?"

In most states, the answer is fixed by law at either zero or one depending on whether you count insurance, because medical practices must be wholly owned by doctors.

Yes, but that's still like 20 states that don't have strict CPOM laws.

It does, but how often do you see people argue that California and Texas are paradises where healthcare is affordable because the profit-seekers have been driven out?

Inefficiency is their business model. They just soak $$ into their system. More overall revenue even if most of it is some rube goldberg machine of apathy.

From time to time, I see similar claims like this on HN: "doing a ton of unpaid work". The full quote:

    > These reports are frequently over 100 pages and she is only slotted so much time to do it, so she ends up doing a ton of unpaid work.

What if she refuses to do the work unpaid? This seems like an open-and-shut case with the US Dept of Labour. There is a whole page that explains how to make a claim here: https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/contact/complaints Also, if she is part of a labour union, she can raise concerns with them.

    > A ton of states purposefully overburden and underfund their Medicaid systems for ideological reasons.

Can you provide some evidence for this claim? Also, does this affect the state(s) where your wife works? From what I found, 66% of Medicaid is paid for by the federal gov't, and the remaining share is funded by each state.

> What if she refuses to do the work unpaid?

Then her client doesn’t get the help they need? That should be obvious.

> This seems like an open-and-shut case with the US Dept of Labour.

Even if it wasn’t for the “u” in labor I could tell you don’t live in the US.

The most obvious example were the 10 States which refused to accept increased Federal funding for Medicaid that was made available with the passage of the ACA, which seems largely ideologically driven.

Otherwise the situation is more complex than the original comment suggests, and I can only speak to one state (Idaho), but I don't think the scenario is uncommon in other GOP controlled states and isn't limited to Medicaid.

Idaho has cut taxes in the state for five consecutive years, largely (IMO) on an ideological basis. This had the result, desired by many in a deeply conservative legislature, of creating budget deficits. Even the GOP is normally wary of espousing cuts directly to the state's contribution to Medicaid, but the deficit gives them cover to reduce funding and introduce barriers to service like caps on authorized services and new work requirements. Even when revenues were higher than expected for FY 2026, the governor's office had to act to actually retain those unexpected revenues as it was pretty clear that the Legislature was going to look to claw them back and continue drive down State spending. It's worth noting that health services, including Medicaid funding, represent about a third of the State's budget and their largest portion of the budget.

This whole process has been playing out in public education funding in the State for years as well. Coincidentally, charter school enrollment has increased by roughly 35% over the same 2021 - 2026 period.

Attacking a policy, program or institution financially and then pointing to the deficiencies of those same programs to further fuel funding and efficacy reductions is a pretty well established tactic in US politics as I'm sure it is elsewhere.

> What if she refuses to do the work unpaid?

Depending on the competition for her job and the state laws, she would either be put onto a performance management program, or fired. I've been through this before. The HR approved response is that they expect those 100-page reports to be complete within normal working hours, and a failure to achieve that means you are unable to fulfill the requirements of the job.

Of course those in high demand who can easily move to better employers will often do so. However there is a lot of friction when moving jobs. It's very time consuming, mentally demanding, and risky. I've seen incredibly talented staff treated awfully in my years, and they refuse to leave for various reasons.

If enough people are fired for this reason and file complaints with DoL (US Dept of Labor), then surely the DoL will open a case against the company for unpaid wages. If I recall correctly, for a while, Amazon used to force staff to arrive early (before shifts) but did not pay them for it. DoL got involved and the rules changed. To be clear: It is difficult, but not impossible, to make labor practices change with the help of DoL.

EDIT

This part should have appeared first: I agree that your scenario is the most likely outcome, even if I think it is reprehensible!

I agree, but I do think it makes the book industry more difficult. A flood of books makes it makes it harder for new authors to make it. Just like a new youtuber has a very difficult time. Eventually publishers will turn to AI just to deal with the volume on submissions, and then it will become just like YouTube, where an algorithm decides who wins and loses.

At the same time, readers will have to sift through an insane amount of books to find what they like. It is already kind of like this, even before AI. This causes people to rely more on reviews and word of mouth, which becomes a volume game and is also influenced by the algorithms.

I don't think it is the end times for literature, and for those who put the work in, they can find their places. But it is a whole new set of challenges.

OpenAI also didn't piss off a vindictive government with the whole military use things a few months ago.

It’s not just about size. Much of the U.S. would be cheaper to build rail networks because there is a lot of open, relatively flat land without dense building on it. Japan is very mountainous and has a lot of dense development, and it has to be more resilient in case of earthquakes.

If you are a B2B SaaS and you aren't getting big customers via the website, you're neglecting it. We get fortune 1000 customers from organic traffic, and we aren't a big company.

There is a stigma with all of those things except maybe pharmaceuticals (unless you are selling opioids), sugar and junk food (because of their ubiquity).

The line is clear for some people right away. Other people have to see the effects first hand. When I was younger, I worked in a gas station, and the never-ending line of obviously poor people dropping nearly their entire paychecks on scratchoffs, then buying a case of beer was a formative memory for me. It most states, the lottery is just subsidizing the cost of education on the backs of the poor and uneducated and gambling-addicted so that they don't have to raise property taxes. And that's if the money actually gets spent on education. Sometimes they just turn into slushfunds for pet projects. It's gross.