I will bet that it is even less now, thanks to smartphones being with people at all times.

Eventually, I identified that the sickness I felt was like what happens if, as so very long ago, I got good sleep, except that one day I stayed up until 3am and slept 2 hours. The way I felt changed: once aware of what I was actually experiencing, I could identify it as extreme sleep deprivation. I’ve slept a lot less than my Fitbit says; correcting for the past several months, I get a maximum of 2.5-3.5 hours per day, mostly light sleep–no restorative slow-wave sleep.

So now I’m powering through Melatonin for that. Time-release Melatonin, because IR spikes the levels way high and TR can work without causing tolerance and rebound insomnia. I kind of want to ask my psychiatrist for Tiagabine or another anti-convulsant (state-of-the-art as of 2013 mentions ACs can provide more slow-wave sleep and less night-time awakening, but not accelerate sleep; but also recommends taking an Ambien every time you wake up throughout the night, and hell no I’m not taking 5 Zolpedim every night), but first I want to see how far I can get with just Silexan, Melatonin, and sleep habits.

As for the pretend-economists in the crowd, no, you don’t just get more work for lower pay. That can happen at the uncontrolled low-end, sort of; essentially, the lower the minimum wage, the more jobs are available, but also the lower the standard-of-living, to the point of a non-living wage (too much financial risk means you suddenly become a non-consumer now and then, which means you’re not a viable profit source).

In general, the market moves profit margins to stable points related to demand–the more demand, the lower the stable margin (e.g. food’s 10%-ish margin and the grocery store 2% profit margin versus any specialist good with a 5,000% margin and all of 2,000 customers worldwide). The reason our GDP-per-capita increases–and why food cost 40% of the middle-class median family income in 1900, 33% in 1950, and 10% today–is we find ways to reduce working hours per good produced, and the margin eventually (not immediately) floats down. The total system of economic effects that cause this are complex, starting with direct competition (hence why high-demand goods have stable, low-margin prices: lots of competitors, versus trying to start a business to sell something to a market that only wants to buy 5 or so of them per year) and going all the way to money supply (the pile of income in any given time period is finite) and mathematical inequality (the change in prices between various goods can’t line up, because some goods would have to sell below cost).

All of that essentially means, in simple terms and among other things, that the price of goods is related to the total cost of wages to make them. If the business makes you work 50% longer, then you make 50% more things; but each thing only costs as much as your labor time. Conversely, if the business made you work 50% longer but didn’t pay you more, goods would cost 2/3 as much. Not reducing prices to match the change in costs would be essentially the same as doing that today, and would or wouldn’t happen for the same reasons–it has nothing to do with how much you *can* work.

Working hours used to be 60-94 per week; they came down to 40. People argued for shorter working hours for hundreds of years, yet the working hours actually started coming down in the 1920s, spanning out to the 1960s, essentially as technology rapidly reduced the amount of necessary labor and, thus, the amount of working time you needed to trade–and thus the amount of wage you need to bring home–to buy essential goods. Suddenly it became possible to work 40 hours instead of 60 and still buy food, even though those 20 hours had to be replaced with (half of) another person and the price of food had to include another (half of a) person’s wage.

Most things you buy cost minutes of your life. Internet costs $80/month, or 4 minutes and 15 seconds of my time per day. Food costs $200/month, or 10 minutes 40 seconds of my time per day. There was a time when food was more than half your budget, and you worked 100 hours every week. It’s not that they can’t make you work; it’s that the system would become unstable if they did. That, plus money is only worth labor exchange, and high prices and high margins and labor abuse reduce the value of money: tweaking our tax system to improve efficiency would gain a 32-hour work week, which would actually make the rich a hell of a lot richer even though the middle-class and poor would be the biggest beneficiaries.

Furnace said: “Lucid dreaming only takes a little time and effort. For about three years straight, I wrote a detailed description of my dreams, and after seeing patterns emerge in my writings, I started having concious thoughts when I noticed them in my dreams. “Hey! I’ve had five different dreams where someone cuts their foot on broken glass and here it is again!” …and the lucid dreaming starts.

My goal for the longest time was to find a book in a dream, then read and remember as much as possible so I could find out what my mind would create. Time and time again, it was always gibberish. This is the longest line of text I’ve been able to get from a dream- “Standard strock not oekey todoso.””

That’s actually quite interesting. I’m also very intrigued by the skill of lucid dreaming (though I’m only just a beginner). My dream diary is about 2 weeks long, but it has quite a few gaps in it since I usually can’t remember my dreams when I awake.

Anyway, when you’re reading those gibberish lines of text, do they actually make sense to your dream self, or do you read it and toss it due to it being gibberish?