Not sure we do have better quality of life in Europe. We may have in the 2000s, but we're in decline relative to the US. Even if you take things like healthcare into account:
US average disposable income is $51,000, while it's $32,000 in the UK (with higher rents in the UK than the US).
Citation? Median earnings is less than that. And median household income is only marginally more.
the U.S. Census Bureau estimates that the median annual earnings for all workers (people aged 15 and over with earnings) was $51,370; and more specifically estimates that median annual earnings for those who worked full-time, year round, was $63,360.
According to the CPS, the median household income was $70,784 in 2021.
That's income, not disposable income. It's also median, instead of mean. It's also wrong. Median income in the UK is £39,039 which is about $49,500.. You linked to the US Wikipedia page twice.
Yeah, OECD is saying the mean disposable income is the US is almost the same as median household income.
Either some of the numbers are wrong, or your (OECD’s) use of mean is misleading… the mean of Bezos’ and my disposable incomes is a very large and mostly useless figure.
Mean personal disposable income being comparable to median household income isn't too surprising and doesn't necessarily indicate any error. Mean is much higher than median, individual is much lower than household, disposable is much lower than total. You are comparing numbers that are different in all three axes (in ways which do not point in the same direction), so really any relationship between them would be plausible without detailed knowledge of the exact distribution of all the relevant components.
Point is the median person earns about the same as the mean disposable income. So the mean disposable income isn’t telling us too much about the quality of life, or financial state, of a typical American. From what I’m seeing, it’s just reflective of our increasing income disparity.
Taken to an absurd degree… the mean of my income and Jeff Bezos’ income tells is nothing about my income beyond “much less than Jeff”.
Depends who you are. 16% of the UK is in absolute poverty (20% if you account for housing costs), while only 10% are in absolute poverty in the US.
I'd rather be an American on an average salary paying for healthcare than in the UK on a much lower average salary. Property costs/rents are much higher and our public services like healthcare are crumbling (my dad nearly died in a hospital corridor because there were no beds left).
I know that last bit is anecdotal, but it's a country-wide problem.
The shoes definitely help, but there are all sorts of other innovations that get far less press.
More is known about optimal fuelling, hydration and sleep. Improve those and you improve your daily training. Better quality training compounds and allows you to reach closer to your talent ceiling.
Kerr also had a system set up so his bedroom had less oxygen than the rest of his house (to mimic sleeping at altitude).
He had two pacers breaking the air for the first 1,000m (although he had to do it himself the rest of the way, which was bloody impressive). Meant he could relax mentally for the first 2.5 laps and didn't have to focus on pace. I think El Guerrouj set the previous WR in a race without pacers.
They also had pacing lights on the track which helps the pacers run at an even pace.
And there are all sorts of innovations like taking sodium bicarbonate to reduce muscle acidity, nitrates to dilate the veins and increase blood flow to muscles and high doses of caffeine to reduce the rate of perceived exertion.
As someone else mentioned, track surfaces are generally a little bouncier now than they used to be.
Nitrate supplements wouldn't seem to meet the WADA criteria for inclusion on the prohibited substance list because they don't present a health risk to the athlete. A lot of endurance athletes are using beetroot supplements and so far there haven't been any adverse effects.
Where do you draw the line? (I know that the answer to that question is always 'somewhere') No one's getting significant levels of baking soda from their diet, and caffeine is a relatively recent cultural addition to most diets.
The gels are much the same. Getting the same nutiritional ratios used to require carefully controlled eating and certainly weighed vastly more than the gels adding both weight and complexity and likely being less performant.
Most(?) sports handle this by maintaining multiple leaderboards. The sub two hour 26.2 mile run was broken years ago, but the sub 2 marathon race was only recently completed, for instance. The difference being that the original was done much like this one in that it was paced, on a track, etc while the later was run in typical marathon conditions with other racers, variable winds etc.
Athletics has never maintained any sort of "leaderboard" for unsanctioned exhibitions. When Eliud Kipchoge ran a marathon-distance time trial sub 2 in 2019 it was an amazing feat of human performance but no one was under any illusions that it was a record.
There are off the shelf supplements that are widely used for this, e.g. BeetElite which contains nitric oxide derived from beet juice. I can testify that they do offer a real performance benefit - in my case I've found them beneficial when running at altitude as a (very) amateur. I'm not sure how/when something like this should become a banned PED.
You'd have to ban beets if you want to ban nitrates. Caffeine is more of a performance enhancer than nitrates, but they wouldn't ban it because everyone drinks coffee.
Sleep is the biggest performance enhancer. They should ban that.
Dr Kyle works out the precise dietary requirements to support my training while my performance chef Jameel Austin does the shopping and makes the meals to ensure I implement that. Everything I put into my body is cooked by Jameel. He also works in a restaurant as a pastry chef – that’s not a food on my menu – but he comes to our house every Monday and Thursday to prepare the meals.
We also do an eight-day coffee fast before races. A coffee about three hours before the race should then have more impact. Regular blood-work informs whether any supplements are recommended by Dr Kyle. Supplements that I might have at different times of the year include vitamin D, omega-3 or beta-alanine.
Like most runners now in almost every distance and endurance sport, I will also take sodium bicarbonate before a race, but I never bother in training. Sodium bicarbonate is essentially baking soda and has long been known to buffer hydrogen ions and thus delay muscle fatigue. Its usage, however, has increased over recent years after it was produced in a gel that helps to bypass the gut and thus reduce the risk of gastro issues.
Yeah, that's valid. It's not open source yet, but watch this space.
I can't even see people's email addresses when they sign up (as they just sign into their Claude Code account), but I get that you'd have to just take that on faith for now.
As it's a desktop app, someone can just point a proxy at it and watch exactly what it sends. You'll see that nothing like your conversations with Claude or even your login ever leave the app.
Yeah, I have used that and it's pretty good. For me, keeping up with multiple Claude Code agents got pretty annoying (hard to see which need your attention etc) so I felt like I needed a lightweight UI. I get that that isn't for everyone though.
VS Code with the extension uses Electron (heavy, because it bundles its own Chromium), extension host, and language servers which is what causes it to crash when you run multiple agents.
Abralo has a Rust backend (0% CPU) and has one shared webview (your native one).
But it's worth saying that the agents themselves use a huge amount of memory however you run them. That's why it's important not to layer additional overhead on top of each.
