I think this is the press release for the new analysis they are referring to. It’s titled Majority of Americans Can’t Achieve a Minimal Quality of Life, According to New Ludwig Institute Research. You can find “bottom 60%” in the fourth paragraph

In 2023, the bottom 60% of households earned just 22.1% of all disposable income but needed 39% to meet MQL.

Cry. We get trained early to hold it in. Whether it’s a good intentioned “please don’t cry” or a heartless “stop crying or I’ll give you something to cry about”, we learn when we’re young that it’s not okay to let out our emotions. But sadness passes in tears. My wife of 25 years died less than two months ago. I have good support from people who understand letting out your emotions and I’ve been crying hard almost every day since then. I’m mostly past the acute grief now. I’m getting out and doing things with people, spending time with friends. I still have moments where I see something of hers and have to take a moment to cry. But I’m up and living my life.

So be gentle with yourself. Hold space for your sadness and let the tears come. It’s the only way I know of to pass through it.

While peppers are prolific cross-pollinators, you don’t see the results of that in the original fruit. If you grow a habanero and a jalapeno next to each other, the fruit they produce will be exactly what you would expect from an ordinary jalapeno and an ordinary habanero. If you save the seeds, however, and grow the F1 hybrid it will be a mix of the two parents phenotypes. It won’t look exactly like either parent, and will be some combination of the two in flavor.

If the original fruit you got from the jalapeno was different than you expected it could have been a hybrid itself, or it could have been growing conditions encouraged a spicier flavor.

Pro:

• It’s good at explaining things. You have a question about coding, geography, or most anything you could answer with a thorough internet search and enough time to sift through the results, it’ll give you an answer immediately that’s tailored specifically to your question.

Con:

• Answers are sometimes subtly wrong in a way that’s hard to pick out unless you already know the answer or are already an expert. It’s like having a really smart uncle who likes to prank you every few times he talks to you.

Pro:

• It can generate any text you ask for. A love letter to your girlfriend, an application for a job, an article to post on the internet. Instead of spending hours thinking about something, learning something, and sharing your opinion on it, it can just give you polished text that makes it look like you have a smart take and an opinion.

Con:

• People who use it for this are getting dumber. It’s growing near impossible to teach kids in school because they can just Chat GPT a paper on the Great Gatsby in seconds. All they end up learning is how to ask an LLM to give them an opinion. This is also producing a tidal wave of slop in every outlet that used to depend on human creativity. Open source coding, books, news, online articles, and many other arenas used to take effort to generate something, and there are systems, businesses, and processes built on the assumption that a human is generating content. Since that’s no longer true these systems are breaking down.

Another Con:

• It’s fucking up the economy, the job market, consuming absurd amounts of energy, and sucking up the production of computer components.

Pro:

• It allows anybody to generate art in almost any style with very little effort. You can produce the picture you want in the style you like in moments.

Con:

• The reason it can do this is the AI companies stole and used art generated by real people in the training data for their LLMs. So now if you want a cartoon in the style of your favorite artist you don’t even have to ask them to make something for you. You just ask an LLM. Obviously, this is killing the goose that laid the golden egg. Business for artists dwindles and they struggle more and more to live. The end state of that is all art is generated by LLMs and nothing new is ever created.

I could go on, but in short the drawbacks greatly outweigh the advantages. Yes, you can get quick answers to questions, but the net outcome on people and society is massive damage.