Pokémon Sleep is a mobile game from Pokémon: Magikarp Jump developer Select Button that can track your sleep. It features Snorlax (of course) and Professor Neroli, a Pokémon sleep researcher. The idea is that you leave your phone next to you when you go to bed. The app will analyze your sleep and categorize it into one of three types: dozing, snoozing and slumbering. Pokémon that tend to sleep in a similar fashion will gather around Snorlax. The more you play, the more likely you are to unlock rare sleep styles for various Pokémon. Droopy-eared Pikachu in particular looks extremely cute.

A new report from Wendell Potter at the Center for Health and Democracy examines just how the private insurance market makes its money—and how American health care is worse off for it. Health care reform has always been one of the least attainable objectives for American progressives. Reverence for private industry has allowed the health care industry to remain at the center of the medical system, and reforms have made modest gains at best. Today, the private health care industry is enormous, notoriously difficult to navigate, and shrouded in secrecy. A new analysis from Wendell Potter, executive director of the Center for Health and Democracy, published on his Health Care un-covered Substack, sheds light on how the industry has grown to such a state, and what can be done to rein in an industry that costs the American people trillions and still leaves millions under- and uninsured. The report analyzes the health insurance market by looking at the financial statements of the top seven insurance providers in the country, information that is typically aimed at financial investors and market analysts. The companies are Centene, Cigna, CVS/Aetna, Elevance, Humana, Molina, and UnitedHealth Group, also referred to as the Big Seven. The report compares growth from 2012 and 2022. It found an industry enjoying massive profits, often by undermining public programs, and whose ruthless pursuit of money has often life-threatening consequences. The numbers are astounding. Big Seven revenue increased 300 percent in the ten-year period studied, while profit increased 287 percent. Potter notes that, at three of these companies, over 90 percent of health plan revenues come from government programs.

The attempt to make the CFPB unconstitutional has grave consequences. The conservative legal movement’s strategy to kneecap the administrative state continued its march yesterday, with a ruling that calls into question the operation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). While bad enough on its own terms, if ultimately successful, this ruling would lead to significant collateral damage that the gleeful destroyers of consumer protection haven’t thought through. The case, where the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals found the funding mechanism for the CFPB unconstitutional, could throw nearly all consumer financial markets into upheaval. Separately, it could potentially toss aside every agency and federal program that is not funded through discretionary congressional appropriations—threatening senior health care, retirement security, food and drug safety, and all kinds of other actions. The unintended consequences of the ruling would drive the U.S. government into near-total paralysis.

There's a reason so many restaurants have almost the same name.

A helicopter with a shooter will fly over a portion of the vast Gila Wilderness in southwestern New Mexico next week, searching for feral cows to kill.

The layoffs also included “hardcore Musk loyalists,” tweeted Zoë Schiffer, who covers the company closely for Platformer. She added that the layoffs included “a ton of surprises.” For instance, she tweeted, among the laid off was Esther Crawford, chief executive of Twitter Payments. In early November, Crawford tweeted, “When your team is pushing round the clock to make deadlines sometimes you #SleepWhereYouWork.” One senior product manager, Martijn de Kuijper, tweeted that he’d been locked out of his email account. De Kuijper, who founded Revue, an editorial newsletter tool Twitter acquired in 2021, tweeted: “Waking up to find I’ve been locked out of my email. Looks like I’m let go. Now my Revue journey is really over.”

In The Third Reconstruction, historian Peniel Joseph examines how how the broken promises of racial equality in the past might be fulfilled in the future.

Rene Gonzales talks about why he’s sticking to his decision, made to help curb tent fires among homeless Portlanders, just before temperatures plummeted.

MEXICO CITY (AP) — Mexico’s president posted a photo on his social media accounts Saturday showing what he said appeared to be a mythological woodland spirit similar to an elf. President Andrés Manuel López Obrador did not seem to be joking when he posted the photo of an “Aluxe,” a mischievous woodland spirit in Mayan folklore.

Supermarkets in the UK have run out of turnips after a Tory minister told Brits to eat them to avoid food shortages. Turnips are out of stock in Waitrose and Tesco, with the latter pointing customers in the direction of swede instead. It comes after Environment Secretary Therese Coffey said turnips would be a suitable alternative to other vegetables that are currently out of stock. She said: “A lot of people would be eating turnips right now, rather than thinking necessarily about aspects of lettuce and tomatoes and similar. “But I’m conscious that consumers want a year-round choice, and that’s what our supermarkets, growers and food producers around the world try to satisfy.” Her remarks came after Tory colleague Selaine Saxby said supermarkets are importing “far too many products” and suggested seasonal eating would solve the issue. Growers have also warned of a leek shortage that will see British-grown supplies exhausted by April. High temperatures and a lack of rain, followed by a period of cold weather, are being blamed for creating the “most difficult season ever,” Tim Casey, chairman of the Leek Growers Association, said. Suppliers have warned that shortages could last weeks as a combination of bad weather and transport problems in Africa and Europe has left some fruit and vegetables out of stock. Four supermarkets have introduced customer limits on certain fresh produce, with photographs emerging of empty shelves.

There is a history of offensive "likes" on Vallas' Twitter account dating back to before he launched his campaign. On Friday, he told us his account was hacked.

As with learning loss, it’s difficult to say how much of this was preventable. The years 2020 to 2023 saw trauma after trauma inflicted on Americans, from more than 1 million deaths from Covid itself to the sharp economic downturn in the initial stages of the pandemic to the racial reckoning that began in summer 2020.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Biden administration moved Friday to require patients see a doctor in person before getting attention deficit disorder medication or addictive painkillers, toughening access to the drugs against the backdrop of a deepening opioid crisis.

DEHUMANIZE YOURSELF AND FACE TO FOXTROT

Adams, who has written the satirical office comic strip Dilbert for more than three decades, said during his Coffee with Scott Adams online video program that current polling proves that there is “no fixing” the current racial tension in America and that whites should live in largely segregated neighborhoods.

A new National Academies report endorses a plan to more than triple the agency’s current construction and maintenance budget.

An explosion in proposed clean energy ventures has overwhelmed the system for connecting new power sources to homes and businesses. Plans to install 3,000 acres of solar panels in Kentucky and Virginia are delayed for years. Wind farms in Minnesota and North Dakota have been abruptly canceled. And programs to encourage Massachusetts and Maine residents to adopt solar power are faltering. The energy transition poised for takeoff in the United States amid record investment in wind, solar and other low-carbon technologies is facing a serious obstacle: The volume of projects has overwhelmed the nation’s antiquated systems to connect new sources of electricity to homes and businesses. So many projects are trying to squeeze through the approval process that delays can drag on for years, leaving some developers to throw up their hands and walk away. More than 8,100 energy projects — the vast majority of them wind, solar and batteries — were waiting for permission to connect to electric grids at the end of 2021, up from 5,600 the year before, jamming the system known as interconnection. That’s the process by which electricity generated by wind turbines or solar arrays is added to the grid — the network of power lines and transformers that moves electricity from the spot where it is created to cities and factories. There is no single grid; the United States has dozens of electric networks, each overseen by a different authority.

A woman who has devoted the last five years of her life fighting a non-existent secret cabal of pedophiles, says her convicted child sex abuser son needs protection.

Some call dozens of pharmacies, pay hundreds of dollars or ration their medicine to avoid a decline in functioning at school or work.

As in so many other things, Twitter hasn’t paid its Slack bill.