Amazon’s warehouse workers and delivery drivers, the people critical to the company’s ability to get you things fast via Amazon Prime, will soon get Prime subscriptions as part of their employment. The new perk was revealed along with other benefit updates, including an average pay raise, announced by the company on Wednesday. The free Prime subscription will be part of the benefits package for “front-line” workers starting “early next year,” according to a blog post. They’ll have free Prime for “as long as they are a part of the Amazon team.” Amazon Prime typically costs $14.99 per month or $139 per year. As for pay, Amazon says that the frontline workers will be getting “at least” $1.50 more per hour beginning next month, which the...

If you need something explained, Vox is the place to go. Now, we’re bringing that ethos to our latest franchise, Explain It to Me, which launches Wednesday, September 18, and focuses on answering your questions through a weekly podcast, a weekly newsletter, and a video series. Every week, we’ll tackle a question from a listener and find the answer.  This week, for our podcast, our Today, Explained colleague Matt Collette asks: Why does going to the dentist sometimes feel like a scam?  “I feel like every time I go to the dentist, it’s like a little bit of a mystery,” he says. “Unlike when I’m at my regular doctor’s office, there isn’t this step where they say, ‘Hey, we recommend you do something, and here’s what it’s going to cost.’ That just feels so [different from] how I think about health care — having to think about not only do I want this procedure, but do I want to pay for this procedure? And how do I want to pay for this procedure?” Matt isn’t imagining things. There are major differences between the ways dentistry and medicine operate, including the way dental and medical offices do billing and how patients pay for services.  These differences caught the attention of Dr. Lisa Simon. She’s an assistant professor of medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School. She’s also a dentist and a doctor. After spending time in a community health care center as a dentist, she went to medical school. “I realized that the ways that dental care and medical care were separate was really harming my patients,” Simon told Vox, “and I wanted to do something about it.” “I think it’s this legacy, and maybe partly this dichotomy between medicine and dentistry, where we almost act like dentistry is optional and medicine is obligatory, which is not how our bodies work at all,” she said. We sat down with Simon to discuss the history of dentistry, why dental insurance works so differently from medical insurance, and how to leave the dentist not feeling like you were a Fyre Fest victim.  Below is an excerpt of our conversation, edited for length and clarity.  You can listen to Explain It to Me on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get podcasts. If you’d like to submit a question, send an email to [email protected] or call 1-800-618-8545. Why does the dentist feel like a scam? What is Matt picking up on? There is a fundamental tension in the way dentistry is paid for, which is that the average dentist is in private practice, and their income is dependent on providing a procedural service to you. So they are incentivized to offer more services to you, and you are disincentivized from wanting to pay for them. There’s this misalignment in terms of what our goal would be, which is to never get a cavity, and what dentists’ goals are, which is to make money doing a lot of procedures that they’re very skilled at.  Have you heard dentistry be described as a scam before? Is this sentiment that Matt has common?  I hear it all the time. Even within the field, I’ve heard it referred to as the mechanic’s principle. [If] I bring my car to the mechanic and the mechanic says, “Oh, yeah, pretty bad confubulator you got there, I definitely need to repair it,” I have no knowledge or expertise to be able to tell if that is true or if I am being scammed.  But the reality is that most dentists are probably not scamming you in this evil, mustache-twirling way, but also there can be legitimate clinical differences in someone’s style.  You may have a more conservative dentist [who is] going to wait and see if this gets bigger and maybe it doesn’t need a filling right now, or you might have a dentist that’s more aggressive and wants to treat something earlier just because they have different clinical experiences, and they’re legitimately recommending what they think would be best for you.  So why is it still so expensive to get dental work done? Why does it feel so different from regular health insurance?  In one way, dental insurance is super expensive: For the average person, a dental procedure like an implant is a crazy amount of money out-of-pocket. In other ways, dentistry is actually super-duper cheap. It’s only 4 percent of our average health care expenses as a country. If you think about the single cost of being in an ICU in a hospital for a day — which can easily be $50,000 — that’s way more expensive than dental care. The idea behind medical insurance is that if this super expensive, absolutely horrible nightmare thing happens to you, you are not financially on the hook for it.  Dental insurance isn’t actually insurance; it just doesn’t work that way. It’s a discount plan. It originated in the ’40s and ’50s with unions who were trying to provide a nice perk for their members.  What it does is it makes the cheapest things — like your cleaning, your exam, or your X-rays that you get every year — free or really cheap. But if you actually need things, you are going to pay progressively more and more of the cost of these more expensive things, which is basically the opposite of how medical insurance was originally designed to work.  So should we even be calling it insurance? Should we call it a discount plan or say, “Here is your dentist loyalty card?” Honestly, I feel like that’s a great point. It’s not insurance. To call it insurance is maybe more of a scam than any other kind of scamming that’s being done. And it’s not to say that it might not be financially a good idea for an individual person, but as a structure designed to take care of a badly unmet need in our society and to provide health care, it’s not the way I think any of us would design it. Clarification, September 18, 12 pm ET: Lisa Simon’s title has been updated to reflect her preferred affiliation. She is both a fellow at the Harvard School of Dental Medicine and an assistant professor of medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School.

The House Energy and Commerce Committee approved a bill Wednesday requiring new cars to have AM radio, which was introduced in response to an increasing number of vehicles coming out without the first-generation radio broadcast technology. The bill passed the committee on a roll-call vote of 45-2 and now heads to the full House for final approval. The bill, titled the AM for Every Vehicle Act, would direct the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) to issue a rule that “requires automakers to maintain AM broadcast radio in their vehicles without a separate or additional payment, fee, or surcharge.” Supporters say they are pushing the bill out of a concern that the slow demise of AM radio could make it more difficult to...

In a second attack on Hezbollah members, two-way radios detonated around Lebanon on Wednesday, causing injuries and multiple deaths.

NASA officials inside SpaceX's launch control center at Hangar X watch the liftoff of a Falcon 9 rocket a few miles away on March 3, 2024. The Federal Aviation Administration alleged Tuesday that SpaceX violated its launch license requirements on two occasions last year by using an unauthorized launch control center and fuel farm at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The regulator seeks to fine SpaceX $633,009 for the alleged violations, which occurred during a Falcon 9 launch and a Falcon Heavy launch last year. Combined, the proposed fines make up the largest civil penalty ever imposed by the FAA's commercial spaceflight division. “Safety drives everything we do at the FAA, including a legal responsibility for the safety oversight of companies with commercial space transportation licenses,” said Marc Nichols, the FAA's chief counsel, in a statement. “Failure of a company to comply with the safety requirements will result in consequences.”

The old technology is used because it's more durable, reliable, and was thought to be more secure from attack.

The iPhone 16. If you've ever had an iPhone update go bad, you may have used recovery mode to resuscitate your device. A device booted into recovery mode can't do anything by itself, but it can be connected to a working Mac or PC with a cable, and that Mac or PC can download a fresh copy of iOS and all of your phone's related firmware to restore it to a factory-default state. You'll need a backup to recover your personal data, but it beats having to take a trip to an Apple Store or send your phone in for repairs. The new iPhone 16 and 16 Pro models launching this week apparently add a new option for phones that are in recovery mode: rudimentary wireless communication, so phones that need to be recovered can be placed near another iPhone or an iPad and be restored without using a cable, a PC, or Mac. The new system was tested by 9to5Mac, which says it uses "the same RecoveryOS that lets users restore Apple Watch and Apple TV firmware from an iPhone." When you place an iPhone 16 in recovery mode near another device, the functioning device will download the software and firmware files and then transfer them to the broken phone, where they can be installed.

OnePlus typically offered competitive specs and features in its devices at aggressive prices, but that’s softened a bit in recent years. The fairly recent OnePlus Pad 2 has some nice qualities, like a 3000 x 2120 resolution / 144Hz display that looks great, but its $550 price, plus add-ons, isn’t exactly cheap. Right now, though, there’s a sweet deal that helps. You can get the OnePlus Pad 2 for $449.99 ($100 off) directly from OnePlus when you use the checkout code SEP50, and it’s accompanied by a free pair of OnePlus Buds 3 wireless noise-canceling earbuds ($99.99 value). As a whole, the package deal saves $200 on the total value of about $650. The OnePlus Pad 2 comes with a fairly spacious 256GB of storage and 12GB of RAM for a...