Deift--Simon and Poltoratskii--Remling proved upper bounds on the measure of the absolutely continuous spectrum of Jacobi matrices. Using methods of classical approximation theory, we give a new proof of their results, and generalize them in several ways. First, we prove a sharper inequality taking the distribution of the values of the potential into account. Second, we prove a generalization of a "local" inequality of Deift--Simon to the non-ergodic setting. Based on joint work with Sasha Sodin