My wife nearly fell for one. I really wonder why I stay with her sometimes....

Basis Peak, if they ever get the notification software, is a good start, but it needs voice recognition.

Of course, I suppose, if you had a Pebble, you could just program it to bring up voice rec on your smart phone and use your bluetooth headset.

Then of course you wouldn't need weather to decide when to leave work (or IF it is worthwhile to leave work at all, I've had a couple of times when it simply wasn't worthwhile to leave work before midnight).

I know all that. Don't forget, I've lived here my whole life and know the mailbox companies. Let the Caymans and Co have them. It's not as if they actually leave money here (tax rates close 0 benefit no one except corporations).

thus the invention/"work around" of Translit and Volapuk encoding.

Free will is not an easy app to code.

I know that. "Crystal" anything makes me think of meth these days.

Crystal Windows? Is that something like Crystal Meth?

And this has happened in every industry invented within 30 years.

Not freely. Restaurants and daycares are regulated by the state, using laws written by larger businesses. They are limited in their ability to compete. Not sure about bicycle shops, but there is a reason why the price is going up, and it isn't because the technology has really changed in the last 75 years or so. Startup costs will prevent businesses from being opened, unless they are extremely minimal.

"As long as the opportunity to start your own business is equal"

There's only one sub-industry I can think of today where that is true, and I've yet to meet anybody who is making a living at it (though, in that sub industry, cell phone app authorship, there have been some big short-term winners, most of them produce fad and fashion, not trend).

Spoke with a friend in NJ, and apparently they used to get on the order of $700 an SREC! Highest I've ever seen was $180? something like that. And as part of the estimate for ROI when I had my 7.2kw array installed, they modeled SRECs as falling off completely in the next year or so (*I'd have to dig that document out... and that sounds like effort).

The problem with Karl Marx, as with most economists of any stripe, is they are incredibly short sighted, and cannot see beyond the present generation very easily.

Thus B replaced A (Aristocrats) by revolution and good business sense, just a generation or three before Karl lived. So he expected P would replace B eventually (because that's what progress means). He failed to take into account original sin, thus B & P really aren't that much better than A, the feudal lords they replaced.