I have not read "The Poetics" but...

I disagree with your interpretation of tragic irony in a modern sense. Every dictionary I can find either makes no mention of tragic irony or has a definition that makes it only a subset of dramatic irony in which the audience knows the truth of a situation but the characters in the drama (in this case a tragedy) do not. This would generally lead to an inappropriate response to a situation because (as I defined before with the first definition of irony) there is a disconnect between the truth and what people perceive (or say) causing some sort of problem. Almost all those dictionaries give Romeo's suicide as an example of tragic irony because, had he known that Juliet was faking it, he wouldn't have killed himself. But the audience knows the truth, thus exhibiting the incongruity between facts and what is being said/done. So even if Aristotle originally defined irony that way, that doesn't make it legit today. And if you take out the intervention of the gods, it really loses its teeth anyway.

That said, even with you definition of tragic irony, most of that stuff isn't ironic. For instance:

• Dying when you're 98: Actually pretty good. I doubt I'll live that long. The prior lottery win has no bearing on that being 24 years longer than the current American life expectancy.
• Fly in your wine? Wine contains sugars. Flies like sugar. Thereby flies like wine. It's not shit happening or irony, it's nature.
• Getting off death row: Unrealistic. If there were still proceedings going on they wouldn't kill the person, and if it was a presidential pardon or something, they probably knew when the person was going down and let it happen, rushing in just too late to make it look like they tried. If not, yes, it would be (by your definition) tragic irony, but it seems more contrived.

I could go on. Not taking good advice? Meeting married people? Having spoons?! Not irony, just life. Jove need not be referenced.

I think that's half the problem. People get passed over for jobs they are qualified for just because hr departments throw out all the applicants who don't have a degree, even in an unrelated field. It makes it so that these people do essentially 'have to' go to college to get jobs, even though they'll get all the training they need on the job.

Personally (as a person working on a PhD in science) I don't think a lot of people need to be going to college. I grew up in a car town, and a lot of my friends knew they were going to be doing manufacturing, but they went to college anyway. A bunch of them (well some, manufacturing jobs aren't so plentiful these days) did just go on to work in the plants, but they racked up huge debt that is just stopping them from being able to do things like afford a nice place to live. And they didn't get much out of college except alcohol tolerance. No joke, I know one guy who took out an $8,000 student loan basically to spend at bars. Now he has a degree in something or another, but spends his days inserting tab a into slot b so that he can pay off that debt. If he had just gone to work in the first place, he'd be doing the same job and have more money. And he could still go to bars.

The whole education system upsets me. I think we're failing in so many places it's hard to figure out where to start trying to fix it. I'm not saying you can't get anything out of it, but that comes much more from personal motivation than any basic qualities of the set up.

That's what the Electoral College is for!

Maybe it's a malamanteau!

She's a pop singer, I don't expect her to have the firmest grasp on the English language. Though she did play a good God.

From Princeton wordnet: "Irony: incongruity between what might be expected and what actually occurs"

This is ironic. Alanis Morissette may have ruined it in most situations, but it gets the okay here.

And people say kids these days put too much stock in wikipedia. Come on, they won't even let an undefined word be added even after it clearly becomes defined by xkcd.

Now the power to change google search results, make new words, and cause spontaneous gatherings at random locations. That's power that only stick figures can be trusted with.

I agree with almost everything you said. People can definitely switch over, it just won't be a one day thing. People are constantly switching from one service to another, but it takes a while for the balance to switch from one to the other.

But I disagree about openness not being a feature. I think the point that could make this take off is that it is open. You get to host your own "node" of the network and choose what information you put on it. That will make it much more difficult to pull a switch like facebook has, at least in theory. Because all the information isn't being hosted on central servers, the main company should have a much more difficult time storing it all forever and saying it isn't yours, which is the main problem with facebook these days.

There is also the potential that if people start leaving for services like this, facebook might shape up a bit. Probably not, but it could happen.

I'm curious to see what effect this will have on the app markets. Like, will more people start developing for Android now because of the increased market share? Will that increase the Android market size to the point that it can catch up to the head start the iPhone had? Will that have any effect on the iTunes policies?

Perhaps not, but it's something to think about.

This is why I'm afraid of cars in the future. They'll have all these safety features, people will forget how to drive (even the little bit they know) and rely on the car, and things will go wrong.

FTA:

"had a human been driving, he or she would have noticed the system was not operating correctly"

And they would have ignored it. Like every check engine light in the world that no one cares about.

Part of my problem has always been DRM. I know it's a lot better now than it used to be, but if I pay for it, I want to get to keep using it forever, not just until a given music store shuts down or something like that. Granted, itunes won't be going anywhere anytime soon, but when all this was starting that was a serious concern.

Even xkcd knows it's true.

I agree. I've been using Firefox for a while, and didn't plan to switch over, but this commercial has changed that.

I am now officially a sheep. Touche, Google.

Yes!

But only after you break it in half.

It would be even better to link the two. Like you buy a first world salad spinner centrifuge and it pays for a third world person to get one too. Like they did when OLPC first came out

Around me, there's still a lot of playground equipment, but not the fun stuff I played on when I was a kid. We used to have these awesome giant wooden play castle things with ropes to climb and bridges and monkey bars and all that. They've all been replaced with the colorful plastic/metal things that aren't nearly as fun and don't allow the same kind of adventure or number of ways to play. Also gone: merry-go-rounds, see-saws, cargo nets etc and anything more than about 10 feet tall. And all the woodchips have been replaced by an unidentified foam-rubber sort of material covering the ground. It's terrible.

Sure, some of my friends broke their arms falling off the monkey bars, and I lost a tooth once (luckily one of my last baby teeth) but we loved them. People should let their kids go outside and get dirty/get hurt. It'll make them healthier and happier in the long run.

But instead one person sued and won a ridiculous sum of money, then other followed suit and now it's not worth the insurance premiums to let kids have a little fun.