Yeah, the failure of Outbox is barely connected to USPS policy. "their market model needed to scale quickly to become profitable". It didn't. The end. Their big problem was paying for the fleet of vehicles? Wow, no one could ever see that coming.

On my lawn, you are.

Switching the stickers isn't the only way to screw one up. It's also easy to make an unsolvable cube after taking it apart with a screwdriver. The wiki-how guide states 11/12 of randomly assembled cubes aren't solvable.

I could solve a cube in just under a minute. Rather than focus on speeding that up further, I worked on all the other puzzles that came out after the cube's popularity. Missing Link, Pyramid, Rubik's Snake...I still have them all in a big bag o' nostalgia.

Blue Horseshoe, buddy, how you been?

fdisk /dev/sda

Amazon's retail store card situation isn't quite as hands-off for parents as Apple's. You need a credit card to create a new iTunes account, but afterward you can disconnect it and kids can be self-sufficient. They might take some birthday cash, buy an iTunes card just about anywhere, enter the code, they're off. I only get pulled in to help with things like backups and migration between devices.

The tween who uses my Amazon account for her Kindle has hit multiple little headaches I had to resolve for her. Example: Amazon's Kindle gift cards aren't as easy to find as iTunes ones, but she did find one at a local store. It turns out you cannot just redeem them directly on the Kindle and go shopping. You have to visit your account on Amazon's web site, add the gift card there, and then it's available as a credit for Kindle purchases. It was not as smooth of an experience, and I have yet to figure out how to make her self-sufficient on the device. If you give the kids enough account info to add a gift card, they'll get full write access to all the account info. That's a bad plan.

I had a mean substitute once, but she was not very tasty at all.

You placed the rich people and the politicians into separate categories. The whole mess is easier to understand once you realize the politicians at the top are a subset of the rich people, not a different group. Congress isn't even subtle anymore about how they structure insider trading to get rich, take a look at how the STOCK act was gutted to see them at work.

"If you do not work you do not eat"? Spoken as a true corporate tool. Who defines what "work" is then? Guess what: the people with money do, as they always have. Ask a rich CEO why they deserve the highest compensation multiple of workers ever today, and they'll tell you all about how their work adds value!

There's only place this road has ever led toward: rich people get so much negotiating power over poor ones they force them into inhumane working conditions, knowing they have to accept that or starve. You don't get a wonderful world--instead you'll just keep reinventing the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire for modern workers. Gotta lock the doors, can't have people in the factory stealing our precious iThings to sell them for food!

People report on topics that draw attention. That alone is enough to explain why the perception of crime is higher than the reality. "Lots of kids went to school and nothing bad happened", zero clicks. "Think of the children!" story, parents furiously re-share with their half-baked "this has to change!" commentary, every reporter tries to cover it, pundits have material for their shows, and politicians get something to lecture on so they sound relevant. Everybody hears about it.

Don't confuse that news spectacle with government scare-mongering. They're both real, but the government one is a slower and subtler game. Also very real: the heavily entrenched biases about race in the US. Why does LeVar Burton teach his kids how not be shot by police? Hint: it's not because of media sensationalism.

"Traditionally" 40%? That's a citation needed claim. Companies like MGIC have let people shift around the downpayment risk to where it makes sense since 1957, and the standard LMI/PMI rate has been 20% for as long as I've been alive.

All three of down payment, mortgage length, and interest rate interact to determine what's been acceptable. The best example of how that can play out dramatically in modern US history were the high interest rates and "stagflation" of the 1970's. Unusual things happened to typical mortgage lengths when the rate jumped up, and the risk/reward on downpayments moved with all that.

The idea that you can always move to somewhere cheap to live is just silly. A major reason real estate prices inflate in an area is because it's where the jobs are. You can't just move away from real estate spikes without a strong assurance you'll get work in the new area that nets you more. That this will always be possible is one of those things you mainly hear from entitled young people. Good luck with that.

The one thing you can sell into a stagnant economy are consumable and necessity products that cost less. Stare at the things that are still selling--food, basic clothing, etc.--put resources into making a cheaper version. It's easy to show there's a huge volume of such opportunities, just look at the growth of Walmart on the back of such work.

But that just circles back to the same problem again. Products where the innovation is improved efficiency and/or lower costs take you right back to less spending.

infamous adjective: well-known for being bad.

They could put a picture of the 2600 ET cartridge on that dictionary entry.

And then after Spielberg replaced all the guns in the movie with walkie-talkies, it ruined that one good scene where Elliott shot his eye out.

The hype around the movie was pretty bad, but I don't remember this as the most overhyped Atari 2600 game. I'd give that honor to the 2600 Pac-Man. The first commercial in heavy rotation for that one didn't even show the real gameplay. They kinda ripped off the music to "Pac-Man Fever" there too.

Well, first they tried to get the cartridges to levitate themselves out, but they kept falling back to the bottom of the landfill.