I have to say, I frequently travel from Georgia to Montana for business, and I was quite surprised that food and basic commodities there are CHEAPER than they are in my home state, despite the higher minimum wage. I'm guessing that housing and utilities must be more expensive or something to equalize it.

I can still get full service gas at a pump here in town. It's attached to a garage and they charge me 50 cents more a gallon for the privilege. Those jobs didn't disappear, but consumers realized it was dumb to pay a premium for something they were perfectly capable of handling themselves. The primary consumers of the full service gas pump here are the elderly, for whom checking tires and pumping gas IS more difficult.

They could have, but it would have been a lot more work. At the very minimum, you need to hire a second pair of eyes to proof read your novel before you toss it up on Amazon for anything more than $0. For someone who is going to take it seriously and do it properly, that alone can cost $400-500. At the 99 cent price point, you need to sell nearly a thousand copies just to break even. Unless you're a well known author, the odds of that happening are pretty low.

This is an anecdote, but back when the dance simulator games were a thing, that's exactly what happened. I had a friend who played Dance Dance Revolution quite extensively. He started out as a freshman in college at a heavyset 180 lbs. Two years of obsessive DDR knocked him down to 140 and pretty darn buff with a faintly visible six pack. Thanks to the core muscle build up, he hasn't really regained anything much in the ten years since.

I have no problem cooking healthy foods from scratch for lunch/dinner. (Well, mostly from scratch. I don't make my own whole wheat pasta.)

What gets me is liking chocolate too much. I lose all self control around a box of truffles. The only safe thing is to get a bag of dark chocolate I really don't like too much and limit myself to a few pieces a day as a treat.

Fine by me. This is why I stopped watching movies and television altogether. Books do not abuse me so.

Different divisions. The AWS geniuses are not the same department as the marketing morons who thought it would be a great idea to make free-to-play kiddie games with $10 bonus characters.

The real dummies in this are of course the parents who handed out devices that had the credit card information stored on record, or even worse, gave their kids the credit cards when prompted. When I tried that shit back in the late '90s I got my computer privileges revoked for a month.

RNA and mitochondrial DNA are two different things, I thought?

That was part of the stretch goals. The initial 1 million was to bring an updated version of the show to the web. At 5 million, they wanted to bring it to all platforms, including mobile devices, video game consoles and set top boxes too.

I'm about the same. Traveled two hours west for work this week and I basically just go to bed and wake up on my normal EST schedule, shifted thirty minutes or so. I call it moving to "grown up time." Back home I stay up til midnight and wake up at 7:30 AM. Here, I'll crash by 10PM and get up at 6AM. When I go back, resetting to my normal schedule takes no special effort at all.

I work my 45-50+ hours a week minimum like everyone else in tech land, but I also normally only have a 10 minute commute. (I'm currently visiting another office and the commute is 30 minutes from my hotel, bleah.)

I know people who are losing two hours of their life a day commuting each way, in addition to working our nasty hours, leaving fewer hours to actually live. It's either cut out eating or sleeping, and thus it's usually sleep that takes the hit.

I could make twice as much money if I committed to a horrible commute but I value my free time too much.

I've talked to plenty of educators about it. I'm married to one. It really does depend on how each individual school board is approaching the situation. Some teachers love it, others hate it, but it all boils down to implementation and how much support the school board is giving the teachers. (And support, as always, boils down to money in a lot of cases.)

Yep, the valedictorian of my high school went to Harvard under those terms. She was the eldest in an Army family. At best her father was pulling $40K/year.

I'm in GA, so my state university tuition was (at the time) completely covered as long as I maintained a B average. I was just on the hook for housing and food, and I committed to loans for that. I also worked, and had a VA stipend since my father was disabled, which covered what would have been my family's "expected contribution." My parents only really contributed about a thousand dollars over the course of my undergrad, mostly for furniture.

I also sat down when considering colleges and looked at my choices. Due to income levels, Ivy Leagues were out for me, as was any private school. That left state schools. In-state tuition is cheaper than out of state, so that left local state schools. I wanted something bigger and better than a small community college or tech school, so that left the Research I and II schools.

I narrowed it down to four state universities, and was accepted to them all. In the end, I went for the slightly more expensive Big State U because I could move away from home (loved my parents but I was being suffocated) and because the brand name on the school would look good on my resume as long as I stayed in the same state. (Huge alumni network here.)

The ROI on whole schools and on individual majors should absolutely be a point of discussion with high school seniors, and parents need to be frank about it. But it isn't the state schools that are the cause of the student loan crisis, it's the for-profit schools that prey on those who CAN'T get accepted to the state schools.

Common Core is being unnecessary vilified by people who don't understand it. All Common Core does is define a base line of standards for all children in all states that adopt it. It says, "This is what a US student should know at each grade level." The methods and curriculum for how to achieve that goal are still left up to the states and local school boards, but the educational companies who supply them with books are not helping them the way they should. Many books incorrectly state they are common core compliant.

The way it was handled could certainly have been better, but I see nothing wrong with saying all second grades should be able to do basic multiplication and all 7th grades should be able to find the primary theme of a passage of writing.