Since I only have to walk across a grass lot to get mine, does that mean I've got better odds than you do? (Also, poking holes in your logic, most people already go to a gas station or grocery store for other reasons, and don't need to make a separate trip just for the ticket.)

A friend of mine found a scratch-off ticket on the ground that netted him $10. It had already been scratched. No idea if the original owner just dropped it, or somehow misunderstood that it was a winner.

While I'm generally agreeing with you, I think we're actually in the middle of a huge glut of lawyers, and employment prospects out of law school are especially lousy, and have been for a while, so that may be a bad example.

I think you forgot the line about the cosmonauts.

Compatibility, on the other hand, is one reason I've used them. In my youth I created a bunch of files in WordPerfect on the Mac. Originally they were compatible with Microsoft Word so I didn't care. At some point decades later I realized that by drifting from Mac to PC and to MS Office as a default, I could no longer open those files. Even installing a newer version of WordPerfect for Windows wasn't working for me. Out of desperation I tried LibreOffice a couple of months ago and got the files open. I was very pleasantly surprised, and extremely happy to have my old projects back.

Brought to you by the people who invented "click start to shut down." I like it.

Now I'm going to have to invent sun-baked potato chips, just to prove a point. And make a fortune on the marketing gimmick. I shall call them Sun Chips. No, wait ...

I like the scroll wheel for scrolling, but I don't find it at all easy to click the wheel. That function may as well not exist for me.

The most frustrating part about those posts is usually the entire analysis is correct, up until that last throwaway line "it will never happen again." Why do the authors feel the need to include it? In some cases the real answer is it won't occur for another thousand or ten thousand years, but that's not good enough? Of course some of the others (December has five Tuesdays this year) happen about half of all years and are complete junk articles, but I actually find the rarer ones kind of neat, with the exception of the completely erroneous disclaimer.

Thanks for the confirmation. I thought so, but didn't want to say that and give anyone bad information.

Schedule D won't apply to tax-sheltered retirement accounts (at least during the investment stage; I haven't gotten to the withdrawal stage to figure that part out yet), so it's only if you've got investments outside of that.

Taxable interest is a line-item on the 1040. It's not treated as "investment income."

Well, most retirement accounts (IRA, Roth, 401(k)) won't trigger a Schedule D, so it's only if you're investing outside of that, which many people may not need to.

Both my kids actually have sound soothers that are programmed to play white noise to muffle background sounds.

Last spring I was watching 'Uncle Buck', a John Candy movie that features multiple car backfires, and I commented that it was an aging joke because it's something you never hear. The next day a car backfired driving by my house, and I've heard a couple since then. I had to laugh at the coincidence, but I also wonder if maybe we tune them out rather than they never happen.