Your story and mine are similar, and I suspect Zuckerberg's is also close. I suspect Zuckerberg said was true - for the people now in their early to mid 30s but I think circumstances have changed in the last 20 years. All the digging through manuals and "ATDT" tweaks we had to make back then are all, standardized, GUI driven and automatic these days. Save for DayZ, it'd been years and years since I downloaded and installed a mod on a game. It isn't even possible to mod most games out there these days.

Younger than that and video games are a more widely accepted past time, and require almost nothing in the way of technical expertise to make work. There are programmers in this demographic but you won't be able to say with 90% accuracy someone has a future in IT because the group of people playing video games is not limited to the people willing to spend hours hand tweaking system files to get it to run well (or at all).

Older than that and (I suspect) there wasn't much gaming to do.

I agree wholeheartedly. Sadly, the handwriting for this has been on the wall for some time. I can only hope Debian's Iceweasel port of Firefox does not adopt this "feature".

This makes me start to wonder if there is a reduced capability browser -- something leaner and meaner, focused militantly on privacy and even going so far as to deliberately not support portions of HTML5 (e.g. DRM).

Coders of the world, here's a niche you could fill...

Rich people are richer because they, overwhelmingly, inherited capital from their parents.

It was tried for a while, the 0 dollar wage. It was called slavery, and it DID work. The plantation owners were the wealthiest humans to ever walk the planet. Still might have been, adjusted for inflation. A great success. Those owners would have bought the world up with their wealth, bit by bit, had slavery not been sort-of stopped. Of course, normal non-slave humans were competing against free labor, and so barely got by, with lousy schools and dirt roads and abysmal ignorance that lasts to this day. We paid a lot for that free labor, didn't we? A truly "free" market - once side got their goods for free.

And that is only if they weren't forced to take it out of the their net profits, instead of the customers' pockets. They've made a KILLING in profits.

People were paid 18/hour in 1966 to work like a dog at McDonald's (you've never worked a restaurant chain job, I see). And the corporation grew into fantastically profitable giant. Seemed to work.

And people who get paid minimum wage don't get forty hour work weeks. They usually are capped at 18-29 hours, to avoid full-time employee status. And the work hours are jangled weekly so they can't get second jobs. Fun!

You're not everyone. And you've no imagination when it comes to life's little snafus. I take it life has treated you well. You've never really been too ill, or blacklisted, or locked into a bad situation because of family issues, or been unable to find employment because of past accusations or convictions, or had a nervous breakdown, or been hit by a car and been unable to function, or been employed in an industry that was gutted for profits.

And no, you've not seen the minimum wage jacked over the years. It was down to 40% of its original value even after all the "jacks", until finally someone performed arithmetic and found it started life at $18 an hour.

Worth, to whom? People who work 7 buck an hour burn a hell more calories than you do, probably. Your version of their worth has a lot with your perception of yourself. Who gets what is a rigged game.

Perhaps they would be happier being employees, then. I await their conversion to the wage earner world. I will be waiting a long, long time, won't I?

Even with a poverty minimum wage, corporations were getting workers for no pay whatsoever - interns - with the promise that if they slave now, someone would smile on them someday and hire them. This is what happens when there are no real laws. After a time, people will be paying businesses to hire them for nothing - logical, same reason. And it is happening overseas - H1B and other workers are paying for the priviledge of not being paid much, or at all, when they bribe recruiting companies.

Your words are marked. It may be possible, but only if other states don't raise the MW. But they will. So, when all is done and you are wrong, will you admit it?

Said cramming is illegal in most American cities, even in private homes. They like to have it both ways - a reliable pool of impoverished people, and no impoverished people living anywhere in their town.

don't you people ever get tired of being wrong?

Austerity failed. Give up. And there is no inflation anywhere that didn't adopt the notion.
The minimum wage was about 18/hour in 1966, and the republic did not fall. Some inflation took off later, but that was Vietnam and OPEC which blew our heads off.
It is possible to pay a decent wage and survive as a business - if you don't demand infinitely growing profits. Inflation and profit slowing is the bugaboo of the wealthy, not the giant group of the people known as the nation. Germany kept its decent paying jobs, and is one of the powerhouses of the planet. They didn't worship corporate profit increases over all else. Balance is the key.

in 1966, the minimum wage was about 18 an hour, adjusted for inflation. The world did not end. Actually, we were doing pretty damned well.