I don't have my people tested for drugs. For more than one reason. First and foremost, I fear they could find something. Actually, I'm pretty sure they'd find something with one or two of the guys.

Then, why the fuck should I care what they do in their spare time? I'm neither their mommy nor their nanny. I care about them coming to work sober and being able to do their job. That they do. So where's my interest in anything beyond that?

That's swell. Abusing religious laws to fight religious bullshit.

Would it make me the devil if I can't help but giggle?

That's what I love about sane countries. Your religion means fuck if it conflicts with laws, first you have to obey the real laws, then the ones of your imaginary friend.

If your imaginary friend conflicts with the law, he can take a hike.

By typing "how the fuck can I get rid of the damn ads" into google.

In other words, I went looking for it. Nobody ever bothered to shove their crap in my face to convince me it's a good idea. They had plenty of others who did that convinced me without even trying.

If there's a market for a product, there's no need to slap someone in his face with it.

When people learned that working won't get them a house that you want to live in and that one income just ain't enough to get by on, let alone when you have kids and a dog.

What decision for fuck's sake? "Allow them to stick needles in me or starve?"

That is no decision. That's like me offering you the decision to dance for my amusement or end up with a bullet in your head, and then me claiming that dancing like an idiot was your own free will.

Oh yeah, like they have a choice. A decision entails that there is a viable alternative. And I kinda doubt they go "hmm... become a human guinea pig or pursue my career in advertising...".

We're still talking abusing the plight of a person. I don't know about you, but in my books that's kinda immoral. According to our law books, that's even illegal under certain conditions.

You just conclusively explained Windows and WoW.

I don't really fear that you'll be going extinct anytime soon. Web designers were in that bind before. "Nephew art" anyone? Where webdesigners got fired 'cause "my nephew can do it, he's good with computers".

Development doesn't stop, especially not in a technical field so closely tied with marketing and PR as web design. What "anyone" can do will flood the market, to the point where webpages that offer it will be met with "been there, done that" yawns. What people want is something new. New ways of presenting stuff to them is the key. Because that's something those "web kits" can, of course, not offer.

And don't get me started on security...

Oh yeah, what the world needs is more advertising. If that takes off, I'll create an adblocker for the appstore and get rich, for there will be ONE app that EVERYBODY wants!

There has never been much of a market to begin with.

Given that you can today get quite decent indie games for your computer for 5-10 bucks, flashgames-gone-iPad can't sell for more than pennies. There was a bit of money in timewaster games, games you can pick up and put down at the spur of the moment as you have to kill a little time, waiting in line, waiting for the bus or waiting for your girlfriend to stop talking.

The problem is that these games are rather easy to make and that only the first handful of people who had the idea to do so actually had a market to speak of. After the flood of copycat games drowned everyone, nobody really could make more than a handful of bucks out of the 99 cent game fad.

The next step now are free-2-play, pay-2-stay games. Games that are "free" but require you to spend money (and often quite ridiculous amounts thereof) to keep playing. Considering that I now even start to see TV ads for them, I dare say that they, too, are no longer something an indie game maker can try his hand at, considering that very obviously the game mafia has cornered that market already.

So, essentially, I'd say indie games on phones are over. Get over to Steam, there seems to be a market for indie games left.

It's just reheating the American Dream: Anyone could win. Just not everyone.

So ... yes, it's a lottery. But then again, so is the Dream.

ANYONE could get a place to live, even anti-Soviet dissidents. Of course, if you had connections to the right people then you could get a much nicer place. There were no rent payment you're probably confusing them with payments for utilities.

As for the availability, the USSR grew quickly from a very poor country with most of population living in squalor to a moderately wealthy one. Whole cities were built from scratch to provide better living conditions, and such advances were not uniformly distributed geographically.

I'm NOT saying that the USSR was a paradise or even a nice place to live. But it was not a totally bad commie hell with doom and gloom everywhere.

Yes, and there was an amazing level of gender equality only recently surpassed by the Western world. And a lot of other cool stuff.

But of course, there were some downsides. Like lack of the freedom of speech, or pervasive spying. Oh wait...