I take surveys for pay, for fun mostly, and for a bit of extra cash. Sometimes I get interesting surveys about new products, mostly it's boring demographics and junk. I've done enough surveys now to immediately recognize that certain sites will waste my time with lengthy irritating questions about crap I don't care about, and/or just throw me out without pay after way more time than would be reasonable. J.D. Power is one of those. When I see a survey is hosted by J.D. Power, I just close it immediately.

> "The woman's father reportedly believes he's in the right to post the pictures because he took them."

Well, sounds like I have a trip to Austria to make. Specifically, to right outside this guy's window, to take some pictures of him while he's changing, which I will then have the right to post, because they were my pictures, right? Apparently, according to this guy's logic...

I'd expect that number to be higher.

After all, unless you get a new phone, most like you already *have* all the apps you need, unless something truly new comes out, which doesn't happen every month. I use a handful of apps all the time, but I'm not going to go out and replace them with new ones every month, because the ones I already have, work great.

I would actually be tempted - Firefox has gotten increasingly sucktastic, and Chrome has some glaring deficiencies as well, so if I had already been forced onto Windows 10, I'd certainly have tried out Edge, and if it wasn't actively noticeably *worse* than FF or Chrome these days, I'd happily use it if they were paying me. Hard to pass up free money.

But must use Bing as your default search engine? Frack that. (Moot point anyway for the moment, I'm staying with Windows 7 for as long as I possibly can. Eventually, though, my machine will die, and I'll be forced onto 10. So at that point...)

There's "comfortably", and then there's "in style". I'm a big fan of the subreddit /r/financialindependence, which is about retiring early, and it's actually surprisingly (semi)-easy - your estimates are way too high. With really just a couple million, you could live off that pretty indefinitely if you did it smart. But while there's certainly diminishing returns after that, I'd say it tapers off pretty slowly - while being able to retire early at all is the biggest thing, I could easily increase my enjoyment of my retirement by splurging more and more, based on how much money I had, up to a point. Total rough ballpark, I don't think diminishing returns would start to make additional money *totally* pointless until probably around the 100m mark or so.

But yes, definitely at *some* point more money is irrelevant, regardless of specifically what point that is, if you're just talking about personal enjoyment of life. Jeff Bezos, however, probably thinks way bigger than that, or Amazon wouldn't have become such a monstrously enormous company in such a relatively short period of time.

"Hi! I'm a robocaller! I'm just calling to let you know that this message is free speech and there's nothing you can do about it! Nyah nyah nyah!"

I would argue that "what constitutes free speech" itself definitely falls under the category of "political messages". So let's just all robocall him with that message roughly every 3 seconds, see if he gets the message?

My favorite was when one of the developers of Kingdom of Loathing forgot they'd installed that, and replaced cloud with butt permanently in some item descriptions after updating them (through their web-based dev tool) without noticing. That was awesome.

> "Do you think you would still have it if nobody wanted to work?"

Yes, I do. UBI is a solution to the problem of "not enough jobs due to automation", and automation is the solution to the problem of "not enough demand for jobs due to UBI". They go together. I'd much rather not enough jobs due to automation and UBI (so people could not only survive, but have the freedom to come up with newer and better things - people who currently are mostly instead doing gruntwork for existing companies, because they need to pay the bills), than not enough jobs due to automation and you're just crap out of luck, too bad for you.

Automation is going to increase, that's just the way it is - but it could be utopian instead of the opposite, if we do it right.

> "I expect to see in 2020, if not sooner, people running for public office talking about how they believe marijuana to be as safe as alcohol and tobacco"

Which is of course completely untrue. Marijuana is *far* safer than alcohol (which is relatively easy to overdose on) or tobacco (way worse for you in general, plus almost always smoked, while marijuana is commonly smoked, but also commonly ingested, which is much healthier.) Heck, I'd go so far as to say that it's healthier for you than coffee, albeit with rather stronger effects at common dosage levels.

Is it cheaper? Is it safe to eat? Does it have roughly the same taste and consistency? Then why the heck wouldn't I? (I expect they'll get the first two pretty easily, but I'm not totally convinced on the last one. But that's what reviews are for. I have no moral or philosophical objection to the concept, merely practical ones.)

I switch programming languages all the time: half the time I'm writing code in C#, the other half the time I'm writing code in javascript. I jump between them frequently, even in the same project! :p [/totally not what you meant]

> i'm surprised you had a complete thought.
i've had a team of 15 fbi thugs armed with fully automatic machine guns pounding on my door to serve a warrant to investigate copyright infringement..
they didn't shoot and kill me.
do you know why? ... cause you're probably, and I'm just guessing here, I could be wrong, caucasian-looking?

Presumably they're taking into account the full time cost of air travel, which is not just liftoff to touchdown, but also includes getting there early to park, get through stupid security, wait around because you got there early, then wait around for your bags to eventually make it out.

Presumably a hyperloop train also wouldn't be delayed nearly as often, either.

Sure, I suppose, as someone who really likes physical keyboards, it's technically sad that we just lost another one, but I don't care that much, on grounds of a. Blackberry OS rather than Android, and b. keyboards should slide out in landscape mode, not portrait mode. So I would never personally buy one of those anyway.

But when I can no longer find any Android phones with proper slider keyboards to replace my current one when it dies... I will be pretty pissed at that point.

> "With so many billing errors made be ISPs and telecom companies, how come there's never been a class action against them?"

Possibly because under current laws, you're no longer allowed to file class action suits against like 99.999% of all companies on the planet, as a required part of being their customer, because reasons? >.>