Look, if you'd really wanted to be part of the club, you'd have been born into a richer family. Sorry for your poor foresight in the womb.

Yes, and that is exactly why the system works. People, even fairly rational and intelligent people, are convinced that A) there is a way to get into the upper echelon of society, and B) that is the only way to be happy and/or comfortable.

The fact of the matter is, you are really unlikely to ever make it there and that there are many, many other ways to be happy. But most of those don't increase the GDP as much as working you like a mule until you die.

I'm sorry, I got a little confused there; were you talking about casinos or the entire financial industry?

I don't think you quite understand who works for whom, here. If the goal is to vacuum as money out of The Masses' wallets and into the pockets of the rich, then obviously the incentives should be for "investing".

And this is not some kind of conspiracy, here, this is simply a lot of people trying to act in their own best interests and, in the case of Wall St and Washington, succeeding. Unfortuately, because of the way our financial system is set up, that is at the direct expense of Joe Six-pack. Until your average person becomes a little more savvy and realizes that more than half The Economy is a Ponzi scheme, this will continue. Sadlly, it is likely that by the time Joe Six-pack gets wise, Wall St and Washington will have moved on to bigger and better money vacuums.

You are obviously not from New Orleans.

...versus correctly spelling the names of common automobile components.

This is, I think, one of the most important real-life lessons. Most of the time when you do something in real life, nothing of consequence happens. It's only your media-fed, government-encouraged, over-inflated-ego-based fear of all the horrible things that could happen to you if you do something. If you ask yourself, "what's the worst that could happen?" and think really hard about just how bad that answer turns out to be, I think you'll find yourself having a lot more fun and doing a lot more stuff.

Don't take life too serious; you'll never make it out alive.

Take a look at wikipedia's graph of extinctions from the article about the history of life. I haven't done any actual signal analysis on this data.

I would buy that there is a bit more energy in the per 62 million years signal, but I wouldn't call it clockwork-like regularity. If they came up with a p-value of 0.01, I'd say that there must be something happening, but I would expect a little more consistency out of a big cosmic event like the one they're describing.

Not so: they remembered your song history and then recommended / played you music which they thought you might like. Less like twitter, more like Cinematch. It worked quite well, IMO.

Yeah, also, if you don't live in the US, the UK or Germany it costs you money to use the good part of their service. This means that, from Canada, I can still send them my musical habits, which they will apparently send along the RIAA, but I can't benefit from doing so by learning about cool new music from them.

I hope they go down. This kind of behaviour is just stupid.

And that is why this will really be the google killer.

I think you meant "and boom: the iPhone tethers."

I always find it interesting when the knee-jerk reaction to regulators dropping the ball is to increase their authority. "The regulators screwed up, let's give them more power!" It just feels a little bit like leaning into a punch to me...