You could very well be right. Amazon generally seems pretty sophisticated with this sort of thing. At the same time, though, everyone blunders at times and the comments on HuffPo were full of people claiming they'd be happy to pay as much as $200 for Prime. So I could also see them having done some sort of market research and deciding that people like that were their target demographic for Prime and forget people like me. I still think that'd be a poor idea though. As people have noted, Prime is a leash. I do almost all of my online shopping on Amazon these days. That'll change if I don't have the incentive to maximize the value of Prime. I might be poor, but I do shop online and will continue to do so. Seems to me it'd be better for them to cement my brand loyalty, which a price hike at all will not do at this point. I /might/ not have noticed or cared about $5 without this announcement. With it? I've definitely thought about what value I get from Prime and will not be keeping it with a hike of any sort.

I'm pretty sure they send you the replacement item before you ship the broken one regardless of whether you have Prime or not. I know for sure they did it with a Kindle for me once and I can think of some other items that I'm pretty sure happened before I had Prime. Doesn't make sense that they wouldn't since their reasoning is that they have your credit card number (and if they don't, they will require you to give it to them before shipping the replacement), so they can just charge you for another if you haven't returned the broken one within a month. As for small items, many of the small items on Prime have now become "add-ons," and you can't even buy them without a $25 order.

That seems like a brilliant strategy to get Prime members to all quit. If they raised it by a little, say $5-10, a lot of people probably wouldn't care enough to go to the effort of quitting. Increasing the price by 50% though? People are going to care then. As it is, the value of Prime has gone down substantially in just the three years I've had it. One of the reasons it seemed worth it to me was that before, I'd always feel like I had to make sure I had an order worth $25 in order to get free shipping. Prime made it so that I would just go and buy the thing I actually needed instead of buying extra crap just to get free shipping. Now they've made a huge number of items, including the exact things I've bought in the past, "add-on" items that you can't buy unless...you order at least $25 worth of product. So I'm back to square one. I haven't even been getting my free book lately because trying to find good stuff by digging through the Kindle's awful, slow menus takes longer than hitting TPB (or even Baen's free list) and downloading what I want. As for Prime Video, I don't think there's ever been anything I wanted to see (though admittedly there are a few kids' shows my kids like) that wasn't also on Netflix. So go ahead, Amazon. Raise the price. I'll just cancel. I'm half tempted to right now after documenting how little value I'm getting out of Prime already. Getting a new power supply in a day for only $6 extra (the best use I've gotten out of it recently) really doesn't justify $79/year as it is.

Every site loads slower for me in IE. Quite literally every single one. I just tested msn.com, which is set as my homepage in IE since I don't use it much. It pulls up in less than a second on FF. It takes several seconds in IE. I then tried opening up Google.com. It's so close to instantaneous in FF as to make no difference. That plain, simple page, took about two seconds in IE. There have been times I've tried to pull open a page in IE to have it show up properly where NoScript was blocking things and I've actually given up and closed the program because it was taking so long to load the page.

Weird, because I use IE 11 to pull up sites occasionally when I don't want to figure out what part I need to have NoScript let things through on FF. It takes forever to load anything. It takes longer to load up the program with a single tab open than it does for me to open up Firefox and restore 40+ tabs. Honestly, using IE makes me feel like I'm in the bad old days of dial-up. Maybe I'm just spoiled due to blocking so much stuff through Adblock and NoScript and most people experience the web the way IE displays it, but if that's the case, man, there are a lot of ads out there to cause pages to take seconds to load on 20+ mbps cable. I don't touch Chrome, so I can't speak about that, but I'm genuinely baffled that anyone could prefer IE. I see no sign at all that it's gotten better other than them finally adding tabs years after everyone else had them.

You really don't seem to be trying. You can not only talk to a person, you can have them call you. I've never had a broken package (though let's be fair, broken packages are usually the fault of the carrier unless there's poor packaging, and Amazon goes overboard with that) and the customer service I've received from Amazon is better than any I've received from other companies.

So where are these studies of people who have lost weight and kept it off for over five years? The studies out there show that 95% of people who diet and exercise do not keep the weight off.

So what's your definition of "works?" Because the people on The Biggest Loser do not keep it off and are doing things in a very unhealthy manner, including going against doctor's orders. There have been a number of exposes about how horrible things are "behind the scenes" there with everything from people being screamed at to exercise until they literally collapse to people peeing blood to purposefully dehydrating themselves for the weigh-ins but not being allowed to drink when the doctors say they have to for health reasons. Using The Biggest Loser as your example of how things just makes you look like a bigot who doesn't care what the means are as long as the end has a result (except, oh wait, there is no good result since no one could live like they do on the show so they immediately gain everything back).

Yeah, it really amazes me the efforts people went to in order to distort the facts so much. I was just cleaning out some newspapers last night, came across the story printed by the local paper about Zimmerman's exoneration, and the accompanying photo was that of Martin at thirteen years old. Just makes me shake my head. I won't claim to be an expert in the case, but it certainly makes me suspicious of the media's interpretation of it when they're doing things like showing four year old pictures of a teenager.

Agreed. My son is going to do kindergarten again. He's just not where he needs to be to do well moving on. If I insisted, he could go to first grade, but it would be terrible for him and he'd probably be identified as "special ed," when it's clear that he mostly just needs more time. There are countries that don't even start school until age 7 and their kids do just fine, but if a kid can't read here at 5, there's supposedly something wrong with them. My son is getting more interested in academics all the time and has made huge strides. I'm sure by the end of next year, he'll be caught up to where he needs to be and will do fine from there on out. He's an April birthday, btw, so while not the youngest in the class, definitely one of the younger ones.

First off, if you're a newbie cook, it sounds like you do a poor job of picking recipes to learn to cook from. You can't just do things like pick the first few recipes in a book like you say you do on Amazon. Cookbooks aren't organized in an easiest to hardest fashion. They're organized by type of dish, and then usually alphabetized within those categories. Secondly, if you don't have the very most basic skills of cooking, reading isn't the way to get them, and I'm saying this as a big reader. There are loads of helpful videos online, such as those found at http://www.beyondsalmon.com/2010/05/technique-videos.html. Going to YouTube directly can also produce good results as well, I was just particularly impressed with this woman. There are terribly written recipes out there (I've got one I got off the web for a stew that calls for two cans of beans, tells you to put /one/ of them in at one point, and then never tells you to use the other). Still, the fact that you say you're consistently having bad results with beginner cookbooks suggests to me that the problem isn't with the books. Look at the factor that is present in all the circumstances and consider that either your expectations or your understanding might be lacking somewhere and causing issues.

Same here. The only weird thing to me is that Opera is second. I've been running Firefox so long it was named Firebird when I started with it. Competitors aren't getting buried in my experience.

Hmm, let's see. I am in my early thirties and the parent of a five year old and a four year old. Yet, when I was a kid, there were not only kits for specific items (I had a pretty epic castle with a dragon), but there were tie-ins. My brothers had Star Wars Legos. The Star Wars stuff might have been a bit later, around the time of the special editions or Episode I, but even that would put any "selling out" as at least thirteen years ago. Even the video game tie-ins started coming out, what, ten years ago?

Tldr; If Lego sold out, it happened over a decade ago at the very latest. If they're sell-outs, it's not new or news.