hughprime

I've always thought of it as the other way around. A less "progressive" city would have cracked down on all the bums, vagrants and low-level crime long ago. One Giuliani-style mayor and the Tenderloin would look like... well, Times Square.

(Admittedly it would probably just kick the problem to the other side of the Bay.)

Buying and collecting the cards is the dumb part.

What do you think is a "fair" amount of royalties to pay?

In my opinion, whoever owns the land should get 100% of whatever income they can derive from it. If Shell wants to buy some land, they should own whatever oil they can suck up from under it.

I guess that the appeal of Pokemon and similar dumb phenomena (somebody correct me if I'm wrong, I'm too old to have played any of these games myself and too young to have children who have) is twofold -- there's the "game" part and then there's the "collection" part. The "game" part is pretty "smart" as a game, and one could easily imagine a card game with a similar sort of game mechanic that could be bought for a few dollars. But it's the "collection" part of the game that makes it so addictive, expensive, insidious, and the source of much needless (and dumb) social anxiety among children.

Googling a bit I found an article http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/28/national/28alpaca.html?pag... implying that the "people are realizing this is a bubble" stage of the bubble stretches as far back as 2004. And one guy quoted in the article says:

When I started, I would tell people I thought the market would be good for another five years. Well, I've been saying that for 15 years

Still, alpacas wouldn't be the first bubble in a useless commodity to stretch on for several generations. (That honour belongs, I suppose, to gold -- a bubble at least five thousand years old and still going strong.)

The lesson doesn't work if your parents actually buy you the cards (rather than giving you pocket money and watching with bemused tolerance as you spend it all on slips of cardboard), though, like this kid's parents apparently did.

I'm not convinced that there are indeed 27 million people fitting that definition at the moment, but I can't see how someone fitting that description is anything other than a slave. (Hmm, though I suppose legitimate prisoners can be forced to do work without being "slaves" so perhaps the definition does require tinkering around the edges.)

No BS essays, no BS extracurricular activities (unless, of course, you want to do them) and no potential for racial or other bias.

Whereas now they only use them to keep out whites and Asians?

I expect it's one of those creative accounting things where you can come up with pretty much any number you like.

Mostly because the hype was huge and the product is, to many people, a bit of a letdown.

I've been playing with it, and I think I agree with him on most points -- it is awfully difficult to follow a conversation, and I'm not sure whether I'm going to be able to find a use for it once the initial "Hey folks, my wave invite finally came through!" conversations die down.

a) See trailers for movies coming out further in the future than this week, and

b) Rate the trailers before the movie comes out (and more to the point, see what other people think of the trailer of as un-yet unreleased movie)

You could have two forms of voting: until the movie comes out the question is "What did you think of the trailer" and after it comes out it switches to "Was the movie better than the trailer?"

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why we can't have nice things.

"Please enjoy what you get, even if you hate it."

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6592990

(I will also accept "dagnammit", "dognarnit" and "magnabbit".)