You don't generally realize how odd the whole situation is until you need dental surgery, and get deep into the confusion of what's covered by dental vs medical insurance.

So true. My wife is having surgery next month to remove a very belated wisdom tooth, and finding an oral surgeon that could bill it to our medical insurance was ridiculous. Ended up having to go with somewhere an hour away, even though there's a surgeon 10 minutes from our house.

Exactly.

The Microsoft "Engineers" on their forums have always been borderline incomprehensible and/or comparable to chatbots dispensing useless pre-baked responses. Who cares if those go away?

These days? Better get in line - there's so much stuff that deserves massive public outcry, I doubt this even makes the top 10.

Some news stories, a smattering of angry people say they'll cancel their subscriptions, life goes on and Amazon gets more money.

It sucks, but personally it's still worth it to my household, another $20/year is way below my threshold for going on the warpath.

Yeah, perhaps I was a bit harsh, but that's basically what I was getting at.

In Blizzard's collective mind, I imagine they don't feel like they've abandoned anything, only improved. Whether it's *actually* an improvement is debatable i'm sure, but their game, their rules.

They don't offer it because basically *nobody* (i'm sure you'll find a few exceptions here to try and prove me wrong) running a game of any real size offers it. That's not how MMO's work

They're not going to run separate servers for every patch level, just to accommodate folks that forgot they signed up for a game that was going to be constantly updated.

Probably not. But that still assumes there's a reason everyone would be getting their salaries in Bitcoin in the first place.

Bingo. If there's anything missing from my current economic experience, surely it must be having to check before I buy anything to see what my currency is actually worth today.

Good for them?

I will gladly eat my words if/when Bitcoin ever becomes a serious competitor to current global-scale payment methods, but simply announcing a consortium that hasn't actually accomplished anything yet is waaaaaaay far off from that.

Yep. They're not viable for large-scale use, and probably never will be. Sure seems like a lot of stories here lately though, breathlessly trying to make it sound like they're a big deal.

Exactly. If someone is exploiting this in my house, then it means they already broke in and have complete physical access to my house, screwing around with the Echo and maybe making fradulent Amazon orders or whatever would be the least of my concerns.

None, at least not in the way you're probably thinking, because Google Home & the Amazon Echo can't call 911 directly.

My wife & I used the USDA loan program a couple years ago, and bought our first place with 3% down & the seller paying closing costs.

Would we have liked to have 20%? Do we understand why that would be better financially than what we did?

Yes on both counts. But, to us the trade-off was worth escaping the hideously high DC metro area living costs...and things worked out to where the mortgage is literally the same as the rent payment we had paid for 4 years after moving here - and thanks to the low down payment, we still have enough cash stashed away in an emergency fund to pay for an eventual new roof and other large expenses.

I think it's a little of both - I provide tech support to a lot of college students, I see random samples of their writing from abandoned printouts and such...and honestly i'm not sure how a lot of them make it through classes when finishing high school left them barely able to write coherent sentences, they can't handle basic "click X to do Y" computer tasks, etc.

If this is at all representative of people with high school diplomas lately, I kinda can see why employers are heading that way.

It happens - not everyone lives (or wants to live) in California/NY/LA/etc and/or can find a nice high-paying position right away.

Job before this one, I was making ~$29k in sort of a tier 1 + 2 combo help desk position - yeah, the pay sucked by most standards, but it was enough to let me make a move and get established in a nicer area with lower cost of living, so the sacrifice was worth it till I found something better a few years ago.

I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that you think console/PC games aren't "adult enough" either?

Some people like what you don't like, man/woman - not everyone is looking for their entertainment to be SERIOUS BUSINESS/based on something super obscure/etc.

There's really not much other way to explain it.