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The end of Lotto 6/49 as we know it

Sunday 4 September 2022, 00:00

The rules of Lotto 6/49 are about to change in a way that I think is pretty significant. It's drastic enough that I think we might well say Lotto 6/49 is coming to an end, being replaced by a new game that is not even properly a lotto game anymore and only happens to reuse the name.

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Project Wonderful, 2006-2018

Thursday 14 June 2018, 16:15

Project Wonderful, a banner-ad network popular among Web comics authors, suddenly announced a few days ago that they would be shutting down. I've used them off and on almost from the very beginning of the system in 2006, at that time to bring in traffic for my own Web comic and later for some other projects, both buying and selling ads. There was a Project Wonderful ad box on this very Web site for several years, now replaced by a permanent ad for North Coast Synthesis Ltd.

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This is why your Shopify storefront has no sales

Sunday 8 October 2017, 11:03

Since launching my own Web shop on Shopify in August, I've spent a fair bit of time on the Shopify forum, reading comments from other shopkeepers. There's a specific genre of discussion thread that comes up there about once per day: the "Why don't I have any sales?" thread. Someone will post that question, with a link to their own shop, and ask for advice from the other shopkeepers. I don't have all the answers, but I have noticed some pretty consistent habits of shopkeepers who have no sales and are asking the forum for help.

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Some thoughts on the Cost Disease

Saturday 18 February 2017, 06:40

The lovely and talented Scott Alexander has a posting on Cost Disease: the costs of some things, notably education and medical care especially in the USA, have increased in the last few generations to a really unfathomable extent. He gives detailed statistics, but it's typically about a factor of 10 after accounting for general inflation. Why has this happened? He gives some hypotheses, and in a followup posting shares some ideas contributed by readers, but it's not at all clear what's going on. And it seems like knowing might be valuable, because the fact of this phenomenon's occurrence (whatever the cause) is causing a great deal of misery for a whole lot of people, bearing on many other important issues.

I don't know either, but it made me think of some things.

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