Consumerism gone wrong --> a $100k razor?

I first read about this in Wired, but here is a quick summary of the "features".  For $100k I wish they could just make it so I never have to shave another hair from my body ever again.  The kicker is that it took three years of research, that's three years that could have been spent on anything else, like knitting....or curing cancer.

A miserable life in a California prison

I know prison life is generally pretty brutal, but I was still more or less a little shocked when I saw this picture in The Economist of a crowded California prison.  I'd have to assume everyone in this picture is in for a relatively minor crime such as drug possession or petty theft, and if so I'm not sure the crime is worth the punishment here.  I just can't imagine having so little privacy and can't even begin to imagine how badly that room must smell.  I guess I'm not alone here, as a California court just required some drastic changes within the next two years. Lazy man's summary: California is currently at 175% prison capacity, and a court decision recently made will require them to get down to 137.5% within the next two years (either releasing 46k people, shipping them out of state, putting them in county prisons, or building more state prisons).  Not an easy task for a debt burdened state.  So what caused this problem in the first place?  "The draconian sentencing laws that now unnecessarily keep huge numbers of entirely non-violent inmates behind bars: for smoking dope or writing bad checks , say, or for missing parole appointments."  Read the full article here

Firefox 5 - some cool new features

One of the best features in a browser I've found in a while was introduced recently in Firefox 5.  It's called "App Tabs", and it allows you to pin sites that you always use into your browser so that every time you open it the sites are automatically loaded.  It also makes the tab much smaller.  So handy for sites I always leave open like Gmail, Facebook, etc..  Read more here and then download here. I also just started to experiment with the Firefox Synch feature, which allows bookmarks and open tabs to be constantly in synch between my desktop, netbook, and my iPhone.  Seems to work pretty well so far, so long Xmarks plugin.

Firefox (and other browsers as well) are starting to ramp up their release schedule for new versions.  This is great for consumers, but man does it suck as a product manager for a web app when you have to spend half of your life regression testing if you wish to support various browsers.

1 + 1 + .... = 308,745,538 people and $13 billion

I never would have guessed that the 2010 US population cost about $13 billion until I read about it in this Economist article.  That works out to around $42 per person, which in my opinion is absolutely ridiculous.  India spent about 40 cents per person, China about $1 per person.  I recognize that the Census is important and is part of the US Constitution, but you cannot tell me that in today's electronic world there is not a technical solution that could solve this problem more efficiently.  I would think this would be a great opportunity for a private company to come up with a creative solution, save the government billions, and make a killing for themselves.