Can you make a desert version to touch some rocks?

No shopping floor, just a warehouse. You order online.

This is interesting because https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumers_Distributing went bankrupt and afaik never came back. Sometimes I wonder if capitalism has any memory.

Texas Hold'em

I'm not a fan of gambling for money conceptually, but I was surprised by how much I learned playing Texas Hold'em for small cash stakes with a group of friends.

I think the most generally applicable thing I learned is the idea of folding a bad hand, and that most of the time you should fold. It seems to come up in regular life quite often, and I used to routinely double down on bad hands in life. It's also impressive how someone who is "ahead" can sort of bully people off the table.

It does seem to be the case that playing for some interesting amount of cash is helpful or even necessary in order to properly stimulate the brain. I hear backgammon for money is totally different as well, with the introduction of the doubling cube.

Seconded. Poker is a generally applicable set of life skills, imo.

Same for me! I check every couple months to see if anything changed in the Google Wallet policy but I lost all hope now. It's outrageous.

I'm trying to get my head around it but one thing looks particularly confusing.

The article says that "If the second blockchain has agreed to be a Bitcoin sidechain, it now does something really special… it creates the exact same number of tokens on its own network and gives you control of them."

Does "the exact same number of tokens" mean the same exact amount in Bitcoin? Therefore, does it mean that there's no exchange rate and you always move coins 1:1 between Bitcoin and a sidecoin?

This doesn't make much sense to me. How does the actual currency amount get converted from BTC to a sidecoin?

There isn't any "sidecoin" here. One of the slogans for sidechains is "altchains without altcoins". The idea is that you are in some sense still using bitcoin tokens, even though you're doing so in an unorthodox way.

It can be implemented either way - it's up to the sidechain. For example, a simple sidechain might lock its exchange rate at 1=1 to the bitcoin network (if the creator just wanted to test out protocol improvements, such as faster block times).

On the other hand, someone could create something totally different, like a lotto coin, where each week one of the holders is allowed to "withdraw" all bitcoin in the network back to the bitcoin blockchain.

All that matters is that all the miners/participants in the sidechain agree what the rules are for importing and exporting bitcoin. If the sidechain miners allow the withdrawal to go ahead (and it reaches enough confirmations to mitigate a double spend attack), then the bitcoin blockchain allows the original coins to be unlocked.