🐤 Game over

An infatuation with video games can be expensive, but for one computer programmer it led to a prison sentence and a multimillion-dollar penalty he doesn’t expect he’ll ever be able to pay back.

The real-life Bowser?

“Super Mario Bros.” fans will likely recognize Gary Bowser’s last name as that of the game’s primary enemy … but the 54-year-old says he’s not the bad guy everybody seems to think he is.

Here’s how it all started: Bowser had a long history of messing around with electronics and started working early in life after his mother died and he had to support his retired father. His interests in technology led him to open an internet cafe where he encountered a number of avid gamers.

And then fate struck when he crossed paths with a shady group that produces the equipment necessary to pirate, modify, and play video games without paying the companies that make them.

“I started becoming a middleman in between the people doing the development work and the people actually owning the mod chips, playing the games,” Bowser recalled.

He essentially became the face of the group, however, because many of the others had social anxiety.

Sending a message

While Bowser might have understood the sketchy nature of the group he’d become involved with, it was still a shock when he was awakened in September 2020 by authorities and locked up on serious charges.

He was living in the Dominican Republic and the combination of international laws and the pandemic presented even more chaos to the situation.

Prosecutors and attorneys for Nintendo characterized him as a dangerous criminal and he ended up serving more than a year in prison. Now he’s out, but now he’s facing the prospect of paying back $14.5 million in criminal and civil penalties.

🦫 The shadow knows: Yesterday was Groundhog Day, and fans of rodents as well as warmer weather should be happy. Punxsutawney Phil didn’t see his shadow, which according to tradition means we’ll have an early spring this year. But what does that actually mean? As it turns out, not much. Although there’s no specific criteria for an “early spring,” rough estimates indicate Phil is only right about two-fifths of the time. Nevertheless, researchers believe that over the past 75 years, he’s been able to outperform a coin toss.

🚗 Tesla troubles: Elon Musk once again turned to X for advice, this time regarding whether he should relocate Tesla’s state of incorporation from Delaware to Texas. That question came in response to a court decision in Delaware to reject a proposed $55.8 billion compensation package for the company’s CEO. There was other bad news for Musk and the EV automaker: An investigation into possible steering failure, lawsuits over hazardous waste disposal, and a recall for display fonts, to name a few.

🔪 The ides of March: In Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar,” the Roman statesman was told to beware of March 15 … day he was assassinated. But for those of you sharing your Hulu and Disney+ passwords, you’ll need to be prepared for the previous day. An announcement this week from Hulu (of which Disney is a controlling owner) indicated that the streaming services will roll out new restrictions on password sharing on March 14. Neftlix implemented such a strategy last year and attracted millions of new subscribers as a result.

💰 Endorsement deals: It’s not uncommon for NFL stars to supplement or follow up their careers on the field with lucrative contracts to advertise a host of products and services — and Toyota recently signed two prominent quarterbacks to join its team. Brock Purdy, the current starter for the 49ers, and Eli Manning, who spent 16 seasons with the Giants, are now national spokesmen for the Japanese automaker. At just 24 years old, Purdy has already inked endorsement deals with Alaska Airlines and Buffalo Wild Wings.

When discussing the economy these days, there always seems to be more bad news than good. And inflation is a prime example.

Price increases are slowing, but that doesn’t mean everything's getting more affordable. And the impact of years of post-pandemic soaring costs is still hitting consumers where it hurts.

Perhaps the most obvious place that people are feeling the pinch in their wallets is at the grocery store.

So what’s going on?

There are a few reasons that millions of Americans are being acutely impacted by high food prices. For starters, we all need to eat, so there’s no real way to offset the cost. Switching to generic brands can only do so much, after all.

Plus, there’s plenty of evidence that groceries in general have been getting more expensive, more quickly, than other consumer goods:

• Over the past four years, inflation overall has been about 19%
• During the same period, grocery prices have soared 25%
• Some other prices have declined recently, but food kept going up

More than two-thirds of Americans say food prices have hit them hardest, which is much higher than anything else on the list.

Lower your expectations

A number of issues have made grocery prices more susceptible to inflation than other sectors of the economy — from supply chains to labor shortages to industry consolidation. And then there are more specific factors that have impacted certain foods, such as egg prices soaring in response to an avian flu outbreak.

And while some grocery items have gotten cheaper over the past year (milk, apples, and lettuce are a few examples), you shouldn’t expect to see a big drop in your supermarket bill as things get back to “normal,” whatever that is.

“We’re going to see prices stabilize, and that’s likely it,” explained agricultural economist Dawn Thilmany.

Markets: Things were generally moving in the right direction on Wall Street to wrap up the week on a positive note.

The gains were fueled in large part by an encouraging employment report that showed a higher-than-expected number of jobs — about 353,000 — were added to the economy last month.

There was also some increased optimism surrounding the tech sector, with strong performances by Meta and Amazon following the release of their latest earnings reports.

Even if you’re not a “redditor,” you probably heard something last year about the falling out Reddit had with its own users and various third-party apps that had been accessing the website’s content.

A brief recap

Basically, Reddit decided to start charging a lot more to apps that were using its application programming interface (or API), resulting in a deal that critics felt was predatory and unfair.

As a result, a number of prominent subreddits went dark, making all of their content private in protest of the decision.

And several notable apps simply shut down or shifted to other websites due to the inability to absorb the added cost of doing business with Reddit.

Most of those that remained were forced to start charging users a fee to help offset the new charges, but not all of them. Some have found ways to bypass Reddit’s API, offering niche services that might not provide everything avid users want but also not warranting a monthly subscription fee.

The dust has settled

It’s been months since the backlash began and almost all of the protesting subreddits are now public again. The apps that remain have revamped their pricing structure and a lot of users have shown a willingness to pay the fee in order to support the services they have come to value.

Pricing structures include flat monthly fees and tiers based on how much users access the site.

There haven’t been any major changes on Reddit’s part lately, so we can probably expect the status quo to remain in effect for the foreseeable future. But as the platform proved last year, it’s not always going to make popular decisions just to satisfy redditors and developers.

So those apps that remain in business do so with the knowledge that everything could change quickly.