This has already been everywhere, so instead of just looking, which of these did you own? You have to use some judgment here: I list #98 (Pez dispenser) even though I didn't have the original one, but I don't list #99 (fire-engine red Swingline stapler) even though I've owned other Swingline staplers. I've had a Dustbuster (#88), but not the introductory model. If it was the timing or the specific model that made it cool, then I only listed it if I had that model, otherwise, in general.

Here's my list: #3, 9, 10, 12, 25, 36, 43, 46, 50, 57, 63, 64, 65, 69, 72, 74, 78, 88, 89, and 98. Never had a PowerBook 100 or 500, but have a PowerBook 540 not too far from here.

And, along with them, much of the American agriculture economy - and poured the foundation for today's obesity epidemic. I was reminded of this today due to AMERICAblog:

Please tell me that the farmers, who received massive handouts in the first term, did not actually believe Bush was going to give them more after the election. With the black hole of spending in Iraq, the Christian-right program spending, the corporate welfare, etc., etc., surely they knew that Bush was going to throw a few people under the bus. What ever happened to farmers being conservative anyway? Did they think that they could keep taking taxpayer welfare forever?

The thing is, farm subsidies, as designed and implemented by the New Deal, weren't taxpayer welfare: they were price controls to keep the food supply and its price from bankrupting family farmers. Most of the story is a long New York Times excerpt, but it's a must-read if you want to know what happened the last time the Republicans dismantled a New Deal program, some 30 years later. An excerpt of the excerpt:

This wasn't a perfect system by any means, but it did keep cheap grain from flooding the market and by doing so supported the prices farmers received. And it did this at a remarkably small cost to the government, since most of the loans were repaid. Even when they weren't, and the government was left holding the bag (i.e., all those bushels of collateral grain), the U.S.D.A. was eventually able to unload it, and often did so at a profit. The program actually made money in good years. Compare that with the current subsidy regime, which costs American taxpayers about $19 billion a year and does virtually nothing to control production.

So why did we ever abandon this comparatively sane sort of farm policy? Politics, in a word. [... Earl Butz] inaugurated a new subsidy system, which eventually replaced nonrecourse loans with direct payments to farmers. The distinction may sound technical, but in effect it was revolutionary. For instead of lending farmers money so they could keep their grain off the market, the government offered to simply cut them a check, freeing them to dump their harvests on the market no matter what the price.

The new system achieved exactly what it was intended to: the price of food hasn't been a political problem for the government since the Nixon era. Commodity prices have steadily declined, and in the perverse logic of agricultural economics, production has increased, as farmers struggle to stay solvent.

"Minor technical changes" in economic programs can have wide-ranging impact.