So then

what have we missed with all the iPhone coverage and heartless "jokes" about situations Megan will never experience and celebration of deprivations she'll never know?
A: More crap. Shorters, genuine and semi.

Gone to the dogs: Leaving vast fortunes to pets or boutique charities for poodles is a privilege of being rich, and since Leona Helmsley was Megan's life model it's an extra double good move. Plus being nice to animals makes her feel better about herself without demanding actual effort.
Bonus stupid:

You could argue, I suppose, that the government could have taken the money and given it to needy children. But looking at the budget shows that most of it would have gone somewhere else: affluent old people, wealthy farmers, defense contractors, holders of US debt, road builders, government employees, and so forth.

Have house, won't travel: The most terrifying thing about the mortgage crisis is that people might stop living as a migratory workforce to be easily taken advantage of by corporations. FFS, we might even have communities develop if we leave people in one place long enough. How are we going to maintain an economy that benefits the bosses if it keeps going like this?

Gone, but not forgotten:

Ted Kennedy comes back to the Senate in order to block cuts in Medicare payments for doctors. The New York Times rather gleefully calls this a stinging defeat for Republicans. This makes it sound as if the whole thing were some sort of glorified athletic contest, where the important thing is that our team wins.

Or that hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of Medicare recipients aren't denied health care. That might also be important, what with it being the actual news reported.

But the question is rather more important than that. Basically in the late 1990s Congress passed a law tying Medicare payouts to GDP--if they grow too fast, relative to GDP, reimbursements automatically drop. Ted Kennedy came back from medical leave to override that automatic cut, just as Congress has every year in recent years.
All very well, and many physicians will tell you that they just can't afford to treat Medicare patients for much less. But this--not some bogeyman in a pharma marketing department--is why the cost of Medicare is rising so fast. If we don't have the political courage to slash reimbursements, or to ration care, then the Democrats should give up any pretense that they are going to slow the growth of entitlements, and just admit that they're for the thing growing as fast as it can, forever.

Yeah, Democrats. Geez. The health care system will be much more effective if we just let the sick poor people die.

What gains from cap gains?: Trickle down economics by any other name.... are something Megan is willing to consider. So long as the rich get richer, it's all good.

Give me some credit: Racially based discrimination involving credit is not only a myth, but justified. Lesser people deserve less credit.

Note to trolls:

This is MY blog, not a publicly owned free-for-all; you do not have the right to consume MY comments threads with flame wars. [Emphasis added]

Look, the focus of Megan's blog is Megan. If you try to steal that focus, you will face her wrath.

That's for girls, he said scornfully . . .

The feminists are mad because I said SF isn't girly. I think SF is girly, because I'm a girl, and my father gave me my first 3 SF books for my eighth birthday (Tunnel in the Sky, Sargasso of Space, and the third one escapes me). I spent one summer in Bantam Doubleday Dell's science fiction department, which was all female. I have an entire elaborate space opera planned out in my head which I may someday write, if my fiction writing stops being terrible.

That... is not a good argument. Also, "the feminists are mad" amounts to the following; first, from Feministe

Megan McArdle at the Atlantic tells a reader how he can get his wife to enjoy science fiction, since women could never possibly find spaceships and robots interesting. (The key: tell her it’s like a fairy tale! Awww.)

(in a roughly 500-1000 word post), and, second, a post about one of Megan's commenters at Feminist SF. In no way does it help show why Megan isn't a feminist that she's willing to conflate a couple brief and unflattering mentions with an angry party attack on her by the entire movement. Neither does it betray an inherent hostility towards feminism on Megan's part.

I think we'll take a longer look at the Boundary cases post that Nutella started to touch on later today, and I still am going to write that post on political burnout, promise.