Freakonomics readers get a lesson in price discrimination (or bad customer service): Interestingly, as I gave a lecture on “Price Discriminationâ€, using an example of the demand for textbooks (relatively inelastic) vs. novels (relatively elastic), the students pointed out that in our campus textbook store, “Freakonomics†is on sale at the regular price in the …
Monthly Archives: February 2006
we quit
Separated at birth?
On your left, booker extraordinaire Natasha Bishop. On your right, Pollyanna Bush.
trust who?
Heather and I spotted this on the way out of the hockey arena in Yerba Buena in San Francisco.
The Secret Life of Dr. Chandra
The CBC’s The National ran an exposé on Dr. Ranjit Kumar Chandra. It turns out he’s been faking his research data for 20 years: Chandra claimed to have given 96 healthy seniors from St. John’s a daily multivitamin pill for a year. He then tested their memory for improvements. But the test results didn’t make …
tim redmond loses it
the san francisco bay guardian‘s editor, tim redmond, has been drinking something funny lately, resulting in him ranting against craigslist: The problem with that is simple: When Craig comes to town (and he’s coming to just about every town in the nation soon), the existing community institutions – say, the locally owned weekly newspaper – …
when your warranty expires
Ssomeone called me last week and asked what do about his 16-month-old monitor that had just died. He had already shown it to a dealer, and the dealer told him there would be a $500 minimum charge. Since monitors aren’t something you can easily troubleshoot or repair, i started think about ways to avoid paying …
o’reilly gets skewered
Thanks, Keith Olbermann — that was excellent.
one expensive VISIT
Since January 2004, the US-VISIT program has apprehended nearly 1,000 people. Out of 44 million. At a cost of $15 billion. That’s $15 million per bad guy caught.
cash cows explained
at work, i posed the question “can vegetarians have cash cows?” the answer: since a cash cow is something that generates cash, and vegetarians are okay with consuming animal products (but not animals), vegetarians can indeed have cash cows. vegans, on the other hand, cannot.