Alex Tabarrok on price discrimination and buy-one-get-one-free.#

BOGOs can be much more profitable for stores than a half-price sale. To see why, assume that you value your first pizza of the night at $15.01 and the second at $5.01 and let's say it costs the store $2 to make each pizza. If the pizza store has a buy-one-get-one-free offer at $20 then you will buy two pizzas and the store will have profits of $16 ($20-$2-$2). But if the store sells pizzas for half price, $10 each, you will buy just one pizza and the store will have profits of just $8 ($10-$2). The BOGO doubles the store's profits!

Richard Tallent's main gripe with XML is mine as well.#

My biggest gripe with XML is the artificial difference between single child nodes and attributes. If there's one value and the value has no attributes, an attribute is more efficient. If not, child nodes are better. Six of one, half dozen the other as far as I am concerned, they should look identical after parsing. Yes, you can make some semantic argument about attributes vs. descendants, but what about real-world use? If I have one phone number it is an attribute, but if I have three (or they each have a country code) they magically have to be children? I'm not talking about how they are actually rendered in XML, I'm talking about the way they appear program-side. Why should the developer have to care which is which as long as the XML writer spits out something well-formed?

Typepad appears to be down. Suck.#

Tyler Cowen links to a story about fame and childhood.#

Celebrity worship may play an important part of growing up, suggest the results of a UK study.

Star-struck teens are generally emotionally well-adjusted and popular, with their celebrity interests forming a healthy part of adolescent development and bonding, say psychologists from the Universities of Leicester and Coventry.

However, those with extreme celebrity fascination, are likely to be lonely children without close attachments to friends or family, suggests the new study.

John Maltby and David Giles surveyed 191 English schoolchildren between the ages of 11 and 16. They found that those who avidly followed celebrities' lives were the most popular.

Dr. J. C. George excerpts a post of mine. No way to contact him though. I wonder what he thought of it.#

Curt Siffert writes about his Christian beliefs.#

My personal beliefs about God and Jesus are unsupported (as far as I know) from anything literal in the Bible. But as far as I know that doesn't make them any less likely of being the truth. I believe Jesus existed, was more than just a "great man", was a part of God, and I believe that God was heartbroken by the crucifixion of His son, and I believe the crucifixion wasn't what God desired for Him at all.

I think guilt, sacrifice, and sin are horrible concepts designed to undermine free will, love, and desire.

AKMA writes about The Passion, and it's very interesting.#

Second, Gibson has set himself a very peculiar challenge. Making a movie about the last twelve hours of Jesus' life seems as counter intuitive as making a movie of just the fifth act of Hamlet, or of Abraham Lincoln's trip to the theater; it's all the degradation and misery without any of the contextual cues that might render the events comprehensible. It's no wonder people feel deeply moved by this presentation — one would hope we'd feel sympathetic to an inoffensive civilian being dragged off the street, beaten to a bloody pulp, and executed in a uniquely agonizing way.

Now, the matter of context remains an interpretive choice — by opting out of a portrayal of Jesus' teaching and healing ministry, by ignoring the closely-reasoned controversies with his theological rivals, Gibson chooses to represent Jesus as unaccountably persecuted; he contrasts obscene suffering with utter innocence. But that's neither the gospels' narrative version of Jesus' life and significance nor even the passion narrative that, even in Mark, constitutes a heightened, concentrated narrative exposition of how Jesus ends up on the cross. Gibson chooses to film only the grimmest moments from a narrative that ranges from shared joys to confusion and dismay to transcendent ecstasy to brutal, dehumanizing torture.

Chip Gibbons writes about miscegenation laws.#

The government is simply a tool for domination, a weapon that certain individuals use to impose their will, their values and their boundaries upon others. At the root of the same-sex marriage debate is the question of who has the right to control the life, the choices and values of each individual, the individual or somebody else?

The government as an irrational inanimate entity cannot make choices. It is irrational to ask if the government has the right to control the lives of individuals. The government cannot have such a "right" because it does not even have the capability. The question is whether certain individuals have a "right" to use government to control the most personal choices that individuals make in their lives.

Chip Gibbons writes about The Passion and an alternatively way to view it.#

I wonder what it would be like to watch the movie without giving any credibility to the faith-based aspects of it; assuming that Jesus was nothing more than a man who suffered from some pretty serious delusions. Then it would just be the story of an individual being persecuted by both the church and the state. That would be a story I could identify with.

I'd like to watch the movie from that point of view, but don't want to be a victim of the marketing. So we'll see. Maybe Mel will read this post and send me a free ticket, good Christian dude that he is.

The Black Saint is so hilarious, I can barely stand up.#

Tim Robbins (accepting Best Supporting Actor Oscar for Mystic River): In this movie I play a victim of abuse and violence and if you are a person who has had that tragedy befall you, there is no shame and no weakness in seeking help and counselling.

Whitney: See? See what the man on TV said? There ain't no shame in burning your Pop-Tarts. I'm leaving you. I'm going to get help. And I'm going to build a new and better life for myself and my child.

"Jonathan Ichikawa" explains why you can't be certain he is who you think he is, based on his blog now being anonymous.#

Fortunately for me, names need not pick out unique individuals, and there's no reason to believe that mine does. With this in mind, the following possibilities should make it clear that, as my blog stands now, you don't know who I am, and that I'm therefore in an important sense anonymous:

• You think that I am Jonathan Ichikawa. Possibly, I'm not -- I'm someone else whose name is 'Jonathan Ichikawa'.
• I might, as far as you know, be lying -- it may not be the case that my name is 'Jonathan Ichikawa'. Furthermore, Jonathan Ichikawa might be in on the trick, such that he pretends to be the author when you talk to him in the non-internet world.
• You assume, based on the fact that my language appears similar to English, that I am writing in English. This may not be the case -- I may be writing in Shmenglish, which is almost identical to English, except with respect to the way that speakers or writers identify themselves (also, some things look like typos in English but are correctly-spelled in Shmenglish). So in fatc, I may not have even alleged to have been Jonathan Ichikawa.
• Nobody knows the real me.

Unless you can definitively rule out these scenarios, it is not the case that you know my identity.

Julie Leung writes about marriage proposals.#

On the one hand I think I would have said Yes to Ted no matter how he had asked me, over an intercom system, on a billboard or TV commercial (or a blog?). Any way would have thrilled me. But I also feel that if I had been asked in the way that these two examples portray, I might have said no, simply because of the way it was done. Neither man seems to be treating his beloved with respect or dignity, at least how I see it. I wouldn't want to marry a mascot, or a man who compared me to all his exes before he asked me. To me saying yes is a private and intimate moment, not one I'd want to share with an entire stadium or a winery train of strangers.

If marriage was up to men alone to determine, I imagine proposals might be a bit different in general. Maybe for some men. Maybe more like an invitation to join a harem. A business card or paper flyer to distribute. That would be a lot less risky. A lot less romantic too.

Bob Murphy explains Christianity.#

The son was to give wise instruction, to point out the error of your ways, but above all he was to lead by example. He was to show you and your family that there was another way to live, that you could be just as "rich" as the hated neighboring clan if you would only abandon your thievery and killing.

Naturally, you and your family mocked, tortured, and murdered the master's son — just as he knew you would. But through this episode, a few of the members of your clan had a change of heart. Where threats of punishment would not move them, seeing the logical conclusion of your way of life — i.e., that it required the murder of the wisest, gentlest man to ever walk in your midst — caused many of your clansmen to renounce their allegiance and cross over into the lush gardens of your rich neighbors.

Tibor Machan writes about inheritance and capitalism.#

Few things invigorate critics of free market capitalism as much as inherited wealth. Quite a few defenders of this system tend to stress its supposed reward of hard work, ingenuity, industriousness, thrift and diligence — all virtues one can hardly argue with and which, if one practices them, seem to justify holding on to the often resulting wealth. So, critics focus on inheritance, a species of good luck, which those who benefit from it cannot easily be said to deserve.

And it is true enough — notoriously many beneficiaries of inherited wealth seem to be quite undeserving. They often waste their inheritance away rather rapidly; if not, they do nothing much creative or productive with it; often they spend it on projects that actually turn out to be out and out hostile to the very system that made making the wealth possible in the first place (just take notice of the many rich kids of industrialists who decided to fund collectivist think tanks, magazines, and activism). So, if this result can be associated with free market capitalism, how could any right-minded person defend the system?