If You Want To Save Money, Don't Spend Money....

I was reading an article today on CNN Money's page about three ways you can save money. The link to the article was "Save Money Now! Three Great Deals!"

Let's examine the three deals first and then I'd like to make a small comment.

1. Fly At A Deep Discount
2. Get Cash For Appliance Clunkers
3. Tee Off For Less

Okay, the first one says that you can save money by using special promotion codes to book air travel. Um, okay. That's nothing new. And the deals aren't always THAT great, even though they want to hype the thought they might be BECAUSE PEOPLE DON'T WANT TO FLY ON LOUSY AIRLINES THAT ARE NOW CHARGING YOU FOR CHECKED LUGGAGE.

The second one says you can save money by using promotions for appliances to replace your older equipment. Now, this could be a good thing if the incentive was to get rid of resource using clunkers, but not everyone really has that need, and you kind of have to decide if the price you're going to be paying overall is really going to garner a savings down the line, or just make back the money you spent buying the new appliance.

The third one is to save money on golf courses by calling and asking if there are any discounts available. Duh. Okay.

Having read that article, I'll put forth three alternative ways to save money:

1. Don't fly anywhere. Don't travel unless you absolutely have to.
2. Use the mediocre appliances you already have if they're not consuming more energy than necessary.
3. Don't golf. It's a stupid sport anyway, kind of like NASCAR is a sport. Whenever a sport involves people who can perform it while drinking beer, it's not really a sport. It's a diversion.

The point is: If you really are trying to save money, don't spend more money than you have to spend on entertainment. If you really like golfing, then make sure you allocate a certain amount of money to golf, and all will be fine. It's a luxury, so treat it as such. If you're having trouble paying the rent, golf needs to take a backburner to paying the rent, the car payment, the loan shark or whatever Maslowian need that needs to be fulfilled.

This goes back to one of my biggest pet peeves, and that's department stores where a clerk will ring me up and automatically say: "You saved $50 today by buying this coat" right after I just handed her $150 for a coat that was originally marked up for $200. No, I did NOT save $50; I lost $150 in the transaction. A savings means that I GAINED money, not spent it. Whenever I hear that statement, I want to pull out my glock (which I should point out that I saved $33 on by buying it on sale at Walmart) and open fire on every cash register in the joint. But instead, I smile, thank her, and go dump my head into a barrel of water.

Anyway, just saying....

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The Problem With Health Care Legislation May Actually Not Have Anything to Do With Health Care

I'm going to go out on a limb and say something most people aren't thinking about, and most people probably don't want to admit (or will admit). The problem right now in today's political environment isn't health care, even though it does seem to be the main focus. Like most major issues, health care is serving as a metaphor for what is really wrong. What's wrong is not health care. What's wrong is that our country is stuck in at a nexus, and NO ONE has a clue where to take it next.

Think about it. The United States has been rudderless for decades now. We've been going on autopilot towards...well, to be honest, no one really knows where we're heading. All we know is that we seem to be reactive against things that we don't want. We don't want terrorists. We don't want unemployment. We don't want wars. We don't want cars speeding up and crashing into walls. We don't want crime. We don't want taxes, bad health care, mean people, too many commercials, men kissing on television (okay, some people don't want that, and others REALLY want that), pirates, high prices, corruption, evil banks, Wall Street profiteers and, well, the list seems somewhat endless, although I'd go on a limb and say we don't want long lists that seem to go on forever.

What we don't seem to know is what we do want. Oh, I don't mean intangibles. I know we all want "peace", money and Megan Fox (okay, some people want that and others REALLY don't want that). But we really don't have a grasp on what we really want and need. Throughout most of the US's history, we were at war with someone, or were fearing a war with someone. I'm sorry, but Iraq, Afghanistan, the Taliban, Osama Bin Ladin, and terrorism is NOT a war. Almost all of those are intangibles that really have no substance. Iraq is a war we didn't want or need that is now a mess we have to clean up. Afghanistan is a cesspool that has needed cleaning for several centuries now and has been a failure of numerous administrations, hegemonies and various dictators. The Taliban is another metaphor that has no substance to most normal Americans anymore than Team America: World Police was an accurate depiction of US Foreign Policy. Osama Bin Ladin is a spectre of an entity that we keep bringing back to scare little children who happen to be Republicans, live in Texas and vote for Sarah Palin. Terrorism? Um, a state of being is not a process of war. Terrorism is something you do to scare governments; it's not a thing you fight anymore than a War on Fear makes sense.

We need direction. And we need some where to actually go with that direction. Once, we needed to go to the Moon. So did Ralph Kramden, but we got there (he didn't). We elected a man who claimed he had a vision for America, but so far, that vision has been more like a new pair of glasses. Yes, it helps us see better, but it doesn't make the picture any more palatable. The kind of direction we need is the kind that leads us to a positive future of tangible benefits, not a potential esoteric plane of existence where we might feel better.

In the process, we have people out of work who need jobs. We have people without health care who need long term care. We have cities that cannot afford to put police officers in the streets, and even when they do, we have populations of people who don't even trust them, teamed up with populations of people who have been fending for themselves for so long that they've given up the Hobbesian perspective of trusting the gatekeepers.

The United States needs a vision of an actual future where tangible things can be worked for. People can work together towards an ideal if that ideal makes sense, but there seems to be way too much "trust me and all will be okay" in current day policy decisions. There is also way too much corruption in the ranks of the people who are supposed to be leading us towards that type of future.

Do I have an actual answer? No. I'm not the person who needs to be doing that in the first place. I never claimed to be a politician, nor do I even claim to have the best interests of the greater good at heart. I just know that listening to self-motivated individuals talk about how they know best about health care is not leading us to answers that will help the rest of us. Obama had one thing right during the election, and that was the concept of town halls. What he's not getting right is how they should be used. We need leaders that stop talking to us with great speeches about how they're going to continue doing the status quo in hopes of making things better. What we need are for those leaders to put together town halls and listen to the people. Listen to those constituents who put them in office in the first place.

Unfortunately, listening in this country involves money and lobbyists. As long as that continues, the cesspool is all we have available to us for future development.

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So, who really owns the computer games people play?

One thing I've always found fascinating about online games with persistent worlds (games where the world doesn't change, but lots of people can interact together in the same world) is the concept of who actually owns the content. I don't mean the overall game itself, because that is obviously owned by a company that made the game, but the specific property that each character owns within the game.

Think of it this way: If you're an elf who owns a +5 Sword of Death (I'm sure some game has something named like that), and you log out, that sword is still in your in game inventory somewhere. When you sign back on, that sword is still there with your character. Some other player doesn't get to just go into your private inventory and steal it (unless you're playing some twisted game where you can do just that, but I have yet to see a successful one that has survived longer than a few hours with that kind of play style). So, do you really own that sword, or is it the property of the company that makes the game?

That's an issue that has been argued back and forth since the creation of games like Ultima Online, long before World of Warcraft and the latest Star Trek Online. The game companies will always argue that THEY own the property within the game, and that you are just playing in THEIR world (Sony Online Entertainment used to make that argument of "You're in OUR world now" on their marketing materials for Everquest). But that's an easy argument to make before getting into the nitty gritty. A customer IS paying money for the experience of playing the game, and there is a somewhat legal precedent that as long as the company honors its commitments (meaning all of your stuff is there after you leave and return to the game), your business arrangement remains. There are any number of customers who have ended their business arrangement with a company when the company has lost their equipment (thus, they have felt a breach of unwritten contract was reached). Therefore, in legal terms alone, a company that runs a computer game may have been making the accepted agreement of honoring that unwritten contract by continuing to take money for services. The challenge is convincing a judge of exactly what those "services" actually were.

But that's going further than I wanted with this post. What I was really wanting to talk about are these people who sell their accounts, convinced that the property within the game is theirs. I actually find myself somewhat fascinated by the advertisements they make on Craigslist and other such places. A lot of these ads involve the most popular game on the block, World of Warcraft, and way too often someone tries to sell his or her account for hundreds of dollars. What caused me to want to write about it was how someone actually had the nerve to write: "You are paying me for the time I put into making this character." In other ads, I've seen words such as: "I wanted to get something back for all of the time I put into building this character."

Now, I play World of Warcraft, and I have a lot of fun playing the game, as I believe many other people do as well. Not once have I ever thought that I was producing work, that my tribulations were actually part of the process I must endure before I have a commodity that I can now sell back to another customer who will value the time I've have endured in this game. No, I had fun doing what you do when you play a game, and never was it thought of as work. Oh sure, the quests might have been difficult, and I might have been frustrated from time to time, but it's not a job, and trying to convince someone that he needs to pay me hundreds of dollars for my account because of my "work" is just ridiculous.

But I see it all of the time. What is even more interesting is that selling one's WoW account is not authorized by the Blizzard, the company that owns the game. Nor is buying or selling of gold, the currency used in the game. Yet people still do it.

And I've often laughed at the arguments people make to justify it. Here are some of my favorites:

1. It takes a lot of time to accumulate money in the game. I work hard in my regular job, so I should be able to use that money to save time in the game because unlike the kids who play this game, I don't have as much time to waste on the game.

If it's wasted time, then don't play the game. Part of the challenge of the game is being able to accumulate wealth in the time that you're actually playing it. Being a CEO of a company OUTSIDE of the game shouldn't suddenly make you a god in the game. Cheating in the game is cheating in the game.

2. Buying gold (or a character) doesn't hurt anyone else, so why should they care?

Buying gold actually causes massive inflation in the game so that those who play the game must pay outrageous prices for items they buy from other players. Essentially, that CEO with his outside money is making it impossible for anyone to play the game without investing outside money into the game to bring the game back to an even playing field. It does affect other players, and it ruins the experience of the game. Also, Blizzard has pointed out that people who partake in the gold selling community also contribute to illegal programs in the game that are used to accumulate money through exploits. It also causes a lot more hackers to play the game who go after legitimate players and take over their accounts, selling their goods when they take over their accounts and then going onto the next victim.

There are a lot more points to make about this, but the main point is that virtual worlds are living worlds of their own that do much better without outside stimulation that brings outside forces into the inner dynamic. While some games welcome microtransactions that benefit the game making company, virtual economies do not benefit from profiteers who try to link outside money with internal money economies. Even the microtransaction models of some games out there ruin the experiences for normal players. This type of behavior practically destroyed the Ultima Online housing market because you couldn't get a home unless you were able to buy it through Ebay, back during the hey day of UO. When new housing opened up, that Ebay market died almost overnight. People who used to make $150 for a keep (large house) could no longer get that, so they let those properties just collapse, and then players were able to place homes for the price of housing that existed within the game. It practically changed the market within the game overnight, which was a great thing.

Anyway, that's my rant for this topic today.

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Microsoft vs. Apple: A Conflict Seen Through Political Exhaustion Theory

If you own a television and live in the United States, you've no doubt seen the numerous commercials that have come out from Apple that show the cool Apple guy who says "Hi, I'm a Mac" and the nerdy, plump guy who calls himself a "PC". This was a series of ads that Apple designed to show that Macs are cooler than PCs, and to convince people that PCs are too hard for the average user to understand, so go ahead and buy a Mac.

Well, this seems to have been causing a dent in Microsoft's bottom line, so they started to run a series of ads that use the exact same kind of rhetoric in hopes of countering Apple's continuous successes with this campaign. To the tech crowd, often the response has been "it's about time" to "how desperate". What is interesting is that no one has actually looked at the long term effects of this kind of rhetorical battle.

Now, I've done some work on narratives and counter-narratives, so if dealt with in just that capacity, it would seem that whichever side winds up with the stronger narrative ends up being the winner of the conflict. However, there is one further variable that needs to be discussed, and there's a rich literature already done on it. I brought it up in a conversation the other day, and it made me realize that people are only capable of accepting what's immediately in front of their faces; thinking through things strategically rather than tactically is something people do not do (we look for immediate results, not long term effects).

Well, political exhaustion is something no one ever seems to discuss outside of political elections. I think it's actually the problem that's being seen here, but no one wants to recognize it because there's no "political" situation that they can match it to. Therefore, they don't make the connection.

Political exhaustion posits the very simple idea that if attack ads continue to wage during a campaign, you end up with fewer people participating in voting. So, the other side doesn't gain more votes, but the side that was attacked loses votes, so fewer and fewer people participate.

Well, it might not come as a surprise to people, but Microsoft was starting to lose business due to the Apple attacks, and thus decided to turn the tide by starting their own attack ads. Well, guess what? In February, Apple's sales dropped 16 percent, meaning that Microsoft's attack ads were doing exactly what political attack ads do. In other words, people aren't deciding between Macs and PCs because of the ads; they're deciding against both Macs and PCs because of the ads. The only reason people are continuing to buy PCs and Macs are because they aren't influenced by the ads at all, they are so in need of a computer that they'll forgo the argumentation and just buy one anyway, or other factors besides wanting to buy one or the other. All that these attack ads have succeeded in doing is convincing people NOT to buy the other product. But because both sides are now in full gear (Apple responded with their own response to Microsoft, causing the next round of Microsoft ads), we're guaranteed to see continuous, diminishing returns.

This would be a really good time to be a third option.

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The Problem with Solving the Economic Mess

Personally, I think the problem is that no one actually has an answer here. Rather than try to figure out a unique solution to what has shown to be a product of the failure of several different types of systems, the users of the old systems keep praising the old systems as the only way to solve the problem that the old systems caused. All of our economic models in the past really don't solve a perception problem, which is the biggest problem that is the real big elephant in the room. We can talk about tax cuts all day but without a job to cut taxes on, it doesn't really make a difference. We can talk about increasing spending, but if there's no income to continue that spending, then it becomes temporary and ends after a short impetus. The problem is that people realize this now. They realize that the money geniuses weren't really geniuses but were just good at saying what was necessary to keep the other money geniuses capable of taking advantage of the happy thoughts that were being produced. Once the happy thoughts turned into sober realizations, the whole house of cards started to collapse.

What is needed is a new solution that moves away from making money off of greed rather than solid production. When the people making all of the money are the ones who have no idea what the companies are actually doing, other than from some spreadsheet, there is a problem. But because people kept making money off those spreadsheets, no one cared. Years and years ago, sober rationalists were trying to explain that you can't keep firing engineers and hiring more executives who don't produce anything just because the company is big enough to keep being traded high on the stock market. When all of those engineers realized the money was to be made in managing rather than producing, we had a real problem on our hands. We STILL haven't addressed that, nor are we ever going to because people still want to believe that money can be made from talking about business rather than producing solid items that businesses can sell. People have become experts at selling the labors of business but somehow thought it would save money to get rid of the laborers. This isn't a marxist sort of complaint, but a logical kind of complaint.

No one in this globalized world has realized the impact this has made over the last few decades. There's a reason why smart, sober people kept claiming that we have a lot to fear from China and India. These are the places where a lot of the production force has existed, and it's slowly ushering out the executive corporations that used to think they could move all their labor over there. Now, they have huge factories we built and slowly these countries have moved out the companies that built those factories, allowing the factories to be taken over by homegrown executives who now have the resources to produce items that we no longer can produce ourselves because we stopped doing it a long time ago, thinking someone else would do the grunt work for us.

Anyway, I'll leave it at that because I get so tired of the Keynesian versus whatever logic that keeps getting thrown about. I've been complaining about this for a very long time now, and I finally just gave up because everyone knew better.

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The World's Leaders are Meeting at G-20 and Why I Don't Feel We Really Should Care

The world is in pretty bad shape right now. We all know that. But it's in bad shape for a whole bunch of different reasons. Economics is really the least of our problems. Sure, it sucks that finances are in bad condition, but so is the world. And so is each one of our countries in that world.

One of the problems that they won't address in this economic summit is the wealth disparity that exists in each country and across the world. It's really bad. There are very poor people and there are very rich people. Those in the middle? Not so much as there used to be. They mostly tended to coasts into the poor category.

But no one cared when it was happening because the only people who were listened to were the ones who had the money and the power. No one cared what the poor thought. No one cares now. Are there poor representatives at the G-20 summit? Nope. Maybe a poor country that might get a seat in the balcony, but that's about it. No, the people who are going to attend are the rich ones, and these rich people are going to talk amongst themselves to figure out how they can get back to making themselves rich again.

Obama has one good idea and that's to state that the United States is no longer going to be the consumer that it once was. But that's probably not really even his choice. The number of people who are capable of being that type of consumer has dwindled, and people have started to realize that charging up huge credit card balances is not conducive to long term happiness. So, that's really a symptom to something that was going to be happening anyway. So, really, nothing new has been revealed here, unless everyone else going to the summit was going there with the hope that the US president was going to announce that gratuitous spending was going to be the answer out of the crisis, and it was going to be one way (with the US taking the brunt of the spending and giving it to other countries).

There are massive protests going on at the G-20 summit, and the funny thing is, the media is covering these protests as "events" rather than as movements. There's a big difference. An event happens once, and you don't focus upon it again. A movement happens over time, and if you don't pay attention to it, it becomes revolutionary. The media doesn't cover these things very well. I've been shaking my head all week long as I've seen EVERY dispatch from CNN read that "anti-capitalists, anarchists and environmental activists" are preparing for protests. It also appears that CNN appears disappointed that the protests were not as violent or disruptive as they predicted. So, as expected, the impact of protests will be marginalized because no one burned anything down or overturned any cars. And one wonders why people don't protest anymore, unless they intend to do actual violent protesting.

Right now, there's a huge row over the fact that France and Germany are about to leave the summit because, well, the summit isn't actually causing anyone to do anything. Gee. What a surprise. They feel that the summit is coming across as one of those "feel good" expressions that world leaders often do when they don't actually want to do anything substantial. Okay, they haven't said exactly that, but that's the point they're actually trying to make but their press secretaries are too polite to come out and say so.

Look forward to lots of "exciting" speeches that don't do anything. I'm hoping that they'll invite Jimmy Carter to write a strong letter of protest and displeasure at those that did bad things, like bankrupt entire sectors of business, putting thousands of people out of their homes and jobs.

Anyway, back to our regularly scheduled program of America's Top Sous Chef.....

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Is the Party Over? The potential American economic downfall

I've been keeping this to myself for a bit now, mainly because I really didn't want to say it myself, specifically because I've been hoping I might be wrong. But one thing has been resonating in the back of my mind for some time now, even before the financial crisis hit, and that's a tie to the infamous argument of how Reagan "beat" the Soviet Union by pretty much bankrupting them. One thing always bothered me about that connection because I kept thinking to myself that we were doing the increasing in budget at the same time as the Soviets, and we kept selling it as "we're America and can handle the increase in spending", but I always felt that wasn't true. I always felt that there was a saturation point we surpassed during this conflict, and that once something happened that challenged our financial capability, the whole thing would start crumbling down like a house of cards, kind of like happened to the old Soviet Union.

But I kept wanting to think that the economists were smarter than me, that they figured this all out, that my minimal understanding of economics was obviously not filling in enough information. And now I fear that I may have been right, even though I don't want to be right. I want to be wrong so badly right now, but I believe we may be seeing the beginning signs of our economic downfall, and that we'll never accept it until we're too far past the ability to maintain our cohesive bonding.

My fear is that we not only brought down the Soviet Union, but we also brought down ourselves as well. It just took longer for us to succumb to the process.

I suspect there are all sorts of Keynesian and Smithian responses to explain why this is not the case, and of course add in the inevitable Chicken Little reference, but I'm having a harder time distancing myself from this potential circumstance.

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What America Needs: A Volkswagen

I was just reading up on how the United States is probably going to be bailing out, again, Chrysler because we don't want to lose more jobs. I'm sorry, but at some point you need to cut the cord and just let the company fail on its own. We're holding up a dying company model because we're afraid of losing jobs, jobs that are designed to create a product that nobody wants to buy. Let's face it. Chrysler stopped making viable cars a long time ago. Even Ford and GM have started to realize they're not as indestructible as they thought they were, and they're starting to make more useful cars (after decades of forcing suvs and mini-tanks down our throats).

So, what's the solution? Let Chrysler fail? Yes, kind of.

We should let Chrysler fail and then buy up the infrastructure used to make their cars. Then nationalize it. And create our own Volkswagen.

You see, back during the era of Nazi Germany, the Germans did one thing right. They invented Volkswagon, a company that was designed to give both jobs and cars to the common people of Germany. It also made military vehicles that they used to run over most of Europe, and but let's just kind of pretend that didn't happen, because not all history has to repeat itself. I mean, if we create a Volkswagen of our own, that doesn't mean we have to run over Canada and Mexico, no matter how appealing those ideas might be. Okay, I don't want to attack Mexico. All right, I don't want to attack Canada either; they're just so much fun to make fun of, even though they are our northern friends. Besides, we'd never be able to live without Canadian bacon.

But I see this as a win-win situation. We could start making our own version of Volkswagen back in the states, in Michigan, right where all those people keep losing their jobs. And the government would own the contracts. And we'd sell the cars, VERY CHEAPLY, to the American people. We could also make nothing but hybrids. Lots of them. And possibly cars that fly, because dammit, we were promised cars that would fly! Oh sorry, kind of getting off topic here.

This proposal would put people back to work, and it would actually benefit Ford and GM because it would force them to compete with a company that's owned by the government. That means they have to be efficient. Nationalizing the post office didn't do away with alternatives. As a matter of fact, FedEx and UPS do quite well on their own, even though they were invented AFTER the post office was nationalized. You could even say they're doing better than the post office. And that would be the goal. To do BETTER than the government, which if you're a Republican that would be a great thing. If you're a Democrat, you can be for this because you like government, and it would be in your best interest to make the government auto industry as efficient as possible.

This would spur competition between government and private industry. As long as we don't get stupid and use government laws to hurt the private industry competition, we might actually grow the competition and both would compete well with each other. And one day, if the Republicans ever figure out what they're doing and stop listening to Rush and Coulter, perhaps they might realize how to spin off the government company, and our Volkswagen company can survive on its own alongside Ford and GM, if they manage to survive themselves.

The business model, as is, isn't working right now. We need to do something to make things happen. We have too many naysayers who complain about everything and no one who wants to do anything to shake things up. We put a new president and party in office to shake things up, so let's do that.

And then we can all take coast trips in our new Volkswagen bug (named something else, obviously for reasons of patent and trademark infringement lawsuits), knowing that we did something to make America better. Anything else would be unpatriotic.

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Does Democracy make better people?

I've been watching a couple of arguments on democracy and capitalism, and what often fascinates me is that as people become smarter and smarter, they tend to make really complex arguments that muddy the waters until we hit a point where we lose track of simple, common sense. We start speaking in tongues that show how intelligent we are, and we use words to trap ourselves into complex dilemmas that need even more loaded words and phrases to get outselves to dig even deeper into our arguments. By the time we're done, we advocate death and violence because our argumentation has made it a logical progression towards this end, because we lacked the simple foresight to push forth the idea that perhaps killing people for economic reasons isn't always the best alternative, especially when we justify the ends by means that only we can spend.

In Samuel Huntington's The Third Wave, we find ourselves in a situation where democracy and capitalism is a naturally occurring event that happens after major world events, such as World War I, World War II and the end of the Cold War. Each great rush towards democracy and capitalism is followed by a backlash towards dictatorships and popular, hostile oligarchies. But does recognizing all of this really lead us anywhere or just give us the ability to recognize a dog is a dog if it barks loud enough to be heard?

There has been an argument going around democracy advocates for as many years as there have been philosophers who thought about democracy: Democracy makes for better people. In other words, if you have a democracy, people will then become better people. We back this up with quantitative studies of nations that have moved forward with capitalistic intentions and democratic institutions, and we've been relatively happy with the statement. We tend to ignore the cases where it doesn't work and then claim those "other" cases weren't really democracies in the first place. Therefore, the comment still works.

I put forth the idea that perhaps the comment has never worked. It was just worded wrong. What I think really gives that phrase power is a rewording of it so that we read something closer to: Better people make democracies. And that's not just a little quibble here that I'm putting forth. It's a much larger statement, indicating that as much as we'd like to put forth the idea that installing a democracy in a nation that has never seen a democracy is a great thing, chances are pretty good we're just going to be installing the justification for someone, or someones, to raid the empire's coffers in the name of democracy, creating that sense of corruption that we generally point out is always present in dictatorships and group-run autocracies.

What we need to be focusing on is bettering the people who might benefit from a democracy and let them build whatever government is best for their functioning. Unfortunately, this means that we're really going to be successful in installing democratic institutions into a sovereign nation that has little desire to be open and just to its people. The unjust acts will continue; they'll just have the mantle of democracy to hide behind as they raid the treasury and hurt the citizenry, all in the name of God and country.

So, what is the answer then? It's not easy, it's not simple, and it's not immediate either. If we're so interested in installing just governments for people of the world, and we really think we have the onus to do just that, then we need to be focusing on the people of these areas and see about bettering them, not their system of government. If you reward those who do good things, you send a message that good things are to the benefit of all, especially the do gooders. But if you reward a country that is corrupt and works against its own people, you only reward those in power who are benefiting from the horrible dichotomy.

Unfortunately, this has been our policy for as long as we've been doing diplomacy, and I don't see it changing any time soon. Instead, I imagine if it's even discussed at all, it will be met with resistance by economics professors and those who have an incentive to create a game theoretic nightmare of rewards that continue to honor those who have no incentive to make things better.

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Food prices are hitting hard in the areas people don't notice

I was in the grocery store this morning and noticed some prices were up 50 percent for much lower priced items. I think they believe we won't notice a difference if something that used to be 99 cents is now "on sale" for $1.50. I also noticed frozen food prices are up quite a bit. Some of the really badly made items that used to sell for 99 cents (the really bad budget frozen dinners) were now "on sale" for 2/$3.00.

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