An Apparent Non-Money Pricing Anomaly
The City of Austin offers airport parking in three tiers, from garage ($20/day), to close-in surface ($10/day), to distant surface ($7/day). Frequent parkers accumulate points entitling them to free parking days.
The incentives for redeeming the points are bizarre:
Garage 2500 points
Close In 2500 points
Long Term 2500 points
The “price” of a free parking day is the same for the very desirable garage, where I never park if I have to pay $$, and for the close-in parking (where I park for $$ if staying fewer than 5 days) as well as for the long-term (where I park only if staying more than 4 days). Seeing this, we will redeem our 10,000 points for four days in the garage—parking for “free” anywhere else makes no sense. Now if the airlines would only charge the same number of frequent-flyer miles for a trip to Australia as they do for a trip to New York, I would be even better off!
What Would it Be Like to Climb 26 Years of Federal Spending?
Data is often difficult to comprehend, especially when the numbers are huge. As Sanjoy Mahajan points out, the $14.3 trillion national debt seems impossible to fathom. It’s not a numeracy problem; it’s more a question of how to divide the gigantic number into parcels we can understand. Mahajan suggests using smaller measures we can handle – namely thinking about debt in per capita terms.
Fortunately there are also some media tech folks to the rescue. This spring, two computer engineers from Minneapolis challenged designers and coders to come up with a visual program to help the public understand the U.S. federal budget. You can see the winners here. If you want a fun way to understand the cuts that Obama’s talking about, the game Budget Climb lets you physically experience 26 years of federal spending data in a virtual reality, interactive format. Read More »
How to Eat What You Kill
Life only tastes good when you eat what you kill. When you hustle for what you earn and someone pays you money in proportion to the service you’ve offered, the idea you’ve created, your ability to execute on it, and their ability to consume it in a way that benefits them.
Someone asked me the other day, “What does it mean when you say you ‘Eat what you kill’?”
It means that the greatest pleasure is going into the jungle and mastering the ability to hunt and survive without the help of masters who only pretend to guarantee our safety; i.e., bosses. Whether you’re an entrepreneur, an employee, a student, a homemaker, a writer — it’s time to start forgetting about all the ways the world has promised you safety and comfort.
Human knowledge has torn apart our families, our bank accounts, and lulled us into a creepy sense of Disney stability. A good friend of mine was just laid off from his job of ten years. He found out through an email and was asked not to come into work for the rest of the week and to clean out his desk when security came in on Saturday. All of that human knowledge in an email. Ten years of work. Time to cut costs. “What do I do now?” he asked me. Read More »
The Osama Spike on Obama’s Re-Election Chances, Per InTrade
Here it is:
These things don’t last long, do they? Meanwhile, Rick Perry has a better chance of winning the GOP’s nomination (29%) than Rupert Murdoch has of being booted by year’s end (20%).
and 
. If you haven’t seen it yet, the movie features Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, and was made by a dream team of documentary directors. Paste Magazine named it one of the 