Price Drop Illogic

Apparently many people are unfamiliar with the idea of buying things. It's a simple system: A person pays money for goods or services, and the recipients of that money delivers that good or service.

The furor over the price cuts of the 3DS and Team Fortress 2 imply some new philosophy of shopping. The thought seems to be, "If I buy something, and someone else gets that same thing for a lower price, I'm getting screwed."

You still got a product in return for your money. You thought it was worth ten dollars, or two hundred fifty dollars, and you got it for that price. Once that transaction is complete, the relation between you and the seller is complete. You may have been ripped off*, or you may have won a great deal**. Either way, the price in the future has nothing to do with the value of your purchase in the past.

Where have these people come from, anyway? Almost every consumer product's price goes down over time, except survival commodities like Petrol and Food. When did this completely ordinary process become an outrage?

I suppose I shouldn't bother; people will complain about anything nowadays.

*If you got a 3DS
**If you got TF2

All In The Family

All in the Family is the best show ever made. It pushed more borders than anything today, (although a lot of that is the fact that there were more borders back then,) and the show is still funny, and sad, and powerful, in a way that still applies to modern day.

Lots of episodes are on youtube, check them out if you get the chance.

The Debt Ceiling Talks

Here's my current theory: Obama has said that he will not sign a deal unless it extends the debt ceiling past the presidential election. The Republicans want to use this latest crisis to dismantle another large portion of the federal budget. Failing that, they're perfectly willing to have Obama ignore the debt ceiling as an exercise of the 14th amendment.

So long as the Republicans can make it seem like they made a reasonable offer, they win either way. If Obama caves like always, they win because they get to kill universal healthcare. If Obama finally mans up, they get to say that Democrats are increasing the deficit, they can say he should be impeached for breaking the law, etc., etc. The only way Obama can make this look good for him is by making it clear he went completely out of his way to make a deal, offering up Democratic sacred cows.

He did offer to increase the age for Medicare availability, (which would kill a lot of people, I would guess more than 100, but fewer than 10,000 a year) so he made the appropriate gesture. The question is whether he can sell this fact to the people of the United States. He will almost certainly win re-election against this terrible Republican field, but he needs a congress that won't threaten to blow up the country every time they don't get their way.

So this all comes to marketing, which Democrats have been incompetent at since LBJ. Hooray for the future.