Amazon Is UNFAIR to Procrastinators

I'm a procrastinator, I freely admit. I'm usually fairly optimistic, crediting others with good intentions. But I've just become suspicious of Amazon. In the last few days I have twice gone to their site, put items in my shopping cart, then procrastinated over whether to buy then or wait and find more items. Net result, I left the shopping cart sitting. Each time, when I've come back to the cart to complete the transaction, I've been notified that the price has increased on the items in the cart.

It makes sense for Amazon, at least narrowly. They know a customer is either going to abandon the cart entirely, in which case raising the price doesn't matter, or is going to want to buy on a later date. Indeed, they may even know I'm a customer who often comes back and buys. Customers like me have a psychological investment in the transaction and are unlikely to back out. So it's an easy $2-4 per item for them.

I said "narrowly", because the suspicion immediately causes my customer satisfaction with Amazon to drop. They aren't operating in good faith if my suspicions are true. And the mere suspicion is damaging.

Guaranteed Loan Programs

Speaking of things that don't get the scrutiny of direct outlays (see previous post), guaranteed loans would fit, except for this very critical Post article on the rural development guaranteed loans.

Something I didn't realize, from a good farmgate post (Uof IL):

The advent of revenue insurance programs, which have been attractive to farmers, have greatly increased the business being done by insurance companies and the cost to the government has doubled over the past 7 years.

I think it's safe to say that the costs of subsidizing crop insurance, much like those of flood insurance, don't get the scrutiny that direct outlays do.

5 Megs 50 Years Ago

Via Snopes.com, here

Peta and Tera--the Bytes of the Present

A piece yesterday on the new superfast computers, now up to 1,000 trillion computations per second--i.e. a "petaflop". And I see ads now for 1 terabyte storage systems (designed I guess to be network storage on a home network.)

Now my children, in the old days some 30 years ago, a COBOL program would run in a partition of less than 100K and the first PC from IMSAI had 4 or 8K RAM. Simply incredible, the speed of change (but then we've been saying that since the steam engine and telegraph.)

Why Corn Prices Will Fall

From a NYTimes article on OPEC's dilemma over whether to raise production:

"At the same time, new supplies are slowly making their way on the market. New oil and natural-gas liquid production from OPEC nations could reach 2 million barrels a day next year, and another 1.1 million barrels a day are expected to come from non-OPEC sources, like Russia or Norway, according to estimates by Deutsche Bank. Some OPEC specialists say these factors could substantially alter the balance between supply and demand after years of market tightness."

If the economy slows in the U.S. and more production comes on line and Iraq gets a hair closer to normality, the price of oil will drop more than the $10 it has already. That means ethanol is less attractive. That means corn prices drop.

Monica Davis Redux

Received a nice message from the Kansas City Star saying that her Nov. 20 article had never run in that paper. See my prior post.

Moving Government Offices--a French Perspective

See Dirk Beauregard's post for a perspective on the process of moving government offices in France. (Remember Madison's Federalist 10 and 51)

Farm Income Up 50 Percent, Household Income Less Than 8??

Although farmers are having a record year in 2007, farm household income is up less than 8 percent (still a good increase). Why? Because "farm" households get 87 percent of their income from off the farm. See this link to ERS.

Talking Out of Both Sides of My Mouth

The NASCOE site has a letter from the President, in which he says:

Please be aware there are numerous jobs available in WDC. If you are interested in working in WDC go to www.usajobs.gov and check it out. CEPD would also be interested in working with employees outside of Washington in flexible ways to test and develop software. NASCOE hopes to be able to work with them on that opportunity in the future. The MIDAS project will also be looking for folks to be detailed to WDC in the near future. If you have an interest in that keep watching the vacancy announcements!

I once was actively prodding people to move to the DC area. It's still a great place to live (Fairfax county has the best high school in the country) but not to buy. Unless the housing crash gets much worse, I don't see how FSA can get good people to come, unless they're singles who want the big city life or those who have a burning ambition to move up. Of course, the same applies for the teachers in those Fairfax schools.