Here’s the deal:
Dress properly, act dignified, be polite, smile. And spend a little extra for good service� it will pay you back in droves.
Yep, with the right bribe you will find yourself eating at a select table in that exclusive restaurant that has a 2 hour wait if you can get in at all.
Via Marginal Revolution.
While at Costco this morning I noted down the names of the politically oriented volumes on the book table. Here is the list starting from the high visibility end:
Hannity…..Deliver Us From Evil
Clark………Against All Enemies
Hughes……Ten Minutes From Normal
Leamer……Sons of Camelot
Stossel…….Give Me A Break
Franken……Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them
Lewis… …..Buying of the President 2004
Goldberg….Bias
Charon……Useful Idiots
Hannity…..Let Freedom Ring
I don’t know as there is much to make of this beyond this is what they are selling and the prices are good. Perhaps I’ll do this again in a month or so and with more data we might have more fun.
Chris Tweney tells us why he is not joining Orkut and his reasons seem good to me.
Via The Talking Dog.
Well, yes, really free culture.
Lawrence Lessig’s new book Free Culture is available both for sale and for free via download or bittorrent.
It will be interesting to see how this experience compares to these results.
Lessig’s announcement is here.
Lost in their ongoing attempt to keep the music market constrained the RIAA continues to harrass music downloaders and the MPAA is attacking peer 2 peer applications and working to have anticopying technology built into consumer goods.
They would, perhaps, be better served to look at what is happening over at that bastion of capitalism on the web: the Ludwig von Mises Institute. Amongst other activities these folks sell books and an interesting thing has happened to the volumes that they have made available on the web: the sales of paper copies improve. For example, they recently made a book called Omnipotent Government available on the web:
What happened was precisely the reverse of what the publisher expected. Instead of lost sales, the sales of the book shot up. In the few weeks since the text went online, more copies of this book left our warehouse than during the whole of the last decade.
The RIAA and MPAA folks would do well to think about this:
The point is to expand the market and not assume a fixed number of consumers. Books online and offline reinforce the viability of each other, just as movies in theaters boost movies in rental, and free radio helps the market for CDs for purchase. It takes some thought and entrepreneurial judgement to understand why, but the history of technological development informs the case.
Read the rest of the article.
Via Hit and Run.