Quicks and squicks
- You know the little children who tug at you to try a different shop when you walk through a bazaar? Amazon just turned your cellphone into one of of these (I write “cellphone” because it seems to be a US only thing, so far). This service lets you text them for a better quote when out shopping, and then buy the thing over the phone — without ever leaving the shop which has just lost your business.
If it takes off this kind of service is going to be interesting in a depression. It’s a technological way to drive prices down, or to drive them down more quickly, than the underlying economics would suggest. We’re all used to thinking aboutr this as consumers, perhaps because so few people in the modern Western economy produce anything at all. But a world in which all the producers get screwed all the time is one in which politics grows very interesting.
- From time to time I vent about the price of fly rods on this blog: the point being that every year the manufacturers bring out a new line whose only real novelty is the price; back when graphite rods really were revolutionary, they cost about half of what a top of the range model now does, and I can’t believe that they have not got much cheaper to build. In any case, a friend of mine just got onto the “professional pricing” programme of one of the big rod manufacturers and has bought, through this, two rods whose retail in the states is around $750 (and, of course, £600 here) for $156.00 each. I doubt the manufacturer is making a big loss at the second price.
- Little-known side-effect of a hernia operation: your scrotum fills with blood. This really upset the person who told me, who had not been warned by the doctors. On the other hand, the anaesthetist did say that after the operation he should abstain for a day from alcohol and cocaine. This is someone who neither looks like a user nor is one; apparently the warning is routine in London now.
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I’m pretty sure the amazon service is described in detail as a thought experiement by Batelle in The Search
I think you’re right. Of course it’s also true that with an iPhone or even Opera Mobile you can do the same thing right now, without texting; but that feels slower and less spontaneous.
I sometimes wonder how many of us actually produce things. For survival we need people to grow our food, herd animals, build houses, and manufacture essential tools: now they must be a minority of the population in a country like ours, and the rest of us more or less parasites. Yet there seems to be an enormous amount of money sloshing around (especially for incompetent directors of plcs). Is this all some enormous South Sea Bubble which will one day collapse, leaving us all with some very sore heads?
My father is in one of those professional rod pricing programs (for casting rods, not fly rods), and they seem to send him the rods in bundles. I don’t know how much he pays for them, but it’s not a lot.
Most fly fishermen probably like paying a lot because to them it means they’re getting something really, really good.