Lane recently contended in comments: You go to the Apple store and you really want that new Steve Jobs gadget. (Steve Jobs is one of my pagan gods) You pay $300 for the object that has a production cost of $50. The $250 difference is the sacrifice at the altar of Apple. And that new [...]
Archive for the ‘Commerce’ category
Stella investigates: the financial crisis
Stella sat down with an international economist to ask the burning questions that have not been answered by the media. Our friendly economist is the kind of guy who is very busy, because there’s a global financial crisis, yet found the time to talk to Stella over a glass of Johnnie Walker on the rocks. [...]
Early Christmas presents for you, or last-minute gift guide? You decide.
Have you noticed that low-cost 1980s-era gifts are back all over the tee-vee set? I know that they re-appear nearly every Christmas season, but this year they seem really ramped up. Is it a sign of the recession, or simply cheesy nostalgia? Who knows? Who cares? But those annoying commercials everyone loves to hate are [...]
Stella’s ten tips for cheap and cheerful holiday shopping
Today is Black Friday, which sounds like a mediaeval day of reckoning to non-Americans. Stella will not shop today and has not yet participated in any Black Friday consumer experience in nine years of living in the United States of Capitalism. She is scared of the busy mall and fortunately does not have to shop [...]
Les enfants terribles
The primary role of a fundraiser is to manage rich people. Rich people are hard to manage. I’m exhausted after working on a gala and award ceremony for months. Regular people have to control their whims, desires, and thoughts. Rich people do not. They are like badly behaved children. Rich people trust and like their [...]
Home coming
As regular readers know, Stella recently moved out of the little gem of a house in D.C. that once contained a delightful garden. (And thank you, dear readers, for your outpouring of garden grief sympathy.) I set out on my home-seeking journey for a one-bedroom condo with a set of very precise criteria: price range; [...]
Crack House Diaries: The realtor shows us the house.
The first time we visited the house, we pulled up to find our real estate agent attempting to jimmy the lock on the front door with a $2 hammer and a bent screw driver. He had already mangled the lock so badly that the key would no longer fit, so the hammer and screwdriver were [...]
The long goodbye?
Analysts at Goldman Sachs recently projected that oil will likely reach $200.00 a barrel within the next year. GM announced today that it was closing four SUV manufacturing plants, and rumors are buzzing around that they will also discontinue the civilian-use line of Hummers. Are we on the cusp of real change? What does a [...]
On Principal
Watching the television show is not a lonely exercise. The clothes are pretty, the shoes are shiny, and usually the question Carrie asks – a question like, “Were we all in fact just dating the same person over and over again?” – rings a bell with your own life. Each of the four characters has [...]
Green is the new black
Since global warming has begun to manifest itself in a frighteningly real way, environmentalism is no longer the radical idea it once was. The “greener than thou” attitude now pervades every pore of modern American society. On the surface, this isn’t such a bad thing; if people realize that their actions directly affect the future [...]
