The good thing about reinventing the wheel is that you can get a round one.
Waldfogel's main finding is that, in general, people spend a lot more on presents than they're worth to those who receive them, a phenomenon that he calls "the deadweight loss of Christmas." A deadweight loss is created when you spend eighty dollars to give me a sweater that I would spend only sixty-five dollars to buy myself. Waldfogel estimates that somewhere between ten and eighteen per cent of seasonal spending becomes deadweight loss...
I've never heard of anything so childish, with all of the selfish, unthinking cruelty that childishness implies.
A worrying precedent, especially in this era of mashups.
The service of philosophy, of speculative culture, towards the human spirit, is to rouse, to startle it to a life of constant and eager observation. Every moment some form grows perfect in hand or face; some tone on the hills or the sea is choicer than the rest; some mood of passion or insight or intellectual excitement is irresistibly real and attractive to us, -- for that moment only. Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end. A counted number of pulses only is given to us of a variegated, dramatic life. How may we see in them all that is to seen in them by the finest senses? How shall we pass most swiftly from point to point, and be present always at the focus where the greatest number of vital forces unite in their purest energy?
To burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life.
Amazingly good free font site, even offers a printable PDF catalogue for easy browsing!
Information clearinghouse about buying eyeglasses online. The short of it is that you can save obscene amounts of money.
e.g., "ostensible occupation", "His heart was full of enterprise", "It is a perfectly plain proposition". Lazyweb request: do some datamining, find out how common these phrases are and where Kleiser probably found them.