People are suckers. Haven’t any of you seen HOUSE OF GAMES?

“If people vote against their own interests, it is not because they do not understand what is in their interest or have not yet had it properly explained to them.

“They do it because they resent having their interests decided for them by politicians who think they know best.

“There is nothing voters hate more than having things explained to them as though they were idiots.”

I wonder if such a sizeable percentage of working class Americans would continue to oppose the Democrats if the Democrats would actually propose reforms that would substantially brighten the outlook for US wage-earners. As it is, the Democrats seem stuck with a formula that always generates the maximum degree of condescension in support of policies that offer the minimum degree of social progress.

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601088&sid=aDSKBvYrZAaA

Quoting from the article:

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If you have money to burn, three gentlemen can help.

Chef Daniel Boulud will serve you a $150 hamburger. Ralph Lauren is offering alligator bags for $16,995 apiece. And what about Damien Hirst’s platinum skull encrusted with diamonds? The original asking price was 50 million pounds, or about $100 million at the time.

Just one warning: Those prices are decoys. Each is designed to make everything around it look more affordable, writes William Poundstone in “Priceless,” an entertaining look at how companies, restaurants and even artists exploit psychology to extract more cash from the rest of us.

The trick is simple. Once you’ve seen a $150 burger on the menu, $50 sounds reasonable for a steak. At Ralph Lauren, that $16,995 bag makes a $98 T-shirt look cheap.

This mental process has a name. It’s called “anchoring and adjustment,” a term introduced by a famous team of Israeli American psychologists, Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman. An initial value becomes a benchmark, “a starting point for estimating an unknown quantity,” says Poundstone, a prolific author of fun books that explore the intersection of academic research and real life.

Anchoring appears to be built into our cerebral software, he writes. In experiment after experiment, humans try to resist anchors and fail. They can’t do it, “any more than someone can obey the instruction not to think of an elephant,” he says.
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That’s also why the manufacturer’s suggested retail price (MSRP) exists. Retailers can appear to be giving you a bargain when they sell goods for less than the MSRP, when in reality, the items never sell for MSRP.

I’ve read Poundstone’s “Fortune’s Formula,” about the math gurus behind Wall Street financial wizardry and blackjack counting, it was a good read. I expect this one to be equally entertaining.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/03/nyregion/03vincents.html

I *hate* their emergency room, but it’s better than *NO* emergency room in this part of Manhattan.

Quoting from the article:

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In an indication of how St. Vincent’s reputation had fallen in the neighborhood, during a fierce debate over whether to demolish a low-rise Modernist building to make way for the new hospital, the actors Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins suggested that St. Vincent’s no longer served the neighborhood well.

“I would not want to bring my children there,” Ms. Sarandon declared at a landmarks preservation hearing.

At the height of the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s, St. Vincent’s ministered to those affected, and was bursting at the seams. But by the 1990s, drugs and public awareness helped bring AIDS under control, and the Village’s wealthy newcomers were choosing other hospitals.

[... snip ...]

In short, many of the patients who frequent St. Vincent’s are part of the old Village rather than the new Village, as was clear from a tour of the emergency room last week. It was electric with activity, every bed filled. Many of the patients were elderly, from Chinatown, or grizzled remnants of the Village’s old working class. Nuns from Mother Theresa’s order hovered about.

The room, like other parts of the hospital, had a homey feeling, more like a place television’s kindly Dr. Marcus Welby would have taken his patients rather than the overly caffeinated environment of “House.”
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What drugs is this author taking? I want some. Homey? Try decrepit. Marcus Welby would never have taken his patients somewhere that puts triaged feverish patients in respiratory distress sitting for hours next to immune-compromised HIV+ patients, waiting to be seen by overworked residents.

Nice to know I’m a “grizzled remnant.” Foo.

(… goes back to looking at her grizzled locks in the mirror …)