A take-away restaurant near my house offers customers free home delivery or a ten per cent discount if you pick up. It sounds much better than saying you get no discount for picking up and suffer a ten per cent fee for delivery – this is the power of ‘framing’.

It was like that for years at gas pumps.  You got a four-cent a gallon “discount” by paying cash.  This was really a slick way to pass through the credit card processing costs directly to the consumer by tacking a four-cent a gallon fee onto credit card purchases.  But people would complain about a “fee,” so the station owner reverses it and calls it a “discount.”

You also see this in political surveys.  I remember some site opposing same sex marriage.  The site was warning visitors not to use the question “Do you want to ban same sex marriage?” because “we lose 10 points in the polls with that question.”  There was some other question that, while it meant the same thing, it was just framed differently, and this framing had a huge impact on responses.

electoral college reform

By no means do I think this should happen, but I think it’s interesting that South Dakota falls into the new state of “High Plains,” which is the biggest, geography wise.  Logic tells me that this region is the most sparsely populated in the country.

The organization of the states should be altered. This Electoral Reform Map redivides the territory of the United States into 50 bodies of equal size. The 2000 Census records a population of 281,421,906 for the United States. The states ranged in population from 493,782 to 33,871,648.  In this map, new states have formed, all with equal populations of roughly 5,617,000.

I love the names he picked too.  Where does he get “St. Croix” for Minnesota?

What happens when population shifts?  Do we re-draw again?

Coded references to New Testament Bible passages about Jesus Christ are inscribed on high-powered rifle sights provided to the United States military by a Michigan company, an ABC News investigation has found.

[…] One of the citations on the gun sights, 2COR4:6, is an apparent reference to Second Corinthians 4:6 of the New Testament, which reads: "For God, who commanded the light to shine out of darkness, hath shined in our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ."

Last year I listened to “Guns, Germs, and Steel” by Jared Diamond, which is about why and how civilizations developed.  I enjoyed it, and I was thinking to myself, “Man, I wish Jared Diamond would answer my questions about Haiti…”

And here is an article with this subtitle:

Why does Haiti have it so tough compared with its neighbour, the Dominican Republic? Jared Diamond explains

That’s crazy awesome.

(The article is actually extracted from his current book, “Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed,” which I now have to read, I supposed.)

The gist of it comes down to these precipitating factors:

• The Haitian side of the island doesn’t get much rain – not nearly as much as the Dominican side. So the Dominican side of the island is vastly superior to plant life and agriculture.
• Back in the Colonial Period, Haiti was a French colony, and France developed it with slave labor.  The Dominican Republic was a Spanish colony, and Spain was having economic problems, so couldn’t develop their side of the island.  This caused Haiti to have a much greater population density than their neighbor, along with the accompanying societal problems of slavery.
• France deforested a lot of the country in the 19th century and brought the timber back to Europe.

So, Haiti by the start of the 20th century was (1) relatively arid, (2) packed with former slaves, and (3) largely stripped of its forests.  Not a good way to head into the Industrial Revolution.

The Dominican Republic, on the other hand, was still fairly fresh.  It peaked later, essentially.  In the 20th century, it was much more attractive to Europeans who brought business, investment, and help it develop an export economy.

The rest is history, really.

The question becomes, what do you do now?  How do you turn a country around?  I wish I knew.

The project’s curators purchase objects — for no more than a few dollars — from thrift stores and garage sales.

A participating writer is paired with an object. He or she then writes a fictional story, in any style or voice, about the object. Voila! An unremarkable, castoff thingamajig has suddenly become a “significant” object!

Each significant object is listed for sale on eBay. The s.o. is pictured, but instead of a factual description the s.o.’s newly written fictional story is used. However, care is taken to avoid the impression that the story is a true one; the intent of the project is not to hoax eBay customers. (Doing so would void our test.) The author’s byline will appear with his or her story.

Once we’ve got our card in hand, our behavior becomes riddled with irrationalities. In one experiment, Drazen Prelec and Duncan Simester of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that people were willing to pay twice as much for basketball tickets when they were using a credit card as opposed to paying cash. Credit-card spending just doesn’t feel like real money.

[…] the typical consumer unnecessarily spends $200 a year in interest payments by keeping a sizable stash of cash in savings or checking while at the same time carrying a credit-card balance. In our heads, the two don’t line up.

Burdened with man’s inhumanity to man, Interstate Batteries Chairman Norm Miller created a commercial to promote God’s love. The commercial, which airs on Dish Network, shows the positive change in the lives of several people when touched by God’s love.