maybe when the price decreases 50%

Why have I not heard of these before? You get free 3G wireless to download books and magazines, and apparently you can use wikipedia on it as well. It's like a little notebook too, you can write on the pages, take notes etc. And who doesn't like having books read to you in a creepy computer voice?

cookies for everyone

Sometimes (like at my optometrist's today) when I tell people I'm doing my Ph.D., year 7 of 9 in my gluttonously excessive post-secondary academic career. their response is some admixture of pity, sympathy, and hopefulness. Like "Oh, that's too bad, but at least you're almost done." I'm always happy to correct them with assurances that I love being a grad student. It's a bit stressful at times due to its highly self-guided nature, and I have occasional doubts about my aptitude for it, but most of the time it's pretty great. And there are certain little things that remind me of how great it really is.

For instance, I have a row of magazine boxes above my desk containing old papers; they had various journal names and years on the fronts so I re-labeled them with nonsensical things: "Gremlin-related materials", "Secret Documents", "Items pertaining to the moon", and my personal favourite, "Enemies Lists". Somehow I find the notion of having multiple enemies lists to be very hilarious.

A recent incident really highlighted the awesomeness of grad school though. Every Tuesday at 2:40 pm we have a little coffee and snack get-together in the faculty lounge. The first week of every month we have cake to celebrate birthdays, and the rest of the time it's just cookies. Now, the big controversy in the department was the fact that the grad students would eat all of the cookies before anyone else got there. To rectify this, the graduate director offered to give $20 to teams of two people who would sign up to be in charge of cookies for that week, going to the grocery store and purchasing extra cookies for the department. So today along with our usual assortment of cookies we had tiny cinnamon buns and two-bite brownies.

If a shortage of cookies is the worst crisis my workplace has to deal with, I think I'm going to be okay.

why do you hate fun?

I do like it when academicians have a sense of humour.


But I guess some peer-reviewers didn't find it that funny.

preferences

An annoyance that ranks highly on both the intensity and frequency of occurrence spectrums is when, upon learning that I'm studying economics, people ask me about the financial crisis. Sometimes they just want to know what I think about it; at other, more annoying times there are comments to the effect that I should be able to fix it. Now, I'm relatively new to the subject, having done my undergrad in math, so I understand when people immediately associate "economics" with "finance". Certainly they are related/overlapping, but the one is not subsumed in the other. As far as economists go, I'm probably below-average in my interest with finance, global financial news, and in fact any topic pertaining to or containing the word or some derivative of the word "finance". Anything macro - having to do with regions, countries, global, overarching, aggregate, big things - I try to stay away from. My interest lies in the micro, behavioural side of things. Why people make the choices that they do, their decision-making processes, how individual behaviours influence larger outcomes - things of that nature.

From one annoyance to another, there's a pet peeve of mine whose inception coincided with this interest in economics. It's likely that the most conspicuous way that studying economics has changed my general day-to-day way of perceiving the world has to do with accepting other peoples' preferences. I first noticed this during a car ride with my sister-in-law when, upon exiting a little strip-mall plaza type arrangement, she complained about the blight which such establishments were upon the earth, how they impeded traffic, causing congestion, accidents, encouraging people to drive rather than walk etc. Now, I agreed with her 100% in her essential points; I too thought they were terrible manifestations of equally terrible capitalist shortcomings. But I found myself objecting to her categorical rejection of them, to her belief that the government or some other institutional entity should step in and hand down a law that prohibited the building of such structures. If they were so bad, if everyone hated them so much, wouldn't they just stop using them? There certainly wasn't anything unique about the stores in the ones we passed; typically they contain some form of nail/hair/spa type thing, a convenience store, maybe an electronics store or an adult video establishment. There's a trade-off involved, as there is with most things - on the one hand they may be conveniently located so that it's easy to stop in there while going to and from other places; on the other, they have all the aforementioned flaws. To say outright that you know the way this trade-off balances out, considering all the people who benefit from it, all the people who suffer from it, what sort of alternatives would arise in their absence - it's just impossible to know.

A similar debate ensued after a comment about the sheer volume of pay-day-loan, cash-mart, and similar services. Once again, I agreed with her that they were terrible in nature, greedily taking advantage of people's short-sightedness and impatience, especially people who were particularly ill-equipped to suffer the monetary loss that inevitably comes with the use of these services. But once again I couldn't help but adopt the agnostic standpoint - maybe some people really do discount the future so much that these services are worthwhile for them. Maybe they do get so much satisfaction out of immediate consumption that it's a viable trade-off for them. How can we make any statement about how people will be made better or worse off in the absence of these loans?

Which brings me to a general class of comments of which I've become poignantly aware. These are comments of the kind "I would never spend money on ______.", or "That product/service is not worth its price." I fall prey to this kind of thing too, and I usually feel a slight pang of self-loathing when I do; consequently I've become conditioned to stop myself when I feel compelled to say something to this effect. Unfortunately I have an office-mate with unusually astute powers of observation, who happens to remark every time I enter the office with so much as a new pair of socks. I can sit down and begin writing in a recently-purchased $10 bound notebook - a transaction that I find perfectly acceptable as I derive a great deal of satisfaction from having my writing safely secured in pleasant-looking notebooks - and I hear in a disapproving tone a comment like "Is that a new notebook? Those are expensive; I just write in my cheap $2 notebook." As though that was the most socially objectionable $8 someone could spend. And I usually find myself instinctively defending this apparently overly-extravagant purchase, until I catch myself and enter into a rant very much similar to the current exposition.

This is the kind of thing you really can't comment on. If someone is indifferent between a $2 notebook and a $10 notebook, that is a matter of preference and taste; if they find the value of the difference in quality to exceed the cost, that is also a matter of preference. For every thing that person A finds wasteful and not worthwhile in the purchase decisions of person B, it's highly probable that there is something in the spending of person A that person B finds totally useless. Someone who frowns upon the extra $8 in notebook spending every few months may also devote hundreds of dollars a year to haircuts and other hair treatments; I moderately dislike having others cut my hair, and since I mostly just throw it up into a ponytail anyway, I cut it myself. The point is, people spend money on what makes them happy, or at least that's the way it usually goes. You can't argue with that, unless you want to say that they get happiness from the wrong things, and that's just crazy-talk. Maybe serial killers get happiness from the wrong things, I would allow for that. And there are probably a few other examples. But if my $10 notebook makes me happy, or if a new pair of shoes makes you happy, then I think that's pretty innocuous. Materialism and wasteful consumer spending aside, most of us should probably just let preferences be preferences.