Recent Comments

1. 8 days ago on Doonesbury

   That makes sense. It’s like when you post something for sale for $100 and someone calls right away, you realize you probably underpriced it and want to ask for more.

   Of course, this all works only if Alex just spoke informally about what she might pay. If she actually offered 10 cents, she would be legally bound to pay that if the seller accepted the offer. And I think a good seller would insist on an actual offer before considering the price, if only to prevent this kind of unfairness.

2. 9 days ago on Doonesbury

   Thank you — that’s what people reading this arc have been missing — these companies say yes to the low price because they have looked for someone willing to pay more and couldn’t find anyone. If the assets were worth 20 cents on the dollar, some greedy businessperson would have offered at least 4 cents in order to get all that profit for himself.

   What I don’t believe about the kind of negotiating in this strip is that if Alex knew the guy would take 3 cents, she wouldn’t have offered 10 cents in the beginning. Nothing in that phone call made the company appear to be worth less than it did before.

3. 10 days ago on Doonesbury

   But that’s not relevant to the question, “why would anybody buy unfinished code?” That’s an answer to “is it possible for code that cost $8M to develop to be worth less than $8M?”

   In the house analogy, it’s possible the original builder made so many mistakes that he spent $500,000 building a house that still needs $500,000 of work and then will be worth $600,000. And that’s why he ran out of money and has to sell the unfinished house. People would presumably bid up to $100,000 for that unfinished house.

4. 12 days ago on Doonesbury

   People buy unfinished code so they can finish it and sell it (or just use it). (People buy unfinished houses for the same reason when the original owner ran out of money to finish it).

   If there is already $8 million of engineering in the software, that’s $8 million the buyer would have to spend himself to duplicate the code to that level of completeness.

5. 12 days ago on Doonesbury

   I can’t imagine what would be illegal about what she’s doing. Buying intellectual property? Drinking a soda? Negotiating by phone? Making an offer that expires in a few seconds?

6. 25 days ago on Pickles

   No amount of exercise will make you lose weight, because as Earl has discovered, exercise just makes you eat more. And if you’re willing to go hungry after exercise, you might as well just go hungry without the exercise and lose just as much weight.

   The only use I can see in exercising for weight loss is if you enjoy eating per se — not to fill you up, but for the taste or company or something. Then exercise will let you eat more and still be hungry.

7. about 1 month ago on Monty

   Yep, we had that at my elementary school. Learned a lot of physics from that.It was installed on asphalt.

   I loved it, but such play equipment is long gone.

8. about 1 month ago on Doonesbury

   When I was a boy, we used our lanyard to tie our pocket knife to our belt loop.

   The kit with the vinyl strands made a lanyard about a foot long, single strand, not the kind that goes around your neck.

9. about 1 month ago on The Duplex

   It’s strange that you can remember that. I had Propofol too, and my understanding is that those drugs work mainly by making you unable to remember. I.e., the patient says one minute they turned on the drug and the next he was in the recovery room, but what really happened is that he was somewhat conscious the whole time and just doesn’t remember it. My guess is you had a much lighter dose than I.

   My brother had a different drug, and I know it had that no-memory-formation effect, because it didn’t wear off until an hour or more after the procedure, and though we were conversing the whole time and he was quite lucid, he remembered nothing. He asked the same questions over and over and today says he went straight from the operating room to his bed at home.

10. about 1 month ago on Overboard

    No president can cause or stop inflation — he just doesn’t have that power. But inflation is caused by government borrowing and spending — putting more dollars into the economy makes every dollar worth less.

    The borrowing and spending was kicked off in 2017 by a law called TCJA passed by both houses of Congress and supported so strongly by Donald Trump that he insisted on signing the checks. This gave 1.9 trillion dollars to individuals and corporations to spend any way they wanted to. There was no revenue or cost cutting identified to pay for that — it was all borrowed.

    Then the pandemic hit and a few trillion more was borrowed and spent to counter that once in a lifetime disaster. Half was while Trump was president; the other half Biden.

    Then the government borrowed trillions more in two or three bills passed by Congress – one (IRA) focused on environmental stuff; I can’t remember what the other was. Biden was president then and signed the bills.

    I think the total was 13 trillion dollars. You can’t expect to create that many dollars without the dollars losing value.