Adventures in shopping continued: Amazon and daily pricing shifts

This is fascinating. I blogged previously on the dramatic fluctuations in Amazon and Amazon partner pricing for the very popular Canon Digital Rebel XT. I discovered then that if I put a variety of this item on my shopping cart, then 'deferred' purchase to "later", I could see the price changes as they occurred. Their were quite a few today -- similar to airline ticket price changes:

Please note that the price of Canon Digital Rebel XT 8MP Digital SLR Camera with EF-S 18-55mm f3.5-5.6 Lens (Silver) has decreased from $899.94 to $879.94 since you placed it in your Shopping Cart.

Please note that the price of Canon Digital Rebel XT 8MP Digital SLR Camera (Body Only - Silver) has increased from $838.94 to $854.99 since you placed it in your Shopping Cart.

Please note that the price of Canon 50mm f/1.8 II Camera Lens has increased from $74.94 to $75.99 since you placed it in your Shopping Cart.

Please note that the price of Canon Digital Rebel XT 8MP Digital SLR Camera (Body Only - Black) has decreased from $829.94 to $799.94 since you placed it in your Shopping Cart.

I'm sure someone has s written software that will check the deferred cart list items every 10 minutes, and execute a purchase based on the price fluctuations. Buying from Amazon.com these days seems to resemble buying shares on the NASDAQ. Inevitably the same sofware used to execute trading strategies will be used throughout the retail chain.

It's not just electronics by the way. The price of the Calvin and Hobbes compendium, a book, just jumped $10 on my shopping cart. I assume Amazon is adjusting costs in real-time based on sales, competitor pricing, customer profiles, the cost of gasoline, the futures market, and some randomness factor to measure the impact of different price points.

More complexity. More obscure costs. Where does it end?

PS. My "buy signal" for the next five days is something around $840 for the camera with the default lens.

Emily's new cell phone and the cost of complexity

Emily needs a new cell phone. Here 2-3 year old coddled Samsung flip phone is now unreliable (it turns off unpredictably when closed).

Unreliable technology. That's a cost of complexity.

Ok, I'll just buy her the phone I have, the Samsung i500. It's a flawed device, but I know it well and I've more or less got it working with Emily's iMac. It will run ePocrates and she'll finally be able to dump her crummy SONY CLIE TJ-27.

Except the Samsung i500 is history. The PalmOS being 90% dead, Samsung has switched the physical descendant of this phone to whatever it is Microsoft now calls their PDA OS. There's no equivalent at Sprint. This launched Emily into an eloquent rant on the cost of complexity -- summarized here.

This is progress, yes. But it has a cost. A 10 minute exercise will now consume hours of research -- starting with figuring out if I can buy the phone on eBay and get Sprint to switch it over. There's a huge hassle cost here.

It's a hassle and complexity cost we pay almost every day. Call it "the progress tax". It consumes a lot of our life.

We are starting to adapt. The price tag of a new item is now almost irrelevant to us -- the cost we look at is the complete cost of ownership. This is dramatically changing what we buy and how we buy. Even so, we can't avoid the progress tax completely, and sometimes the churn cost far exceeds the value of the "progress". Indeed, in many cases, there is change with regression, such as the loss of capabilities that we value (reliability in particular).

I would like to see more scholarly investigation of complexity cost and its impact on our lives. We know that the average middle class person watches much less TV than they used to. I wonder if that really represents a switch to other entertainment forms, or whether it's how middle class Americans are paying their complexity taxes ....

Who has the bigger middle class - China or the US?

By one measure, China:

The Big Picture: China by the Numbers

• Shanghai boasts 4,000 skyscrapers -- double the number in New York City. Still, 17% of the entire Chinese population lives on $1 a day. Only about 300 million people in China, or 23% of the population, are considered middle-class.

Since the population of America is less than 300 million, and at least 25% is in poverty or tenuous circumstances, China has now a much larger "middle class" than America. I suspect in absolute terms the average member of the American middle class has much more money than the Chinese equivalent, but this transition is remarkable. America is very far from ready for China.

By the way, the word "only" in the above quote is kind of weird. What's "only" about 23% of China?

Fundamentalist history and biology - a bias issue for Universities?

Fundamentalists schools teach different versions of history, geology, biology, etc. In Saudi Arabia the Holocaust is probably not a big topic in modern history. In Christian fundamentalist America Darwin was inspired by Satan. (My public high school history class, by the way, taught that the Children's Crusade was a noble spiritual cause worthy of emulation. That was in the days that the Catholic Church wrote Quebec's history books.)

This can be a problem, of course, if one applies to university. What does an A grade in history mean if the history is fraudulent? What good is biology class without natural selection? Naturally, this conundrum has lead to a lawsuit:

University Is Accused of Bias Against Christian Schools - New York Times:

... The suit, scheduled for a hearing on Dec. 12 in Federal District Court in Los Angeles, says many of Calvary's best students are at a disadvantage when they apply to the university because admissions officials have refused to certify several of the school's courses on literature, history, social studies and science that use curriculums and textbooks with a Christian viewpoint.

If a fundamentalist math class teaches that imaginary numbers are satanic and cannot exist, should that math class be meaningful in college applications? If the college uses ACT tests, and the students fail biology, is that bias? If the student is admitted, and fails all of their college biology tests, is that bias? If I'm a Satanist, can I be denied admission to a Fundamentalist college because my theology doesn't match their standards?

Eugenics, take II

It's been a while since the heyday of European eugenics, but these days that ancient spirit is rising almost everwhere. Among the community of persons with genetic disorders, tests that allow quicker and faster abortions raise the specter of extinction ...

The Problem With an Almost-Perfect Genetic World - New York Times

.... One study of 53,000 women's choices, published in Obstetrics & Gynecology in 2002, found that the termination rate ranged from about 1 percent for conditions that were classified as having no impact on the quality of life, to 50 percent for those considered to have a serious impact.

Women were far more likely to choose abortions for disabilities that have a high probability of affecting cognitive functioning. For conditions that have little or no impact on the quality of life but might require medical or surgical therapy, the abortion rate was 16 percent, but doubled for those likely to cause mental dysfunction.

As for Down syndrome, doctors estimate that about 80 percent of women who get positive test results choose abortion...

I would expect China to pioneer in this area, I think a magazine article on eugenics in China would be absolutely fascinating.

Americans may think that the evangelical movement will stop abortion in America. Wrong. The fear of a 'defective' child will keep abortion alive and well among all Americans who can afford it. Medical abortion rates do not differ significantly between evangelical fundamentalists and secular Americans of a similar socio-economic class. That datum predicts that abortion will remain available in America (though it may not be covered by medicaid) and that the new eugenics movement will stay with us. We shall all be ubermensch one (very sad) day ...

The American infatuation with performance: optimizing genius

The New York Times Magazine has a long review of various past and present programs to identify children with extraordinary intellectual gifts and guide them to careers of power, prestige, fame and prominence. Some of the projects have a strong eugenics influence, others are reminescent of Nietzshe, still others seem to feel the children will be "wasted" unless their gifts are harnessed.

The enterprise appears to have a history of disappointment. This matches my own limited experience with living among geniuses, my undergraduate experience at Caltech (note: I am not a genius). The geniuses I knew were exceptionally good at almost everything. They usually didn't study very hard, since they could excel with relatively little effort. They, were, however, not necessarily terribly ambitious. Indeed, I'm tempted to recall that the more balanced and well adjusted they were, the less driven and ambitious they appeared (even there, however, the numbers were small and memory is misleading).

Perhaps a truly brilliant deep thinker would conclude that many driven persons suffer from a lack of deep insight, and that they would be better to spend their limited days caring for loved ones and quietly contemplating the uncaring universe.

Update 11/20: One way to think about this is to consider Lance Armstrong. What made Armstrong one of the greatest atheletes of the past 100 years? Was it genetics? Sure. Was it luck? Definitely. Was it being emotionally well balanced and raised to be wise and mature? Uh, no. Armstrong was (he's mellowed a bit), by all reports, a bit of a nut case. He wanted to win in a "rip arms off", "sell soul", "pay any price", "crush the enemy" sort of way. He is even now not a nice man. A well rounded, well balanced, optimally raised person with Armstrong's genetics would more likely be a sunday school teacher than a world champion bicyclist.

Or consider Isaac Newton. Was Newton a nice well rounded man? No. Isaac Newton, perhaps one of the greatest human minds of all time, was a miserable, nasty, bitter, cruel, vengeful creep.

Genius is genius. It doesn't say anything about how the person will be, it doesn't even seem to correlate with insight. You may produce more Newtons by cruelty and spite than by wise instruction and compassion. Which is not to say we should torture our young geniuses, but we shouldn't imagine we'll produce great leaps in knowledge by making their lives more agreeable.

Autism-like findings in relatives of autistic children and the evolutionary biology of autism

The first degree relatives of autistic children share behavioral and neurologic traits with autistic persons: Be the Best You can Be: Autism-like findings in relatives of autistic children and the evolutionary biology of autism. What does that tell us about the natural history and evolutionary biology of autism?

Conason flays Woodward

Joe Conason works over Robert Woodward: Salon.com | Woodward's disgrace. When he's done, there's not much left of that ex-journalist. Worth reading, as a lesson in the seduction of power.

The Walmart healthcare memo: You DO need to read the original

A few weeks ago there was a brief furor about the leak of a confidential "memorandum" that was presented to the board of directors of Walmart -- America's largest employer and one of our wealthiest corporations. The news coverage was pretty fluffly and it passed quickly with nary a ripple.

Recently, however, I read a summary in a trade newspaper written for family physicians. That coverage was more intriguing, it suggested the Walmart memo had very broad implications for workers and health care providers. Reading that coverage I speculated that Walmart was merely transferring the well developed risk selection techniques used by managed care entities to the employer setting. (Payors do not develop and market their "wellness" and "alternative medicine" programs for noble reasons -- these programs help them select for healthy customers who don't use expensive resources.)

I decided I'd blog on this, but I needed something to link to. Looking for a link, I came across the actual memo. (Link is to a Google search rather than memo source, I don't employ the lawyers of the New York Times.)

I read the memo. Wow. The newspaper coverage was truly awful.

This "memorandum" is a 27 page white paper prepared by McKinsey (famously ruthless consulting company) and 16 highly compensated Walmart employees for the board of directors of one of America's largest companies. There's not much dissembling, though there are a few euphemisms. It was written for an audience that probably dislikes euphemisms, and is so removed from the "associates" that it can think about them the way a farmer thinks about their valued cattle.

The memo is not particularly cruel, but it's dispassionate and ruthless. It's also very well done. If you receive healthcare in America, you should read it. Did you realize that the feared coverage expense is not the employee, and not the employee's children, but rather the employee's spouse? Yes, that's obvious in retrospect, but it never occurred to me.

Did you know that the economic advantage of Walmart's 'defined contribution' plans (aka 'medical savings accounts', health savings account, employee driven healthcare) is not the global cost savings, but rather that they're a better deal for employees with healthy spouses? (So that overall the benefit biases the workforce towards employees with healthier spouses?)

I'm not done with the memo. There's a lot there that I may yet comment on. Read it yourself. I recommend starting with the last 3 pages.

Don't imagine this is in any way unique to Walmart -- they're merely slightly ahead of the curve. This document is "free" consulting for every employer in America, and anyone who works with McKinsey will receive the same advice.

Personally, I think this is a great thing. The inexorable engine of capitalism will force all but the healthy and the genetically gifted out of employment and out of heatlhcare coverage. Sometime in the next decade, sooner than I'd anticipated, this will lead to a political revolt, and we will get to the place the world has been heading for over the past twenty years:

• Second tier health coverage for the entire population that includes medications and procedures whose R&D cost has been fully recovered (depreciated). This second tier system will use less costly health care workers and will be extensively industrialized. Medicare, the VA system, the Indian Health Service, and Medicaid will go away.
  
• Lexus care for the wealthiest 10-20% of the population. This will include life-extending technologies who's R&D costs have not yet been fully recovered. Black market versions of these technologies will be available illegally in India, China, and Thailand.
  

Amazon pricing weirdness -- Digital Rebel XT

This is weird. I'd heard Amazon plays some odd games with their prices. They sell the extremely popular Canon Digital Rebel XT in two versions, with and without lens. To see prices you need to add the items to one's cart. I added both. The version WITH the lens is $5.00 cheaper than the version without the lens.

Canon Digital Rebel XT 8MP Digital SLR Camera (Body Only - Black) - Canon
Usually ships in 24 hours
$829.94

Canon Digital Rebel XT 8MP Digital SLR Camera with EF-S 18-55mm f3.5-5.6 Lens (Black) - Canon
Usually ships in 24 hours
$824.99

So is this a goof, or some diabolical scheme?

The price for the camera WITH the lens is very competitive with the slightly seedy but not criminal vendors like 'ibuydigital.com'.

Update 11/19: Amazon just jumped the price of the lens camera to $899. So either it was a goof or I'm being punished :-). Next time that happens, I'm buying it!

How to Fund a Startup by Paul Graham

Thinking of starting your own business(es)? You need to read Paul Graham. Or so I say, never having started a real business (yet).

If you doubt the advice, however, start with this one: How to Fund a Startup

God bless the plague

Fafblog! is in good form as he tackles the alleged antipathy of christian fundamentalists towards the cervical cancer vaccine. Brilliant and ripping.

Personally I suspect the Christian fundamentalists aren't really going to fight this vaccine. Firstly I don't think they're really that sick, and secondly Rove wouldn't let them.

In a dark corner of a secure underground Google parking garage ...

Is the key to world domination ...

PBS | I, Cringely . November 17, 2005 - Paper War

...The probable answer lies in one of Google's underground parking garages in Mountain View. There, in a secret area off-limits even to regular GoogleFolk, is a shipping container. But it isn't just any shipping container. This shipping container is a prototype data center. Google hired a pair of very bright industrial designers to figure out how to cram the greatest number of CPUs, the most storage, memory and power support into a 20- or 40-foot box. We're talking about 5000 Opteron processors and 3.5 petabytes of disk storage that can be dropped-off overnight by a tractor-trailer rig. The idea is to plant one of these puppies anywhere Google owns access to fiber, basically turning the entire Internet into a giant processing and storage grid.

While Google could put these containers anywhere, it makes the most sense to place them at Internet peering points, of which there are about 300 worldwide.

Two years ago Google had one data center. Today they are reported to have 64. Two years from now, they will have 300-plus. The advantage to having so many data centers goes beyond simple redundancy and fault tolerance. They get Google closer to users, reducing latency. They offer inter-datacenter communication and load-balancing using that no-longer-dark fiber Google owns. But most especially, they offer super-high bandwidth connections at all peering ISPs at little or no incremental cost to Google.

Where some other outfit might put a router, Google is putting an entire data center, and the results are profound...

Cringely claims next week's essay will fill in the rest of the tale. I'm waiting to hear about two things: 1. How will Google manage identity and ownership for GoogleBase data and 2. When does Google become the world's biggest private bank?

Schneier: the real SONY DRM story is the failure of McAfee, Symantec and Microsoft to catch it

Schneier, the deity of computer security, doesn't think SONY's malign incompetence is the real story. Rather, the real story is that the big name spyware antiviral software companies missed this intrusion.

Dang. I didn't think of that.

Schneier is right. We pay our XP taxes to Symantec and their kin every year -- and they blew it. Completely. Either they knew this was going on and didn't bother to tell us, or they missed it entirely. Both explanations are damning.

So, sure, boycott SONY. But also look to swith away from Symantec, Microsoft, and McAfee. They've disgraced themselves. F-Secure and Sysinternals, by contrast, deserve new attention. The next time my Norton Tax comes due, I'll switch to F-Secure Home instead.

SONY - "My God, what a fiasco".

SONY's spyware installation catastrophe has moved from merely "jumping the shark" into mad hilarity ...

Good Morning Silicon Valley: Let's see -- Secret installation? Check. Hidden changes? Check. Security breach? Check. Dangerous uninstall? Check. Now what was ... oh, yeah. Stolen code? Check.

...Looks like Sony's little sojourn to the ninth circle of PR hell isn't quite over yet. A pair of programmers who disassembled Sony's now infamous rootkit Digital Rights Management scheme, have found code that appears to have been plagiarized from VideoLAN, an open source media player distributed under the GNU General Public License. Worse, the code in question was written by "DVD" Jon Lech Johansen, author of a number of DRM-busting programs.

My God, what a fiasco...

Emphases mine.

It truly beggars belief. SONY may yet rival the stark raving incompetence of the Bush administration. I can't believe the CEO of SONY Music is still employed; in the SONY of the 1960s he would have died an honorable self-inflicted death by now. How are they ever going to keep track of all the lawsuits pouring in?