Detour

You’re at home on a Friday night watching a ‘Will and Grace’ marathon on TV. A friend calls you up to go see ‘Flightplan’ at the Loews cineplex starting in an hour; movie tickets cost $8.50, though you’d be willing to pay up to $15 for that comfortable stadium seating and a gripping flick. You do have to pay for your own ticket, but your friend said that he’ll pick you up and drop you off home afterwards.

Q1) What is your opportunity cost of watching ‘Will and Grace’?

Q2) If you value seeing ‘Flightplan’ so much more than ‘Will and Grace’, why were you watching ‘Will and Grace’ to begin with?

What do you do when your wife laughs at the discovery of grey hair on your head?

1) Ignore her…that always seems to work when she wants you to kill the bug over the tv in the living room.

2) Tell her how sad the comment makes you…women love sensitive whining men.

3) Dye your hair…she can’t make fun of what does not exist.

4) Hold the anger in, letting it fester and burning a memory in the brain that will only be relieved by the onset of those same grey hairs on her head in the not to distant future…After all, pay back is a female dog….get it…OUCH…why did you hit me Laura…I didn’t mean you were a dog…it was a joke referring to payback being a bitch…OUCH…stop hitting me…OK…OK I’ll stop cussing in public…sorry honey…

I guess plan (2) will do for my PUBLIC opinion.

I have a suspicion that many countries do not give the amount of money they pledge to disaster relief. It flew under the radar earlier this year, but Kofi Annan has the same fear.

TSUNAMI RELIEF: ANNAN FEARS NOT ALL AID PLEDGES WILL BE KEPT

The United Nations — along with international aid agencies and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) — is expressing skepticism over the eventual delivery of the hefty 2.5 billion dollars in pledges made by donors for tsunami disaster relief operations in Southeast Asia…

This fear is based on past experience in places like Bam, Iran where only a small fraction of pledged international donations actually got to the people to whom they were promised. Does anyone know of a place where actual donations GIVEN are tallied? I would love to see a comparison between pledged donations and donations actually given for Nations, NGO’s, Charities, and private donations. I have a strong suspicion that private donations will have the smallest spread between pledged and given donations…I fear that National Governments will perform very poorly in such an analysis.

Pledges are just pledges! They shouldn’t be reported as actual dontions when they are made, they are simply PR responses from organizations in a time of need…when the media attention goes away, so does the urgency to follow through with promises made.

In the spirit of Robert Aumann and Thomas Schelling’s recent Nobel Prize in Economics for their theories on ‘conflict and cooperation’, riddle me this…

How do you convince a collection agent that you are not the person they are looking for, over the phone?

When I much younger, I was a deadbeat. I acquired a plethora of credit cards and maxed them out without the slightest as to how I would pay them off. Within a year of my credit splurge I had fallen completely behind on all of my bills and had collection agents calling me almost daily (I still don’t like the phone as a result of the constant badgering I received from those bill collectors). Eventually, I told the debt collectors that Chris Silvey no longer lived at this address. The bill collectors knew I was lying, experienced collectors have probably heard that line as much as Macy’s shoe salespeople have heard the response ‘just looking’ to the question can I help you…so they would keep calling back, pretending to be old lost friends, or innocuous salespeople, or any one of a number of varying pretenses to try and get me to slip up and admit I was in fact Chris Silvey. Eventually I paid everyone back (no bankruptcy, no negotiations, full payment through years of hard work). Fast forward to today.

I don’t like landline phones and hate paying a monthly service charge for one…but the damn TIVO requires a phone line to function properly. So apparently my love of TIVO outweighs my hate of landline phones. People keep calling my home phone number asking for a guy named Jose. Apparently the guy who used to have my number is/was named Jose. Family members, friends, solicitors, and bill collectors have all called looking for him. Over the last few months everyone but the bill collectors have figured out that Jose does not actually have the number anymore. But the bill collectors don’t seem to believe me when I say that Jose doesn’t live here anymore…why would they…from the bill collectors perspective, the likelihood that Jose still lives at this number but is lying to avoid talking to them is extremely high. How do I convince a bill collector that I really am not Jose?

As I see it I have three options when they call asking for Jose

If I select 1 then the collector will most likely not believe me and continue to call in hopes that I will screw up and admit I am Jose.

If I select 2, they will keep calling to convince me of the urgency to pay them.

If I select 3, they will keep calling because no one likes to be ignored.

Given these facts, and assuming I do not want to get rid of my phone or stop answering my phone and the collectors are under no obligation to stop calling me if requested to do so…how do I convince the collector to stop calling?

What is the optimum strategy?

WWGTD = What Would a Game Theorist Do?

I have a new job and no life. My new job is for a CPA firm that primarily audits school districts, cities, special assessment districts, and banks. So far I like my job very much, albeit I am mediocre at best in my knowledge of my new career test-drive. From September to December is the audit season and I have been very busy lately…sorry for the abandonment of the blog. If I like the job I will be taking a few accounting classes and taking the CPA exam within a year and a half. The detour from economics may be permanent, although I will always love the dismal science.