That's probably why they're using NR for the source. You know, Naval Reactors, those reactors that sit in the US submarines and surface warships and operate nearly without break for years between refueling? If they were to put a Soviet-designed and built NR in there, I think I would not be so confident, though.
Right. Well, I was speculating in advance of actual data, so I deserved to get it wrong. The vulcanologists had been predicting that the new dome was going to fall apart, thus releasing some pressure and causing an event like we saw, and I thought that that might be what had happened. The new dome has already experienced some falling apart, so it seemed like a good call at the time.
Here's a shot of the "whaleback" with one "scar" that raised some dust on 2/22, and further disintegration on 2/25. The "whaleback" is gradually coming apart.
The new lava dome has been growing steadily for the past three months, but has recently started fragmenting and big chunks falling off, causing minor ash eruptions. The thing was unstable, and the daily reports were predicting that the dome might undergo a more serious collapse (that is, a sudden fragmentation) which was bound to result in pressure release and a big ash and steam blowout.
Living not far from this fascinating truncated cone, I try to keep a watch on it, but it premontory rumblings today and its blowing big clouds into the air went completely by me until the 11 oclock news. My brother lives closer, and he got a photo of the ashclould from his roof, taken ten minutes after the eruption started. I think he must have heard it.
I wrote a little VolcanoWatcher app that captures and stores the jpegs from the VolcanoCam, and of course I completely missed getting any shots from it! Argh. Just turn my head for an instant, and '
THAR SHE BLOWS!
Something about a watched pot... or in this case, volcano.
This is proof of the old Tao of Programming, where it says that increasing the number of developers assigned to an already overdue project will make it even later.
Ooops, dude. The "whole light side"? You have succumbed to the myth that there is a "dark side of the moon." The so-called "dark side of the moon" is the side we never see because of the tidally-lockstepped rotation of the moon. It has daytime and nighttime just like the earth, just that the days are two weeks long or something like that.
And thanks to you, too! You remind me why I just have to keep watching my back, because 49% of America (your fellow travelers, I presume) want the power to run my life for me, if they happen to think I'm being self-destructive.
I have my doubts about it being the single largest change in forcing, however. I am aware that the scientific community is not all in agreement on this point, either. And the scientific community, far from being a collection of sober, objective observers, sometimes can get quite shrill when their pet theories are threatened (and possibly also their funding!). Even when they're eventually proven wrong.
My brother, who started smoking at age 6, thought it was sooooo cool that our dad was smoking, so he got into the stuff when dad was not around. He never saw a lick of advertising. His was a concious decision. Maybe uninformed. But concious.
So he should blame our dad. Who died of a massive heart attack at age 46 -- but then he had a congenital heart condition, so the cigarettes might have merely hastened his death a little.
This is the big argument for the bloody nanny state: "people need protection from themselves." Go ahead, extend the argument; why stop with tobacco? In fact, extending the principle is essential, because PEOPLE ARE DYING OUT THERE!
I have a wonderful idea! Why not prohibit manufacture and importation of alcohol? It's addictive, isn't it? Booze kills thousands of people a year, too, doesn't it?
News flash, dude: it's been tried. Didn't work with booze! It wouldn't work with tobacco, either!
So go ahead: put the tobacco company owners in prison; close the factories; burn the crop (no, wait, that might not be a good idea); throw everyone in jail who won't quit smoking.
That's the way to turn an unfortunate addiction into a new illegal substance problem, as if we needed another.
The only way to stop tobacco addiction is to effectively educate people as to the perils of the activity. But guess what, some people just won't stop, and some who don't smoke will start.
Go ahead and tax it to death, too. Next thing you know people will be growing it in their bedrooms instead of pot, and the black market price will be only just a little lower than the taxed price. You may think that people need protection from themselves, but creating a totalitarian state for the purpose of your oh-so-noble cause will demonstrate to you that those people won't be at all grateful for the favor.
Besides, it's not so addictive that people can't quit if they want to bad enough. My sister quit after 30 years of puffing away, one of my brothers (who started when he was 6, for cryin' out loud) quit finally at age 40, the other one quit at 55. I never started, thank heaven.
Finally, you say "No one has the right to put their life at risk" ? BS, buddy. You want to live my life for me? Addiction or not, it is my life to live, and I REFUSE to allow you or any other Hitler-Stalin-Mao wannabe the power to take that away from me.
Ooops. Sorry for the heat -- got a little ruffled there for a moment.
I had a look at the page you showed, and according to them they are considering solar activity and other "forcing conditions." Interesting term...
The original article did not make much of this very clear, and especially leaned on CO2, something that sends a red flag up for me --- dependence on atmospheric CO2 almost seems a political factor these days rather than a scientific one! I prefer my science de-politicized, but sometimes that's a preference that gets unsatisfied, more's the pity.
Re:And when there is no significant immediate thre
on
New Climate Change Warning
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I love it. It's not bad enough that 400K Americans die from cigarettes each year, IT WAS BUSH'S FAULT FOR 2 MILLION OF THEM!
Jeeze, what does BUSH have to do with it? You can't quote a negative statistic without mentioning Bush in the same thought? How about this: 3.2 MILLION AMERICANS WERE KILLED BY CIGARETTES ON CLINTON'S WATCH!!! Makes no sense, right?
...why isn't the government grabbing the tobacco manufacturers and throwing them in jail?
It's because millions of workers would be out of their damned jobs (assuming they weren't in jail) and ready to vote the jerks "in the government" out of office, if not start outright rebellion.
Dude, get real. Every smoker out there made a concious decision to light up for the first time. My father died at 46 due to a massive heart attack, massively influenced by his two or three pack a day habit. His father died at 40 for the same reason. But I know whose fault it was --- both of them knew it wasn't healthy. Nobody forced them to light up.
Thanks for the kind words about peacekeeping and humanitarian operations.
OK, you're Canadian, so I understand. I lived in Toronto for almost three years as a kid, and I never heard so much collective bitching, moaning and whining as I did there about how much the US disrespected Canada. Otherwise, I loved Canada and Canadians. Still do. Even if it does have an inferiority complex.
So, it doesn't surprise me to hear Canadians bad mouth the US and US policy. It's almost obligatory; you know, like apple pie down here.
But seriously, what would have your government done if al-Qaeda had somehow gotten confused and taken out the CN Tower, the Houses of Parliament in Edmonton, and interfered with the Calgary Stampede? Sent a strongly worded diplomatic note to The Taliban in Afghanistan? Froze the Taliban's funds in Canada? Kicked Afghanistan's ambassador out of the country (if there was an ambassador, that is)?
Whatever Canada would have done, none of the above mealy-mouthed useless things mentioned above, or any other non-violent thing you could think of, would have made any difference at all! If force is not met with force, but with platitudes, then this encourages the use of more force. Next thing you know they would have stolen the Stanley cup!
Not to denigrate Canada's armed forces (because I trained with them a couple of times when I was in the US Army and know them to be competent troops), but sending a stiff note to Afghanistan would have been just about all you could have done, unfortunately, because Canada cannot project power in any meaningful sense. The US, however, can. In the case of Afghanistan it was appropriate. I believe in the case of Iraq it was less appropriate, but now that we're there we better stay the course, or things will get worse, especially for the Iraqi people.
"The scientists behind the project, called climateprediction.net, say it shows there's no such thing as a safe level of carbon dioxide."
This project was a massive attempt to determine what kind of an effect an increase in atmospheric CO2 would have. Were they only projecting increased heat absorption and retention due to CO2? The article doesn't say, but it seems likely. And that is no climate prediction model!
As Spy_Handler mentions, there have been hotter periods in historical time, when CO2 and other greenhouse gasses were not factors (as far as I have been able to find out). The sun is more than likely the culprit in those past times, and is more than likely the culprit in our times as well.
As reported by New Scientist (in Nov 2003, so it's not news):
"The Sun is more active now than it has been for a millennium. The realisation, which comes from a reconstruction of sunspots stretching back 1150 years..."
So, if we truly are contending with a global warming trend, it seems likely that it isn't because of increasing CO2, but because of a larger heat input. So what are we going to do, launch ice cubes at the sun? That's ridiculous, of course, so we're better off enforcing Kyoto. It won't make a bit of difference, but it will definitely make us feel more virtuous.
You get your life, and the robber gets $100k. You want your life, don't you? It's worth the 100 grand, right? The robber certainly wants the 100 grand. So it's still win-win, just you wouldn't have preferred that exact exchange, or would have preferred to negotiate for a lower amount.
On the other hand, the demand "your money or your life" is rather one-sided because even if you refuse, after he takes your life he gets your money, anyway.
That is, until you pull out your own gun and shoot HIS ass first. Assuming you live in a state with concealed carry laws! Otherwise, you ARE toast. If not by the robber, then by the sheriff.
Side with him, then. The glass is clearly half-empty with you, isn't it? It's not enough that both parties to an exchange generally benefit, you're hung up that they benefit equally. Guess what, probably never happens that way, and how can you tell who benefitted more? Every breath of air has a risk that the next breath will be the last, so buying a house might turn out unfortunately for all concerned, too. But the general situation is that of win-win, with only very small positive and negative externalities involved. Small enough, that they are negligible in most cases. So my advice is don't sweat the small stuff!
And you really ought to get straight as to what exactly an externality is. A house's new owner possibly not taking care of it is not an externality of the sale, per se, it is a possible consequence of the mere fact of ownership, and this could occur even if the house isn't sold, if the old owner became ill or indigent and couldn't keep maintenance up. An externality is something only indirectly related to the main event, such as the sale of the house at a given price causing the market value of other houses in the neighborhood to go up or down.
The rule of externalities could be expressed as: You Can't Do Just One Thing. I'm not saying there are no externalities, just that the externalities involved in freely-chosen exchanges generally do not militate against the value of the exchange.
As to having taken economics classes and paying attention, you do realize that not every bloody stinking economist thinks alike, and that they change gradually over time? Or that even famous economists make incredibly stupid predictions based on faulty theories? Putting Milton Friedman and Paul Samuelson into the same room in 1948, for instance, would likely have resulted in a barfight because of diametricly opposing views, but Samuelson's own book "Economics" (now in its 17th edition) started out strictly Keynesian, but gradually gave some ground to other schools of thought until Friedman's own work has received favorable mention in recent editions (of course, that might have had something to do with Samuelson's giving over editorship to Nordhaus starting in 1985).
Samuelson claimed at one time that the economy of the Soviet Union was "thriving" (13th edition), but dropped this after the Soviet collapse. Samuelson predicted that the economy of the United States would undergo a deep recession after WW2, but was completely off-base. Samuelson himself wrote ruefully in his 14th edition that "What was great in Edition 1 is old hat by Edition 3; and maybe has ceased to be true by Edition 14."
So don't worship at the feet of the Economists. Their feet are made out of clay, just like the rest of us.
The funniest thing about the claims of bias in Fox News is that it is true! Fox news has a much larger percentage of conservative commentators and writers than any other large news service. But it isn't 100% or even 80%. It's more like 50%.
Then consider that the commentators and writers at ABC, NBC, CBS and CNN are practically all liberals. The only variation is that poor, lonely libertarian John Stossel, who is constantly subject to demands from supposedly enlightened and broad-minded viewers that he be fired for daring to show the opposite opinion once in awhile.
Yes, Fox News is biased. It is well-known for its bias. But tragicomically, the other networks are far more biased. Just in the opposite direction. But they try assiduously to maintain the illusion/lie that they are objective.
"Time preferences" be hanged! The last time I needed to get a short term loan for an astronomical interest rate was when I suddenly realized that my mortgage payment was going to overdraw my account big time if I didn't get some money into it without delay!
It's not an oversimplification at all. On the contrary, the win-win nature of the free market is the heart of the matter. In this regard, your example as to negative externalities are faulty, sorry to say.
The "classic" example of externality you gave:
the classic example of an externality as posited by milton friedman is that of the company with the smoke stack that dirties someone's shirt downwind. the owner of the shirt must pay for its cleaning and that cost is not borne by the factory owner.
This is most certainly NOT an externality associated with a free market exchange, as you posit it. It's a negative externality of a property rights violation! The shirt's owner did NOT consent to have his or her shirt dirtied, nor was any compensation paid, and an injustice occurred. The polluter should pay for cleaning the shirt, but any such payment, while an exchange of money does occur, still does NOT take the form of a free market exchange, but is compensation for damages.
An example of a REAL free market, win-win situation is if I have a house for sale for $100K, and you're willing to pay that much, then I win because I get the $100k I wanted, and you get the house you wanted. The only negative externality is that the guy who offered $99K for the house is screwed because you don't need to lower the price to sell the house after all. And that is just tough beans.
If you have a widget and are asking for $2.00 for it and i refuse to buy it at that price, one could say that your greed stoped me from buying it. Or that my greed stoped you from selling it to me.
It's not greed. It's relative value, which is subjective, true, but the pejorative term "greed" is inappropriate here. The widget is worth $2 to me, but it is worth much less to you. If we don't have a meeting of the need, or mind, on the value, then we have no deal. Simple as that.
There's also market conditions and economics to consider. If the widget cost me $1.50 to make, and you won't buy it unless it is $1.25 or less, then I would be nuts to sell it to you for your price.
As you suggest, there's a strong case for calling you greedy for not being willing to meet my price and thus putting pressure on me to take less for it.
Additionally, you would be committing theft if you forced me somehow (such as via government price-control) to sell it to you for less than the price I was willing to take for it.
Economics is fun, that's for sure. Try reading Ayn Rand's book "The Virtue of Selfishness" for an interesting take on this.
We use an MCI phonecard we bought at Costco a few years ago. We keep recharging the same card --- however, the actual physical card no longer exists. We continue to use the same pin number off the old card. Works pretty neat, and the rate seems to be adequate. We use it for all long distance calling --- discontinued long distance on our local phone some time ago after a dispute between us and Qwest.
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That's probably why they're using NR for the source. You know, Naval Reactors, those reactors that sit in the US submarines and surface warships and operate nearly without break for years between refueling? If they were to put a Soviet-designed and built NR in there, I think I would not be so confident, though.
That's clearly glass. Something to seal the surface, yet allow light to pass through? They're not using SiO2 to generate the current.
What part of "Check those URLs!" didn't you understand?
Here's a shot of the "whaleback" with one "scar" that raised some dust on 2/22, and further disintegration on 2/25. The "whaleback" is gradually coming apart.
When the old webcam broke it took them a year and a half to put a new one up. So don't ask them to improve anything, or we'd lose it entirely.
So, it happened. Cool, but no big deal.
Living not far from this fascinating truncated cone, I try to keep a watch on it, but it premontory rumblings today and its blowing big clouds into the air went completely by me until the 11 oclock news. My brother lives closer, and he got a photo of the ashclould from his roof, taken ten minutes after the eruption started. I think he must have heard it. I wrote a little VolcanoWatcher app that captures and stores the jpegs from the VolcanoCam, and of course I completely missed getting any shots from it! Argh. Just turn my head for an instant, and ' THAR SHE BLOWS! Something about a watched pot... or in this case, volcano.
This is proof of the old Tao of Programming, where it says that increasing the number of developers assigned to an already overdue project will make it even later.
Sweet!
Ooops, dude. The "whole light side"? You have succumbed to the myth that there is a "dark side of the moon." The so-called "dark side of the moon" is the side we never see because of the tidally-lockstepped rotation of the moon. It has daytime and nighttime just like the earth, just that the days are two weeks long or something like that.
And thanks to you, too! You remind me why I just have to keep watching my back, because 49% of America (your fellow travelers, I presume) want the power to run my life for me, if they happen to think I'm being self-destructive.
Ever hear of the "phlogiston theory"?
My brother, who started smoking at age 6, thought it was sooooo cool that our dad was smoking, so he got into the stuff when dad was not around. He never saw a lick of advertising. His was a concious decision. Maybe uninformed. But concious. So he should blame our dad. Who died of a massive heart attack at age 46 -- but then he had a congenital heart condition, so the cigarettes might have merely hastened his death a little.
This is the big argument for the bloody nanny state: "people need protection from themselves." Go ahead, extend the argument; why stop with tobacco? In fact, extending the principle is essential, because PEOPLE ARE DYING OUT THERE!
I have a wonderful idea! Why not prohibit manufacture and importation of alcohol? It's addictive, isn't it? Booze kills thousands of people a year, too, doesn't it?
News flash, dude: it's been tried. Didn't work with booze! It wouldn't work with tobacco, either!
So go ahead: put the tobacco company owners in prison; close the factories; burn the crop (no, wait, that might not be a good idea); throw everyone in jail who won't quit smoking.
That's the way to turn an unfortunate addiction into a new illegal substance problem, as if we needed another.
The only way to stop tobacco addiction is to effectively educate people as to the perils of the activity. But guess what, some people just won't stop, and some who don't smoke will start.
Go ahead and tax it to death, too. Next thing you know people will be growing it in their bedrooms instead of pot, and the black market price will be only just a little lower than the taxed price. You may think that people need protection from themselves, but creating a totalitarian state for the purpose of your oh-so-noble cause will demonstrate to you that those people won't be at all grateful for the favor.
Besides, it's not so addictive that people can't quit if they want to bad enough. My sister quit after 30 years of puffing away, one of my brothers (who started when he was 6, for cryin' out loud) quit finally at age 40, the other one quit at 55. I never started, thank heaven.
Finally, you say "No one has the right to put their life at risk" ? BS, buddy. You want to live my life for me? Addiction or not, it is my life to live, and I REFUSE to allow you or any other Hitler-Stalin-Mao wannabe the power to take that away from me.
Ooops. Sorry for the heat -- got a little ruffled there for a moment.
I had a look at the page you showed, and according to them they are considering solar activity and other "forcing conditions." Interesting term...
The original article did not make much of this very clear, and especially leaned on CO2, something that sends a red flag up for me --- dependence on atmospheric CO2 almost seems a political factor these days rather than a scientific one! I prefer my science de-politicized, but sometimes that's a preference that gets unsatisfied, more's the pity.
Jeeze, what does BUSH have to do with it? You can't quote a negative statistic without mentioning Bush in the same thought? How about this: 3.2 MILLION AMERICANS WERE KILLED BY CIGARETTES ON CLINTON'S WATCH!!! Makes no sense, right?
It's because millions of workers would be out of their damned jobs (assuming they weren't in jail) and ready to vote the jerks "in the government" out of office, if not start outright rebellion.
Dude, get real. Every smoker out there made a concious decision to light up for the first time. My father died at 46 due to a massive heart attack, massively influenced by his two or three pack a day habit. His father died at 40 for the same reason. But I know whose fault it was --- both of them knew it wasn't healthy. Nobody forced them to light up.
OK, you're Canadian, so I understand. I lived in Toronto for almost three years as a kid, and I never heard so much collective bitching, moaning and whining as I did there about how much the US disrespected Canada. Otherwise, I loved Canada and Canadians. Still do. Even if it does have an inferiority complex.
So, it doesn't surprise me to hear Canadians bad mouth the US and US policy. It's almost obligatory; you know, like apple pie down here.
But seriously, what would have your government done if al-Qaeda had somehow gotten confused and taken out the CN Tower, the Houses of Parliament in Edmonton, and interfered with the Calgary Stampede? Sent a strongly worded diplomatic note to The Taliban in Afghanistan? Froze the Taliban's funds in Canada? Kicked Afghanistan's ambassador out of the country (if there was an ambassador, that is)?
Whatever Canada would have done, none of the above mealy-mouthed useless things mentioned above, or any other non-violent thing you could think of, would have made any difference at all! If force is not met with force, but with platitudes, then this encourages the use of more force. Next thing you know they would have stolen the Stanley cup!
Not to denigrate Canada's armed forces (because I trained with them a couple of times when I was in the US Army and know them to be competent troops), but sending a stiff note to Afghanistan would have been just about all you could have done, unfortunately, because Canada cannot project power in any meaningful sense. The US, however, can. In the case of Afghanistan it was appropriate. I believe in the case of Iraq it was less appropriate, but now that we're there we better stay the course, or things will get worse, especially for the Iraqi people.
What climate prediction model?
This project was a massive attempt to determine what kind of an effect an increase in atmospheric CO2 would have. Were they only projecting increased heat absorption and retention due to CO2? The article doesn't say, but it seems likely. And that is no climate prediction model!
As Spy_Handler mentions, there have been hotter periods in historical time, when CO2 and other greenhouse gasses were not factors (as far as I have been able to find out). The sun is more than likely the culprit in those past times, and is more than likely the culprit in our times as well.
As reported by New Scientist (in Nov 2003, so it's not news):
Read the complete article here
So, if we truly are contending with a global warming trend, it seems likely that it isn't because of increasing CO2, but because of a larger heat input. So what are we going to do, launch ice cubes at the sun? That's ridiculous, of course, so we're better off enforcing Kyoto. It won't make a bit of difference, but it will definitely make us feel more virtuous.
You get your life, and the robber gets $100k. You want your life, don't you? It's worth the 100 grand, right? The robber certainly wants the 100 grand. So it's still win-win, just you wouldn't have preferred that exact exchange, or would have preferred to negotiate for a lower amount.
On the other hand, the demand "your money or your life" is rather one-sided because even if you refuse, after he takes your life he gets your money, anyway.
That is, until you pull out your own gun and shoot HIS ass first. Assuming you live in a state with concealed carry laws! Otherwise, you ARE toast. If not by the robber, then by the sheriff.
And you really ought to get straight as to what exactly an externality is. A house's new owner possibly not taking care of it is not an externality of the sale, per se, it is a possible consequence of the mere fact of ownership, and this could occur even if the house isn't sold, if the old owner became ill or indigent and couldn't keep maintenance up. An externality is something only indirectly related to the main event, such as the sale of the house at a given price causing the market value of other houses in the neighborhood to go up or down.
The rule of externalities could be expressed as: You Can't Do Just One Thing. I'm not saying there are no externalities, just that the externalities involved in freely-chosen exchanges generally do not militate against the value of the exchange.
As to having taken economics classes and paying attention, you do realize that not every bloody stinking economist thinks alike, and that they change gradually over time? Or that even famous economists make incredibly stupid predictions based on faulty theories? Putting Milton Friedman and Paul Samuelson into the same room in 1948, for instance, would likely have resulted in a barfight because of diametricly opposing views, but Samuelson's own book "Economics" (now in its 17th edition) started out strictly Keynesian, but gradually gave some ground to other schools of thought until Friedman's own work has received favorable mention in recent editions (of course, that might have had something to do with Samuelson's giving over editorship to Nordhaus starting in 1985).
Samuelson claimed at one time that the economy of the Soviet Union was "thriving" (13th edition), but dropped this after the Soviet collapse. Samuelson predicted that the economy of the United States would undergo a deep recession after WW2, but was completely off-base. Samuelson himself wrote ruefully in his 14th edition that "What was great in Edition 1 is old hat by Edition 3; and maybe has ceased to be true by Edition 14."
So don't worship at the feet of the Economists. Their feet are made out of clay, just like the rest of us.
Then consider that the commentators and writers at ABC, NBC, CBS and CNN are practically all liberals. The only variation is that poor, lonely libertarian John Stossel, who is constantly subject to demands from supposedly enlightened and broad-minded viewers that he be fired for daring to show the opposite opinion once in awhile.
Yes, Fox News is biased. It is well-known for its bias. But tragicomically, the other networks are far more biased. Just in the opposite direction. But they try assiduously to maintain the illusion/lie that they are objective.
"Time preferences" be hanged! The last time I needed to get a short term loan for an astronomical interest rate was when I suddenly realized that my mortgage payment was going to overdraw my account big time if I didn't get some money into it without delay!
It's not an oversimplification at all. On the contrary, the win-win nature of the free market is the heart of the matter. In this regard, your example as to negative externalities are faulty, sorry to say.
The "classic" example of externality you gave:
This is most certainly NOT an externality associated with a free market exchange, as you posit it. It's a negative externality of a property rights violation! The shirt's owner did NOT consent to have his or her shirt dirtied, nor was any compensation paid, and an injustice occurred. The polluter should pay for cleaning the shirt, but any such payment, while an exchange of money does occur, still does NOT take the form of a free market exchange, but is compensation for damages.
An example of a REAL free market, win-win situation is if I have a house for sale for $100K, and you're willing to pay that much, then I win because I get the $100k I wanted, and you get the house you wanted. The only negative externality is that the guy who offered $99K for the house is screwed because you don't need to lower the price to sell the house after all. And that is just tough beans.
It's not greed. It's relative value, which is subjective, true, but the pejorative term "greed" is inappropriate here. The widget is worth $2 to me, but it is worth much less to you. If we don't have a meeting of the need, or mind, on the value, then we have no deal. Simple as that.
There's also market conditions and economics to consider. If the widget cost me $1.50 to make, and you won't buy it unless it is $1.25 or less, then I would be nuts to sell it to you for your price.
As you suggest, there's a strong case for calling you greedy for not being willing to meet my price and thus putting pressure on me to take less for it.
Additionally, you would be committing theft if you forced me somehow (such as via government price-control) to sell it to you for less than the price I was willing to take for it.
Economics is fun, that's for sure. Try reading Ayn Rand's book "The Virtue of Selfishness" for an interesting take on this.
We use an MCI phonecard we bought at Costco a few years ago. We keep recharging the same card --- however, the actual physical card no longer exists. We continue to use the same pin number off the old card. Works pretty neat, and the rate seems to be adequate. We use it for all long distance calling --- discontinued long distance on our local phone some time ago after a dispute between us and Qwest.