Diabolical Scam

I saw an advertisement for Swoopo and was a little curious why the deals seemed too good to be true. Turns out that to place a bid you need to spend $1.oo. Each bid increases the price of the item by $0.15 or $0.01 (and incidentally increases the time of the "auction"). They are just raking in the cash on these items. I can't believe that people are willing to gamble on winning the ability to pay for these items. The real winner here is swoopo, the expected return for the bidders has got to be so low.

Little Jokes

In the Economist this week they show how to write two paragraphs of story and four paragraphs of tongue in cheek jokes. This is but one small reason why it is the best news magazine around.