“As for Slocum’s posts – I found the first one funny, and more gentle teasing, rather than insulting. It’s a fair enough observation, and I’m sure it actually applies to most things bought by anyone on the Left earning over the average wage, right down to organic or Fair Trade food, or cultural consumption.”
It’s common, but it’s rather falacious – in the discussion on inequality, Henry was not trying to introduce New American Socialist Man, with everybody earning the same amount of money and wearing the same fatigues. Nobody was. The issue was how large a share of the GDP does a very small minority get. The analogy would be if Henry was against meth or crack, and Slocum was ragging on him for talking about a nice new brand of wine he’d found, under the grounds that they’re all intoxicants.

” Ironically, the only way to escape that accusation is probably to shop only in Walmart, etc.”

At which point one is open to accusations of being driven by the lowest price, so how does one criticize Wal-Mart for providing the lowest priced goods?

In the end, it was all a pile of BS.

No, you haven’t missed anything obvious, and yes, there is a fix. Witch is a $9.95 “System Preferences” pane, the main purpose of which is to provide a more powerful alternative to the business of switching between open programs with Cmd-Tab. On my Witch-equipped system, when I hit Alt-Tab, I get a list in the middle of my screen of, not open programs, but rather of open windows, which is much more useful in my view. Here’s how it solves your problem: if a window is open but minimized to the Dock, Alt-Tabbing to it with Witch will re-open it.

Having LiquidCD for free CD and DVD burner software will be a lot helpful when you want to burn data CD or DVD.

Enjoy.

Most of the other apps I’d recommend have been covered, but I’ve found OmniGraphSketcher to be useful lately for creating diagrams than neither OmniGraffle or Vector Art programs produce easily.

As for Slocum’s posts – I found the first one funny, and more gentle teasing, rather than insulting. It’s a fair enough observation, and I’m sure it actually applies to most things bought by anyone on the Left earning over the average wage, right down to organic or Fair Trade food, or cultural consumption. Ironically, the only way to escape that accusation is probably to shop only in Walmart, etc.

Sorry, I thought I could hold it in.

I wished I coulda had could have a V8 instead of tomato paste.

I thought your jokingly expressed feelings of matrimony suggested something other than pure pragmatism.

“The measure of satisfaction derived from a positional good depends on how much one has in relation to everyone else. Competitions for positional goods are zero-sum games because such goods are inherently scarce, at least in the short run. Attempts to acquire them can only benefit one player at the expense of others. By definition, every person cannot be the most popular, cool, or elite, in the same way that every person cannot be a star athlete – all of those terms imply a separation or superiority over other people.”

And I find your denial that the accepted definition of positional good actually means something very different from what your argument requires it to mean, to be, well, disappointing in that it seems like a denial of the blatantly obvious.

And indeed people are not always aware of their motivations for doing things. But you have neither evidence nor any actual argument that my motives were what you suggested them to be rather than what I stated. In other words, my sekrit desire to humiliate grad students by flaunting my computer at em has exactly the same degree of evidentiary support as your pathological need to argue with lefties because of your series of humiliating romantic fiascos with liberals of various descriptions.

But that’s not quite right—Here’s sentence number one from the Wiki article:

Positional goods are products and services whose value is mostly (if not exclusively) a function of their ranking in desirability, in comparison to substitutes.

Of course, it’s always a matter of degree to what extent the value of a product is a function of it’s position in the status hierarchy of like products. And that varies from person to person and situation to situation.

If you could have pointed to any evidence whatsoever in my post that this was why I valued the laptop.

I thought your jokingly expressed feelings of matrimony suggested something other than pure pragmatism. But the point is that even if a $2500 Mac Laptop is not a positional good for you—it is perceived that way by many people (who own but don’t need them or who want but can’t afford them). That this is common knowledge is pretty obvious in the humor of the Simpson’s clip. I find your denial that a $2500 laptop could be considered a positional good in any way, shape, form, or situation to be, well, disappointing in that it seems like a denial of the blatantly obvious.

And are people always fully aware of their motivations for buying things? Do they never engage in self-deception when explaining to themselves why they ‘need’ something that they want for emotional reasons—which reasons may be related to status? I try to avoid deceiving myself that way, but I’m sure I’m not entirely successful.

…you are quite right in suggesting that you won’t be missed if you take yourself to other parts.

I can’t say an exchange like this raises my blood pressure exactly, but I do find it intruding when I ought to be focusing on other things. So yeah—let’s call it a day.

You might specify exactly what I had to say about positional goods lead you to believe that I was wholly unfamiliar with the concept. You’ll note that on that topic, I am making arguments and posting references, whereas you are just tossing off insults. OK —fine—you’ve done that. And now given that you’ve taken the trouble to respond a few times, you might take a little trouble to explain.

please don’t expect to be able to play the wounded innocent who was only interested in encouraging substantive conversation downthread and expect to get away with it.

Let’s put it this way—to most posters here who are of the left, CT is friendly environment. For a libertarian, it is not. Somebody once said that when flying low cost airlines, that you need to make sure you’ve got your body armor. Same goes here. Abuse is expected—that’s just the price of engaging in debate on left leaning sites. But I still do it because I do find the exchange interesting. Well, sometimes, anyway. And of the left-leaning sites I know, CT is the most civil by a pretty fair margin—on the others, it’s not even worth bothering.

Now you might say that it’s just me—could be—but I don’t know of any others of a libertarian persuasion who post in the comments and don’t run into the same thing. No, I’m not saying I’m a ‘wounded innocent’, I’m saying I expect it to be rough around here. So I generally ignore the insults and try to have a bit of debate in the midst. And sometimes it works. Eventually, I suppose, it won’t seem worth it and I’ll wander off for the duration (or one of you will save me the trouble and ban me). And no, obviously I won’t expect any tears to be shed.

ppm:
Skim as a pdf viewer. Much better than Adobe

What do you need from Skim that preview doesn’t do, these days?