Friends don’t let friends do Livejournal. If you or anyone you know wants help setting up a blog, let me know. I’m trying to help as many people I know as possible get online and blogging. It’s the Right Thing to Do. Plus I have this big ’ol dedicated server running at less than 10% capacity.

Last night Josh and I started our mission to try every single item on the House of Pies menu. Two down, a lot to go. It just occured to me that some sort of mini-review of each item might be worthwhile, a thought that occured to me as I’m about halfway through the menu at Get Wired.

Well after much Googling, I found two definitive sources that say there are price differences in cookies. I found an article (word document, view as HTML) from the Wall Street Journal that talks about a price war in Michigan between neighbooring councils that had prices at $2.50 and $3.

Girls are told that if customers ask about the price difference, they should explain the economic factors at play — that the Metro council serves four times as many members as its “sister” council, and runs three more camps. Michigan Metro says its troops receive a profit of at least 45 cents on each box sold; in Macomb County, the minimum is 32 cents.

Oh that’s wonderful. Item 9 on this Girl Scout FAQ confirms that prices are set indivdually by over 300 councils.

Such scenarios have been repeated in other parts of the country, as many of the nation’s 330 Girl Scout councils go through their annual pricing debate. Officials say they can’t adopt the simple solution—setting one national price—because their parent organization, Girl Scouts USA, follows the Sherman Act, which prohibits price fixing.

With each council individually incorporated as a nonprofit organization, Girl Scout officials say the law, originally designed to rein in robber barons, could apply to them as well. “In being good citizens, we choose to abide by the spirit of the law,” says Girl Scouts USA spokeswoman Ellen Ach. At a national meeting of council leaders last month in San Diego, Girl Scouts USA officials reiterated their position that prices shouldn’t be discussed among local councils.

So there’s a legal reason for the price differences, but I think it’s highly unlikely that the Girl Scouts of America would be prosecuted under the Sherman Antitrust Act, though personally I think the prices are a bit high. It’s supply and demand, and I think people would buy more at a lower price. They are also outpacing inflation: my simple calculations using the GDP Implicit Price Deflator, which is Greenspan’s favorite measure of inflation, gives me that if a box of Girl Scout cookies was $2.50 in 1996 it should be about $2.80 now, give or take a few cents. There haven’t been any changes in quality I know of, they have a great distribution model, and I don’t see why their costs would have gone up at all to justify that sort of price increase. Just my two dollars and fifty cents…

I’ve decided that nothing disappears quite as fast as Carmel deLite Girl Scout Cookies. Here’s a little tidbit: according to Interbake, Carmel deLite cookies make up half of their total cookie volume and are also the hardest to make. According to the site linked above, the cookies should be $3.50 a box, yet when I bought mine the other day I swear they were just $3 a box, because I bought three boxes for $9. Is there some sort of vast Girl Scout conspiracy behind this? Is it because I was in a small town?

As always, this is best appreciated as a PDF, but for the rest of you here’s the text:

The divine command theory is the view of morality in which what is right is what God commands, and what is wrong is what God forbids. This view is one that ties together morality in and religion in a way that is very comfortable for most people, because it provides a solution to pesky arguments like moral relativism and the objectivity of ethics. Continue reading Divine Command Theory and the Euthyphro Argument →

Here’s a quote to ponder, from Bertrand Russell on the “scientific view” of the world:

That Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins—all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand.

Happy Tuesday to you too.

Put up the awesome photos taken this weekend. Combine autop and the curly quotes and make them both work perfectly, dangit. Write a paper on Aristophanes, and another and the Euthypro dilemma. Can I finish it all tonight? Doubtful. But I’ll fall asleep trying…

Tonight was the second time I’ve come to Austin and locked my keys in the car. Luckily this time it was easier to get them out, and was free thanks to AAA. They have saved my butt so many times, it’s worth every penny. (Of course I don’t pay, but if I did it would be worth all the pennies.)

“Today looks like it’s going to be a long day.” Oh Fate! Such a cruel and fickle force. It started shortly after the last post when I missed the shuttle to transport me across the UH campus to my car. Because of some sort of irregularity in the bus schedule, or perhaps just horrid management, instead of having a bus come by say every 7 or 8 minutes, they have two come every 15 minutes. Of course that is just for the Blue route, the other three routes just happened to have their buses come at the same time, so it takes forever for everyone to load up. The loading was made even longer by the fact that we had to load a wheelchair up too. Now I’m not complaining about that, as no one can help that situation, but I’m just pointing out that it is an amazing set of circumstances.

So I make it to my car. I can’t write the rest of the story, because it’s too painful. Too make a painful story short, I stopped to pick something up, left, left my wallet, went back, and when I started to leave for the second time my car would not start. So here I sit awaiting the white trucks of AAA to pick me up and tow me home. The timing couldn’t be better either, I have two important appointments this afternoon and I was planning to go to Austin tomorrow.Times like this I try my best to see the bright side of things, try to find of ray of light in this gloomy day. I guess things could be worse, but I don’t want to tempt Fate, or Murphy, again.

Update: Ray of light — it was just a minor battery problem.

I can’t win! Several days ago I made a remark to the fickleness of weather, and she has not given me a break since. I dress warm, we have a semi-tropical day in humid Houston; I dress light, and a cold front comes in that has me shivering all day. Some days you just roll with it. Today looks like it’s going to be a long day.