Is that what that mess said?

The NY Post is the left???

Man, I dunno. Hudson Hawk isn't that much better than this desk.

God daaaamn that was an annoying audience! Laugh or clap or whatever, but the screaming. For four minutes. Ugh.

They interviewed her at Deadspin. The news crew made them come out in the middle of the street to talk (where all of the ice had been packed into ice), and they were trying to make it back over to the easy-running powder when the fall happened. She couldn't see the ice because she'd just been staring into camera lights.

This is still very impressive, but there's no indication that the crow knew "I need a bigger stick to get this food. There is a bigger stick in that box over there. If I solve that puzzle, I will get the bigger stick to get the food." It could have just known (since it had seen these obstacles before), that if it did all of the things it had done before eventually, somehow, food would be involved.

Because he's kinda dumb. And so is Karl. Why is celebrating ignorance okay when it's Brits?

I'm an introvert, and of course I would draw it facing the right direction to be read by others. Otherwise people would have to ask why I had a backwards Q on my forehead, and that would be humiliating.

I had an '89 Celica. I loved that car.

Are Beats by Dre Any Good?

*dead

That you're normal. Everyone (normal) loves a rum and Coke!

I kind of meander between domestic beer, craft beer, and scotch/rocks. ...I guess those are pretty accurate.

Thank you! I wasn't sure if I was communicating my thoughts clearly.

@Trancecoach: We're not going to agree, and that's fine. This'll be my last reply.

Retailer strong-arming: Imagine Apple makes up 95% of Best Buy's tablet sales. Off-brand-X wants to sell tablets at Best Buy. Apple says: If you sell Off-brand-X tablets, we will not let you sell our tablets. Off-brand-X is likely to only provide a tiny profit to Best Buy, compared to Apple, so they comply. (This actually happened, in a different form, with Intel paying computer manufacturers to not use AMD processors. See here). Also see price-fixing.

Widget-distribution-prevention: This is just an extension of the previous point.

Buying up all of the competitors: Ma Bell. Old AT&T. That should be enough said. But, if that's not enough, now Ma Bell is nearly entirely re-formed. The US was one government approval away from having cell carriers limited to Sprint, Verizon, and AT&T. That's been spoiled, now, but I don't think it's hard to imagine that future continuing on to two carriers colluding and price-fixing (as Verizon and AT&T pretty much have freedom to do anyway). This is another quasi-natural-monopoly situation (or at least a tragedy of the commons situation), in that the radio spectrum is not infinite. To keep the spectrum usable at all, blocks of frequencies are doled out to radio/TV/cellular/military/etc. etc. with stiff penalties for interference.

Patents: Patents present a litany of problems, but the world without them is even worse. You have two things happen, both of which are bad:
1) New technology remains veiled in secrecy indefinitely; no one else can riff on it even after patents would normally have expired
2) My previous point. The marginal utility of R&D decreases drastically based on the likelihood of a competitor being able to get hold of your secrets before you can profit on them sufficiently.
This is exactly why patents were created. It's a temporary monopoly granted by the government in exchange for the promise that the knowledge will be released to the universe after X years.

Predatory pricing: If excessive, it's illegal. That's why it doesn't happen very often. In a country with anti-trust laws, you just want to hurt your competitor, you don't want to drive them out of the market.

Natural monopolies: Since you brought this one up, you can choose your energy service because the government forces the utility to lease its lines and to decouple distribution from production. That is to say, you have a free market in production because the distribution is not free. See here. My state is the same way.

Misinformation: Who vets marketing claims in a free market? My competitor says that their food is organic. Well--hell, so is mine! They're environmentally conscientious? So am I! Their drug cures cancer? Mine cures it even better!

Oh, shit. Someone caught me in a lie! Well, I'll just force the media to ignore it and ramp up my disinformation campaign.