How to get 15% off of everything in iTunes

I interrupt my regular content flow for this commercial tip.

Every so often, Best Buy runs a sale on iTunes gift cards. Right now, they're selling all their iTunes gift cards for 15% off. No strings attached, no sales tax, nothing. I'm not sure how Best Buy can do this, if they buy the cards at a discount, or if they're using this as a loss leader (which doesn't seem smart in an age when online shoppers can just spearfish loss leaders without ever setting foot in a store) or if they receive any subsidy from Apple for this promotion (also seems unlikely).

Whatever the reason, it's a good deal for consumers like me who buy lots of apps for my iPhone and iPad or who occasionally rent movies through iTunes to watch on my iPad or AppleTV. Make sure to purchase the iTunes gift cards, not the App Store gift cards, as I think the iTunes gift cards can be spent on a wider range of products, not just all media but apps and books from the iBookstore (I'm not certain about that, but it's implied by the fine print).

15% off is nothing to sneeze at in these tough economic times. Best Buy doesn't run these sales often, but every time they do, I load up my iTunes balance.

Election math

Nate Silver is the one garnering all the headlines, but the Princeton Election Consortium is another blog I follow that does meta-analysis of state polls. In 2008, their prediction came within 1 electoral vote of the final outcome, beating out FiveThirtyEight, among others.

Currently, Princeton Election Consortium forecasts Obama winning 303 electoral votes, giving Obama a 99.8% chance of winning re-election. FiveThirtyEight currently has Obama winning 307 electoral votes, with an 86.3% chance of winning re-election.

Silver has been the target of much recent criticism from pundits, and I've seen many people argue that stating Obama's chances at re-election as a percentage is meaningless. That is, if Silver says Obama has an 86.3% chance of re-election and he loses tomorrow, Silver loses all credibility.

No doubt Silver would take a fall from grace in the eyes of many if Obama loses tomorrow, but the percentage is meaningful. It's not the exact same analogy, but if I tell you a fair coin will come up heads 50% of the time and you flip it once and it comes up tails, that doesn't mean my percentage was wrong. Silver and others who are analyzing these state polls suffer from only having one trial. If you could run the election multiple times instead of once, the sampling error would likely decrease and the % of the time Obama wins should converge on Silver's prognostication, according to his math. This is why high level poker players will often ask a hand to be run out multiple times, or why if you count cards you have to play blackjack over an extended period of time to squeeze out a profit from your edge.

If Silver retires from the political space after this election (and from past things he's said it sure sounds like he's ready to move on to a new field; who can blame him), I'd love to see him release his methodology publicly, like open sourcing software. It will ensure his legacy lives on in this field even as he goes on to point his methodology at another problem space.

The economics of forgiveness in a marriage

My own approach is to think of the Coase theorem. Assume that you can’t redistribute happiness or wealth within the marriage. If your spouse is unhappy you will be unhappy and if your spouse is happy you are likely to be happy; happy wife, happy life. If you can’t redistribute happiness the play to make is to maximize total happiness. Maximizing total happiness means accepting apparent reductions in happiness when those result in even larger increases in happiness for your spouse. If you maximize the total, however, there will be more to go around and the reductions will usually be temporary.

That's Alex Tabarrok on the forgiveness versus tit-for-tat as a strategy for dealing with transgressions in a marriage. Only at Marginal Revolution will you hear the Coase theorem invoked in a discussion about marriage. If I were officiating another wedding I wonder if I could get away with dropping that in my marital advice.

I liked this:

...you really shouldn’t model a marriage as a prisoner’s dilemma.