Comments by chengiz5

Yes that was kind of my point - bargaining over markup, which is a small overhead compared to the actual price of the gold, must be by definition less than bargaining over jewelry made from precious stones, where the price of the gems is also up for bargaining.

> Traditionally, gems have been personal whereas gold, even when made up into jewellery, has been seen more as an investment. So, for gold purchases, customers expect to haggle furiously over prices: sellers down at the bazaar will bargain, whereas the new chains have fixed prices.

Not sure why something being personal vs an investment means people will bargain more for the latter. In fact, gold usually has a fixed price, so there is less bargaining for gold than other gems.

The only correct use of a thesaurus is when you are unable to remember the right word with the nuance you are looking for, whether it is for writing a school essay or solving a crossword or writing a comment on a blog. The only wrong use of a thesaurus is finding a substitute for a perfectly cromulent word in order to look clever. If C.S.W. thinks the thesaurus's time is up, maybe he or she is using it wrong?

> Becoming even a bit like Apple, at least in its customer-centricity, is a daunting goal. But to turn itself around, Best Buy must pick as its next boss someone who believes it can be done.
This is an apples and oranges comparison. Apple sells its own products whereas Best Buy does not. Remodeling themselves based on Apple Stores would be folly.
The only way out of the mess I can think of is smaller, sleeker stores, and deals with manufactures to sell exclusive products.

I have no clue how to parse the winning entry.

It is strongly believed that Kurt Waldheim, ex UN Secretary General and President of Austria, was a Nazi war criminal. The powerful often get away with it and make scapegoats out of the less "connected".

This blog reminds me of the proverb, "If you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail". You read way, way too much into Mr. Patel's article, which has nothing to do with either language or Whorf's hypothesis. All he's saying is English speaking introduces Indians to outside influence and knowledge. The gist of Patel's rather well argued article is that inflammatory newspapers and acts should be controlled as they very easily lead to riots in India. If you want to argue against the free speech aspect of it, you're welcome to it. But the kind of fallacious attack you have pulled here is rather shameful.

What Connect The Dots says is not actually true. Nowadays, the best considered wine comes with the plainest labels, similar to how the best clubs and restaurants are unknown locations with not even a sign on the door.

> Much of modern software is written using one of C’s more evolved dialects. These include objective C... C#... and Java.

C++?
[Does ctrl-F C++]
Damn.

Yeah I can see how it might be hard to show a picture of a bird that's gone extinct!

If everyone wanted a different pronoun for themselves, you know what we'd have? Proper nouns. Yeah, they were invented like millennia ago.

As the writer of this piece is no doubt aware, Shammi was also a great storyteller. Several events mentioned here are recounted in his fascinating youtube videos: http://www.youtube.com/show?p=XqLZl_RNSnE

Now *that* is a flake.

@jomiko

Julianne Moore in 30 rock has made the Boston accent easy. Anyone can do it now and say, it may not be very good, but it's way better than *that*.

Seems like everyone is jumping on the Sandberg bandwagon. She is now officially everywhere. By the way I have to say this was the worst of all the recent articles about her - a very poor derivative blurb that has nothing original or particularly insightful to say.

I dislike godmen as much as any other rational person, but this article was just mocking. Even last week's Osama one was more respectful of the dead.

So R&D/innovation by itself is not sufficient for an economy to thrive? Isnt that pretty much tautological? China is one step ahead here - they deem it not *necessary*. Their economy based on as you say plagiarism and low wages seems to be doing quite nicely indeed.

@Fritinancy, re my earlier comment, I just realized that you think 'blel' is a phoneme. It isnt.

@FritiNancy, if any arbitrary string in a word can violate phonotactic rules, then any proper noun you have never heard before violates phonotactic rules. The rules are for phonemes, not arbitrary strings.

"Rules" courtesy old fogeys who thought Latin was the perfect language:
- Dont end sentences in a preposition
- Split infinitives. Boldly to go...