What a night

In my Strategy class, we had the opportunity in our business simulation to buy or rather negotiate an exclusive marketing agreement for our product (toy boats) with a major media company (the mouse). Which ever company won the contract would see the effectiveness of its advertising increase at a minimum of 12%. We didn't expect to win it and put in what we thought would be the minimum bid. We also structured it to make fixed payments over time and inflation in the game is running at 11% PER QUARTER. You can do the math, any fixed contract price signed now will cost much less in the future because we will be paying for it with inflated dollars. It came down to two teams and the professor said if we would prepay 3 quarters, pay for quarters 1, 2 & 3 in quarter 1 we would win the contract. Of course we said YES. So we have been able to take a variable cost, advertising and make it a partially fixed cost which will save $$$ in the future. Two other teams were extremely unhappy which is a good thing, to make your competition unhappy.

On to the news:

The double standard of torture continues. For the US, torture is when we make bad guys feel bad about themselves. For the insurgents, its not bad when they mutilate our soldiers before and after killing them. Hat tip Lucianne.

At the moment, illegal immigrants are counted in the census which is used to determine the number of seats each State has in the House of Representatives. The State of Michigan says that is not fair, only citizens should be counted. This is a repeat of when the country was founded and the North did not want to count slaves for representation purposes and the South did (of course the situation was just the opposite for tax purposes). Hat tip Lucianne.

Does capital punishment save lives? IBD says it does. Hat tip Lucianne.

What happens when government opposes the wish of the people? Government will back down or will find itself replaced by recall or election. I just wish the government would learn the lesson and it would stay learned. Hat tip Lucianne.

Have a good day and will see you tomorrow.