You enter a room that contains a table and two doors.
Upon the table is a bundled stack of United States currency, totalling $1,000,000. One of the two doors, the one you entered through, is open. The second door is closed. Behind the second door is an adult human, who may be anyone, from anywhere in the world. The identity of this person is not known to you.
You are presented with two options:
(1) You may leave the room via the open doorway, leaving the bundle of money on the table. If you do this, the entire sum will be given to the person behind the closed door.
(2) You may take the entire bundle of money, and leave the room via the open doorway. If you do this, the person behind the closed door receives nothing.
Which option do you choose?
I have written an introductory article on the Ruby programming language. The first part of the article is posted on the Code.box.sk website:
http://code.box.sk/newsread.php?newsid=948
There will be a second portion coming along as soon as I can finish it off.
Dear News Media,
Please stop asking. I have heard this question asked several times, by reporters from many different networks, and it is getting old.
You have been told time and again, and the answer is significant.
When interviewing search & rescue team members, STOP ASKING WHY THEY AREN'T DOING ANYTHING WITH THE DEAD BODIES. They are still trying to rescue LIVING HUMAN BEINGS from the area, some of whom may have been stranded for a week or more without food or clean water. Do you actually think that dirty, starving, possibly sick people should wait around and twiddle their thumbs while rescuers move corpses around the city?
It may sound harsh, and I mean no disrespect for the dead. But from where I'm sitting, it seems as though the dead bodies are in no hurry to get anywhere in particular. I am not so sure I would feel the same if I were stuck with my wife and family somewhere, in need of rescue.
So please, give it a rest. I know it makes for good shock value ("The situation is so awful that even dead bodies are being ignored and piling up in the street!"), but we are all aware that there are bodies everywhere.
Let the rescuers tend to the living first. That's more important.
This whole issue just has my hackles up.
This is an interesting read -- how gas prices work. Turns out that, while the overall dollar amount is the highest it's ever been, if you adjust for inflation we are actually better off now price-wise than we were in the early to mid 1980s.
Not that it makes me feel better, though.
And today on the way home, $3.19.
This is all at the same gas station, one that tends to be average or lower in prices usually. Though my wife and I went to the store, and on the way passed a gas station that typically has higher per-gallon prices, and they were advertising $2.82. I have seen more variety in prices between gas stations than normal... usually most stations are within a few cents of each other.
This has to stop. Seriously. My monthly budget doesn't allow for the price of gasoline to double or triple -- let alone the minivan we just bought. In fact, I would venture to say that our entire economy could not stand up to such a quick and enormous increase in the price of gasoline. We're simply not rigged for it.
Take the bus? Even the transit system has to buy gas... so expect to see the fares go up.
Delivery trucks and planes also use gas, so expect a higher premium to be passed on for any shipped merchandise or any shipping services (expect to see postage stamps get more expensive soon).
Almost everything that we as a society do is somehow tied into the purchase and/or use of gasoline. From mowing your lawn, to going on vacation, to deciding whether or not to get a pizza delivered -- things are going to change.