Rak Hayom! Rak Hayom!

Yes – I did disappear, and No – nothing bad has happened to me.

I am alive, and kicking all sorts of equilibrium problems. According to the UC Berkeley Economics department, you have not been through a real Zubur unless you’ve been applying the implicit function theorem on anything you can, in very explicit ways.

You would never imagine what Google images brings up when you look for "zubur"

Seems like the best equilibrium I could find is writing this post at 2:29AM.

Kind of reminds me of undergraduate years, only without the uniform and the pool table.

But, tiny issues aside, I’d like to touch on a very important topic of marketing in this post – variety, and how it affects consumers. In my case, it’s very simple – it makes me terrified, it paralyzes me and makes me unable to decide.

I don’t get the fixation with variety here. The question isn’t of quality; it’s of amounts,

Quantities, Selection and Volume – The more, the merrier.

Comcast’s strongest selling point here is that they have more HD cannels than their competitor.
Does showing Law & Order in 100 channels instead of 90 make viewers happier?

Here’s a simple example of one of my favorite choices of a major food group – tomatoes (the others being beef and chocolate, in case you were wondering).

The choice is simple among Regular, Organic, Certified Fair Trade, Zero Emission, Heirloom and Certified Picked by Free Range Leprechauns tomatoes.

$5 per one, and believe me, it's after a discount

The ice cream aisle in my local Safeway is much larger than my apartment – and don’t get me started on the options for tortillas or cereal - I once even had to use a GPS to navigate out of the cereal aisle…

But, as always, something is rotten here.

The problem is, as a matter of fact, that things do not get rotten here for suspiciously long times.

Have you ever seen a lettuce that looks as fresh after 4 weeks (yes, four) as it looked the day it was bought? Would you trust an apple to be good after 3 weeks? A banana after 5?

All these are simple examples of how the truths of life change:

• If it looks fresh, it will be cheap, is probably 3 weeks old and made of plastic.

• If it looks half rotten, it’s probably organic, 2 days old, and you must eat it immediately or it dies within a day, but – it will make you healthy. The price, though, would be $5 per pound.

As a finishing point, I’d like to share with you a key finding in my latest research.

Based on a very biased research, which is extremely unscientific, I have reached an eye-opening flabbergasting conclusion – Americans do not cover their mouth when they yawn.

The only reasoning I could find for this phenomenon is that Americans want to boast the fact they can afford dental insurance, but who knows…

- Ron