Childrens is Learning

That headline appeared in my local paper's website a while back. It refers to a blog post by some guy who ranked a bunch of major cities by college graduate density. Now maybe the appalling grammar and quote marks around "smartest" are intentional. Just one paper's dig at a very progressive city that's become a favorite conservative whipping post.

Unfortunately, my local paper is actually The San Francisco Chronicle. So much for smarts.

How To Pay For Something That's Free But Isn't Really Anything

I saw a 7-11 ad on a bus today that read "Free Virtual Gift with Taquito Purchase." Where to begin? I consulted my dictionary to be certain, and it confirms that a gift is "a thing given willingly to someone without payment." Which suggests that a "free gift" is redundant like an "automatic ATM machine."

But wait, this alleged gift is presented to you only if you purchase a taquito. So 7-11 isn't going to willingly give you this thing without payment for your taquito. The "free gift" is actually something they're going to include with the purchase of a taquito without an additional charge. Free-ish, but you still have to part with some cash.

The questionable freeness of the gift notwithstanding, there's the matter of reality. Does a virtual gift have any value? Sure, some design and coding effort went into its creation, but with the ability to create hundreds of millions of copies with negligible effort or cost, do you really have something of worth? And if you give up your WhateverVille account, you don't get to keep your gift that wasn't real to begin with.

In the end, then, you're buying a nasty-ass 7-11 taquito and receiving access to some computer code for as long as you maintain the FriendFace application that runs it. Score.