bad start

yesterday was a complete disaster. i wouldn't say i'm incredibly lucky for not being involved in the red line accident because i get on at union station, 4 or 5 stops after fort totten, but still. while i was annoyed at the fact that my train was late going home by 30 minutes, i had no idea what had just occured on the same line i was riding and now i feel like an ungrateful fool. many people including my parents seem to have lost faith in the metro rail system in d.c., but i view this as a freak accident. articles in the washingtonpost say that the fail-safe computer program controlling the trains was designed to prevent the type of accident that occured yesterday. obviously, something screwed up pretty badly, and my thoughts are with the victims and their families

everybody working on my virtual world project is out either on vacation or sick, so i am immensely bored and decidedly writing another entry in this blog. i could be occupying myself with the literature that an anti-trust economist named Alan gave me: two UCLA economics textbooks and two California Law Review pieces he wrote about price theory when it comes down to horizontal mergers of companies.

so basically, a merger is challenged by the government when it believes that such a merger would lead to anti-competitive effects. this is less common in perfect competitive markets that have an "infinite" number of firms, but more so in oligopoly-type markets. in these, there are only a handful of big players, so if any two of them decide to merge, the newly formed company will have an enormous market share to play with and will probably raise prices.. because it can. basically what the readings are about is how the government should also consider market efficiencies that result from mergers. these efficiencies make the cost of production lower, and by basic economics since MR = MC, prices should fall. so, if the increased market share's anti-competitive effect is offset by this market efficiency, then the government should approve the merger. i'm too much of a novice to go into more detail, but i hope my interest in the topic is evident.

so today after getting to work half an hour late because of delays on the red line, i

1) checked my e-mail
2) perused facebook
3) checked my e-mail
4) made a LinkedIn account
5) picked up another reading from Alan
5) ate lunch
6) checked my e-mail
7) wrote this blog entry