You are the type of person who generally weighs benefits against costs, but the costs usually win. Family and friends look to you as a pillar of strength, and rightly so. Today, you are likely to spend a great deal of time waiting for visits from door-to-door solicitors looking to buy either storage boxes for your income tax returns or an AC adapter for your CD player. Be on the lookout for neighborhood pets, especially belligerent parrots. You should consider shopping at stores or businesses beginning with the letter L, but do not buy any products with a serial number or product code containing the number 509640. Your preferred shopping venue is thrift stores. Your special symbol is the comma (,).

As a Brown Pragmatox, you are down-to-earth and practical. You are hard working and industrious. You are frugal to the point that you might even refrain from making a purchase that you really, really need. Doing so often causes problems down the road. You definitely go with function over form and substance over style.

The notion that business cycles are caused by changes in business sector investment expenditures triggered by the natural ebb and flow of market conditions. This investment explanation of business-cycle instability rests on the proposition that the seeds of each subsequent business-cycle phase are planted during the current phase. An expansion creates the conditions that cause a contraction and a contraction creates the conditions that cause an expansion. This explanation suggests a critical role for government intervention and stabilization policies to correct the business-cycle problems of inflation and unemployment.

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Upon leaving Scarcity Stan's Bakery Shoppe and Confectionery Palace our pedestrian's excursion drops into Mega-Mart Discount Warehouse Super Center. A quick tour of this mecca of mass production -- lasting no more than three days -- is likely to reveal within the 20 gadzillion square feet of floor space a number of sales racks, shelves, and tables filled with merchandise marked down for clearance. A prominently displayed sign on one sales rack boldly declares that the regular $24.99 price has been drastically reduced, for this week only, to $3.98. What a bargain! What a sale! We have the chance -- "for a limited time only" -- to get stuff valued at $24.99 for only $3.98! With a bargain like this, how can we lose?

It's easy to lose, if you don't understand the concept of value. Most of us have several "bargains" stored away in the attic, closet, or garage that never have seen, and probably never will see, anything resembling use. What seemed like a great "bargain" at the store, does nothing but occupy space at home. (By the way, does anyone have use for a distributor cap for a 1949 Ford?)
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-- Desmond Tutu, activist

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