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When the local barber shop I liked raised prices after COVID it felt spendy but a reasonable concession for a business that had trouble for a few years. About a year ago a new booking app switch lead to a $2 service fee per transaction. Annoying, but bearable. Finally on May 1st they announced a whopper of a 24% price increase. Businesses are not just riding the wave of inflation, but being greedy.

As I spent yesterday fixing things around my house I began to wonder: why? In my intro to Economics textbook from college Greg Mankiw proclaims “Trade can make everyone better off.” However I have learned time and time again that the effort required to procure competent people to fix things exceeds the effort to simply learn how to and fix them myself.

Programming Note: The blog will be “off” this week. Returning next weekend.

In March of 2022 Disney opened an ambitious project called Star Wars Galactic Starcruiser. A little over a year later, it will close in September of 2023. This ambitious project was quickly lampooned for its premium price tag. The initial surge of demand seemed to prove the critics wrong, but the well of galactic voyagers dried up quickly, and Disney is mercilessly ending this project.

The Associated Press reports that the TSA is testing facial recognition at Logan Airport’s Terminal A. Instead of handing your identification to a TSA worker you will place it on a kiosk and it will use a camera to compare the photo on your ID with your photo taken from a camera. They are not yet storing photos so you do not have to take your ID out, but that may be coming soon.