The amusing part is the park is open from 5am until the unusual time of 12:01am.

This is evidently to avoid the confusion about noon and midnight:

The use of “12:00 midnight” or “midnight” is still problematic because it does not distinguish between the midnight at the start of a particular day and the midnight at its end. To avoid confusion and error, some U.S. style guides recommend either clarifying “midnight” with other context clues, or not referring to midnight at all. For an example of the latter method, “midnight” is replaced with “11:59 p.m.” for the end of a day or “12:01 a.m.” for the start of the next day. That has become common in the United States in legal contracts and for airplane, bus, or train schedules, though some schedules use other conventions

You can see an example of this at the Hertz car rental website. If you try to make a reservation for midnight, you get the following warning message:

This is all well and good, but it’s exactly the reason I tend to use the less problematic 24-hour time system.

I thought about a few reasons why one should tip for tap water.

It takes just as much work to fill a glass of water as it does to pour a glass of draft beer or soda.

The bartender could be serving someone drinks instead and getting a tip for sure.

If enough people tipped, it would be a lot easier to get tap water in bars.

So lately I’ve been tipping a dollar when I get water, and most of the times the bartenders are very appreciative of the surpise gratiuty.

Ideally bars would offer water in a self-serve station, both so drinkers can stay hydrated and so bartenders could concentrate on doling out drinks.

But until that happens, I feel better to tip for my water.

What’s your opinion: should you tip for tap water in bars or not??

I suspected the “tall” was a better value, but I always ask to make sure. Occasionally bars will charge a premium on larger quantities, as illustrated in this post on Freakonomics: Happy Hour Fail.

Here were my choices:

The “pint” was $5
The “tall” was $7.50 and contained 23 ounces

I’ll mention a standard U.S. pint is 16 ounces. So quick quiz: which choice is cheaper?

The case of the missing 2 ounces

I was a bit surprised to find out the “tall” was actually slightly more expensive on a unit cost basis.

A standard pint is 16 ounces, so the pint was evidently a cost of 31.25 cents per ounce. By contrast, the beer in the tall cost 32.6 cents per ounce.

I thought I was being smart to get the pint. It was only later that I realized I was doing the wrong calculation.

The glass offered to me was not in fact a true U.S. pint. I would later confirm it was a “cheater pint” that only contained only about 14 ounces.

These cheater pints are exactly the same size glassware, but they contain thicker bottoms so the glass holds less liquid. This is a phenomenon that has been going on since at least 2008, as documented in the article Caveat Drinkor.

Doing the calculation again

As the “cheater pint” only contained 14 ounces, that mean the beer’s unit cost was really 35.7 cents per ounce, making it more expensive than the tall at 32.6 cents per ounce.

It makes me annoyed to think about all the time I’ve been given less beer. But then again, there isn’t much I can do about it, even if I was given 12 percent less beer than promised.

One article on cheater pints suggested a couple of tips to avoid feeling swindled:

1. Report to the local Bureau of Weights and Measures that the establishment is advertising pint glasses but serving 14-ounce glasses.

2. Order a beer in the bottle or can to guarantee the volume listed on the side.

3. Go someplace where the bartender doesn’t mind “topping off your pint,” like England.

And let’s not even get started on inconsistent hard liquor pours in mixed drinks. Though at least there you can try to get a bit more by ordering in a tumbler.

Dark Lord is only distributed on one day of the year in a festival known as Dark Lord Day.

While festival tickets cost about $20, it is even hard to buy tickets. The ticketing website is always overloaded, and only a lucky few can get the tickets.

The extreme demand and limited supply create a lively market for resale of the Dark Lord beer, and even for tickets to the Dark Lord Day festival, which entitles one to buy the beer.

Tickets for the festival alone can run $160 on StubHub and eBay. This seems outrageous to many as this is just a ticket for the festival with a right to buy the beer.

Still, could the $160 price be justified? I think it can, if you consider the economics.

The market for Dark Lord

I found a great article on this blog that explains in detail the economics of Dark Lord Day tickets.

But let me summarize. There is a valid economic reason for why Dark Lord tickets cost so much. The reason is the Dark Lord beer has tremendous value in the resale or beer trading market. The $60 one spends to buy Dark Lord can easily be flipped into $240 worth of beer trades or sales on eBay.

Thus, if one sells the Dark Lord Day tickets too low, then it would be profitable for someone to simply buy the beer and sell them for a profit.

In an efficient market, there should be no profitable arbitrage opportunity. As the case is, the beer market seems fairly efficient and Dark Lord Day tickets sell for around the right price.

Here’s a general picture of the market:

A person who has a ticket and wants solely to profit can either buy the beer and sell it, or he can go ahead and just sell the ticket. There should be no way to profit from one method or the other.

As the chart shows, the market is in equilibrium when Dark Lord Day tickets sell for around $160, which is about the asking price on StubHub currently. (The tickets may sell for a bit less as there is some hassle in actually going to the event. Then again, the festival has live music and is a very fun experience, so that itself is worth something)

And if you’re surprised that beer can sell at these crazy prices, you should check out the market for rare craft beer. There’s a good article on ratebeerians that analyzes rare beer on eBay, definitely worth a read.

Link: Market Behavior for Rare Beer: eBay Auction Prices in Review

In Pune, India I noticed a much more tiered pricing system for its movies.

Here’s an example in which a theater set ELEVEN different price points for a single movie.

Here’s the price variation in a graphical form:

The earliest movie showing is bright and early in the morning at 8:30. The gold seats are better seats near the back and they go for 90 rupees, but the silver section can be had for 70 rupees (about $1.50).

The exact same movie Jodi Breakers ranges from 70 rupees (morning, front seats) to nearly 6 times the cost of 400 rupees (evening, lounge recliner seats).

Here is how the movie ticket prices appear at the ticket counter:

Apparently America never adopted this system because of various reasons explained in this article: Why do all movie tickets cost the same?

We will see if this ever changes.