Principles of salesmanship
A good rule of thumb when trying to sell things: If you think a potential customer may not have much money, and you're especially polite to them anyway, that's a good thing. If you think they may not have much money and you're rude to them, that's a bad thing. These two effects are magnified if you guess wrong: especial politeness to a customer who turns out to have money will make them happy. Especial rudeness to a customer who turns out to have money will make them take their money elsewhere.

On a completely unrelated note, if you're ever buying a car, you may want to give Stevens Creek Acura in San Jose a miss.

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Ethics of a copied cat
There's a big ethical debate storming over the recent cloning of a pet cat. One line that caught my eye in this was from David Magnus, of the Center for Biomedical Ethics at Stanford: "It's morally problematic and a little reprehensible... for $50,000, she could have provided homes for a lot of strays."

This argument seems specious to me. For $50,000, she could also have provided homes for humans; does that also make the action reprehensible? Would it be less so had she spent it on a car? For that matter, a number of people persist in having biological children, even though there are plenty still available for adoption. Is he arguing that that's morally problematic as well?

It seems to me that if there are ethical issues involved in this, the ones being discussed right now aren't them - but I'm a bit surprised to see so many scientists and ethicists jumping on this bandwagon. Is it just me, or is some deep fear of "cloning" - not a fear of the actual procedure, but of something subconsciously associated therewith - taking over the discussion?

Does someone have a sense of what the actual underlying fears are?

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