Watching for the cobra. Prof. Yin has a nice analysis of last night's The Apprentice. There are lots of reasons for watching this show. As you may know, I was going to quit watching, right at the point when Trump promoted his golf course as the best golf course in NY State. But, yeah, I'm watching again, even though last night he went on about how great his "yooge" house in the suburbs is. One reason people watch, apparently, judging from Prof. Yin's comments, is to see Trump snap his fingers in the the cobra-strike motion when he says "You're fired." I think I've heard of people going about saying "You're fired" and doing the cobra gesture just for fun. That could be really annoying. Imagine if lawprofs did that to students who gave bad answers in classroom Socratic dialogues.

My comment on the competition last night is this. They spent way too much effort and, especially, time fixing up the apartments. More of a markup on the previous rental price for either apartment could have been achieved if they had just basically cleaned up the apartment on the first day and spent far more of the time drumming up prospective tenants and negotiating with them. The apartments were already quite valuable, and the teams were going to be judged on how much of a markup they achieved over the old rent. But there was no way to determine how much of the markup to attribute to improvements made. They left too little time to sell the apartment and completely reeked of desperation in the end. As usual, they were reduced to running out in the street and begging passersby to do business with them. That was a bad approach to lemonade, but even worse when trying to get people to sign a lease.