This morning I saw a new commercial for Ally bank, which you can view here. If you haven’t seen it, please watch it now so I don’t have to describe it below. It only takes 30 seconds.

Normally, I actually like the Ally bank commercials, using simple situations with children to show that some things banks do are wrong and Ally doesn’t do them. They’re funny and they make their point cleverly. (That they have to use children to make their point makes me wonder how stupid they think people are, but that’s a whole other issue…)

Ally is saying it’s unfair to give the new kid ice cream, and if you’re the less new kid you sympathize with him. Most of us went through it with cell phone companies at one point before they started equalizing the promos for new and existing customers. When new customers get a bonus that existing customers don’t get, that just doesn’t seem fair, right? We should all be treated equally, right?

Wrong.

It sounds great, but you have to see how treating everyone equally will actually play out in the market. In this case, credit card companies offer teaser rates to convince people to open up new lines of credit or transfer existing lines. I’ve done it — transferring higher balances to 0% for a year, knowing full well the rate will go up after that year, but in the meantime I’ve saved hundreds of dollars. If Ally is going to treat everyone equally, they either have to give everyone a year at a really low interest rate or give nobody that year. As the commercial makes clear, Ally doesn’t give anybody teaser rates.

The commercial is cute, but it plays on our notions of fairness in a twisted way. If Kid A is getting ice cream but Kid B isn’t, most of us think the fair solution is that both kids should get ice cream. But if you actually take this commercial to its logical extension, nobody’s getting ice cream. An honest commercial would have both kids going up to the ice cream cart and the man saying, “Sorry, new kid — since I can’t give him a scoop, I can’t give you a scoop. Nobody gets ice cream here.”

I always tell my students that when I grade their exams and homeworks, it’s not an exact science. I try to be consistent, but when you’re giving partial credit, sometimes you give one student 8/10 for an answer and another student 8.5/10 for a very similar answer. Usually there’s a slight difference, but sometimes after a long night of grading the words start to blur and I just make a mistake. I tell students to compare their grades with their friends’ to see if the grading on each question is consistent. And if they find a situation where their answers appear to be the same but their grades are different, they should bring their exams up to me. My remedy for the situation: I will either explain how their answers are different and why that resulted in a difference in their scores or, if the answers are basically the same, I will mark the 8.5 down to an 8 so that everything is fair. I say that as a joke, and they all laugh because it’s so obviously unfair to the student who received the 8.5

But that’s exactly what Ally is so proudly doing here.

It’s been a while since I found a new show worth discussing here, but my brother clued me in to the Discovery channel’s new show The Colony and it’s easily my favorite show this summer.

The concept is simple: a dozen or so people (who the show calls “volunteers”) have somehow managed to survive a viral outbreak in Los Angeles that has killed most everyone else and they have to see if they can survive. They come from all walks of life and have different skills to contribute. Their first tasks are basic: get to a warehouse, secure it, find food and water, and try to do something about electricity. Beyond that, they try to get creature comforts and figure out if they’re going to stay holed up in the warehouse forever or try to venture out somewhere. They are assigned tasks and put in situations that might be expected in a real post-disaster world. I’m impressed with the level of hard work and ingenuity most of them have shown so far.

The Discovery channel managed to shut down a huge area along the Los Angeles River so when these people venture outside, they see no signs of life. It’s been two weeks for them so far (the whole project is supposed to last 3 months) and their behavior is entirely consistent with people who really are alone. It doesn’t seem like they know they’re on a television show — nothing like most reality shows where the contestants are playing a game and trying to win money, while fully aware they are being filmed. The roving marauders that occasionally try to break in, cause havoc, and steal their supplies have been told by the show’s producers that they are not allowed to hurt the volunteers… but the volunteers are not told this. The fear is palpable, and you can almost smell the adrenaline through the television screen when these people realize that everything they’ve worked on for two weeks can be taken away in an instant if they are not vigilant in securing their sanctuary.

At times during the show, there is commentary from survival experts, psychologists specializing in traumatic situations, and others who have studied Hurricane Katrina, earthquakes, and other natural disasters. It all helps explain what one would expect and how one would need to behave to survive.

It’s like Survivor on steroids but with none of the voting or talk about strategy. It’s all about survival, getting along with each other, and trying to retain some sanity in a post-apocalyptic world. The volunteers on the show have bought into it completely, and now so have I.

The third episode is airing this whole week in case you want to jump in. If you have On Demand with your cable or satellite provider, you can probably get the first two episodes too — that’s what I did with DirecTV. Or you can go here and watch full episodes online.

Last weekend I had time to go through some new shows that have been accumulating in my DVR’s inbox. I’ve watched 3 episodes of Flashpoint and I liked each one of them. I almost cried at the end of one of them, too. I know, that means I’m a wuss. But it also means it’s good television.

The show follows the Strategic Response Unit, a SWAT-like group of cops that does just about everything: negotiation, profiling, bomb-defusion, and flash-bang raids — whatever the moment requires. The cinematography is top-notch, especially on a HD television. The colors are vivid and bright when they need to be, dark when they should be — whatever helps reinforce the scene. I don’t usually pay much attention to cinematography on television, but I guess that’s because most shows don’t really go out of their way to do a superb job. I enjoyed the picture much so that at times I actually stopped, paused the show, and just looked at the image on the screen, something I don’t often do in a normal television drama. The show is beautiful.

The acting is top-notch.  For all us old-school Felicity fans, Amy Jo Johnson is back (and badder than ever, since now she has guns and grenades!). Enrico Colantoni (probably most famous for playing Elliot on the 1990’s sitcom Just Shoot Me) is a better actor than I ever thought he was. I thought he was just a comedy actor — he was great as an alien in the movie Galaxy Quest – but he does drama well too. And the rest of the pack is a bunch of actors you have probably never heard of, but they all hold their own on screen. The writing is clever but not too clever, funny when you might not expect it and serious when it needs to be. While the show’s drama and tension are solid, and an explosion here and there always helps, the main reason I like the show is because the characters are so accessible. They seem like real people, not “characters,” especially in the episode “Haunting the Barn” (the one that almost made me cry).

You may have missed a few episodes by now, but it’s not too late to start watching. So far there has been only one running thread through the 3 episodes I watched: two of the SRU members started dating and then, realizing that it was affecting their work on the team, called it off. Aside from that, every episode has been self-contained, so it should be easy to jump in and enjoy.

CBS is showing the latest episode of Flashpoint on its website if you want to check it out. Unfortunately they don’t have full prior episodes on Hulu yet.

That’s the new slogan for MTV’s Sunday night line-up. As a slogan, it’s worse than Must See TV in my opinion, but I watched two of the programs last night and I’ll watch them next week too.

First was Nitro Circus, a stunt show (produced in part by Johnny Knoxville and Jeff Tremaine, both of Jackass fame) with Travis Pastrana and some of his friends. If you don’t know who Travis Pastrana is, he’s a freestyle BMX-er who was the first to pull a double-backflip on a motorcycle, and a few other tricks as well. If I did half of the things that kid does in just the first episode of this show, my mom would have a heart attack. Jumping out of a plane with no parachute. Doing a backflip over a 75-foot span on a pink big wheel. The stunts are awesome and I don’t know how the people on the show aren’t all in the hospital as we speak. Not nearly as much crude humor or nudity as Jackass had, and the stunts are even more physically challenging and death-defying. It’s definitely an adrenaline rush. It has you wishing you were there so you could try it too, until someone rides a motorcycle 30 feet in the air and falls on his back — then you’re glad you’re just watching someone else do it.

Next up is Rob Dyrdek’s Fantasy Factory. I’ll admit it right now: I have a giant man-crush on Rob Dyrdek. I want to be his best friend so I can hang out with him. I’m pretty sure I’d trade in all my friends right now if it bought me a friendship with Rob. The guy is a multi-millionaire and for all intents and purposes his full-time job is having fun. For those of you who loved Rob and Big, you’ll love this one too. Christopher “Big Black” Boykins is gone now (I saw him serving as a bodyguard for a UFC athlete a few months back so apparently he really does do security). Meaty is still there. And there’s a new puppy named Beefy. I don’t even want to tell you what happened in the first episode because not knowing what’s going to happen is part of what makes the show so entertaining. You can’t watch the show and not wish you worked at the Fantasy Factory. I wonder if they need an economist…

I haven’t watched the other two programs but when I do, I’ll let you know.

I finally had a chance to watch the series premiere of Trust Me this weekend. My girlfriend and I both agreed that if we never saw another episode of it, we wouldn’t feel like we were missing out on anything. Yet we both want to watch another one to see if it gets better. It certainly has the potential, with a great cast that seems to play off each other well. But as a comedy/drama, it doesn’t seem to know which it is and doesn’t do either as well as it should. I’ll give it two more episodes to see if it can find its identity.

What I will remember most is a funeral scene that really made me think. A total jackass of a man died during the episode and at his funeral everyone, struggling to find something good to say about him, just talked about how he was “inspirational.” It made me think about a story I read a while ago about a man who wrote his own obituary when he was around 30 years old. He set out this great life for himself, about his family, his accomplishments, etc. He used that obituary as a challenge to himself to do all the things he wanted to do and to be the man that he thought he could and should be. It made me think about how people will remember me and what I would want them to say about me at my funeral. And while I don’t think I have anything to be ashamed of, I’m still not doing my best to be the man I can be and to be remembered in the way I would hope. Everyone can use a wake-up call every once in a while, and I think I had mine. So I challenge you to think about how you want to be remembered, and to do your best each day to live up to that ideal.

P.S. I talked to my mom tonight and she said that while she likes reading my blog, she didn’t like how I came off in the piece I did on my jury duty experience. It was a little too boastful for her taste. I guess it’s hard to talk about how being smart got you kicked off a jury with all the other smart people without sounding vain. Point taken, Mom. I guess that’s the first place for me to start on that obituary…

Every once in a while, I take a good hard look at my life, as we all should. Usually, it means going through the list of programs that are set to record on my DVR and asking “Why am I watching this crap?”

One of the most important concepts in economics is that of opportunity cost: what you give up in any situation. Even something like free television is not free — the cost of watching an hour of television is what you could have been doing instead. For me, it’s reading a book (I haven’t finished a new book in a long time, sadly), doing work around the house, getting ahead in my work for the semester, or getting more sleep so that I’m better able to take on the day.

Last night I found myself watching Bad Girls Club. Normally I would ask the reader not to judge me for this, but last night I started judging myself, so I can’t really blame you. I slept on it, and this morning I decided that I have watched my last episode of Bad Girls Club. It provides absolutely nothing redeeming to me and, while it can be entertaining to watch a bunch of crazy women scream at and fight with each other (and definitely makes me appreciate how sane my girlfriend is), it drains 45 minutes of my life each week and provides nothing positive in return.

But why stop there? If I can free up even an hour a day, that’s 7 hours each week I get back. I think it’s worth it. So here are the shows I’m removing:

The City — I haven’t even watched an episode, but I have 4 episodes taped. I love Whitney as much as the guys in the Sonic commercial, but it’s just not worth it.

Bromance. I’m ashamed of myself for even having taped them in the first place. Like The City, I haven’t watched an episode. And thankfully I never will. And if I never see Brody Jenner’s face again, I will live a happy life.

Dirty Jobs. I love it, but I’ll just wait for a Saturday marathon when I really have nothing to do. It’s always nice to realize that there’s an episode you haven’t seen before.

The People’s Court. I was going to go to law school before a professor by the name of Martha Olney at Berkeley taught me Econ 1 and put me on this track. I love court shows.  I have jury duty this week and I’m actually hoping they pick me. And it’s nice to have something to listen to while doing the dishes or cleaning up. I’ll miss her spanish idioms like “Toma la chocolate, paga la cuenta.” (You drink the chocolate, you pay the bill. — i.e., if you use a service, you have to pay for it.) But I still have Judge Judy, so Marilyn Milian must go.

I know there are more. On the DVR in the living room, I have 7 episodes of Fringe. In the bedroom, I have 8 episodes of True Blood, 3 Grey’s Anatomy, and will soon be racking up new episodes of Friday Night Lights, Hell’s Kitchen, and more shows than I care to admit. I am at the point now where I actually hope that a new series I record will be canceled so that I don’t have to watch those shows any more. When television becomes a chore, something’s wrong. But they say that realizing you have a problem is the first step towards fixing it. So thank you, Tanisha from Bad Girls Club, for scaring me straight.

This is a new show on the Discovery Channel with Last Comic Standing finalist, and Minnesota native, Dave Mordal. It shows you some of the crazy, usually fairly white trash things that people do like race lawnmowers and train to wrestle alligators. The first episode was pretty funny; Mordal has a good dry humor and doesn’t usually just go for the obvious joke. And you can’t go wrong with a television show that shows you a girl getting bit in the face by a 12-foot alligator, and then coming back to finish the training.