Not haggling and bad haggling, in certain scenarios, are the same. This isn’t a difficult concept to grasp. Sometimes not doing something is the same as doing it badly. If you enter a boxing ring and get punched in the face until you are unconscious, you have boxed badly whether you boxed or not.

“The point of a deal is to enter into a deal at a reasonable cost (from your point of view).”

“If that was the lowest he was willing to go, it made sense to start there and walk away when it was clear the company wasn’t.”

Those are completely seperate tasks, bike riding doesn’t involve running, and running doesn’t involve bike riding. Salary negotiations do involve haggling, though, whether he liked it or not. Either he elected not to haggle or haggled badly. Either way makes him a bad haggler.

The point is: that’s not haggling. That’s not how haggling works. If you go into a negotiation saying ‘here is my rate, take it or leave it’, you aren’t haggling, or you are bad at it.

If negotiations begin and end at the bottom line, they can hardly be said to have negotiated at all.

We all assume he wanted the job. Seems fair, given the context. I suppose there are other reasons to apply for a job, besides wanting it, but they don’t reflect on his negotiation skills.

There’s no way to know after the fact, either. But a compromise was not reached; we might say that ‘negotiations broke down’. It’s a fail state even if it was the best possible outcome. Assuming that it was the best possible outcome is charitable, but not necessarily true.

Trump also largely dictated the pace of the debate. If he had stuck to his two minutes, maybe the topics would have gone better for him. As it was they only really asked like, what, three questions? Four?

I was really annoyed Trump managed not to talk about for-profit prisons. I hope someone holds him to that point eventually.

Could be!

Sure, if it’s a no-win scenario, we can’t fault a haggler for not winning. But if we take that as a given we are essentially assuming that haggling was never really useful here to begin with.

I am so glad it involves actual cattle, thanks!

He walked away with nothing. The point of good haggling is to get something. The compromise that most favors the haggler is the haggler’s goal; achieving a less-than-ideal compromise is less-than-perfect haggling, but achieving nothing is a waste of time.

Ooo you gotta tell me about the cattle trading, I haven’t heard that one

I’m here from the future to let you know not to worry about that particular fear

You know it’s funny but neither candidate mentioned education

That last chart doesn’t show Clinton favor dropping as she campaigns. It shows Clinton favor dropping before campaigning begins (and continuing to decline thereafter).

Steam is different because it’s the largest. Those other marketplaces are complained about less because they are visited less. They are less important.

To the extent that everyone we see is a character. We all could be said to present ourselves as more flamboyant or energetic or narcissistic or any attribute, really, than we ‘really’ are. But who we ‘really’ are has to be an aggregate of our actions and attitudes over time. So, as far as I can tell, that is the real…