November 8, 2011

The Great Rocketfish Power Adapter Mystery

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Apple Computer seems to think that $50 is a fair price for a spare iPhone charger, so I headed off to Best Buy today to see if I could find something more reasonably priced. And I did. But can anyone explain this?

On the left, you can buy a power adapter plus a cord for $21.99. On the right, you can buy just the cord — the exact same cord — for $24.99. Surely there’s a breakdown of the free market at work here. But of what nature, exactly?

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We've never been very good at being conservative.

And usually, that serves us well in doing the ambitious, hard-hitting journalism that you turn to Mother Jones for. But it also means we can't afford to come up short when it comes to scratching together the funds it takes to keep our team firing on all cylinders, and the truth is, we finished our budgeting cycle on June 30 about $100,000 short of our online goal.

This is no time to come up short. It's time to fight like hell, as our namesake would tell us to do, for a democracy where minority rule cannot impose an extreme agenda, where facts matter, and where accountability has a chance at the polls and in the press. If you value our reporting and you can right now, please help us dig out of the $100,000 hole we're starting our new budgeting cycle in with an always-needed and always-appreciated donation today.

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