Talk:Free lunch

Merge proposal

The TANSTAAFL article claims to be just about the acronym, but it attempts to cover the concept of a Free Lunch anyway. The two articles are not so far apart conceptually that they merit separate articles. A short section on the origin, a short section on the acronym, and then sections on the concept and the current-day use would suffice in one article, "Free lunch", or maybe "No free lunch". Classical geographer (talk) 13:50, 17 January 2008 (UTC)

• Against merger Tanstaafl is an idea with many facets. "Free lunch" is a historical story. Smallbones (talk) 15:21, 17 January 2008 (UTC)
• Against merger Tanstaafl is a useful way to explaining free market and thermodynamics succinctly, "Free lunch" is just the fact that there are bums —Preceding unsigned comment added by 66.187.186.170 (talk) 16:06, 8 February 2008 (UTC)
• Against merger - Tanstaafl is a well known principle in economics and needs a separate article.--Svetovid (talk) 10:15, 9 February 2008 (UTC)
• Against merger - I agree with the reasons put forth by Smallbones and Svetovid. Feb 10 2008 —Preceding unsigned comment added by 220.60.15.12 (talk) 03:38, 10 February 2008 (UTC)
• Against merger - For the reasons given. I think that the origin of the phrase 'free lunch' should be moved to Free lunch, however. —Theo (Talk) 14:47, 22 February 2008 (UTC)
• Against merger - Please see Robert A Heinlein page:

  In his fiction, Heinlein coined words that have become part of the English language, including "grok", "TANSTAAFL" and "waldo."

  I do not see how this page (Free_Lunch) about the fact that there were free lunches given away at one point in time of the United States of America's history (there is no mention in the article that there was a drink minimum that was enforced, and so the lunches were {according to Free_Lunch}, in fact, free) has any relation to the term "TANSTAAFL", which says that THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A FREE LUNCH. Hopefully, now that I have pointed it out, you can clearly see the difference between the practice of gifting with the expectation of a return and the fairly clear statement that THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A FREE LUNCH (which I feel is pretty clear in meaning). The reference on the Free_Lunch page has a (self-admittedly

  refers to this custom in a back-handed way

  ) very weak, uncited reference (unless '***' is a form of citation I am unaware of) to the acronym TANSTAAFL. (Feel free to pick up any of RAH's books to expand your mind as well) Any further discussion on this topic should be addressed to SF fandom. IVIamp (talk) 03:15, 19 March 2008 (UTC)
• Against merger Tanstaafl is an idea, a sort of mindset, even. Free lunch is no more than an event or process. There is pretty much no correlation whatsoever.8squishy fishy8 (talk) 07:01, 24 March 2008 (UTC)

Removed Merger Proposal per discussion above. Smallbones (talk) 18:44, 24 March 2008 (UTC)

Errors

The 1872 NY Times article mentioned in the text was actually published in 1875. This is correct in the notes. See http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?res=9407EEDA133EE43BBC4851DFB466838E669FDE. [Sorry, just realized that the text discusses at least two different NY Times articles.] The $0.15 in 1875 is about $2.30 now should be reworded to say precisely when—when is now? My use of the inflation calculator gives a different result for 2009. 165.189.101.177 (talk) 18:56, 24 June 2009 (UTC)

• Done, but put it in the footnote, as I don't see the need to put this disclaimer in the main text. "Roughly" covers it. Dpbsmith (talk) 15:50, 26 June 2009 (UTC)

Subject of recent "copying without attribution" new story

There have recently been news stories about Chris Anderson of Wired using Wikipedia material without attribution in a book. Thanks to The Fat Man Who Never Came Back for calling my attention to the fact that this is one of the articles that was used. Details here. It's embarrassing to me that the use of Wikipedia was detected through Anderson's inclusion of errors of mine. The errors involved transcription of sources and the year of of one of the cited New York Times articles. These errors were corrected recently by User:Matt Ruff.

My sloppiness didn't affect the accuracy of the article materially... and, fortunately, Wikipedia's requirements of source citation allowed others to find and fix my mistakes. Dpbsmith (talk) 15:50, 26 June 2009 (UTC)

The Universe as a free lunch

In Philosophy, there is a pejorative reference to "The Universe" as a free lunch, because it has no cause, and was eternally existent. This would infer that although parts of the Universe are all scarce, the Universe itself is a free lunch. 129.180.147.130 (talk) 07:26, 8 July 2014 (UTC)