The date did not begin well. He had begun talking, and through some miracle of outlandishly misplaced industriousness and fecundity, he had kept talking. It was market efficiency this and competitive advantage that, an endless stream of words which, for all its forward momentum, seemed to emanate from a parallel universe, a completely alternate social reality completely disjointed from ours. At length – we should not understate just how long this unit of time was – she deemed the meal and the date over, and so spoke her first words of the evening:

The free market has spoken. It says no